Claudio Barbier was one of the best climbers of his generation — roping up with folks such as Reinhold Messner and Chris Bonington — that most people have never heard of. So what happened? In “Il Divino,” his masterful profile of Barbier, Tristan Kennedy probes how legacies are shaped — and by whom.
“If the circumstances around Barbier's death remain unclear, there's an air of mystery about his life, too,” writes Kennedy. “And in the intervening decades, the details have only grown more opaque.”
In this interview with Kennedy, we discuss the year-long reporting that took him to Catholic monasteries and the police archive in Belgium, all over the Dolomites and Switzerland, and into the murky waters of memory.
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Tristan Kennedy is a British journalist based in the Italian Dolomites. He specializes in stories about adventure, outdoor sports, and the climate crisis.
Kennedy's article, "Il Divino: The Troubled Life and Mysterious Death of Claudio Barbier," appears in Summit Journal 324.
When Journalism Gets Complicated With Tristan Kennedy
Summit Journal: After “Il Divino” was published in the latest issue, you wrote on Instagram, “I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of an article.” Why is this piece so meaningful to you?
Tristan Kennedy: Summit Journal is a really beautiful magazine — not just because of the stories Michael focuses on, but also because Randy Levensaler’s design is so on point. After working on the piece for the best part of a year from pitch to publication, it was amazing to see it laid up on those large-format pages, accompanied by the gorgeous old photos we’d persuaded Anne Lauwaert to dig out and have scanned for us.
This wasn’t one of those stories where I had a strong personal connection to the subject before I started researching it. But I did feel kind of uniquely placed to tell Claudio’s story — at least to an English-speaking audience. I live in the Dolomites, where he did most of his climbing, and I speak Italian (thanks largely to my long-suffering Italian wife). Before moving here, I spent years studying French. This story involved a lot of face-to-face interviews with elderly French and Italian speakers who were sharing pretty intimate — and often painful — memories with me.
When I said I was proud, I guess I was proud of all the work that went into that reporting process, as well as the writing. And I was also proud to be able to give some of Claudio’s loved ones a voice in his story. I’m thinking specifically of Nelly Bériaux, who had never spoken publicly about her relationship with Claudio.
SJ: I understand that you first learned about Claudio Barbier from your friend Monica Malfatti’s biography about him, Dimmi che mi ami. There are a few other books as well. What was it about Barbier’s story that you felt there was more to tell?
TK: Yep, it was Monica who first put me onto his story, and I can’t thank her enough for her time and patience — both in interviews and in introducing me to a lot of her sources. Monica’s biography is excellent, but it’s tightly-focused on Claudio’s achievements in the Dolomites, she doesn’t really go into much detail about his life in Belgium.
The only other books that have been published about Claudio are two self-published titles by his former partner, Anne Lauwaert (one written in French, the other in Italian). They’re based on her personal recollections and diaries, conversations with many of his friends, and Claudio’s correspondence with his parents, which she inherited when they died. But they come from one, pretty subjective, viewpoint.
Reading them, and speaking to Monica, left me with a lot of questions — not least about how and why Claudio died so tragically young. There was this theory, proposed by Anne, that he’d been sexually abused by Catholic priests as a child, and eventually took his own life. And then there was an article on the website claudiobarbier.be (published by the climber and amateur historian Didier Demeter, who became an important source) that suggested some of Claudio’s friends thought he might have been murdered.
I thought both possibilities were worth investigating!
(Left) Tre Cime di Lavaredo. (Right) Claudio Barbier in 1967. / Photo: J. Slegten / Photo: Anne Lauwaert Collection.
SJ: The article takes a notable turn from focusing on Barbier to centering on Anne Lauwaert, whom he was dating at the time of his death. Not to give away any plot twists, but how did you decide to shift the focus of the piece towards this new “character”? What did that allow you to do as a reporter telling the story?
TK: Well, Anne is basically the key primary source for Claudio’s life story. Most of what’s publicly known about Claudio has been filtered through her.
Anne’s the only person who knew him well who’s published anything about him, and because she’s inherited his archive of letters and so on, she’s kind of the custodian of his memory. She’s also the person who found his body.
Reading Anne’s books and talking to her, though, I felt like their relationship was perhaps more complicated than it seemed at first. So I thought that explaining who she is, and exploring some of the subjective biases that might influence her memories — and memoirs — was essential to giving the reader an understanding of who Claudio was.
SJ: There are many personalities with diverging opinions in the article. One theme in the story is about who gets to be the “arbiter” of truth or legacy. When putting together a piece like this, how do you think about presenting these differences, contradictory information, etc.?
