Ordure out of Chaos

Voyeur Voyant. A Portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
by Erika Ostrovsky.
Random House. 398 pp. $10.00.

The year before his death in 1961 Céline claimed one achievement: it was to have succeeded in getting everybody to agree that “I’m the biggest bastard alive!” The word moderately translated as “bastard” in Erika Ostrovsky’s sympathetic biography, the first in English, evokes filth and excrement (ordure), but then Céline’s paranoid scatalogical slangy verve is often virtually untranslatable. He was exaggerating as usual, for he has had his apologists, among them the late Roger Nimier who, with characteristic effrontery, gaily suggested him as candidate for the Nobel prize. However, if many thought ill of Céline, it must be admitted that he had long worked masochistically to achieve that end.

See what a mangy cur I am, Céline proposes, but nobody else is any better, so why am I singled out for all the kicks? Some famous literary lights who were wining and dining with the Germans during the Occupation have become respected members of the Académie Francaise, he complains. Others had their works performed with German authorization, like the ungrateful Sartre who took from Céline’s only play the epigraph of The Diary of Antoine Roquentin. But Sartre, whom he scurrilously satirizes under the name of Tartre, had ventured repeatedly to accuse him of being in the pay of the Nazis. Céline did not like it when others wielded the weapon of bilious rancor with which he himself laid about so frequently.

The difficulty about writing a biography or “portrait” of Céline is that his own novels are largely autobiographical, neither quite fictitious nor quite “real,” and his manner inimitable. He soon gave up the pretense that his narrator was anyone but himself, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, the son of squabbling Parisian lower-middle-class parents (his father worked for an insurance company while his mother kept a lace shop). The struggling if mean-minded poor are for him eternal victims of the selfish rich, a view that for a brief while endeared him to the Left. The sight of his mother on her knees offering her lace samples to a wealthy bourgeois couple who quietly filched a handkerchief would surely have been enough to mark him for life. His progress from the complete nihilism of his first and best book, Journey to the End of Night (1932), to sympathy with the radical Right, offers a typical French case-history of the first half of the century.

Educated in Germany and England in preparation for a commercial career, he enlisted in the army in 1912. In Flanders in 1914 he was severely wounded on a dangerous mission for which he had volunteered, and was awarded the Military Medal. No longer fit for military service, he went out to the Cameroons and disliked what he saw of colonial exploitation. He studied medicine, became a doctor, but despite his medical training and his wide travels (he visited the Soviet Union and the United States) he remained narrowly opinionated, with a readiness to swallow extreme theories of impending disaster and doom, and a scorn of “intellectualism” and ideas.

His experience of the horrors of World War I made him determined to oppose “apocalyptic crusades” while encouraging his nostalgia for apocalypse. So in the 30’s he favored a Franco-German alliance, and without being a member of any of the fascist groups, he adopted a racialism of the Hitlerian stamp (belief in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in selective breeding to protect the white race, in the Jews as a principle of decadence, in the black peril and the yellow peril).

The last year of World War II found him in Germany, whose defeat he foresaw, and where he could gratify his apocalyptic leanings to the full. His final trilogy of novels includes a nightmarish picture of the last days of the Vichy government and its supporters at Sigmaringen, where he served as doctor. One of the most remarkable scenes is a wildly grotesque encounter between Laval and Céline, in which the former recalls that the novelist (who disliked the politician’s “racial type”) had called him a Jew and a traitor.

Did this interview take place, or did it take place in the form described in the novel? Who knows? How to distinguish between Céline’s powerful vision, at once lucid and hallucinatory, and the mere prosaic facts? Erika Ostrovsky (who has already published a critical study of Céline) takes as epigraph the novelist’s own words: “A biography . . . is something one invents.” While consulting his relatives and friends she has adopted a Célinesque novelistic approach, moving back and forth in time, almost as if wishing to add another volume to the canon. It would appear from the blurb (for there is no explanatory preface) that she feels an author as anarchistic as Céline should not be treated in the usual straightforward manner. Yet few writers more urgently require cool and dispassionate assessment and portrayal, although few have made such an aim more difficult to achieve.

For Céline does what he always intended to do: he sticks in one’s throat like a sharp bone. He presents the insufferable and insoluble challenge of the modern split between literary talent of a high order and humane values. As supposedly sophisticated students of literature we do not know what to do about this because—since Stendhal and Baudelaire—we have been brought up to believe that true art is only concerned with authenticity, integrity, risk, regardless of where these may lead: drugs, crime, suicide, the ruin of others or of oneself or both, the worse the better.

