K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [89]
Fritz Wiessner died in 1988, at the age of eighty-eight. During the last decade of his life, Kauffman and Putnam interviewed him at length, as they planned to write his biography. Their book did not come out until 1992. For reasons best known to themselves, the work they published was not a biography at all but an account of the 1939 expedition that its authors hoped would be the definitive record.
Kauffman and Putnam did meticulous research, and they discovered evidence that no one else had been privy to, such as Durrance’s diary and Groth’s memorandum to the State Department. But K2: The 1939 Tragedy was deeply disappointing to younger climbers who had come to see Wiessner as a hero. For some, Kauffman and Putnam’s book verged on a betrayal.
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it is galling to see the same old ethnic stereotypes from the 1930s and ‘40s recycled in the authors’ strictures and interpretations. And it’s annoying how Kauffman and Putnam sit in condescending judgment of Wiessner. The authors were good climbers themselves—Kauffman was one of the two men who made the first ascent of Gasherbrum I in 1958, the only 8,000er pioneered by Americans. But their smug second-guessing of an even better climber, Fritz Wiessner, is hard to swallow. A couple of examples:
Fritz had a different attitude toward mountaineering from the others. The Americans played for fun, Fritz for keeps. Fritz also adhered to an authoritarian leadership model, whereas the Americans had a tradition of independence, even of rebellion.
On K2 and elsewhere Fritz Wiessner demonstrated outstanding skill as a climber. But what can be said of his leadership on the 1939 K2 expedition? … Did he treat his companions even-handedly? Did he make allowance for the weaknesses of those less competent than himself and recognize the perils to which these weaknesses might expose the undertaking? Finally, did he overextend his human resources and, at the critical moment, rely on luck?
The upshot of K2: The 1939 Tragedy is to blame Wiessner for much of what went wrong on the expedition, and even to implicate him in errors of judgment that led to the deaths of Dudley Wolfe and the three Sherpa. As if in counterbalance, Durrance comes across almost as the hero of the story, constantly solicitous of the well-being of his teammates and doing his best to hold the fragile team together.
It’s hard to understand how these two men, who, in the 1960s, had the most to do with rehabilitating Wiessner, who championed his readmission to the AAC and his honorary membership, could write a supposedly “authoritative” account of the 1939 expedition that on almost every other page makes some sly criticism of the leader.
A friend of mine who knew Wiessner well and Putnam fairly well has his theory. He told me recently, “For years Kauffman and Putnam spent day after day with Fritz, recording his memories and listening to him tell his old war stories. Fritz could be pretty imperious, and he probably took for granted that these two guys would hang on his every word. And when you got Fritz talking about K2, his bitterness came to the surface.
“I can imagine that after years of this, Kauffman and Putnam got a little tired of Fritz. They may have started resisting some of the things he told them. And then they befriended Jack Durrance, and got on his good side, until Durrance let them read and quote from his diary. That July 18 entry was a bombshell—it pretty much disproved Fritz’s lifelong idea that Durrance was the villain of the expedition.
“So by the time Kauffman and Putnam were ready to write, they had lost interest in doing a biography. But they thought they had instead the true story of what happened on one of the most enigmatic expeditions of all time. And by now, conveniently enough, Fritz was dead. He couldn’t answer them from