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Michel Bernanos was born on January 20, 1923, in Fressin, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France. Michel Bernanos was the fourth of six children born to Georges Bernanos, the famous French Catholic writer of rural damnation. He was the only one to become a writer, though in the vein of the fantastic and often under pen names, so as not to partake unfairly of his father’s fame.
Michel Bernanos began to write poems as early as 1938 (at fifteen years of age). In 1939 his brother Yves almost died from malaria in a risky expedition with a missionary, a slightly lunatic Indian priest. In 1942 Michel, nineteen years old, left Brazil for London, where he joined the organisation of the external resistance “France Libre” in 1943. He served as a submariner until late 1944. After the war, he returned to Brazil in 1946 and created an rubber plantation in the Amazonian forest, which provided the setting of his first fantasy novel and the inspiration for the imaginary forests of the stories published after his death, like the cycle of the "Montagne morte de la vie" ("The Other Side of the Mountain").
The son of French writer George Bernanos, Michel Bernanos was the author of pseudonymous thrillers, several volumes of poetry, and "La montagne de la vie", a surreal fantasy novel which garnered considerable critical acclaim when it was published in France shortly after its author’s premature death at the age of forty. In the United States, the novel was translated as "The Other Side of the Mountain" and its interpretation continues to provoke critical discussion.
"The Other Side of the Mountain" is “a thin, but deadly serious religious allegory,” according to Richard Freedman in Washington Post Book World, attempting to characterize Bernanos’s tale of a eighteen-year-old boy who is shanghaied aboard a French galleon, briefly subjected to the cruelties of the sailor’s life, and then shipwrecked on an island of phantasmagoric but threatening marvels.
"The Other Side of the Mountain" is presented as the personal narrative of the nameless boy, and is divided into two parts. In the first part he recalls how he drunkenly signed up as a cabin boy on a ship, was nearly keelhauled for laziness his first day, and eventually befriended Toine, the ship’s cook. En route to Peru, the ship is becalmed for nearly two months, resulting in depletion of the food supply, slow starvation of the crew, and eventually an orgy of cannibalism when the crew mutinies, dismembers the captain, and eats his body. This harrowing view of life aboard ship as a Darwinian struggle for survival made a strong impression on the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, who remarked that “the brutal degeneration of the men before privation and fear lays bare the affinity with a deeper nature, revolting and incomprehensible to the intellect, but shared in common with the rest of the natural world.”
This observation is born out in the novel’s second half, in which the boy and Toine are the only survivors of a violent storm that wrecks the ship on the rocks of an uncharted island and washes them ashore. The island is home to a variety of predatory natural phenomena including carnivorous flora and hungry rivers, subterranean caverns filled with statues of humans and animals frozen into postures of terror, and an omnipresent noise from the ground that makes it sound very much as though the island is a living entity with a beating heart. Persuaded that their salvation lies beyond the distant range of mountains to which all of the plants bend in apparent reverence, the pair set out to cross the island, but endure a succession of setbacks and privations, including slow petrification once they begin to eat the island plants and a final encounter with a giant staring eye at the bottom of a volcano crater.
In the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, Francis Amery offered the opinion that “the story lends itself most readily to interpretation as a posthumous fantasy in which the strange continent is a post-Dantean afterworld. In that decoding the narrator’s journey to the mountain becomes a kind of rite of passage by means of which he becomes able to accept death meekly and reverently.”
Critical appraisal of "The Other Side of the Mountain" was most sharply divided on the coherence and meaning of the narrative. Sara Blackburn, reviewing for the Nation, criticized the novel’s “baleful allegories", finding the novel “badly written and tedious.” Phoebe Adams was less harsh in her criticism of "The Other Side of the Mountain" in the Atlantic Monthly, but found its descriptions unpersuasive.
Other critics, however, were won over by the complexity of the novel’s symbolism and the richness of Bernanos’s imagery. In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Henri Peyre detected “a streak of Melville, of Poe, even of Dostoevsky” in Bernanos’s tale, and further commented that “he tells a tale superbly and, like the Ancient Mariner, we cannot choose but hear and see with our mind’s eye staring aghast.” To readers of Harper’s, Katherine Gauss Jackson described the novel as a “beautiful and terrible little book ... a nightmare come true.” John Leonard, writing for the New York Times, concurred.
One day, in the summer of 1964, Michel left his home of Gentilly in the Parisian suburbs. Three days later, he was found dead in the forest of Fontainebleau. He was forty-one years old. Michel Bernanos had made two suicide attempts the previous year. There is indeed a sort of legend that begged to be born, an aura of tragedy that would have matched Michel Bernanos’s intent as an author pacing the land of confusion between reality and imagination. Most of Michel Bernanos’ works of the fantastic were published posthumously.
