Breakthrough - True Summit - page 55

co-authored a picture book with Marcel Ichac about the expedition, called Regards vers
l'Annapurna ( Looking at Annapurna ) and issued a historical tract titled Les Grandes
Aventures de l'Himalaya ( The Great Adventures of the Himalaya ). There are some
passages of considerable power in the memoir, particularly those recounting with fresh
detail the agony of Herzog's retreat from the mountain and his convalescence in the
hospital.
In sum, however, L'Autre Annapurna is a feeble performance, riddled with parables
of character-building and self-congratulation, marred by an unfortunate predilection
for name-dropping. Nonetheless, L'Autre Annapurna stands as the primary source for
Herzog's youth and early adulthood. In his full celebrity, the leader of the 1950 exped-
ition would blossom as a man of consummate charm and personality. Women found
him irresistible: his looks were often likened to Clark Gable's. It is interesting, then,
to learn that at eighteen, Herzog thought himself not only “taciturn and introverted,”
but a veritable misogynist (his own word). Everything feminine, everything to do with
romantic love, seemed to him soft and weak. His heroes were Wagner's Lohengrin and
Siegfried; his masters, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
Just like his teammates Lachenal, Rébuffat, and Terray, Herzog discovered
Chamonix early in life, thanks to a family chalet at the foot of the Glacier des Bossons,
which spills northeast from the summit of Mont Blanc. On solitary excursions, he ex-
plored the wonders and terrors of the great glacier, graduating to more and more am-
bitious ascents of the granite peaks and aiguilles that tower above it.
Chamonix was Herzog's “little native land,” but school took him increasingly to
Paris, where he earned his baccalauréat in mathematics and philosophy and an ad-
vanced degree in business from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. In 1945,
just as Terray and Lachenal were becoming Chamonix guides, Herzog was hired as a
director at Kléber-Colombes, the mammoth tire company.
Herzog thus remained firmly an “amateur” in mountaineering. In his memoir, he
recounts an exchange with Terray, whom he had befriended in Chamonix. Terray asks
Herzog why he doesn't want to become a guide.
“I suppose I could,” he responds, “but I wouldn't enjoy squeezing money out of the
mountains. Living off what I love.”
“Nature is nobler than offices and labs and factories,” retorts Terray.
“Exactly! A passion should remain free.”
“For Christ's sake,” bursts out the guide, “the point isn't to make money, but just
to get by!”