Gary Hemming by Mirella Tenderini

A historic book. The most classic and polished work on Hemming. Tenderini must have filed this text down countless times. To make it lean, without a single comma too many.

It's a fairly slim book, but it holds a hundred lives inside it. Hemming's. Who he was, we know. He becomes a famous mountaineer, or better, a mountain adventurer, after the 1966 rescue on the Dru. From then on his life takes a turn from which there's no going back. So much so that in Chamonix he can hardly find any peace any more. There are too many admirers, or just people who want to see him.

A man born on 13 December 1934. He is born on Saint Lucy's day, when the night is at its longest and the climate sweeps the heart like a desert of hoarfrost.
He has an elfin temperament, cheerful, but dangerous in his sudden fits of anger. They come  like a click going off in the dark. The mountains draw him in right away. From the United States he'll come to France almost through the workings of a mysterious attraction. But a natural one. Gary Hemming reveals himself to the wider public only after 1966, when he gets to know fame up close. After this rescue everyone realises that this bizarre ragamuffin, with a disarming smile, is also a great mountaineer. A journalist from Paris Match sticks to him like glue until Hemming writes him the main article on the rescue. It's a success. Hemming is finally able to write about the mountains in a way people can understand. And a gripping one. Before then mountain literature had been reduced almost entirely to the role of a sterile handmaiden: only documents and reports crammed with data. Which bore you and can only whet the appetite of mountaineers. With Hemming out comes a piece that lights up the mountain from its human side. The 60s burst  into that article, which marks a turning point. A new way of conceiving the mountain. Hemming is this too: the deep and conscious humanisation of the mountain.

The desire to become a writer becomes an opportunity to seize after the rescue. A French publisher pays him an advance and puts a house and a translator at his disposal. He will write a mountain book - a real patchwork - modelled on nobody but himself.
It won't be a mountain book in the true sense, but his life written from the hardest faces: those of his soul. The book won't be published, because people weren't yet ready to climb over the canonical barrier of mountain literature. Hemming is a forerunner in this too. He is the first true mountaineer of the soul.

He embodies a terribly attractive figure. About one metre ninety tall, with light eyes that speak for themselves, with a smile capable of opening dozens of hearts. Utterly unreliable. A lover of solo climbs, done in complete privacy. A mountaineer who shows that Americans too can produce figures able to compete with Europeans in the high mountains. He fears ice and will always climb it with some reservations. Gifted with another quality as solitary as he is: a natural inclination to save people. That's the spring that drives him to carry out the rescue on the Dru. A supporter of "clean" climbing ante litteram: for him a climb must be fair at all costs, except to save yourself from some unavoidable danger. He writes an eloquent article on his idea of the mountaineer, which is published in 1964 in the magazine La Montagne et Alpinisme. He writes it together with the eternal companion of his mortal life: Claude. A solid woman, overly respectful of Gary's living space to the point of sacrificing herself, she gives him a daughter.
Gary is a man of a thousand hungers: for women, for human contact, for houses to live in. When he's in Paris he sends postcards to his friends and writes on them "I live here", pointing to a random bridge on the Seine. Fast as the wind in his feverish wanderings. He was sick with dromomania. He was a nomad of the mountains but above all of life. He had an urgent need to keep moving and not to stay in the same place for long. He goes through a few periods of calm. Now and then quiet interrupts that devouring, starving anxiety that grips him. With Claude he knows moments of calm, of family warmth. They don't get in each other's way. They both understand each other's space. Gary, like all men who belong to his category ( that of the damned ), needs pauses from adrenaline. He needs zones of calm in which to discharge the excess pressing at him from within. He has wonderful eyes and a liar's smile. His lies are also a spell to defend himself from curiosity. He is reserved and has no wish to let people know who he really is. He is a playful chameleon mortally wounded by himself. He's a beatnik, but not of the mountains. Of the soul.

He doesn't care about clothes. He's untidy in the way he dresses. The most famous photo shows him in a frayed red jumper, holed in fact, a dishevelled blond mop over the face of a weary knight, well-worn boots. He's a Bruce Chatwin of mountaineering. You can almost glimpse the little flames of the fire that burns him and consumes him alive. Perhaps the restlessness that has gone with him since birth is an unconscious foreshadowing of death. It almost seems that Hemming never gives up saving other people, even at the cost of putting himself at risk. Is he looking for death ? Or for life within death ? Is he trying to drive away a dark-eyed goddess with a thousand lives whose eyes beat with life ?

His end is ugly. It's almost frightening. It stays wrapped in a mystery that smells of the shroud. And of impenetrability. Hemming's death remains a whodunnit. Nobody knows whether he shot himself or whether something else happened. Perhaps Hemming dies long before that night when he meets his old friends and  drinks himself into a stupor. To the point of picking a fight just to feel alive, or of seeking redress for a life he feels has fallen prey to absolute defeat. That's the blindfolded goddess who really kills the mountaineer of the soul. A very bitter sense of defeat. And perhaps of loneliness, at a moment when there were no longer any bulwarks to shelter behind. Fame was gone: the return to the States coincides with an apparent surrender in the face of life. Many reproach him for having lost his head over celebrity. Above all for never having recovered the balance of a mental mountaineer once the celebrity had faded.

His all too playful temperament - after the bath of fame and spotlights - had suddenly veered towards melancholy. The most pernicious form of the human inclination towards life. The most destructive one.
The coroner's verdict was suicide. There were many hypotheses. As Tenderini convincingly points out, though, it changes nothing. It doesn't matter whether it was suicide, or a desperate challenge at Russian roulette in the hope that fate might help him. Nor does it matter whether Gary was under the influence of hallucinogens. What matters is that with him dies a hero of the 60s, a saviour of the mountains. A character who might almost have stepped out of the pen of The Lord of the Rings. A man in whom the roots must never freeze, whatever happens, in spite of death.
In the closing pages of this book - which remains one of the portraits that comes closest to the dark side of the man too - Tenderini writes how the series of failures Hemming felt in his personal life killed him first of all.
And she also writes how only in mountaineering did handsome Gary find the balance that life denied him everywhere else.
Too few traces of him remain. After rereading his biography, and savouring a style that makes this book Tenderini's most successful work, I ordered online the issue - I no longer remember the exact number - of Paris Match from September 1966. I'm still waiting for it.

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Retail price: €15.00

Another biography of a leading figure of the vertical world is Dan Osman - Inseguendo la paura.