Starlight and Storm: The Conquest of the Great North Faces of the Alps (Modern Library Exploration) - Softcover

Rebuffat, Gaston

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375755063 ISBN 13: 9780375755064

Verlag: Modern Library, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

“One of the great climbers of all time . . . who has discovered through the medium of mountains the true perspective of living.” —Sir John Hunt, author of The Conquest of Everest

Known for his lyrical writing and his ability to convey not only the dangers of mountaineering but the pure exaltation of the climb, Gaston Rébuffat is among the most well-known and revered Alpinists of all time. He rose to international prominence in 1950 as one of the four principal stalwarts in the first ascent of Annapurna, the highest mountain climbed at that time. Yet his finest feat as a mountaineer was to be the first man to climb all six of the legendary great north faces of the Alps—the Grandes Jorasses, the Piz Badile, the Dru, the Matterhorn, the Cima Grande di Lava-redo, and the Eiger.

With this elegant book, first published in 1954, Gaston Rébuffat transformed mountain writing. His insistence on seeing a climb as an act of harmonious communion with the mountain, not a battle waged against it, seemed radical at the time, though Rébuffat’s aesthetic has since won the day. Through storms, avalanches, rock fall, unplanned bivouacs, and even the deaths of companions, we follow the Chamonix guide to the altar of his communion, on dark, icy walls that struck terror into the hearts of Europe’s finest mountaineers. Nor are these deft narratives mere recitations of dangers faced and obstacles overcome, for Rébuffat pays as keen attention to the joys of comradeship won on these faces as he does to the climbs themselves. In our own day of corporate sponsorships, online expeditions, and eco-vacations, the purity of Rébuffat’s vision of the Alps as (in the epithet of the title of another of his books) an “enchanted garden” shines forth in prose as fresh and stylish as any ever lavished on mountaineering.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gaston Rébuffat was born on May 7, 1921, in Marseilles, France. He was a recipient of France's prestigious Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. He died in Paris on May 31, 1985.

David Roberts is the award-winning author of more than 25 books on mountaineering, adventure, and Western history and anthropology. Some of his works include Great Exploration Hoaxes and The Lost World of the Old Ones. He is a veteran mountain climber who has written for National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, and Smithsonian. Roberts lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John Hunt led the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 with Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. With Wilfrid Noyce, he translated Gaston Rébuffat's Starlight and Storm. He died in 1998.

Wilfrid Noyce was part of the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 with Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. With John Hunt, he translated Gaston Rébuffat's Starlight and Storm. He died in 1962 while climbing the Pamir Mountains.

