Books that generate other books, books that are first in the line, interest me. Despite little interest in mountaineering, I read Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951, tr. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith) by Maurice Herzog, the subject of the book well summarized in the title, a book that led to many other books.
Annapurna was a big hit, and soon after there were
books by other members of the expedition, and a parody novel, The Ascent of
Rum Doodle (William Ernest Bowman, 1956) and a feminist response. That response was to climb Annapurna, but
also to write a book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (Arlene Blum, 1980). The book inspired a great deal of
mountaineering, Himalayan and otherwise.
The last line, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” (311),
apparently became famously inspirational among crazy people, by which I mean mountain
climbers, but I am more interested in what inspired people to write books.
The story of the 1950 French and Swiss expedition in Nepal
to climb whichever 8,000-meter peak was easiest, using state-of-the-art techniques,
is a terrific adventure story, “terrific” in the current sense (entertaining)
but also in the old sense (terrifying, these climbers are out of their minds),
and it is the latter that really surprised me.
Annapurna is study in the variety of human taste for risk, or to
put it in Wuthering Expectations terms* the taste for the sublime.
“Sublime” has softened into an inelegant variation for “very
beautiful,” but I again mean the old aesthetic sense of beauty that is
frightening, beauty that is trying to kill you, like the view from the top of
an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak.
This was quite different [from the Alps]. An enormous gulf was between me and the world. This was a different universe – withered, desert, lifeless; a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired. We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward. I thought of the famous ladder of St. Theresa of Avila. Something clutched at my heart. (207)
Herzog does not normally write like this. He is typically a model of clarity. But atop Annapurna he goes on for three pages
like this, while his companion keeps insisting they head back before the bad
weather hits them.
Some additional fragments:
How wonderful life would now become! (208)
Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. (209)
Before disappearing into the couloir I gave one last look at the summit which would henceforth be all our joy and all our consolation. (210)
The latter is well into the descent which at that point has
become terrible and will get much worse.
But Herzog remains captured by his sublime experience, wavering between the
struggle to descend and an obliterating acceptance of imminent death.
Given the practicalities of the earlier part of the book,
the organization of camps and supplies, the turn towards St. Theresa was
fascinating. It’s those camps and
supplies, along with the team doctor, that save Herzog. If you happen to have strong feelings about
needles I recommend that you skip chapter 16, “The Retreat,” which is full of horrors
(frostbite treatments). Perhaps skim the
next couple of chapters as well, although the worst is over.
The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly where I am still having rather a difficult time. (11)
I suppose another reason for the rise of the mountaineering
book in the is that explorers had used up other parts of the world. The Arctic and Antarctic had been exhausted
as subjects for books. I will note that while
Roald Amundsen insisted on the scientific value of his pointless feats, Herzog
and his team have no illusion that climbing a Himalayan mountain has any value beyond
the adventure. The legendary Alpine
guide Lionel Terray, one of the members of the team who got Herzog down off Annapurna,
titled his 1961 memoir Conquistadors of the Useless. Useless except for generating books.
Page numbers are from the first edition, which has a helpful
fold-out map in the back.
* See this old post about Little House on the Prairie
for more on the sublime.
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