The Eiger Obsession - John Harlin Jr.

One is reminded of what Elio Vittorini said to Cesare Pavese when he received Paesi Tuoi from him. It was June 1941 and Vittorini told Einaudi’s workshop man that three or four books like this a year were needed to dispel all those age-old prejudices lying at the root of false books.

If there is one mountain book that is beautiful and absolute, for the year 2008, it is this one. The story of John Harlin and his family told in the first person by his son, Junior.
It is not a classic book of memories. There would have been no room in one for a man like John Harlin. A friend of Gary Hemming, daring to the point of recklessness, as bold as he was restless, a leading figure of a new vision of the mountains in the ’60s. He is the first to climb the south face of the Fou and then makes two direct routes on the West Face of the Dru. He then drifts away from Hemming and begins to dream only of the Eiger, the most problematic and inward mountain in all the Alps. The Eiger is an absolute mountain, where only gods or shamans go up. Not ordinary mountaineers, who can die there. That is why Harlin falls madly in love with it. His is an ill-fated love. It closely involves, indeed overwhelms, his whole family. His wife Marilyn Miler, and their two children, John and Andréa.
“You will come under enormous pressure to conform to others, to swap your path for another one, to follow the easier one. Don’t do it. Always be true to your dreams”. This is what Bruce Bordett, one of his pupils from the time he worked as a PE teacher at Leysin in Switzerland, remembers of John Harlin senior, known as the Blond God.
It was for this reason that John Harlin never gave up the Eiger. At the cost of his life and his dream.
The part devoted to his relationship with Hemming is hilarious, as it is only right that the life of the first all-round American mountaineers should have been in the ’60s, in a playground as boundless as the Alps. They seemed like a married couple in perpetual quarrel and torment. Except that they came together, as all long-married couples do, when difficulties required it. Hemming reproached Harlin for the shackles of marriage and bourgeois life, as well as for not climbing rock with impeccable technique. Harlin, on the other hand, reproached him for his inexperience and for not being at ease on snow and ice. What is certain is that those two Americans, so different physically but so alike deep in their inner selves, consumed by a dragon in perpetual ecstasy, brought a new life to the Alps during the ’60s. Theirs was a magical mountaineering, steeped in a search for beauty and for novelty in the absolute sense. Harlin wanted to climb the Eiger using the “drop of water” technique. A perfectly direct route. A masterpiece on the rock of the impossible. A walk along the throat of the absolute, looking death in its green eyes, which smile when it grabs you by the throat.
When the rope broke, in 1966, Harlin left a very beautiful wife and two young children. John was nine.
From this point on the book hinges on an inner journey that has no equal and finds no match in any other mountain book. From here begins the road towards finding out what drives a man to put his own life in danger. And what comes after, for those who stay behind.
In the introduction to the book, translated by Mirella Tenderini into an Italian as brilliant as stars on ice, the translator tells us that this is perhaps the first time a mountaineer has “come out” in this sense. The term is ugly, it sounds even worse, but it can convey the explosive force of a revelation outside the canons we have been accustomed to.
Harlin Jr. takes us by the hand, unafraid of suffering, into his family life. The life after the tragedy. His mother and sister are seen without veils. Live and unfiltered, though with tact and psychological gentleness. This does not stop Harlin from telling us how it went. He tells us that the women in his life never accepted the death of husband and father. And that he seemed to go on living with them. His sister above all experienced their father’s death as a betrayal. Great anger and great bitterness at having been abandoned halfway across the ford.
John Jr. seems to live his father’s death in a more precious way. He treasures whatever it may have left him. He takes up skiing, races many times in the Trofeo Topolino, and tries to approach the mountains from a distance. He tries to understand why his father was an animal so thirsty for mountains that he played with sirens who may look like absurd beacons to other men. Beacons without light. To those from the plains who do not know the “brotherhood of the rope”.
Growing up he understands that his inner catharsis, his final liberation, could never leave out the climb of the Eiger, that cursed mountain which had dismembered his father. Breaking his body and mangling it like a flesh puppet pierced by twelve hundred metres of vertical fall. As fate would have it, a drop-of-water line.
An enormously heavy legacy to carry through your life. It is like Frodo’s ring. You know you are carrying a treasure that will destroy you if you cannot get rid of it at the right moment.
So he starts climbing in North America, where people think the peaks are less sharp than in the Alps. He always tries to steer round the suspicion and anxiety of his mother, already burnt once by fire, like an Indian widow.
