Michel Bernanos’s Final Voyage

Grove Koger

Today’s post from the series I’m calling “Sea Fever” deals with an account of a surreal voyage by a little-known French writer who died on July 27, 1964.

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La Montagne morte de la vie (Éditions Pauvert, 1967); The Other Side of the Mountain, trans. by Elaine P. Halperin (Houghton Mifflin, 1968)

The son of French novelist Georges Bernanos, Michel Bernanos was born in 1923 and shared a peripatetic life with his parents, traveling to the Riviera, Majorca, Paraguay, and Brazil. He lied about his age to fight with the Free French Naval Forces in World War II, then returned to Brazil for two more years before spending another two in Algeria. Along the way, he made himself into a writer, but published under pseudonyms to avoid confusion with his well-known father.

Bernanos’s only claim to fame in English is this short work, which begins as a typical adventure novel, develops quickly into a harrowing story of survival at sea, and concludes as a surreal meditation on the futility of human aspirations. After a night of drinking, its eighteen-year-old narrator (whose name we never learn) is persuaded by a friend to sign on as a crewman in a galleon. Ignorant of life at sea, he finds himself keel-hauled by the sadistic crew and is saved only at the last moment by the captain. Afterward he’s taken on as an assistant by the ship’s cook, Toine, a stoic character whose perseverance marks him as the novel’s moral center.

As it nears the equator, the ship is becalmed, and its crew, deprived of food and water, begin to go mad, resorting to mutiny and cannibalism. Rain finally arrives, but it trails a gale behind it that destroys the ship. Cast adrift, Toine and the young man eventually reach land, but it’s a land like none they’ve ever encountered, with blood-red soil, threatening plants, and disturbingly lifelike statues of men and women. A pulse-like beat shakes the ground. They find themselves drawn to a distant mountain, but after a struggle to reach the summit they find themselves at a kind of dead end, doomed to … But I’ll leave that revelation for you to discover.

Like his two characters, Michel Bernanos himself reached a kind of dead end on July 27, 1964. He killed himself in the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris, having carried—in a gesture that in retrospect appears all too obvious—an empty travel bag into the forest with him. Like his other literary works, The Other Side of the Mountain dates from the early 1960s, but it was published only after his death.

The fantastic voyage has a long and varied history, ranging from Homer’s Odyssey (8th century BC) to Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) and William Hope Hodgson’s Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907) and beyond. I’ll be discussing those works and others in future posts.

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The image at the top of today’s post reproduces the cover of my Dell paperback edition, but its artist is not identified. 

Dreaming of Shangri-La

Grove Koger

Long, long ago, there was a category of exciting, imaginative books that captured the pubic imagination. They were “classics” of a sort, but their number didn’t include such standards as Hamlet or War and Peace. Perhaps we should call them “minor classics” or “popular classics,” although in most cases their popularity has faded over time. Their authors brought considerable skill to bear in writing them, and, in a handful of cases, managed to create what are essentially myths in fictional form—compelling embodiments of dreams and fears that linger just below the conscious level like half-forgotten melodies. Some took place in highly romanticized but otherwise authentic settings—P.C. Wren’s Foreign Legion saga Beau Geste, for instance—while others were set in imaginary locales. Among the latter is Lost Horizon by James Hilton, who died December 20, 1954.

Consisting of eleven chapters framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue, Lost Horizon is the account of Hugh Conway’s adventures after he and three others are evacuated during a crisis (it’s May 1931) from Baskul, a fictitious city that may be modeled on Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul. Subsequently the party’s plane is hijacked and flown to northern Tibet, where it finally crashes. Conway, his companions and the injured pilot are then rescued by a party of Tibetans and taken to a lamasery known as Shangri-La.

In the 1930s, Tibet was a relatively autonomous region of China little known to the outside world, and placing a fictional lamasery in an isolated corner of such an isolated place was a natural strategy for Hilton. As it turns out, Shangri-La is a tiny paradise that boasts an extensive library and an impressive collection of art. Its climate is mild and its residents, who live to a remarkably old age, are peace-loving and contented. But what is its secret? Because of course there is one, or rather there are several, which I’ll let you discover for yourself if you aren’t already familiar with the book. I’ll simply mention that the story ends on a poignant note and that its setting during a period of growing anxiety makes it strikingly pertinent to our own day. The year 1931 was, after all, the beginning of what poet W.H. Auden called a “low dishonest decade,” a time of “anger and fear.”

