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Louis-Ferdinand Céline

 
Wikipedia: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Born 27 May 1894(1894-05-27)
Courbevoie, France
Died 1 July 1961 (aged 67)
Paris, France
Occupation Novelist
Nationality French

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and doctor Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961). The name "Céline" was chosen after his grandmother's first name. Céline is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and World literature. He remains, however, a controversial figure because of extreme anti-Semitic statements published during 1937 and the Second World War.

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The only child of Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine). His father was a minor functionary in an insurance firm and his mother was a lacemaker.[3] During 1905 he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he began working as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades.[4] Between 1908 and 1910 his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment.[4] In 1912, at a time when nationalism in France reached a "fever pitch" following the Morocco crisis of 1911 and induced a period one historian has called "The Hegemony of Patriotism, 1911-1914, particularly affecting opinion in the lycées and grandes écoles of Paris,[5] he began a three-year enlistment in the 12th Cavalry Regiment stationed in Rambouillet.[4] During October 1914 he was wounded in action near Ypres, and was awarded the médaille militaire in November, and appeared on the cover of the weekly l'Illustré National in December.[4] The head injury left him with recurrent tinnitus. During 1915 his arm wounds were such that he was declared physically unfit for any more active duty. He was sent to London to work in the passport office there.[4] While in London, he was married to Suzanne Nebout and divorced one year later.[4] During 1916 he began a sojourn in the Cameroons with a French lumber company and returned in 1917.[4] For the next three years he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Brittany, dispensing information on tuberculosis, while continuing his secondary studies on his own in Rennes. During 1919 he completed his baccalauréat and married Édith Follet, daughter of the director of the medical school in Rennes. During 1920 his daughter Colette was born. During 1924 he received his medical degree, for which he wrote a doctoral thesis on Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis. During 1925 he left his family for good and under the aegis of the League of Nations he travelled to Switzerland, England, the Cameroons, Canada, the United States, and Cuba. During 1928 he established a private practice in Montmartre, in the north end of Paris, specializing in obstetrics.[4] During 1931 he ended his private practice to work in a public dispensary. During 1932 he completed Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) and was almost awarded the Goncourt Prize.[6]

Literary life and awards

His best-known work is Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), translated into English most recently by Ralph Manheim. It violated many of the literary conventions of the time, using the rhythms and, to a certain extent, the vocabulary of slang and vulgar speech in a more consistent (and occasionally difficult) way than earlier writers who had made similar attempts (notably Émile Zola), in the tradition of François Villon. The book became a public success, but Céline was not awarded the Prix Goncourt, despite strong support; the voting was controversial enough to become the subject of a book (Goncourt 32 by Eugène Saccomano, 1999).

During 1936 he published Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), giving innovative, chaotic, and antiheroic visions of human suffering. Here, he extensively uses ellipses scattered all throughout the text to enhance the rhythm and to emphasise the style of speech.

By both these books he not only showed himself to be a great innovator of style but also a masterful story teller. He was widely admired at that time by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Exile

During the development of Nazi Germany, he wrote three typically cynical and antisemitic pamphlets: Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937), L'École des cadavres (School of Corpses) (1938) and Les Beaux draps (The Fine Mess) (1941), the last one published during the occupation of France. Céline fled France during liberation, and joined the last remnants of the Vichy government in Sigmaringen. He subsequently lived in exile for a number of years.

The massacre that Céline had in mind when he titled his first overtly antisemitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre was that of the "goïms," or Gentiles, who he thought would be led in slaughter once again in another great war.[7] Céline had been mobilized during the First World War where he received a serious arm injury in the course of a mission for which he had volunteered.[4] During later years he was to claim that he had undergone trepanation at the hands of army surgeons in 1915 (the fictional character Robinson claims to have undergone this procedure in Journey to the End of the Night). This claim was a false one, invented for reasons involving Céline's desire to picture himself as an unjustly persecuted loner.[8] Records from the Paul Brousse Hospital in Villejuif on the outskirts of Paris state that only his arm was operated on.[8]

Although Céline's political ideals appeared to have had much in common with the Nazis, he was publicly critical of Adolf Hitler whom he called a "Jew" and of "Aryan baloney".[9][10] His fascist views are evident in L'Ecole des cadavres where he calls for a Franco-German alliance in order to counter the alliance between British intelligence and "the international Jewish conspiracy"[11]

Céline was a friend of the German-French sculptor Arno Breker. He visited Breker last time in Germany during 1943 at Breker's Castle Jaeckelsbruch near Berlin. After the Vichy regime fell in 1944, Céline escaped judgment by fleeing to Sigmaringen, Germany, accompanying the Vichy Chief of State Marshal Philippe Pétain, and President Pierre Laval. For a brief time Céline acted as Laval's personal physician. A fictional account of this period can be found in Céline’s novel "D'un château l'autre" (Castle to Castle), published in 1960.

