Celine: His Life and Correspondence
In a well-known essay about Voyage au bout de la nuit, Leon Trotsky wrote that its author, French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline “walked into great literature as other men walk into their own homes.” Indeed, Voyage was a revolutionary book, both in terms of content and of style, a book that immediately turned literature upside down. Written in a popular and colloquial language, it presents a dark and pessimistic vision of mankind as well as a nihilistic philosophy that drastically changed not only the way many novelists wrote, but also what they wrote. In France, traditional academic literature became practically obsolete overnight with the publication of Voyage while in the United States, several generations of writers owe a tremendous debt to Céline and his novel.
Céline wrote other books, especially Mort à crédit, the two volumes of Guignol’s Band and of Féerie pour une autre fois, D’un château l’autre, Nord and Rigodon, in which he went further in his experimentations with style and recounted darker and darker adventures in a growing atmosphere of chaos, madness and paranoia. Today Céline is almost unanimously considered one of the two greatest and most influential French novelists of the twentieth-century, along with Marcel Proust, and one of the giants of modern literature.
In fact, in the title of one of the first books devoted to Céline, American critic Milton Hindus used the noun “giant” to describe him, but modified it with the adjective “crippled.” That title, Céline: the Crippled Giant, was partly the result of an unfortunate encounter between the two men, but it also reflected the ambiguous attitude of Hindus, who was Jewish, toward Céline, then in exile in Denmark as a consequence of the polemical and strongly antisemitic pamphlets he wrote between 1937 and 1941, Bagatelles pour un massacre, L’École des cadavres and Les Beaux draps. Although he justified his behavior and his antisemitism in particular by his desire to prevent a new war and although he never actively collaborated with the Germans, Céline saw his reputation irremediably tarnished by those books.
Céline, the pseudonym of Louis Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), was not just a writer. He was very much involved in some of the major events of the first part of the twentieth century, notably the two world wars. He fought and was wounded in the first one while his political writings prior and during the second one forced him to flee to Sigmaringen with the most notorious collaborationists and the members of the Vichy regime before a grueling trip took him to Denmark where he was imprisoned for over a year and remained in exile until 1951. In addition, his extensive travels on three continents, mainly as a hygienist with the League of Nations, allowed him to witness the effects of colonialism in Africa and those of capitalism in the United States as well as the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Finally, as a medical doctor who worked with the poor and the destitute, he became intimately familiar with human misery and suffering.
Not surprisingly, with so much material at Céline’s disposal, his novels, written in the first person, are heavily autobiographical. Voyage recounts experiences that mirror his own, on the battlefields of World War I, in colonial Africa, in capitalist America and in the poor suburbs of Paris where the hero, Bardamu, practises medicine. Mort à crédit primarily deals with the childhood of the physician-narrator, a childhood more miserable but still very reminiscent of the author’s, while Guignol’s Band has been inspired by the time Destouches spent in London after his war injury. Féerie pour une autre fois is loosely based on his life in Paris during the war and but also on his time in prison in Denmark. As for the last three novels, they rather faithfully chronicle his stay in Sigmaringen, his epic adventures in bombed-out and war-ravaged Germany and his escape to Denmark.
If Céline’s novels reflect his own life in a more or less novelized form, his correspondence sheds an even more direct light on the many events he experienced and on his ideas and beliefs. Indeed, from his first stay abroad, in Germany at the age of thirteen, to the eve of his death when he wrote his publisher about his last novel, he sent thousands of letters that faithfully chronicle his life and present an image of him and of his adventures that complements and sometimes contradicts his public persona in a fascinating way. In fact, the publication of his Lettres in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 2009 was a major literary event.
Indeed, Céline’s correspondence often reveals different sides or even different versions of the events and experiences recounted in the novels and, even more importantly, points of view that do not always match those of the fictive narrators or even those of the public Céline. For instance, the child who writes to his parents from Germany is polite, thoughtful and affectionate, quite the opposite of Ferdinand, his counterpart of Mort à crédit. Likewise, even though his letters from the front reveal some of the horrors of World War I, the young man who writes them shows great courage as well as strong patriotic feelings and a deep hatred of the enemy, unlike the hero-narrator of Voyage au bout de la nuit whose bleak and nihilistic vision of mankind was shaped by his war experience. It is only in Africa, two years later, that the young Destouches presents ideas about war resembling those that appear in the novel. As for the depiction of Africa in the correspondence, it reminds the reader of somes pages in Voyage, but in his letters Destouches occasionally manifests an enthusiasm and an entrepreneurial spirit that is foreign to Bardamu. The same can be said about medicine in which Destouches shows a genuine interest that is usually not shared by his cynical narrator. Soon, however, the latter’s philosophy appears more and more in the letters, as shown by those to Élie Faure and, even much earlier, by these lines written to Blanchette Fermon:
Nothing is ever entirely our fault – but neither are we guilty of the sadness that mounts within us and with each passing day replaces the wish to die, and then every evening formulates itself more precisely in our hearts. – life is a melancholy farce, believe you me. A sinister farce, if we abandon the few flowers we might have plucked in the gardens of youth.
