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PB April-May
April-May 67
Tony Lowes reviews ‘War’ by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
(Translated by Charlotte Mandell, New Directions 2024):
‘War was indescribable – until Céline’s War’
Selling Céline
By Tony Lowes
H
ow politically regressive do
writers have to be before you
cannot review them? If they are
bad can you review them but
only negatively? Can you
review only their progressive works? Are the
rules evolving? Are there no rules?
These are some of the issues thrown up
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline who, from 1937,
wrote a succession of vehemently
antisemitic polemical texts within which he
promoted the notion of a strategic military
alliance of France with Nazi Germany. In the
lead up to the Second World War, he
persistently and unabashedly disseminated
antisemitism. Following the Allied invasion
of Normandy in 1944, Céline fled first to
Germany and subsequently sought refuge
in Denmark, where he remained in exile. In
1951, a French court found him guilty of
collaboration with the enemy; however, he
was soon granted clemency by a military
tribunal. Upon his return
to France, he reverted to
his careers of doctor and
writer.
‘Journey to the End of
the Night’, the best
French novel unknown to
English-speaking
readers of literature,
published in 1934,
before his antisemitism
took hold, made Céline a
household name in
France.
When he fled Paris in
1944 because of his
fervent anti-Jewish
views, he left behind
over 5,000 pages of
manuscripts. They
disappeared from his
CULTURE
68 April-May
April-May 69
Céline makes us laugh and he makes us
cry – he brings us humanity more honestly
than any other writer and yet comes up
smiling.
To list the writers (in English) who have
been deeply influenced by Céline is to list
almost all of the most original male writers
of Twentieth-Century American fiction: Kurt
Vonnegut -‘Slaughterhouse-Five’; Norman
Mailer – ‘The Naked and Dead’; Henry Miller
– ‘Tropic of Cancer’; Philip Roth — ‘Portnoy’s
Complaint’; Harold Brodkey — ‘The Runaway
Soul’; Saul Bellow — ‘The Adventures of
Augie March’; James Baldwin — ‘Go Tell It on
the Mountain’; William Burroughs — ‘Naked
Lunch’; and Jack Kerouac — ‘On the Road’.
Kerouac proclaimed, “I think (Henry) Miller
is a great man but Céline, his master, is a
giant”.
In France, Albert Camus’ ‘The Stranger’
(L’Étranger) and Genet’s ‘The Balcony” (Le
Balcon) are cited as influenced by Céline, as
is the ‘Nouveau Roman’ movement which
challenged traditional narrative
conventions, influencing the development
of French literature with the fragmentation
of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and
Nathalie Sarraute.
Maurice Nadeau wrote: “What Joyce did
for the English language...what the
surrealists attempted to do for the French
language, Céline achieved eortlessly and
on a vast scale”
Irish writers have not been so influenced;
reviewing ‘War’ in the ‘Irish Times’ last
summer, Dermot Bolger expressed the Irish
establishment’s view, placing Céline
amongst the “dangerous risk-taking
novelists, tearing up rule books,
narcissistically exploring obsessions in
novel after novel”.
Early in ‘North’, his final work, Céline
addresses the reader and explains his
fragmentation of narrative: “I’m telling you
this every which way…the end before the
who never minded getting his own literary
hands dirty, was more specific: “Brutal,
fierce, the driven witness of an elemental
world who takes us deeper and deeper into
the night. Death, dying, crime, guilt,
grievance, lunacy, sex — all of that and more
is his daily business”.
Like ‘Journey’, ‘War’ brings alive the life
of the utterly poor, the whores and their
protectors, the thieves and the vagabonds,
the dispossessed and the vain – a brutally
honest exegesis of French class structure.
Even more than ‘Journey’ it is
autobiographical. It is all heard through a
‘terrible noise’ in his head that never
ceased, experienced through a belief that
only sex gave relief from life. Sex and of
course death. And both were everywhere,
gristly and hallucinogenic.
‘War’ begins: “I must have been lying
there for part of the following night as well.
My whole ear on the left was glued to the
ground with blood, the mouth too. Between
the two there was an immense noise. I fell
asleep in this noise and then it rained,
hard”.
Céline explained: “I always slept with a
terrible noise after December 1914. I caught
the war in my head. It’s locked in my head”.
At times it overwhelmed him; he vomited
regularly, especially during sex, and some
of his literary sex is so violent and degraded
as to be anti-erotic. All of it is against a
background of the vanity of generals, the
endless marching of troops, and the
incessant firing of weapons.
Tinnitus and dizzy spells meant the
protagonist, ‘Ferdinand’, had to have a
companion. He and Cascade, a fellow
patient, wander at night away from their
soldier’s hospital to a surreal world of
nighttime debauchery. Finally, they are told
that Cascade’s death warrant had been
signed and that he is to be taken within
hours from the hospital to be executed. His
account of the unutterable horror of their
last night waiting is almost impossible to
read.