He also starts writing. Today John Harlin Jr. edits the American Alpine Journal, the bible of American mountain magazines. Even in its folio size. It is strange that writing should be such a companion, and even more a sister of the rope, to mountaineering. Perhaps because writing always amounts to making a journey into the most ancient and primitive things hidden in certain inner recesses. As hard to reach as some snow-covered peaks.
Freud still writes in a modern way today. Was he not perhaps a mountaineer of the human soul?
For Harlin Jr., then, writing becomes a steady occupation, a paid job and a way of throwing a safe, professional bridge between climbing and everyday life. A way of distilling the daily nightmare of a constant loss. A kind of antidote able to mithridatise it every day. The great therapeutic power of writing that does not flinch. That lowering yourself into yourself without ropes and with a skeleton beside you.
Mountaineering is one of the noble expressions of man. Ascent is a rising upwards, it is a liberating ascesis. Perhaps that is why Harlin Jr. manages to bring to light, isolating it, the most moving and truest definition of the mountaineer in two pages as dry as winter icicles: “The true mountaineer follows the sirens’ song because he loves to dance with them and deludes himself that he can escape their grip”.
Illusion is perhaps what his father could not overcome. It was a siren so sweet that it made him lose himself. But Harlin Jr. – and here lies the beauty of the book – also tells us that there is another way of becoming a mountaineer: a passion for the beauty of nature.
It is that distant and close urge by which the mountaineer wants at all costs to be at the centre of nature, to touch it. He does not want to look at it from the window of a chalet, he wants to climb it, Nature. But there is also a whole lot of fun.
Harlin Jr.’s life seems condemned to be only that of the son of the real John Harlin. IMAX, however, the company that created an original kind of show consisting of projecting adventure films, shot for the purpose, onto giant screens, commissions him to climb the Eiger.
It is the moment of truth a man waits for his whole life.
Harlin Jr. realises that he can no longer refuse that spectre and accepts, after getting past his mother and his wife and their feelings of fear, pure terror, and a love wounded once again. The climb must be made in absolute safety and, what is more, it will have his little daughter Siena as a spectator.
The son frees himself from the monster by choosing to look into the eyes that saw his father fall. It is a liberation, a final leap towards the light and above a world thick with a darkness as dense as liquid.
It is the sign that a lifetime of waiting has been spent for good and that the dense liquid of fear will turn into a volatile substance. Infinitely lighter to carry.
He writes the book and it seems that the sirens of the mountain have shown him a path of mysterious light. Almost a miraculous spring from which to drink with both hands. What makes this book a unique piece, though, remains that inner drama lived out over a lifetime. Always with a thought shared by a family and endured by some. This is a confession book. An exposé of what mountaineering demands of those who stand close to the person who hears the sirens within. A life of sacrifice and waiting.
The shadow of the mountain is not an abstract concept.
It is a reality of life that leaves no way out for those who suffer a certain choice and have no weapons to refuse it or somehow try to beat it. No rationality holds for the partners of the brothers of the rope. There is waiting, a continuous evening melancholy, and little to say to the children when the sirens turn into demanding ogres.
A mountaineer is usually said to be a great, incurable egocentric. And this is the dilemma. Sometimes it is hard to forgive a passion that shows no regard for the family. Here Harlin Jr. leaves us a great testimony of truth, without fear, driving away all the fears of the modern mountaineer. Which is no longer only that of falling and dying. It is that of leaving the family naked, stripped of a father and a husband. This seed of doubt begins to tell us that a deep revolution has now arisen in today’s mountaineering. The shift towards the partner and the children. The deadly hard attempt to make a passion that devours its children coexist with the warm sense of family. It is the fixing of a principle that nobody before ever had the balls to put on trial, or to denounce publicly. It is a damned nagging torment, the mountaineer’s real problem, the one that perhaps can never be solved except at the price of sacrificing the mountaineer to the man who prefers to write, and to live in absolute safety, what can give him a quiet as silent as only certain summits can. Up there, high up, there is the wind. But man knows how to learn. Even at the cost of killing the sirens.
But this perhaps applies only to someone who has heard the sirens kill his father. And who for his life – afterwards – wanted to create a justification able to let him sleep sheltered from those so insidious songs. Above all at night. It took a whole lifetime. The mountain is in any case always, for those who practise it and for those who are their companions, a long wait.