Hatred Fueled by Despair

...I have always liked women to be beautiful and lesbian —very nice to look at and not wearing me out with their sexual demands," he once said...

...And, one must note, so erratic was Celine's reasoning that in later years he more than once identified himself with the Jew considered as scapegoat...

...The tradition of rabid pamphleteering stretches back into the 19th century and even to the Revolution...

...Celine's handling of language is perhaps at its best—certainly at its most nimble—in one of his later works, D'Un Chateau I'autre, a deeply sad and hilariously comic account of French collaborators seeking refuge in a Germany caught in the throes of Hitlerian Gotterdammerung...

...His awareness of death as a crushing force, and his view of men as eternally guiltv and malicious, inspire his work with a pessimism unique among his contemporaries...

...The procedure was imitated by Jean Ducourneau some years afterward in the purportedly complete Oeuvres de L.-F...

...Though no less sardonically pessimistic than his two major books of the '30s, Voyage au bout de la nuit and Mort a credit, D'Un Chateau I'autre lacks their largeness of structure and vigor of inverted faith...

...in him the fires of fanaticism burn with special eer-iness because their light leads nowhere...

...He had not been in any active way a collaborator, and Sartre was certainly lying when he claimed Celine had been paid by the Germans...

...He may be seen as the forerunner of the writers of the absurd, and yet he is not one of them...

...In judging the relationship between this tortured neurotic and what he wrote we have to bear in mind that the essential—or at least the most pervasive—dilemma of the novel since Flaubert published L'Education sentimentale over a century ago has been how to reconcile the centrality of the writer as subject in modernist fiction with the dedication to antiliteralism introduced into literature by the Symbolists...

...In France, during the period of intense witch-hunting following the Liberation, Celine was judged guilty of collaboration and given a light sentence that he did not serve because he stayed in Denmark...

...Then too he was misled by his need to be a victim...

...Indeed, it is impossible to understand his subsequent fiction without taking into account that he also wrote Bagatelles pour un massacre, and one can argue even his early great novels become more comprehensible when we recognize in them the inclinations that led him to make the Jews special targets of hysterical attack...

...Criticism is in his case easier to produce than biography, for Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, the compassionate but rough-spoken physician who is the Dr...

...The biographer, however, can permit no such omissions...

...author, "Who Killed the British Empire...

...Lost as well is the sense that in some way, despite its evident absurdity, life is still immensely exciting because human beings are such mad cosmic malcontents who perpetually live in the shadow of an inescapable volcano...

...Life—one's own life especially—must be transfigured into art...

...He must view the whole man, including his flaws and errors, and Patrick McCarthy admirably confronts the problem in Celine...

...McCarthy points out that Celine was not in fact an isolated figure in French writing...

...And for all his hatred of artistic pretensions and his presentation of existence as seen from the viewpoint of the bucket under the operating table, Celine was very much an esthetician...

...He viewed the world as a spiritual continuum, but beyond the manifest absurdity of human life was the Void—not Heaven...

...This is the first life of Celine written by an English-speaking author, though there have been interesting critical studies...

...As McCarthy observes: "The sense of evil marks Celine's lonely place in modern writing...

...He personified his persecutors in the figure of the Jew...

...An Inquest" If one can imagine St...

...At the same time, we must seek to understand why such men as Celine feel almost fatally impelled to stir discomfort in others, and to glory in the inevitable hostility that ensues...

...Recognizing Celine as too considerable a novelist to be excluded from that Pantheon in print, the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, he decreed that only the major fiction should be included...

...A fanatical teetotaler and passionate animal-lover, he was also obsessed with fantasies of a horrendous World War I head wound he apparently never endured, and mad about dancers but alarmed by the devotion he seemed to arouse in women because, like Baudelaire, he believed fervently that sexual activity and artistic creation were im-compatible...