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Introduction
David Roberts

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gaston Rébuffat was one of the half-dozen best mountain climbers in the world. He could count among his peers only such men as the visionary Italian soloist Walter Bonatti; the fanatically driven Austrian Hermann Buhl (with whom, after a chance meeting on the Eiger, he would spearhead the grim survival epic chronicled in this book); and his fellow Chamonix guides, the powerhouse Lionel Terray and the mercurial acrobat Louis Lachenal. (At the time, no American or British climber was even in Rébuffat's league.)
On Annapurna in 1950, Rébuffat and Terray, forgoing any summit hopes of their own, saved the lives of Lachenal and Maurice Herzog after that pair had staggered down from the top in a storm, exhausted and frostbitten. The triumph--the first ascent of any eight-thousand-meter peak--took a terrible toll, as Lachenal lost all his toes; Herzog, all his fingers and toes.
In 1954, as the thirty-two-year-old Rébuffat set out to write the book that would become Starlight and Storm, he was still bound by a contract the team had signed at the airport on their departure for Nepal. Sprung on the unsuspecting members, that contract forbade them to publish anything about the expedition for five years after its completion. The only account of the grand French adventure in the Himalayas would be that of its leader, Herzog. Annapurna, the now-canonic tale of perseverance, self-sacrifice, and heroism, would become the best-selling mountaineering book of all time.
By 1950, however, Rébuffat had serious ambitions to be a writer. He had already published a manual for beginning climbers and a photo book about the Calanques, the sea cliffs of his boyhood. As he read the interdicting contract, he was so shocked and dismayed that he came close to walking out of the airport and abandoning the expedition. At last he signed, but for the rest of his life, he nursed a bitter grievance about Herzog's preemptive strike.
It is in part for this reason that Starlight and Storm mentions Annapurna in only six glancing sentences. Forbidden to write about the expedition, Rébuffat turned to the climbs on which, in the long run, his lasting reputation would rest. During the 1930s, six great walls scattered across the Alps, all facing north, gained the cachet of ultimate challenges. They ranged from the appallingly steep, such as the Cima Grande di Lavaredo in the Italian Dolomites (overhanging in its first 720 feet, vertical thereafter), to the appallingly dangerous, such as the Eiger in Switzerland, where eight of the first ten men to attempt the face met their deaths.
By the time Rébuffat became a first-rate climber, in the early 1940s, all six faces had been climbed, but none had seen more than a handful of ascents. The winning of these precipices had made legends of their pioneers: the redoubtable Italian Ricardo Cassin (the only man to lead the first ascents of two of the six faces); the German Andreas Heckmair, "motor" of the extraordinary Eiger climb; and Pierre Allain, the greatest French alpinist of his day.
What was left for Rébuffat's generation, now that these ultimate walls had succumbed? Without making any particular fuss--today, his counterpart would no doubt come decked out with commercial sponsorships and hovered over by a media horde--Rébuffat set himself the goal of climbing all six of the great north faces of the Alps. When he reached the top of the Eiger, on July 29, 1952, Rébuffat accomplished this stirring feat of virtuosity. It is a measure of the man's modesty that nowhere in Starlight and Storm does he bother to mention that he was the first man ever to seize the laurels from all six of those perilous walls.
Confident though he was as a climber, at thirty-two Rébuffat was by no means sure he had what it took to be a "real" writer. Though he had grown up in Marseilles, he had been obsessed with mountains since boyhood. So brilliant were the alpine campaigns of his youth that in 1942 he was elected to the company of guides of Chamonix--an almost unheard-of honor for a climber not born in Chamonix. (Terray, from Grenoble, and Lachenal, of Annecy, were two other notable exceptions.) For two decades, the tall, craggy montagnard made his living as a guide. To supplement their meager earnings, Rébuffat and Terray conducted a ludicrous experiment in running a farm in Les Houches, just down the valley from Chamonix. (Since childhood, Gaston had had a mortal fear of cows. With both proprietors always off in the mountains, the farm did not last long.)
Starlight and Storm is an odd crossbreed of a book. One wonders whether Arthaud, the original publisher, asked Rébuffat to beef up what they might have regarded as a dangerously slender account of six adventures in the mountains with a capsule how-to manual to give the work utilitarian value and shelf life.
Uncertain though he was in taking up the pen, the Chamonix guide found his voice at once, for he knew what he wanted to say about climbing and the mountain life. It is here that Rébuffat's utter originality comes to the fore. Ever since mountaineering had been "invented," with the first ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786, the struggle of men against the heights had been conceived of and narrated in martial terms. A team "laid siege" to a mountain; it "attacked" its objective by the likely "weaknesses" in its "defenses"; reaching the summit was inevitably a "victory," even a "conquest."
All this chest thumping was anathema to Rébuffat. From an early age, he had gained his remarkable proficiency on slab and serac not by battling against the natural world but by embracing it. The mountain was not an enemy; it was an enchanted realm of peace and harmony, entered into in a spirit of communion, not of war.
In the lyrical hymn to that communion which poured out in the pages of Starlight and Storm, Rébuffat single-handedly revolutionized mountain writing. So thoroughly did this new aesthetic win the day, imbuing the next generation of climber-writers, that today's reader, picking up Starlight and Storm for the first time, can scarcely sense how radical this sort of writing seemed in 1954.
Indeed, at times Rébuffat's exaltations threaten to eclipse the real tragedies and do-or-die struggles he endured. One must read between the lines to sense the horror of his party's bivouac on the descent of the Grandes Jorasses after Rébuffat's companion Georges Michel has been swept 1,500 feet to his death by a falling boulder--not to mention the astounding skill by which Rébuffat himself avoided the same death by instinctively jamming his plunging body into a perfect chimney position thirty feet below the ledge, at the cost of a broken foot, kneecap, and rib.
After 1953, Rébuffat continued to guide, often taking clients up lines otherwise considered too stiff for amateurs. But he receded from the cutting edge of first ascents and new routes. Instead, in collaboration with several gifted photographers, he produced a series of exquisite picture books that mingled personal reflection with historical evocation of the alpine playground. These books--Neige et Roc, Entre Terre et Ciel, Mont-Blanc: Jardin Féerique, and others--gained a large audience and made Rébuffat mildly famous.
In the photos illustrating those books, Rébuffat appeared again and again in profile against a vertical cliff, always wearing the same patterned pullover sweater, the rope dangling from his waist into the void, hands seeming to caress the rock, toes perched on invisible holds. These images captured as none had before the grace and elegance that lay at the heart of Rébuffat's approach to climbing.

So persuasive was the Rébuffat aesthetic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Modern Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0375755063
• ISBN 13: 9780375755064
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien