Céline, peon
by Dean Maresca

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was a physician. He became Louis-Ferdinand Céline, arbiter of crazed, anarcho-depressiveness in 1932, when his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of Night), was published. He was a master of psycho semantics. Some say he was certifiably nuts, due, in part, to a (completely unconfirmable) head injury he suffered in WWI; some say it was psychosomatic. He was definitely anti-Semitic, though, and frequently put his Jew-hating thoughts in pamphlets he created in the years leading up to WWII. This is likely the very reason that he’s been kept just outside the American literary canon all these years.

Despite his questionable politics, however, he was well celebrated throughout Europe when his books were first published. Trotsky said, “Céline entered great literature as other men enter their homes.” Stalin was reported to have been a fan, too. Camus liked him, and even defended his anti-Semitic pamphlets, claiming them to be purely satirical, on par with Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”. Céline, however, although he was quite well-read, was not much a fan of literary men, himself. Milton Hindus, Céline biographer and sometime friend, claimed that this was one of the reasons for his questionable sanity. All his life Destouches had wanted to be a great physician, but he was a mediocrity, at best. He personally hated many authors (calling Sartre, for example, a “tapeworm in a turd”, a “beetle on a dunghill” and “Cain’s anus”), yet he was an incredibly talented one himself. He’d never much been satisfied, and this boiled in him over the years.

His anti-Semitism is much discussed. At one point, he claimed that he didn’t necessarily have a personal vendetta against the Jews, he’d simply joined the Aryan attacks against them as an attempt to keep France from going to war with Germany. In one pamphlet he called for a military alliance between France and Germany “to the death.” He wanted to return to the pre-Charlemagne circumstances, when the two had been one country. As two separate nations they were eternally hostile to each other, he reasoned, and their thousand years of warring had profited only the English, who were a “judaicized” plutocracy.

When it came down to it, he was more of an anarchist than anything. His sociological views were overly simplistic, to say the least. He tended to view the world as two groups: the exploited and the rich who exploit them. Concerning Hitler, Céline quoted Stendhal, “Bad tasted leads to crime.” Hitler was a poor artist, therefore, a criminal. He referred to Hitler as, “a paranoiac, Hollywood great man.” He was said to have attended Parisian meetings of Institut de Questions Juives (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Problem), a French organization financed by the German occupation authorities. After listening to a long ranting lecture by one of its members against the “Judeo-Marxist tyranny,” Céline was reported to have asked, “Et la connerie aryenne, dis, t’en causes pas?” (“What about the Aryan stupidity, you got anything to say about it?”) A fight broke out between a member of the audience and a member of the speaker’s committee due to his disturbance, and supposedly won over the audience and halted the meeting.

Céline claimed that Ghandi had been the only great man of the last century and referred to himself as “distractedly a Ghandist.” Who knows what the hell that means, but it goes to show that his thinking wasn’t entirely consistent. He said that he’d wanted to create spoken language as he wrote. He wanted his prose to explode forth. One can feel the paranoia of his characters crashing in on them. This excerpt from a letter to Milton Hindus, dated August 5, 1947, fairly well sums up Céline’s philosophy:

“Where are all those grand old aristocrats of the mind like Taine, Michelet, Emerson, Ranan?…They all ran off at the mouth, of course—but there were diamonds in the torrent. That explains the price of precious things: lots of waste along with them…But today no one dares to run off at the mouth—we backtrack a hundred times before we come up with one precious thought. No more floods, no more rivers—and scarcely any nuggets either…No more enthusiasm: and I don’t have to tell you the Greek sense of the word: ‘the God in us.’ Enthusiasm is to let yourself go into delirium…But alas, today our delirium is pretty well confined to political fanaticism—even more ridiculous. Oh I know! I got caught up in it too!”

Céline explained the novel as decidedly subjective. He created characters that lived in their minds as much as they did in the real world. As a result, the reader can’t help but become thoroughly involved with their confusion and anger. He explains away his fanatic views in the passage above, but he certainly was an asshole in full. He seemed to have disliked most people, in general, and decided on the Jews as a pointed scapegoat somewhere along the line. After WWII, he left France for fear of imprisonment or execution. He stayed in Germany for awhile, but wasn’t well accepted there, either. So he escaped to Denmark, where he was imprisoned for 18 months, before being allowed to live with his wife on the outside, permitted only limited interaction with the Danish citizenry.

There’s a story from Céline’s friend, M. Geoffroy, a Parisian diamond merchant who visited him in Denmark shortly after his release from prison. Geoffroy said that, instead of going to the toilet for a piss in the middle of a conversation, Céline simply grabbed the nearest container at hand: pot, ashtray, bowl, whatever, and relieved himself in it. He’d grown sick and weak in exile. He wrote nearly every day but had little passion left. He was pretty much wasted to life. His anarchistic beliefs had overcome him, and his life finally became as chaotic as his thoughts.

“The animal in man (or in woman) gives more enjoyment than this so-called [intellectual] reason—and more truth—and I think more progress too. There’s a fantastic lot of drivel in intellectuals. Just look at any library! What a pile of crap! What a hideous sabotage, but a beautiful real sweet ass is a beautiful ass—and the younger it is and the more freely offered, the more pleasant to the taste and to the Muses.”