Deliverance - True Summit - page 72

I was uncertain how to understand this avowal. Did Herzog mean that, as a novel,
Annapurna was not to be held to the standards of truth of a factual memoir? Or simply
that the topic read like a novel, which explained its immense popularity?
About L'Autre Annapurna, Herzog insisted, “These are the feelings of fifty years
later. The first book, Annapurna, was for the whole world. L'Autre Annapurna was
written for me, to express myself. One is objective, the other subjective. The new book
is what I feel now about all my adventures.”
For weeks after my interview, I chewed on the bones of Herzog's strange and pro-
vocative remarks. In those two critical discrepancies—concerning the cause of his frost-
bitten hands, and Lachenal's behavior after the fall—I could discern three possible ex-
planations.
The first was that Herzog had simply started to become forgetful, misremembering
events on which he had already gone clearly on record. The second was that the new
version, in L'Autre Annapurna, was a deliberate attempt to manipulate a whole new
generation of readers, many of whom had perhaps not read Annapurna.
I laid to rest the first hypothesis: in his office, Herzog seemed too lucid to be forget-
fully revising his own past. And the second seemed unlikely, too. Surely the discrep-
ancies begged critics to accuse him of dishonesty. The new, more self-serving version
might cast a better light on Herzog, but it was an open invitation to readers such as
myself to call his rewriting bluff.
The third possibility, I thought, was that this is indeed how memory works, in all its
fallible reinvention of the past. After nearly fifty years, Herzog's emotions about those
dramatic days high on Annapurna had perhaps restructured his memories into what
should have been. He should have lost his fingers not because of the stupid mistake
of dropping his gloves, but by saving the companion whose diary would later impugn
him, as he raked with bare hands through the snow, sacrificing his fingers to find the
boots. As for Lachenal's asking to be left to die after his fall—it was the logical culmin-
ation of the portrait of the genius-madman Herzog had slowly built up in Annapurna.
The suicidally reckless climber, who would rather die in a demonic rage than limp piti-
fully back to ordinary human safety.
These reconstructions need not be cynical, or even fully conscious, on Herzog's part.
They could be the fruit of memory's seizing again and again on disturbing, pivotal
events, reshaping them with each rehearsal, trying to find meaning where there was
only happenstance. They might exemplify the process so ruefully predicted in Robert
Frost's great (and much misunderstood) poem about memory's sentimentality, “The
Road Not Taken.” In that poem, the speaker clearly recognizes that the two paths are