John Long’s review of Lord of the Abyss
Legendary Yosemite climber John Long review's David Smart's most recent book Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss
One hundred and ten years ago, a slight, blue-eyed, Austrian Jew named Paul Preuss (pronounced Proyce) made 1,200 ascents of the hardest routes in the Alps, three hundred of which were done solo (no rope), including one hundred and fifty first ascents.
“I want to be bold, but not dead,” said Preuss. “Some days that line is a little further this way, some days a little further that way.”
Wherever that line was, on Oct. 3, 1913, Preuss climbed right past it and took a 1,000-foot death fall while attempting to solo the north face of the Mandlkogel in Austria. Preuss was 27 years old. (A century later, almost to the day, Quinn Brett and Libby Sauter set the female speed record on Lurking Fear, a popular route on the west face of El Capitan.)
Generations of European climbers, who knew Preuss’ oeuvre firsthand, called him, “an almost supernatural being, born for the rock” and “the most fantastic knight of the mountains of all times and all nations.”
In Preuss’ own time, his “purity of style” so boldly coloured climber’s sensibilities that Sigmund Freud’s own son, Martin, a frequent rope mate of Preuss, wrote that, “To my mind in those days, any sport in which you could not kill yourself had no moral value.” The great Italian mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, who in 1980 soloed Mount Everest without bottled oxygen, wrote two books about Preuss and started a foundation in his name.
“Without Preuss,” wrote David Smart in his 2019 release, Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss, “climbing may never have developed the ethical, existential core that gave it meaning in the long term. Yet even the most trenchant traditionalists remain unsure about whether to add him to their pantheon of dismiss him as at worst a lunatic, or at best, an indelicate subject best ignored.”
Though commonly forgotten, or more likely, unknown, Preuss, “unsurpassed and unsurpassable!” remains a spectral escort to every speed climber and soloist rolling the dice on the Big Stone. I learned all that after hearing about Smart’s book, getting hold of the author and begging him for a copy.
What I received, and had the pleasure of reading, was the finest biography of an adventure figure I have ever found. I cringe to think of the years of research needed to dog down all the information, more than a century after it happened. And the journalistic chops to frame it all so cogently made me jealous of Smart as a writer.
Lord of the Abyss is one of those rare offerings that work magically as a biography while speaking to both a niche (climbing) and wider audience. If you want to know more, buy the book. The degree to which Preuss prefigured the climbers of today will amaze, and for those who appreciate a superfluid, engaging read, you can’t do much better than Lord of the Abyss.
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