BOOKS

...McCarthy, with Celine in mind...

...REVIEWERS father JOHN B. breslin, S.J., is Literary Editor of America magazine...

...And one tended to balance against the cruelties what seemed the symbolic fact that so many of the men who died in 1916-Pearse and Plunkett and MacDonagh-were themselves poets (never had there been as literary a Revolution...

...Today Patrick McCarthy, professor of French at Haverford College, has written a sanely critical and illuminating study of the man's character and of his books, the novels and the pamphlets...

...George Dangerfield's The Damnable Question is therefore a most timely book, since it examines with an ironic -though not wholly unpartisan- scrupulosity the events that lie at the roots of the bitter warring in Ireland of 1976, to which he properly makes little explicit reference...

...But the Unionists had no intention of giving up without a fight-and an actual physical fight if necessary...

...Celine: A Biography Patrick McCarthy Viking, $10 WALLACE FOWLIE For more than forty years, ever since the publication of his first book, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the end of the night), Celine has been a controversial writer, either lavishly praised or violently attacked...

...They could no longer rely on the House of Lords, whose powers of veto had almost vanished, so they turned to the Protestants of Ulster and to the Army, which was largely officered by Anglo-Irish landowners...

...His most recent book is a critical study of Lautreamont...

...and to remember the Celtic dreams of the time and the legendary heroines, like Constance Markievich and the splendid Maud Gonne, for whom Yeats hankered all his life...

...During his last years Celine occupied a house near Meudon, not far from Courbevoie where he was born...

...A pure biography of Celine is almost impossible to write because so little is known about his early years...

...This critic sees it as corresponding to the physical and moral wretchedness of his characters...

...It involves his deprived childhood he dwelt on so persistently, the sadism of shopkeepers he worked for, the wound in his head he received in World War I, the royalties his publisher Denoel cheated him of, the cruelty the French, Germans and Danes had shown him when he lived in France, Germany and Denmark...

...The Irish question, more than any other single factor, was the sickness that killed the once formidable party of Palmerston and Gladstone...

...He died July 1, 1961, but Hemingway's death, the same day, attracted all the attention...

...He studies this dichotomy as carefully as he studies the Baudelairian-like pessimism in Celine's writings, and the forms of hatred in the man that attacked Jews and America, De Gaulle and Sartre...

...It had been brutal, but only thousands had died where millions died in Russia...

...The oldest of Britain's colonies, and the first to rebel, it still burns with civil conflict, and, on an even greater scale than during the earlier civil war of 1922-3, the hatred that developed first against the invader has turned inward to blaze between Irish and Irish...

...There he returned to the practice of medicine...

...There in Meudon where Rabelais had once lived, and Balzac too, he was still engaged in culture criticism...

...The poor consulted him because he charged them little...

...McCarthy is a spokesman for that generation...

...It may be closer to an illustration of hysteria, and the best guide to it may be Sartre's Reflexions sur la question juive, written, according to Mr...

...They inevitably pointed out the monotony of such an art...

...In his detailed analysis of each book, the critic-biographer demonstrates the fullness with which Celine lived his age...

...Voyage almost won the Goncourt prize in 1933 and was hailed that year and during the next few years as an important modern epic, by such writers as Leon Daudet, Malraux, Blaise Cen-drars, Nadeau, Henry Miller...

...He is more solipsistic in the pamphlets than in the novels...

...Louis Ferdinand Destouches was his real name), and the despair of the anti-Semite...

...On the surface it would seem to be an example of the most stupid and the most hateful form of racism...

...Celine's vituperation against the Jews is strongest in Bagatelles...

...As a young man he studied medicine in Rennes and began practicing medicine in a dispensary in Clichy...

...It is, in a word, decadence, one man's story of the end of a race, the ending of a civilization...

...But anti-Semitism is not Celine's real subject...

...McCarthy's biography marks a culmination in this posthumous fame...

...This theme, with its corollary of the flavor of death everywhere in Celine's world, seems to me the most brilliantly developed by Patrick McCarthy, and the most persuasive...