The further they lead—to self-destruction or universal abomination—the greater the proof of the writer’s authenticity and artistic martyrdom. Céline gives voice to this romantic quest when he says: “That is perhaps what one is seeking throughout life, nothing but that, the greatest possible affliction so as to become oneself before death.” It is time we recognized this kind of romanticism for the trompe-l’oeil it is, but we are still dazzled by the heroic element of desperate self-immolation for the sake of self-realization.

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To try to find out why the author of Death on the Installment Plan produced his virulent anti-Semitic lucubrations does not take one far. Perhaps he imbibed anti-Semitism from his father, who can be found railing against Jews and Freemasons. At different times he put forward various reasons—that his mistress, an American dancer, had been destroyed by a Jewish judge; that his book attacking Communism after a visit to the Soviet Union aroused the enmity of Communists and Jews and lost him his job in a clinic; and so on. In his book on Action Francaise, Eugen Weber suggests it arose because the doctor’s ballet was turned down by Jean Zay, a Jew who was Minister of Education in the Popular Front government. Céline was of a medieval turn of mind: he needed a principle of evil so as to be able to justify his ferocious indignation and to conjure his own panic at the state of the modern world.

It is a misnomer to qualify as a pamphlet that vast tome, Bagatelles pour un massacre, published in 1937. Léon Daudet, no mean anti-Semitic polemicist himself, wrote encouragingly in 1938, “. . . this book is AN ACT.” The painter Vlaminck cried in horror, “It’s a pogrom!!” and called it an invitation to another Saint Bartholomew’s massacre. Not content with this work and others of a similar nature, Céline wrote an article in which he actively encouraged persecution during the Occupation, at a time when he himself was being constantly quoted and lauded in the press.

One man of letters in 1938 had the temerity to suggest that Bagatelles could not be evaluated without leaving aside its meaning, and after doing so concluded that it was a masterpiece. A more recent admirer, Dominique de Roux, writing in 1968, maintained that Céline did not mean it; that “so infinitely tender a sensibility would never have permitted the slightest hint of racial persecution”; that, on the contrary, the novelist himself, because of his postwar sufferings, was the Jew, the scapegoat—a view that is gaining currency. If all those who regard themselves as the unique victims of inexplicable hatred, as Céline did, are to be so defined, then the term will become ever more elastic and meaningless.

Certainly, Céline’s outraged and outrageous cries of protest against the horrors of war, against exploitation, against the family and all existing sacrosanct flags and respectable ideals, make the black humor of his heirs, Joseph Heller, Bruce Jay Friedman, or Philip Roth, appear as so much cold tea. There is no denying the potency of the original death-haunted model.

But what he supremely lacks is the sense of human worth. With rare exceptions, like the loving American prostitute Molly who makes him ashamed of having judged humanity lower than it is, man is garbage, a bag of rottenness waiting for death. “I hadn’t got the great human idea myself,” says Ferdinand-Bardamu, always inclined to feel more sorry for animals than men. This attitude goes much further than a doctor’s lucid awareness of the human condition. It has something in common with the horror, loathing, and terror of a grinning medieval dance of death as in their greed, bestiality, and folly, all go helter-skelter into the maw of the Beast. Céline cannot stop rejoicing as well as shuddering at the apocalyptic vision of the approaching end.

For him, writing is flux, a form of excretion. If he sometimes insists that his vocation is medicine, not literature, at other times he calls medicine “excrement” too. He longs to get to the end of everything, including the word: perhaps when everything has been said, there will be peace, he suggests wearily. As Erika Ostrovsky points out, he uttered a warning against the hidden danger of words and then failed to weigh his own words and follow his own advice.

The power of Céline’s word often casts a fatal spell on those who write about him. Erika Ostrovsky is no exception, sometimes even imitating the master’s disjointed elliptic sentences and celebrated three dots. Of his first wife she writes in a manner presumably intended to evoke the novelist’s strained eroticism, but more reminiscent of a less exalted popular American model. (“A rush of hot flesh rocked her, then swiftly ebbed away. Each thrust combined with the threat of sudden escape.”) However, once past the lush account of Céline’s inclination for sex à trois, preferably with lesbians, with its suggestion of impotence, the book grows less eccentric.

The author tries to be scrupulously fair in presenting the evidence for Céline’s complexity and contradictions. It is scarcely her fault if she cannot counter the monotony of the endless moan of the writings of his last years. What one misses is the detailed placing of the novelist in the social, intellectual, and historical context of his day, without which he seems to move in a vacuum. There is nothing like Céline’s extreme decadent romanticism to make one long for a return to rigor and measure.

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