TK: This is a tricky one.
As a journalist, you always have to make editorial judgments about what to include and what to leave out, especially for longform articles, when you’ve amassed a ton of research. My reporting left me with hours and hours of recorded interviews, and reams of notes, and you can’t possibly include it all.
There’s this idea — famously expressed by Janet Malcolm in her essay The Journalist & the Murderer — that by making these choices, journalists are, by definition, imposing their version of the truth on a story (and usually betraying their interview subjects in the process). But I don’t think that’s always true.
My account of who Claudio was will inevitably be different from, say, Anne’s or Jean Bourgeois’, but I certainly didn’t think of myself as an arbiter of truth in this case. I saw my job as gathering as many accounts of Claudio’s life and death as possible, and presenting the salient, credible points of each — pointing out contradictions where they existed, and including explanations where they were given.
Of course, no individual can ever be 100 percent objective. So you talk through this stuff with your editor and with others who can help you interrogate your biases and assumptions. (My wife and my brother are frequent sounding boards). Michael was brilliant at challenging things during the editing process. Hopefully, this helped eliminate any obvious subjective biases I may have brought to the material. Obviously, everything we published was then checked from a legal point of view too.
With this story, the subject is as much Claudio’s legacy as it is Claudio himself. I felt foregrounding that for the reader, and making memory a central theme of the piece, was important. Because everyone has a slightly different version of who he was, how he lived, and why he died. And in the end, it’s not a story with a “smoking gun” reveal that explains everything.
Claudio Barbier (center) sharing a bottle of wine with British alpinist and cameraman Mick Burke (left). German climber Robert Bechem (second from right), and British mountaineering legend Don Whillans (right) in 1969. / Photo: Anne Lauwaert Collection
SJ: You did an incredible amount of research across nearly a year. And it sounds like the story evolved as you were reporting it. Corey Buhay shared with us that one sign that it’s a good story is how much it opens up when you dive into it. With that, can you give a quick sketch of this process?
TK: Yeah, this story totally evolved! What I first pitched to Michael was a piece about why this guy who had done all this incredible climbing, with all these big names (Messner, Bonington etc.) seemed to be largely forgotten. Why hadn’t he left more of a legacy?
I was aware of the possible suicide theory, and this suggestion that he’d been abused at the hands of the Belgian Catholic chuch, and I thought that merited investigation. That’s what took me to the monastery, and then to the incredibly seventies offices of VRT (Belgium’s state broadcaster) to talk to Ingrid Schildermanns, who’d made this groundbreaking documentary series about abuse and the church’s cover-up. But it wasn’t until halfway through the reporting process that I became aware of the theory that Claudio might have been murdered.
I wrote Michael an email that said something like, “At the risk of this turning into a true crime story, I feel like it’s worth spending some time and word count exploring this!” Luckily, he was super up for it, and encouraged me to dig into it as far as possible.
The back-and-forth process about the final shape of the piece was one of the best I’ve ever had with any editor. A lot of what’s good about the story is thanks to Michael.
SJ: When did you know you had enough information to write the piece?
TK: I didn’t, haha. As I mention in the piece, I would have loved more access to Claudio’s archive, but Anne was pretty guarded about that. I was pretty happy that I had more than enough without it, though. I got to the point where I felt like (as I put it in an email to Michael) I’d “pretty much dug under every rock,” and I wasn’t sure anything more significant would emerge.
Also, the deadline was approaching, fast! Michael was incredibly patient about delays, but I had to deliver something sometime.
SJ: What do you hope the reader takes away from Claudio Barbier’s story?
TK: I guess I hope they come away feeling like they’ve learned something about an interesting and contradictory character. And maybe thinking about how legacies are shaped in the world of climbing (and beyond) — why some people’s achievements are remembered while others aren’t.
Also, I hope they’ll just be intrigued by the mystery!
SJ: Are you working on anything now that you think Summit Journal readers should be on the lookout for?
TK: I’m actually currently working on something completely different. A short documentary that I’m making with my director friend Will Nangle about a ski resort that was abandoned because of climate change. One family decided to stay on, refusing to give up on their home. We won a grant to make it (there’s a bit more explanation here) and we’re currently in post-production.
It sounds kind of bleak, and the resort definitely has a sort of Chernobyl vibe, but actually, their story is a really sweet and positive one. Hopefully, it’s a film that gets people thinking about wider issues. That will be out later this year, and (we hope) touring film festivals.
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Feature Image: Claudio Barbier aid climbing Le Toit du Monde ("The Roof of the World") at Freÿr, Belgium, in June 1961. Photo: Anne Lauwaert Collection.