...The two events-the Curragh mutiny and the Easter Day Rising-complement each other...

...When the Liberals came back into office in 1906, and shortly afterwards won their battle over the division of powers with the Tory-dominated House of Lords, it seemed likely that at last the Home Rule for Ireland-a kind of modified Dominion status-which Gladstone had sought would come into being...

...In January 1913, with the connivance of the police and the military authorities, the heavily armed Ulster Volunteer Force was established...

...For it was the savagery with which the atrocious General Maxwell suppressed the rebellion that gave Irish independence its first martyrs, made the mass of Irishmen refuse further co-operation with the imperial power, and gave the small number of guerrilla activists a sympathetic population in which, to paraphrase Mao Tse-tung, they could move like fish through water...

...It is both judgment and explanation, based on all available documentation, and on a lucid understanding of the history of French culture, especially literary culture, from the time of Balzac to the presidency of Pompidou...

...In this way The Damnable Question is the sequel that completes The Strange Death of Liberal England and, appropriately, it is when Dangerfield is describing the Liberals-whether the somnambulistic Asquith, or the ineffectively civilized Augustine Birrell, or the ineffably cunning Lloyd George- that he writes at his best, though his detailed account of the Easter Day Rising, with its emphasis on the static strategy of the rebels, who seemed set on waiting for the enemy to destroy them, is an excellent written narrative...

...Today, as Yeats did before the Irish Troubles of his day came to an end, we think more of the terribleness than of the beauty of what still goes on in the troubled island, sixty years after the Easter Day Rising, and almost 180 years after the great rising of 1798 and the death of the first republican martyrs, Wolfe Tone and his associates...

...McCarthy pays attention to the pamphlets, although he looks upon them as failures in which Celine shows no understanding of the political realities of his age...

...Despite the lapse of so many decades between them, The Damnable Question is written with the same vigor and the same sense of character and situation as The Strange Death, and the terrain is almost identical, for the time when Liberal England died was the time when Ireland shook herself at least partly free...

...McCarthy has reconsidered this kind of writing and sees it as the harmonization between Celine's temperament and the kind of language he had to invent...

...Destouches as he came into contact with the downtrodden and the impoverished...

...The generation of readers that came of age in the middle 1960s, precisely that generation that remembered very little of the war, had tended to make Celine into an important writer...

...Certainly The Damnable Question, apart from its value as English political history, is one of the best background books for anyone wishing to understand the tragedy that still haunts Ulster and, to a lesser degree, the whole of Ireland...

...Yeats' Poem, "Sixteen Dead Men," is far less remembered than its predecessor in the Collected Poems, "Easter 1916," with its compelling theme of the metamorphosis of the ordinary, and its haunting refrain: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born...

...Wallace fowlie is a professor of French at Duke...

...His slang is more highly stylized than ordinary slang...

...The mass of the book deals with the period from 1906-and particularly from the Home Rule Bill of 1912-to the treaty between the Sinn Fein leaders and the British government in 1921 which led to the creation of the Irish Free State, and which led also to the tragic battles between factions of Irish rebels that followed the departure of the imperial garrisons...

...This tormented writer, possibly the most pessimistic of all French writers, felt in his own way France's defeat in 1940...

...Not merely was the Ulster Volunteer Force much stronger in firepower than the nationalist groups, but it was supported by the generals and colonels who staged the celebrated Curragh mutiny, which consisted of a refusal of key regiments to be used against the Ulster Volunteers...

...The long ensuing negotiations over the special status of Ulster were terminated by the outbreak of the Great War, and the fate of Ireland hung in a kind of limbo until the Nationalists forced the issue with the Easter Day Rising, an operation which, as Dan-gerfield quite convincingly shows, its leaders knew to be a suicide mission doomed to present defeat and ultimate victory...

...Then, with two Cahiers de l'Herne, important collections of articles and letters, in 1963 and 1965, interest in him revived, and today his books are read, especially by the young...

...On these rocks the Liberal Party broke apart...

