BOOKS Prophet of the Apocalypse

By ANDREW SINCLAIR

`Vou certainly know P. Breughel's huge Mad- 1 men's Fair,' Louis-Ferdinand Cline wrote to Leon Daudet in 1932. 'The whole problem is nowhere else , . . I only rejoice in the gro- tesque on the borders of death. All the rest is vanity to me.' So the new sensation of French literature wrote to a right-wing leader, who had just praised his masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night. Its publication had been a fantastic success; it was hailed by the press of all political parties. To Daudet's voice, Trotsky added. his, praising Celine for his understanding of the psy- chology of despair—Its filthy, bloody and night- marish absurdity.' Yet no one quite knew what a monster and a genius had been elevated as the Jeremiah of French society in the 1930s.

The left wing presumed Celine was theirs. Clawing his way up from the petite bourgeoisie, hating the rich because of his mother's humilia- tions as a seller of lace, Celine's raving assaults on the corruption of French society continued through his second novel, Death on the Instal- ment Plan. He had been wounded in the head in the First World War and the silver plate in his skull spewed out shrapnel from his pen. 'What other more romantic writers sought, Wilde, Proust, Rimbaud, Verlaine, in the forcing-house of buggery and the hard labour of alcoholism, I, I got it served up on a plate defending my Country! . . . like that! neat!' In a torrent of slang, this insomniac night-wandering doctor of the poor called down the destruction of Paris by apocalypse and deluge. In his flooding prose, the French left saw a prophet denouncing the rot of capitalism with the invective of the people. 'It's hate which makes argot,' Celine explained later. 'Argot is made to express the true feelings of misery . . . to allow the workman to tell his boss that he loathes him.'

With his sliced phrases of poetry and filth, his choppy punctuation of exclamation marks and triple dots, Celine succeeded in his attempt to make print speak from the inner ear, to set down a language of guts and tripes and deep festering hates. He once described his revolution in the French language as one which took his readers through the Metro, the bowels of the earth, in- stead of through the false trivialities of the light of day. It's my genius!' he claimed, 'my stroke of genius! not thirty-six possible ways! . . . I put all my world on the Metro, sorry! . . . and I rush on: I lead the whole world! . . . willy- nilly! . . . with me! . . . the Metro of the emotions, mine! without all the claptrap, the lumber! in a dream! . . . no stop anywhere! no! to the end! the end! direct!'

Because of Celine's rancour and slang and background, the French left was sure of his sym- pathies, despite the fact that he declared himself an anarchist. In 1936, he was invited to Russia to spend his royalties, which could not be ex- ported:He came back with a loathing of Stalin's state and published a bitter attack on it, Mea Culpa. He followed up his anti-Communism with an odious, disgusting and insane assault on the Jews, Bagatelle for a Massacre. With the Jews, he lumped together the Communists, the Freemasons and democrats in general. The right wing opened its arms to this new cham- pion, who sold his delirious prose and un-

bridled envy in hundreds of thousands of copies.

In Bagatelle and its successor, The School of Corpses. Celine's denunciation of the Jews by- passed the pseudo-scientific anathemas of the Nazis and reached absurdity. As Gide pointed out in an excuse for Celine, how could anyone take seriously a man who accused Cezanne, Picasso, Maupassant, Racine, Stendhal and Zola of being Jews? And Celine did not stop there; he even accused the kings of France of Jewish- ness. His madness against the Jews—later apolo- gists were to claim—was like Swift's proposal to eat Irish babies, a supreme irony, a reductio ad absurdum of racism. It was not. Celine never wrote about anyone but himself and he wrote seriously; he was obsessed by his own life and influences. He came from the traditional Jew- hating class of France, the small shopkeepers and clerks, those who were once anti-Dreyfus and who now back Poujade and Tixier-Vignancourt. If Celine mocked his father's anti-semitism in his second novel, it was only because he feared an imagined Jewish conspiracy and thought he should disguise his true feelings. But in 1937, he saw fascism triumphing in Europe, he felt his power as an established author, and he vomited into print.

The left-wingers dropped Celine, now revealed as a petit bourgeois, who equated monopolies and inflation with Jewish banking. They had ignored the fact that his first play, The Church, was overtly anti-semitic. They saw only and rightly that Celine's hysteria and huge sales had spread the defeatism and pro-Nazism which was to lead France to the disaster of 1940. He called for an alliance with Hitler and denounced Britain and America as Jewish stooges. And when the war and the defeat came, he said that he had told France so.

Yet Celine was too dangerous for the French right. His rage exceeded sense. He was the only author to have articles refused by the fascist French press for 'racist delirium.' He loathed Main and wanted all of `negroid' Vichy and the south of France to be eliminated, or at least severed permanently from the north. His books were even banned in Germany. He was too ex- treme for professional Jew-baiters among the Nazis. As early as 1940, Celine saw that the Germans had lost the war. Thus he began to trim. His only novel was an incantation, Guignol's Band, in which his alter ego, Bardamu, had strange adventures in Soho and the East End during the war of 1917. England became a wonderland, anti-semitism dis- appeared—and yet Celine could scoff •at Brassillach for writing articles in praise of Proust to endear himself to his Jewish critics. As the war ended, Celine fled to the collaborator's castle of Sigmaringen, then on to a Danish prison.