...A passionate consciousness of the absence of God is as much a religious emotion as a consciousness of His presence, and can breed its own hatreds, fueled by despair...

...George Orwell once remarked when writing of w. B. Yeats, a less extreme but not dissimilar case, that "By and large the best writers of our time have been reactionaries...

...As Anthony Burgess has said in a review of Celine, "important writers must not be ignored because they make us uncomfortable...

...Nor did Celine take an active part in the wartime pogroms, and he helped individual Jews as well as members of the maquis...

...Destouches tended to cover his tracks assiduously, not merely by taking a nom de plume, but by having Celine write seemingly autobiographical novels that tempt us to mistakenly assume they must be portraits of the artist...

...Later he was amnestied, dying in bitter loneliness at Meudon on the Seine, not far from Courbevoie, his birthplace and that of Arletty, one of the few faithful friends of his last years...

...If such speculations help to explain why Celine wrote the atrocious pamphlets that are still open sores on his reputation, they also help us to understand the other, creative side of him, which erected on the hard rock of despair some of the most remarkable works of fiction ever written...

...His anti-Semitism cannot be divorced from a kind of cosmic despair that bred a need to hate...

...Jekyll of the situation, lived a rather furtive existence that his alter ego, the somewhat sinister literary persona known as Celine, has hardly illuminated...

...McCarthy goes on to argue that, particularly after a depressing trip to Soviet Russia which filled him with fears of a barbaric overthrow of European civilization, "Celine sought refuge in hatred...

...Subjects other than Celine, of course, pose this difficulty—Pound for one...

...For in my view Voyage and Mort are comparable with those other works of cosmic agony, The Brothers Karamazov and that black book, The Possessed...

...Leon Bloy and Georges Bernanos, Charles Maur-ras and Charles Peguy are examples, and not much less violent in their expression than Celine...

...But he did at first regard the Nazis as no worse than the corrupt democrats of the West (an attitude shared early in the War by the French Communists), and his anti-Semitic utterances are there for all to read...

...Besides being an estheticist, after all, Celine was a blaok moralist, the Jerome who has lost faith but not intolerance...

...He was shy, rather paranoid, ill-nourished most of the time, and usually clad in grimy garments...

...Celine, he adds, is "A writer in search of a divine grace that eludes him...

...Yet D'Un Chateau I'autre is not Celine's foremost novel, suggesting that there was more to him than a mere wizardry with words...

...The Fall," as Patrick McCarthy remarks in the first pages of his Celine, "is Everywhere, Redemption nowhere...

...A critic can very easily—and wrongly—evade the more uncomfortable areas of Celine's life and writings, as the French publisher Gallimard did...

...He returned constantly to the defense of formal values and was so dedicated to the writer's proper medium that, as McCarthy justly remarks, "in general his novels are shaped by the torrent of language which spills over chapter endings, creates and discards characters and is itself the order and meaning of the world...

...Jerome, or another agonized early father of the Church, deprived of faith though not passion, one might be close to comprehending Louis-Ferdinand Celine, that inspired and often atrocious nihilist...

...But Celine was not merely following a tradition...

...the notorious polemical works like Bagatelles pour un massacre and L'ecole des cadavres, combining fervent pacifism with some of the most strident anti-Semitic writing of the '30s, were left out...

...My main criticism of McCarthy's presentation of Celine's anti-Semitism—quite rightly an explanation and not an apology—is that he may not go far enough in his examination of the general relationship between Celine the man without God and God-obsessed religious fanaticism...

...The only relief is Celine's laughter as he mocks his wretched characters...

...In fact, so far as we can isolate him, the writer was not one of the great world-defien of his fiction...

...And while he was too sensible to suggest that this should make us cease to read them, Orwell was sensitive enough to insist that "a writer's political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away, but something that will leave their marks on the smallest detail of his work...

...Celine became an anti-Semite, I suggest, because he had to find someone outside himself to blame for his failure to attain the divine grace he sought...