Terre Des Hommes/Wind, Sand and Stars
Gallimard, the famous French publisher, also has a gallery a few blocks from their Paris
store. We went there to see a display on a newly-published, illustrated edition of Terre Des Hommes by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, illustrations by Riad Saffoud. Terre Des Hommes would be literally translated into English as Land of Men or Land of People. However, in English we know the book as Wind, Sand and Stars. A far more evocative title in my opinion, though admittedly any nuances of the French are lost on me. I am a firm believer in the Oxford comma, but the lack of a second comma here feels intentional and right.
Wind, Sand and Stars is often called an adventure book—for example, it’s number three on National Geographic’s list of all-time best one hundred adventure books. It’s a book ostensibly about flying and delivering the mail in primitive single-passenger planes to far-flung places, most northern Africa, where he survived numerous crashes. As aviation instrumentation became more sophisticated Saint-Exupéry feared pilots would become automatons.
Wind, Sand and Stars is an adventure book, but it is a better book about the philosophy of adventure. The style is somewhat aphoristic and, though I don’t see him quoted often today, his words were touchstones to many of us in the 1970s when we began to venture out:
“If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together.”
The new illustrations are beautiful, and the display included original manuscript pages. Saint-Exupéry was lost while flying a P-38 on a recon mission over the Mediterranean in 1944. Fragments of his plane was not discovered until the year 2000, but the cause of the crash was never conclusively determined. He was 44 years old.
Aside: Editions Gallimard is a much revered publisher in France. It was Michel Gallimard of the publishing family who was driving the car when it crashed into a tree–on a straight road, in fine weather–and instantly killed Albert Camus in 1960. Gallimard died a few days later.
Librairie des Alpes
High on my list of sacred sites in Paris is a little bookstore called Libraire des Alpes, just across the Seine from the Louvre–close to where we were staying. It’s a narrow shop, hard to browse in. The proprietor sits behind a desk at the back wall. In France, by the way, a librairie is a bookstore; a library is a biblioteque. Librairie des Alpes sells only mountaineering books, photographs, prints, and maps. So, for me, a kind of heaven. Although, more like getting to heaven and finding out that they don’t speak your language there. But I knew that ahead of time and, I am the sort of bibliophile who also appreciates books as objects, beautiful independently of the meaning their words convey. So, I loved being there.
I loved seeing the collection of Éditions Guérin titles, their distinctive red cloth covers and uniform, squarish shape. I enjoyed seeing which books by Americans were worthy of translations into French. Cory Richards and Lynn Hill titles most recent among these. This information could all, I suppose, be garnered on-line. But I take pleasure in holding a book in my hands.
I thought about acquiring a copy of Roper’s Camp 4 or Lionel Terray’s Les Conquérants de l’intuile, which we know in English as Conquistadors of the Useless. These are among my most hallowed books and these Guérin editions illustrate them beautifully with photographs not necessarily present in the original editions. I would have really liked to have acquired a copy of Terray’s Carnets, but this one is already out of print and selling for 200 euros. It was the very late discovery of Terray’s notebooks (carnets) that somewhat undermined the veracity of Herzog’s Annapurna, the most popular mountaineering book of all time. The Carnets also put to rest the rumor that Terray himself was not the actual author of Conquistadors of the Useless. David Roberts wrote about this in his very astutely researched and observed True Summit, the subtitle of which is “What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna.” I love this book, which is also available in a Guérin edition, fitting as Michel Guérin was instrumental in enabling the full story to be revealed—maybe now I regret not having bought that one.
I do own one Guérin book: Gilles Modica’s 1865, The Golden Age of Mountaineering. It;’s a lovely im]illustrated history with the text translated into English (maybe the only translated Gue2rin title? Don’t know).
Anyway, what did I buy at the Librairie des Alpes? Another aside: I had been hoping to meet with Charlie Buffet, an editor at Guérin when I was in Paris, but that could not be arranged. I had been planning to ask Buffet about Aleister Crowley, supposedly the subject of one of my current writing projects, one of the most frustrating projects ever due to . . . many factors, but mostly a lack of sources, the ones extant often disagreeing, as a well as the lingering Victorian sense of decorum in the mountaineering accounts of the early 20th centaur. A long story of woe and procrastination–my story of the nonwriting.
Anyway, Buffet did put together beautiful book of photographs of the 1902 K2 expedition, which I already possess, also one of my favorites. And now I would buy a small, mini-Guérin of his La Folie du K2 (folie meaning madness, ie. insanity ) hoping to discover there Buffet’s definitive take on Crowley. So that was one purchase.
