Celine: A Biography (review)

Céline is the biography of the French novelist, originally Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, who was born in 1894 in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie and died in 1961 just across the river in the Parisian suburb of Meudon. It was a life lived at top speed, as a soldier, a medical doctor, an adventurer in exotic and primitive communities, and a political stormy petrel extraordinaire. The name “Céline” was taken from one of his grandmothers on the occasion of his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit; it was always his literary name, though as a medical man he remained throughout “Destouches.” His main literary achievement was as a novelist, but he also wrote a play, a scattering of vehement, violent political tracts, scenarios for various (mostly unpro-duced) ballets, and a voluminous correspondence. Apart from three official wives, he was widely and variously promiscuous—not for the most part heartless or predatory, though as selfish and restless as an alley cat. He had as well the curiosity and combativeness of an alley cat; and he had as little of that mandarin stuffiness which commonly afflicts the European intellectual as can be imagined. He came from the scruffy suburbs, and prided himself on those humble origins. Whether he dreamed of a life at sea, as his Breton-Norman background might have led him to fantasize, we do not know—Vitoux tells us he did, but one cannot always distinguish Vitoux’s imaginings from those of young Destouches. More concretely, the future novelist passed through the elementary school at Courbevoie, spent some months in Germany and England to improve his languages, and served for a while as messenger boy to a jewelry firm. Then as the Great War approached he was caught up by the army, thrown abruptly into combat, wounded in the arm, and invalided out for good in the winter of 1915. Whether he was wounded in the head as well as the arm we do not know; he complained for many years of auditory distractions—but here we come again to the question of Céline’s fantasies and delusions.

Mostly these deliriums, visions, and exaggerations were harmless enough, and Vitoux clears away many of them simply by referring to documentary evidence, or other witnesses, or contradictory stories told by Céline himself. But as to the sources of the novelist’s hallucinatory anti-Semitism, which as much as anything else made Céline a pariah at the end of the Second World War, Vitoux is less than helpful.

He does not seem to hold Céline’s father responsible for his son’s bigotry, yet what he describes in the father is not far at all from what emerged later in the son. Down to the tangled syntax, both Destouches, père et fils, put forth the same sort of nationalistic, Anglophobic, anti-Masonic, anti-reactionary parliamentary, anti-Semitic, anti-Prussian, anti-everything diatribe (32). (The son was anti-Russian rather than anti-Prussian, he hated Orientals in addition to his other hatreds, and he despised women generically, but in the total picture these are mere details.) The first two major novels are far from bland, but they display nothing like the unrestrained vituperation of Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937). What caused the change? Vitoux does not explain or try to explain adequately; in fact he tries to muddle the picture as much as possible by saying first that before 1937 Céline was not anti-Semitic at all, and then by saying that everybody in France at this time was. This arrangement of formulas hardly makes for a clear biography, and still less for a proper social history.

Vitoux in fact seems to be more interested in Céline as a dramatic performer, one alternately defiant and pathetic, than as a literary artist. Except for a couple of late pages (530 ff.), the biography has little to say of those writings that are the main reason for being interested in...