In reply to Al Evans:
> What a strange and disturbing thread?
(Forgive me Al, this is going to be more long-winded than usual...)
The thing is that climbing is not always cheerful or morally sound place. Particularly when there’s a mixture of too much prestige, some money, and some big ego at stake. The more one tries to understand the history of mountaineering, the more realizes that it’s an extremely complex environment, where (as in most of humanity!) there are little “black” and “white”, but varying shades of grey.
Most climbing stories are inspiring and uplifting. Some are tragic, some are funny. And few are sad and disturbing. The Corti affair is one; the Desmaison odyssey in 1971 on the Jorasses is another, and the 1996 Everest may be included too in the list. What make the Corti story probably more sad than the others is that here the “victim” was someone who, back then, had very little chances to defend himself. While Desmaison or Boukreev had the means and the connections to write books and make their voice heard, Corti had none – he is a self educated man living in a tiny village, and for all his life has worked as the local carpenter. He was a great climber, but he remained strictly an amateur for his entire climbing career. He was also a difficult character, stubborn, sometime extremely suspicious of other people’s motives, maybe too proud and single minded for his own good. Back in 1957 this meant being considered, in some circle, a “lesser” individual – thus a perfect target for the “slow motion roasting” he was subjected to.
As for his tormentors, maybe few convinced they were doing the right thing; but I understand some other were motivated by less than noble intentions. For the majority of the rest it was a mix of the two – unfortunately, this may include some famous names of Italian climbing who should have known better: if Corti suffered what he did, it was also because they put the weight of their reputation against him.
Just to explain my point: I believe that one of the BIG assets of the post war British climbing scene was a healthy sense of amateurism and individuality/ism. And another was coming in the Alps not being under the long shadow of some “big” accomplishment of the previous generation. Bonington, Whillans, Patey, Brown and all the rest went to Chamonix or the Dolomites as perfect newcomers, maybe trying to emulate the deeds they had read about on magazines and books, but without the added burden back home of someone of an older generation telling them “you should this, you should do that, because that’s the way climbing is meant to be”. There were no local “heroes” whose footsteps was mandatory to follow, no local Cassin or Gervasutti or Comici and all their friends and climbing partners and self styled “heirs” monopolizing the scene and the media, and deciding what’s right and what’s wrong.
Also, there was little money involved, and (generally) no “national pride” at stake (ok the Everest ’53 expedition is an exception to that, but my point still stands). The amateurism, the individualism, the sense of self accomplishment and self reliance meant a big explosion of climbing creativity and, “incidentally”, that MAYBE a Corti affair could not have happened in the UK.
On the other hand, in Italy and Germany (and to a lesser extent in France), all those big shots who had done all those amazing climbs in the ’30s were, in the late ’40s and 50’, still very much there, often with prestigious positions in national climbing organization. Or if physically not there (as in Gervasutti’s case), a plethora of their buddies were continuing their “tradition” (on a side note, it’s uncertain that Gervasutti would have really approved all that was later done using his name, but that’s another subject). And there were the national Alpine clubs, the local, often very hierarchy-oriented local climbing clubs, the whole sense of national pride, the power of the local press etc.
This in some case did a lot of good to local climbing, as it’s debatable that a Bonatti could have ever began climbing in war-stricken Italy without the support of his club and (later) of Cassin. But on the same time this (at least in Italy) created a stagnant, often oppressive environment where it was difficult to do “something new”, as disapproval from peers or from “name” climbers was very often a big no no. Incidentally, this created too the conditions for the Corti affair happening.
As a minor irony, the Nuovo Mattino movement began and development also as a massive backlash against all that, and it’s no secret that the “seed” of the Nuovo Mattino more radical ideas grew because of the contact, in the late 60’s and early ‘70s between few young Turin climbers like Giampiero Motti (who spoke English) and the great American and British climbing literature of the two previous decades: Plus the fact that Motti (and Grassi, Manera, Galante etc) started climbing in the Orco area with people like Mike Kosterlitz. This brought a whole influx of new ideas and new models of mountaineering that, for good and bad, later “precipitated” (among the other things) the sport climbing revolution.
(I tried to keep it short, but the fingers wouldn't just stop!)