Interestingly, Céline’s correspondence to women in general reveals a side of his personality that is generally muted in his novels. Although he can be extremely harsh with them, as in a letter to his then-wife Edith, and although he remarks to Ludwig Rajchman that “Woman is moral and maternal, and pretty, and also almost never critical and profound,” the mysoginy that permeates most of his books disappears behind what appears to be genuine care and concern when he writes to female friends, such as Erika Irrgang and Cillie Ambor who, interestingly, happen to be Jewish.
From the 1930’s on, however, when Destouches becomes Céline, the letter writer tends to resemble the fictional narrator more and more, especially since he often writes in a similar style. In fact, some of his letters look like rough drafts of passages that will appear in his later novels, as if he wanted to use his correspondence as a springboard for his books. For example, the November 26, 1946 (for 1949) letter to René Mayer or some letters to Albert Paraz could easily be inserted in Féerie pour une autre fois, the novel he was working on at the time. To others, especially Milton Hindus, but also John Marks, his English translator, and his various publishers, he occasionally presents his ideas and various theories about literature and summarizes, describes, explains or justifies his works or aspects of them, especially his style, thus transforming his correspondence into some kind of theoretical treatise that prefigures his Entretiens avec le professeur Y, a sort of novel he published in 1955 in the form of a fictive conversation beween himself and an academic.
Finally, and maybe more importantly, Céline’s correspondence allows the reader to know his true position on the many issues, such as what he calls “the Jewish question,” racism and collaboration with nazi Germany, which have stained his reputation and about which he has publicly presented conflicting ideas.
Céline’s antisemitism is so outrageous and so caricatural that many believed and still believe that it should not be taken literally or seriously or that the author of the pamphlets used the word “Jew” metaphorically to designate various people or even some kind of threat or evil. In his post-war interviews, he justified writing his antisemitic texts by claiming that he just wanted to prevent a new war since he was convinced that a large segment of the Jewish population wanted to stop Hitler. The letters he wrote between 1937 and 1948, however, not only do not leave any doubt as to his real convictions, but also show that he was obsessed with the subject. Why else would he ask Arthur Pfannsteil about “the Jewish ancestry of the Pope”? Such a piece of information would have been perfect for his pamphlets where he deals with “the Jewish question” in such an outlandish way that it is often impossible to take his various claims and imprecations seriously. However, in his letters, especially those to Jean Cocteau and Jacques Doriot, he is very serious and uses a radically different tone. To the former he makes clear that he is viscerally antisemitic and racist:
But on the other hand you know my position – my racial position, if you will. And if it comes to racism, well, then I’m blindly against the Jew or whoever. For me Reason of Race is more important than Reason of Art or Reason of Friendship.
To the latter, he regrets “the systematic sabotage of racism in France by the anti-Semites themselves” and reveals his wish that Jews be “eliminated” from France:
If we worked together anti-Semitism would unfurl across France. No one would even talk about it anymore. Everything would happen by instinct, peaceably. One fine morning the Jew would find himself ousted, eliminated, naturally, like a caca.
In the letter to Doriot, he also makes plainly known that he is in favor of a collaboration between France and nazi Germany: “Without the Jews Franco-German Collaboration would have already been a fait accompli, assured, accomplished ages ago,” which he confirms to Henri Poulain of the collaborationist weekly Je Suis Partout when he claims that Germany would have won the war “with a Franco-German army” and asks: “Why wasn’t the Franco-German alliance realized?”, adding: “You can publish this if you dare.” Of course, to Céline’s credit, it is also possible to find a number of letters in which he is critical of the Nazis and of Hitler, but, even if he was never a collaborationist himself, he is clearly insincere when he writes to Thorvald Mikkelsen that he only takes responsibility for Les Beaux draps (where he makes positive comments about the German occupant), that he has “always remained very strictly A WRITER” and that he “never made propaganda for the Germans.” Indeed, in addition to his letters to various newspapers, he is also responsible for the two other political pamphlets, especially Bagatelles pour un massacre which, as he rightly points out in several letters, aims at preventing a general massacre and does not call for a massacre of the Jews, but in doing so creates resentment against the Jewish population and calls for measures reminiscent of those that Nazi Germany was implementing at the time.
In short, if Céline’s correspondence can be read alongside his novels, since it presents many of the same events in a different light, revealing to what extent they are autobiographical and provides useful comments about them, it also brings some answers about the real nature and the deeply felt convictions of the controversial and contradictory man behind the works.
By Pascal Ifri
Illustration by Tony Millionaire