...Although this impulse of sympathy is almost always submerged in waves of invective, Celine remained close to the lower classes, to le peuple, although his writing has nothing to do with proletarian literature...

...In book after book, detail by detail, Celine filled out the myth of the victim...

...The sub-title of The Damnable Question is "One Hundred and Twenty Years of Anglo-Irish Conflict," but the first 106 years of it are quickly dealt with in a single prefatory chapter presenting the background of Anglo-Irish relationships over the period from 1800, the year of the Act of Union, when Ireland lost her ancient parliament and her nominal independence to be absorbed into George Ill's United Kingdom, down to 1906, the year when the Liberal Government led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and later by Herbert Asquith came to power in Westminster...

...george woodcock is the Canadian writer, editor and critic...

...He stresses the Dr...

...The traditional view of Celine as exhibitionist and mythomaniac is somewhat altered by Patrick McCarthy...

...At several points in his study, McCarthy calls this the Jekyll-Hyde contradiction in Celine...

...His most recent book is Who Killed the British Empire (Quadrangle/New York Times...

...Again, traditionally, the majority of Celine's critics have described his art as a powerful illustration of the grotesque, of ugliness and scatology, not only in Voyage, but also in the second book, Mort a credit (Death on the installment plan) and in the third, Bagatelles pour un massacre (not available in English...

...More than most critics, Mr...

...This is George Dangerfield's special period as a historian, the period whose earlier part forms the subject of his best-known book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, published more than forty years ago, in 1935, and one of the classics of modern English history...

...On the day of his death, he completed the third of a trilogy of novels, Rigodon, in which he rehearsed familiar themes: war as a metaphysical mystery, the pain that men feel at their contact with the world, the Celine demons of loneliness, hatred and pity, that make the reading of any one of his books a shattering experience...

...Jekyll side, the tenderness of Dr...

...Celine's sense of pity and his bitterness are in the history he gives us of modern cities, in the burlesque-epic tone of his history...

...Soon after the Liberation and during the 1950s, Celine dropped into partial obscurity...

...not until November the same year did the partisans of independence found their rival organizations, the Irish National Volunteers and the labor-oriented Irish Citizen Army...

...after losing its Liberal Unionists -led by the Chamberlains-to the Tories, it lost its Irish Nationalists and then its Labor tail, and declined quickly into the permanent third party of British politics...

...Likeliness appeared to move into certainty in the elections of 1909 and 1910, when the Liberals came back to power dependent for their majority on two solid interest groups-forty Labour MPs and eighty Irish Nationalists led by John Redmond, whose support gave Asquith a heavy lead over the Conservatives (now calling themselves Unionists to indicate their uncompromising opposition to the separation of Ireland from Britain...

...The Damnable Question: One Hundred and Twenty Years of Anglo-Irish Conflict GEORGE DANGERFIELD Atlantic-Little Brown, $14.95 GEORGE WOODCOCK O but we talked at large before The sixteen men were shot, But who can talk of give and take, What should be and what not While those dead men are loitering there To stir the boiling pot...

...Almost forty when he published Voyage, the contradictions in his character were already apparent: his kindness and generosity of a physician (Dr...

...between them they made the end of English rule in Ireland inevitable, but they also made inevitable that heritage of unassimilable history represented by the six counties of Ulster which refused to be freed...

...These were some of the elements in his life Celine used in order to make himself into the perfect example of scapegoat...

...It is of course possible that all pamphleteers, Celine as well as Bloy, Peguy and Bernanos, are failures...

...Today, when Ireland comes to mind, such overtones no longer resonate...

...There was a time, which a good many of us can remember, when an aura of romance-largely woven by writers like Yeats and O'Flaherty and O'Casey-hung over the Irish Revolution...

...Here again Mr...

...In this regard, Celine had often boasted of his affinities with Rabelais, but McCarthy finds greater affinities with Joyce in Celine's power to destroy or remake ordinary syntax...

...But it is "Sixteen Dead Men," with its sense of the fatality stemming from the Easter Day Rising, that would provide the best epigraph for George Dan-gerfield's The Damnable Question...