Céline, Literary Genius and Antisemite, Readies for a Second Act

One of literature’s most talented villains, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, threatens to take Paris by posthumous storm. The French publishing house Éditions Gallimard, whose catalog includes 38 Nobel laureates and 36 holders of the Prix Goncourt, has just published from Céline’s once-lost manuscripts a book, “Guerre.” Céline’s reappearance as literary force at a moment of rising threats to Jews frames old wounds that are anything but past. Le Monde calls the discovery, made in 2020, a “miracle.” The executor of Celine’s estate, François Gibault, admits, “I no longer believed that we would see the manuscripts.” Pages are now on view at the Gallimard Gallery in Paris. Another book, “Londres,” will hit bookshelves in October. A Céline scholar, Henri Godard, tells El Pais that “‘Guerre’ has its value and an impact, but it is not a true Céline, because it is not finished.”Finished or not, “Guerre” covers Céline’s time as a wounded French soldier in Flanders at the beginning of World War I. At 150 pages, it is shorter than Céline’s completed works, suggesting that it had not ripened into a mature draft. Like the posthumously published papers of Vladimir Nabokov and Franz Kafka, Céline’s remains offer a fulsome if not necessarily edited view of a lifetime’s work. Comprising more than 5,000 pages, the archive was abandoned when Céline and his wife escaped the City of Light for Nazi Germany after the Allies landed at Normandy in 1944. Céline had good reason to see the Reich as a safe haven. He wrote a range of antisemitic tracts and advocated collaboration with the Nazis. Céline was convicted of collaboration, but pardoned by a military tribunal.In works like “Journey to the End of the Night” and “Death on the Installment Plan,” Céline pioneered a style that was colloquial, savage, and rancidly alive to the raw tragedy of the human condition. Céline described his style as one that cleaved to “the intimacy of things, into the fibre, the nerves, the feelings of things, the flesh, and going straight on to the end.” He compared his work to the “métro through an inner city.”When Céline fled to Germany and finally Denmark, he left these thousands of pages of writing in his Montmartre apartment, and they were subsequently swiped. Speculation swirled around who grabbed them. When he returned to France, they were gone. In 2020 a journalist, Jérôme Dupuis, announced that he had all 5,324 pages, and turned them over to Céline’s literary executors. He has not disclosed how they ended up in his possession, citing “confidentiality of sources.”Even before these manuscripts were found, the Céline archive presented particular problems. In 2017, Gallimard announced that it intended to publish Céline’s antisemitic pamphlets dating from before and during the Nazi occupation of France, which the author and his wife had suppressed from publication. An outcry greeted the decision, and plans were suspended.Gallimard’s eponymous editor, Antoine, says, “we will have to think about the possibility of publishing the pamphlets” before they enter the public domain in 2032. Céline was not the only notable writer who found himself on the morally wrong side of the war against the Jews. The poet Ezra Pound, who edited Thomas Stearns Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and whose “The Cantos” are a landmark of modernist poetry, supported Benito Mussolini. In a radio broadcast in support of Il Dulce, Pound admonished the English: “you let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-Jewed the Jew.” Despite their views, Pound and Céline continue to be read and studied because they were literary innovators whose work explored how language could reflect and be affected by the upheavals of the 20th century. The ugliness of Céline’s weltanschauung is far from eradicated from the Fifth Republic. A study done at Tel Aviv University found that between 2020 and 2021, antisemitic incidents in France increased by 70 percent. Céline, who once wrote “our governors are a clique of sadistic yids,” would likely be gratified by that development.

Céline, Literary Genius and Antisemite, Readies for a Second Act

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