We shall never be at peace
until everything has been
said, once and for all time;
then there will be silence
and we will no longer be
afraid of being silent. It will
be all right then
Paris flat, taken probably by the resistance
who did not wish his wife – who held the
copyright while she lived — to profit from his
works. Céline – who is said to have thought
the resistance burned his works — died in
1961. His wife Lucette died aged 107 in
2019, and Gallimard released the first of the
manuscripts in 2022 - ‘War’, translated last
year for the first time into English by
Charlotte Mandell.
Its publication and now translation
reminded me of what drew me to Céline as
a Trinity student in the 1960s. Towards the
end of ‘Journey’, he brings us the ultimate
reason for writing:
“We shall never be at peace until
everything has been said, once and for all
time; then there will be silence and we will
no longer be afraid of being silent. It will be
all right then”.
‘War’, whether directly experienced or
not, is relevant to everyone alive today. We
constantly grapple with the horrific realities
of – for example — Ukraine, Rohingya, Gaza,
Palestine and the Sudan torn asunder by
ethnic cleansing, genocide and war crimes,
more or less exposed.
War was indescribable – until the recent
Céline discoveries. Adam Gopnik writing
recently in the New Yorker contextualises
‘War’: “It makes other famous descriptions
of the trenches seem arty and unrealised:
Hemingway in “A Farewell to Arms”. self-
consciously poetic; Remarque in “All Quiet
on the Western Front”. quietly polemical”.
Unrivalled too, in any language, have
long been his descriptions of the wretched
of Paris where he worked as a doctor in his
first novel.
He brought the people, their argot, and
their often-downtrodden lives to the page,
listing Zola’s ‘realism’ as his greatest
influence. As Gopnik wrote: “No human
appetite or reflection, however shameful or
audacious, is alien to Céline, and no
resource of language, no matter how ‘low’
or demotic, forbidden”.
Philip Roth, masterly American novelist
war was indescribable
68 April-May
April-May 69
beginning!…what does it matter? The truth
alone matters!…You’ll catch on…I catch
on…A slight eort, that’s all!…You take more
trouble with a modern painting…”
Céline has been rightly slayed for the
utterly vile and indefensible anti-Semitism
of his 1930s political pamphleteering. Long
banned in France, they were to be the
second of the rediscovered manuscripts to
be published.
Gallimard, however has since delayed
publication, caught by a public protest and
threat of legal action from Nazi-hunters.
Céline, a pacifist and vegetarian, unlike
many other European antisemites, never
published in the Nazi-sponsored press and
refused invitations to events associated
with the Nazi occupation of Paris. In an
unverifiable translation of ‘Trifles for a
Massacre’, the first 1936 pamphlet (all three
were written before the full horror of the
Holocaust was revealed) he defends himself
in advance against the vituperation: “But
you are anti-semitic, my fine mooncalf!
That’s Vile! It’s a prejudice!”.
The reply: “I have nothing in particular
against Jews insofar as the Jews are what I
would describe as slobs like everybody
else, bipeds in search of their soup…They
don’t bother me at all. As such a Jew is
perhaps the same, on the job, under
conditions of equality, as a Breton, an
Auvergnat, a New Caledonian naïve, a ‘child
of Mary’…It’s possible…It is rather Jewish
racism against which I revolt, against which
I harbour animus, against which I seethe,
until the ends of my benouze!”.
His antisemitic writings have always
complicated appreciation of his literary
works — and it is dicult not to feel that his
hateful rhetoric fuelled prejudice and
contributed to a climate of dehumanisation
that ultimately enabled history’s worst
genocide.
So at the end of the day — or the end of
the night — what is the lesson left us by
Céline, who wrote that the sum total of his
ambitions was to “transpose everything I
have had to endure from people and
things”?
It is perhaps this: “Before the war, time
had seemed endless. We had all the time in
the world. But now, every moment felt
precious, every breath a gift. We had
learned the true meaning of mortality”.
‘Journey to the End
of the Night’, the best
French novel unknown to
English-speaking readers
of literature, published
in 1934, before his
antisemitism took hold,
made Céline a household
name in France
“We went into the café that
looked to us the cheapest. On the
benches around, the
merrymakers were already
asleep, half drunk. The clock
above the little church began to
chime one hour after another and
never stop. We had come to the
end of the world; that was
becoming more and more
obvious. You couldn’t go any
further because beyond that
were the dead people.
There, close at hand on the
Place du Tertre, was where the
dead end of the night began. We
had a good place to see them
from. All the same, you have to
know how to see them — from
inside and almost closing your
eyes — because the great
draughts of light from the electric
signs make it awfully dicult to
see them, even through the
clouds.
There were lots of old patients of mine here and there, and women patients I had
forgotten about and many others. All the time I recognised many more of the
departed, more and more of them. So many that one is really ashamed of not having
had time to see them when they were living here by one’s side year after year…”.
– ‘Journey to the End of the Night’ [1934]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