After the end of the Nazi government Céline subsequently fled to Denmark (1945). Named a collaborator, he was convicted in absentia (1950) in France, sentenced to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace. He was subsequently granted amnesty and returned to France during 1951.

Later life and death

Céline regained fame in later life with a trilogy telling of his exile: D'un château l'autre, (describing the fall of Schloss Sigmaringen), Nord and Rigodon. He settled in Meudon, where he was visited by several friends and artists, among them the famous actress Arletty. He became famous among the Beat Movement. Both William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg visited him in his Parisian apartment during the 1950s. Céline died on 1 July 1961 of a ruptured aneurysm and was interred in a small cemetery at Bas Meudon (part of Meudon in the Hauts-de-Seine département). His house burned down on the night of May 23, 1968, destroying manuscripts, furniture and mementoes, but leaving his parrot Toto alive in the adjacent aviary.

Work and legacy

Journey to the End of the Night is among the most acclaimed novels of the 20th century. Céline's legacy survives in the writings of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Queneau and Jean Genet among others, and in the admiration expressed for him by people like Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Robbe-Grillet, and Barthes. In the United States, writers like Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey owe an obvious debt to the author of Voyage au bout de la nuit[12], though the relatively late date of the first English language translation means that any direct influence can be difficult to demonstrate, except of course in Henry Miller's case, who read the book in French shortly after it was published while he was living in Paris. Few first novels have had the impact of Journey to the End of the Night. Written in an explosive and highly colloquial style, the book shocked most critics but found immediate success with the French reading public, which responded enthusiastically to the violent misadventures of its petit-bourgeois antihero, Bardamu, and his characteristic nihilism. The author's military experiences in WWI, his travels to colonial French West Africa, New York, and his return to postwar France all provide episodes within the sprawling narrative.[13]

Pessimism pervades Céline's fiction as his characters sense failure, anxiety, nihilism, and inertia. The narrative of betrayal and exploitation, both real and imagined, corresponds with his personal life. His two true loves, his wife and his cat, are mentioned with nothing other than kindness and warmth. A progressive disintegration of personality appears in the stylistic incoherence of his books based on his life during the war: Guignol's Band, D'un château l'autre and Nord. However, some critics claim that the books are less incoherent than intentionally fragmented, and that they represent the final development of the style introduced with Journey to the End of the Night, suggesting that Céline maintained his faculties in clear working order to the end of his days. Guignol's Band and its companion novel London Bridge center on the London underworld during WWI. (In London Bridge a sailboat appears, bearing the name King Hamsun, obviously a tribute to another collaborationist writer.) Celine's autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman (intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competition); his uneasy relationship with London's pimps and prostitutes and their common nemesis, Inspector Matthew of Scotland Yard.[14] These novels are classic examples of his black comedy which few writers have equaled.[15]. He continued writing right up to his death in 1961, finishing his last novel, Rigodon, in fact on the day before he died. In Conversations with Professor Y (1955) Céline defends his style, indicating that his heavy use of the ellipsis and his disjointed sentences are an attempt to embody human emotion in written language.

His writings are examples of black comedy, where unfortunate and often terrible things are described humorously. Céline's writing is often hyper-real and its polemic qualities can often be startling; however, his main strength lies in his ability to discredit almost everything and yet not lose a sense of enraged humanity. Céline was also an influence on Irvine Welsh, Günter Grass and Charles Bukowski. Bukowski has famously said that "Journey to the End of the Night was the best book written in the last two thousand years."[citation needed]

Bibliography

References

Notes

  1. ^ O'Connell p88
  2. ^ O'Connell p43
  3. ^ Twayne's World Author Series: Louis Ferdinand-Céline, by David O'Connell, p14
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i O'Connell p14
  5. ^ David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-garde and Politics in Paris, 1905-1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 33-37).
  6. ^ O'Connell p15
  7. ^ O'Connell p104
  8. ^ a b O'Connell p18,19
  9. ^ Introduction to Conversations with Professor Y by Stanford Luce p.xii
  10. ^ O'Connell p32
  11. ^ O'Connell p109
  12. ^ O'Connell p148
  13. ^ The Nation, quoted in the New Directions Paperbook (Eighteenth Printing) of Journey to the End of the Night
  14. ^ Dalkey Archive Press, London Bridge translation by Dominic Di Bernardi
  15. ^ Philadelphia Inquirer

See also

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