Although Lost Horizon did not sell well upon its initial appearance, the publication of Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips and the award of the Hawthornden Prize to Hilton in 1934 boosted the novel’s sales and made Hilton’s name a familiar one. The American firm of Pocket Books published the novel in 1939 as its first offering, making it what is probably the first mass-market paperback published in the country. Pocket Books has since reprinted it more than one hundred times.

The illustration at the top of today’s post reproduces the cover of the 47th (1961) printing of the Pocket Books edition of Lost Horizon, the copy I owned when I wrote a “late” review of the book for my junior high school newspaper that year. The second illustration reproduces the cover of the 90th edition. (The statement that it was “the first paperback ever published” is of course untrue.) The portrait of Hilton dates from the 1930s. Lost Horizon has inspired two “guides,” including the one by John R. Hammond shown above, and at least two sequels. It has been produced as a musical, filmed three times (including once as a different musical), and has inspired at least two sequels. But none of these spin-offs capture the magic of the original.

In Search of Xanadu

Grove Koger

Among the many, many books I bought as a boy from Boise’s now-vanished Book Shop, there were two handsome paperbacks that I still prize—The Lord of the Sea by M.P. Shiel and Om, the Secret of Abhor Valley by Talbot Mundy. Both were part of the Xanadu Library, an imprint of Crown Publishers of New York.

Each volume described Xanadu on its back cover as “a new series of paperback books that are classics of imaginative writing. The Xanadu Library will be built around books on worlds that never were, worlds that might have been and worlds that still may be.”

I can’t think of any words more likely to excite the imagination of a young boy anxious to learn about the wider world!

As far as I’ve been able to establish, the Xanadu Library ran to the eight volumes listed below:

• James Churchward: The Lost Continent of Mu, 1961
• Talbot Mundy: Om, the Secret of Abhor Valley, 1961
• James Branch Cabell: Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, 1962? 1963?
• Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, 1962?
• E.R. Eddison: The Worm Ouroboros, 1962?
• Anatole France: The Revolt of the Angels, 1962
• M.P. Shiel: The Lord of the Sea, 1963
• Ignatius Donnelly: Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, ?

The Churchward and Connelly titles are ostensibly nonfiction, although they’re the sort for which the phrase “farrago of nonsense” might originally have been formulated. The others, however, are important works in their genres, although those genres don’t get a lot respect these days.

Om, for instance, is a classic of Indian adventure that I would rank with Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and The Lord of the Sea is a bizarre mixture of romance, revenge, and socioeconomic speculation. Rebecca West described its author as “a writer of imperial imagination who combines the scientific qualities of Wells with the mystery of Poe.” Cabell published ribald pseudomedieval comedies and was highly regarded by critics such as Edmund Wilson, while France won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Literature. Bramah wrote highly popular detective and pseudo-oriental tales, and Eddison a series of epic fantasies set on, of all places, the planet Mercury. Really!

I suspect that Crown either had rights to the works or were able to procure the rights cheaply. For instance, it appears to have been the first American publisher of the revised, 1924 version of Lord of the Sea. All the authors were dead by the time Xanadu appeared on the scene, although Cabell had died as recently as 1958. Only two of the volumes bore cover illustrations—the Shiel (a sketch by an uncredited artist) and the Donnelly (a map of the Atlantic Ocean identifying the supposed location of the famous lost continent). The rest carried generic covers of overlapping circles in various muted colors.

Why weren’t there more titles? Most Xanadu volumes were solid, but dated, choices; their time had come and gone. There was competition from newer works with jazzier covers—Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land appeared in 1961, for instance—and those carried the day with most young readers.

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Xanadu, by the way, was the name of Kublai Khan’s capitals, although the spelling Shangdu is now more common. But we can be pretty sure that the editors at Crown had in mind not the real city but the fabled one that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about in his poem “Kubla Khan,” which opens with the lines “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.”

Today, Shangdu is a ruin and Xanadu itself remains as elusive as ever.