The French authorities tried to extradite and execute him; they failed. He lived in misery with his wife and his cat in Denmark, until the am- nesty of 1951. His last ten years were spent in Paris at Meudon, where occasionally—a friend of his told me—he played at being half Lear and half Genet, with rare lapses in flagrante delicto of pleasure. His death was announced on the same day as Hemingway's suicide. Thus the most exciting French writer of the mid- century received a few paragraphs while the headlines went to a mediocre foreign author, who (as Cdline's friend Marcel Ayme wrote) may well have been a better hunter than writer.

Politics die, however, and style remains—even if the death of six million Jews will always re- main to blot Celine's reputation. He is a writer beyond pardon; but then, he never asked for pardon. He always slandered everyone he knew,' his editors, his friends, no one was spared from his ravings except his wives, his cats, and the occasional dancing girl. He ended his life bitter against the stupidity of the Germans; the clever- ness of the Jews had been proved to him by their victory. His new hope lay in the Chinese. 'Luckily the Chinese are coming,' he screamed in 1955, 'to put an end to it! this ripe mess!

• to make you construct the Canal "Somme- Yangtse-Kiang!" '

In fact, Celine wanted the total destruction of humanity. He looked for the agents of the apocalypse. First he thought the Aryans would burn Paris and destroy the world. Paradoxically, Bagatelle is Celine's one inconsistent, even hope- ful, book—he only claims that some of humanity is evil, not all of it. Identify the Jews,-rub them out, and perhaps the rest of humanity is redeem- able! But by the time of The School of Corpses, he saw that Aryan conquest and Jewish conquest were all the same. 'The essential truth of the actual world,' he later admitted, 'is the para- noiac.' He remained lost in the follies of his paranoia, disappointed in the Nazi Gotter- diimmerung, hoping to the end that the fall of the West would come from Mongolian hordes.

Under the fine editorship of Dominique de Roux, the two Cahiers de l'Herne* devoted to Celine have brought together a mass of un- published articles, extracts, letters and memoirs by or about the prophet of the apocalypse. They tell of Celine's generosity to poor patients and his personal avarice, of his courage in war and cowardice towards the powerful (except in print), of a personality in shreds beneath a plated skull, in which real madness could not be distinguished from play at madness.

After Celine's death, a posthumous novel appeared, London Bridge,f and there is still one to come, Rigadoon. The first is a sequel to Guignol's Band and, as with all Celine's post- war writing, marks his flight from politics into fantasy. The style is more hysterical than ever. The young Bardamu weaves through Trafalgar Square and the docks in the chase after a ravish- ing fourteen-year-old, Virginia, and ends in a pub under a Zeppelin raid; there the corpse of a pawnbroker killed in Guignol's Band is brought to stink and remind of mortality. One chapter, in which Death (under the name Millipede) takes Bardamu and Virginia to a dive called the Tweet- Tweet, is a masterpiece of Celine's later style, a delirium of hell and lechery, a frantic farrago of libidinous insomnia. But Celine's world is more private than ever, a world that teeters on the brink of the asylum, and those that cross his London Bridge may find it difficult to return to the literature of reason.

Julian Greent is the sort of Catholic intel- lectual whom Celine despised--the safe player at style, with 'his fabricated delirium, a self- willed one, suitable, an echoless and heartless pretence,' Green's diary portrays the existence * LOUIS-FERDINAND CgL1NE, I AND 11. (Les Calliers de l'Herne, 26F.) t LE PONT DE LONDIDIS. By L.-F. C6line. (Gallimard, 20F.)

Dimtv 1928-1957. By Julian Green. Selected by Kurt Wolff. Translated by Anne Greene. (Collins/. Harvill, 30s.) of a responsible, rational man in search of God. Frankly, it is boring after the raving of aline, although it may fascinate those who like to fol- low the contemplative excursions of a peaceable spirit. If Celine needed a little of Green's cool- ness, Green certainly could do with some of aline's fine frenzy. In Denmark, Celine, begging for amnesty, claimed that he should be judged not by his politics, but IV his style. He was right. In my view, he is one of the great revolutionaries of prose of our century, as great as Joyce or Kafka. Certainly, he is the father of the French literature of despair. He was, indeed, vain, mean, detestable and downright murderous for the Jewish people and the French nation. And yet he suffered for his crimes; without his shattered skull, he would not have been delirious, in- somniac and paranoiac; without his anti- semitism, he would not have wandered through burning Germany or wasted in a Danish cell.

Celine said to an American-Jewish professor who went to visit him in exile, that he had more in common with a Jew, who had actually suf- fered in Buchenwald than with a thousand who spoke in the name of the sufferers but had suf- fered nothing themselves. Sufferers had no need of introductions. They knew each other by their eyes. The genius of writers needs no introduc- tions. By their style—not their propaganda— shall posterity know them. The war is twenty years ended, Celine just dead. We should read his novels again.