The other is more dear. A copy of Raymond Lambert and Claude Kogan’s Record A L’Himalaya. This is their co-written account of their 1955 first ascent of Ganesh a nearly 7,500 meter peak in the Ganesh Himalaya. They were accompanied by Eric Gauchat who died on the descent. In English the book is more dramatically titled White Fury and bears the subtitle, “Guarisankar and Cho Oyu.” I have known about and admired Kogan after reading of an account by her and her climbing partner Nicole Leininger’s first ascent of Quitaraju in the Cordillera Blanca. This effort was recorded by Leininger in the book she co-authored with Kogan’s husband Georges Kogan: The Ascent of Alpamayo, book chronicling the first ascent of Alpamayo, considered by many to be the most beautiful mountain in the world. The ascent of Quitaraju by the women feels a little bit tacked on as a footnote, but it was both a pioneering climb and lovely accounting of it.
These histories mean something personal to me as Jim Pinter-Lucke and I warmed up on the slopes of Quitaraju before we climbed Alpamayo in 1984. Now that Jim has passed away I am the sole keeper of those memories and I hold then very close.
So, I’m glad to have their book, a book they Kogan and Lambert each held in their hands and inscribed to a friend on August 26, 1957. The inscription is a bit difficult to read, due more to penmanship than translation issues. But it appears to have been dedicated to Raymond Leininger, Nicole’s husband and fellow member of the Alpamayo team.
Georges Kogan died shortly after his quickly-written book about Alpamayo (of illness, not a climbing accident). Claude went on to become one of the most accomplished alpinists of her day,
Lambert said of Kogan, “For her an expedition is not an athletic feat, it is an essay in the poetics.”
Kogan perished in an avalanche while leading an all-women’s attempt on Cho Oyo, one of the fourteen 8,000 meter peaks, on which she had nearly reached the summit with Lambert a few years earlier. It was 1959, she was forty years old.
Kerouac in Paris
A short barely connected preamble: I acquired a new European copy of Lydia Davis translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. The literal translation into English is the currently preferred In Search of Lost Time. I prefer Moncrrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past. Translated books very often do not even bother to literally translate the titles, as previously observed. A good example being Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, titled Fiesta in Spanish. I am finding Davis’ translation . . . unnecessary, but admittedly I wasn’t reading it side-by-side with Moncrieff. Okay, I only read around fifty pages. I was comparing it with my memory of reading the Moncrieff translation over thirty years ago. Moncrieff called the first book (of the seven that comprise its whole) Swann’s Way. Davis calls it The Way of Swann. This is an important new translation?
I also bought a copy of Kerouac’s Satori in Paris. It is a bilingual translation to French with English on he left and French on the right. It was translated by Jean Autret with an introduction and notes by Yann Yvinec. Published by none other than Gallimard, first in 1971, six years after it appeared in English. It was one of Kerouac’s last books. Unlike much of his other work, which is what today we would call autofiction, he does not bother to call this a novel. It’s nonfiction, although I have seen it referred to as a novella. I’m not sure the words fiction/nonfiction even registered much with him. It’s Kerouac.
Satori, Kerouac explains, is Japanese for a “sudden illumination/sudden awakening/kick in the eye.” The occasion for the book is that he is at home after a ten-day trip to France and he’s now, presumably in this book, “regrouping all the confused rich events of those ten days.”
Now I am doing the same, after my own ten-day trip to Paris, where the events were rich, but not confused. Probably not confused because I did not drink nearly as much alcohol as Kerouac did while he was in France.
I once read a review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The reviewer said Robert Pirsig didn’t get zen right, then added that it wasn’t very good on motorcycle maintenance either. In this case, whatever the illumination that Keroauc experienced was, he doesn’t articulate it very clearly, and as for Paris, most of the book doesn’t take place there either.
Which is to say that it’s not clear what the sudden illumination, the satori, was. It seems to be related to the taxi driver to whom he refers to on the first and again on the last, page. The driver, Raymond Baillett, is in a hurry to get back to work to support his family. Is that the satori: work and family?
It’s not clear. After Bailett leaves there at the airport curb there is one more enigmatic sentence to conclude the work
“ “When God says “I Am Lived,” we will have forgotten what all the parting was about.”
The book is not as depressing as Big Sur, but it’s pretty bleak, in my opinion. My friend O’Grady has a more through understanding of Kerouac and is often able to explain him to donkey-brained me. Perhaps he will again this time.
About Monsieur Yvinec, the preface and note writer, I have little confidence. When Kerouac makes a reference to John Montgomery forgetting his sleeping bag on the Matterhorn, Yvinec unhelpfully notes that the Matterhorn is Cervcin en Suisse, which of course is the wrong Matterhorn, wrong mountain range, wrong continent. In the same note Gary Snyder is spelled Snider.
Which takes me back to Dharma Bums, my favorite book of Kerouac’s. There are many reasons for this, but ultimately, I think it is the most hopeful of his works. And that makes me sad, too. Poor Jack, gone at 47.
