I Caught the War in My Head
A lawyer representing French journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat contacted François Gibault And Véronique Chovin in June of 2020 to pass along some news. It was news no one was expecting, least of all Gibault and Chovin. I’ll get back to this eventually.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) was a complex and contradictory character. He was a nihilist yet a moralist, a decorated soldier yet and ardent pacifist, an unrelenting misanthropist yet a physician who cared for the poorest of the poor. He harbored a broiling hatred for damn near everything, but loved the ballet. My god how he loved the ballet. He’s also one of the most important, influential and reviled authors of the twentieth century.
With the 1932 publication of his epic, phantasmagoric debut novel “Journey to the End of the Night,” Celine took a chainsaw to the weary formalism of French literature. Inspired by his experiences during and after WWI, the sprawling novel was a blend of abject horror, disgust, despair, the blackest of black comedy and and unapologetic contempt for human folly. His conversational prose was awash in gutter slang and obscenities, the narrative wandered off on long tangents and the blunt immediacy of his account helped lay the groundwork for Modernism. The critical success of his first few novels cast him headlong into France’s literary Pantheon, and his profound influence has been acknowledged by the likes of Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., George Orwell, William Gaddis and hundreds of other notables.
For it all, English translations of his books have been hard to come by, he’s rarely taught in college literature courses, and people who’ve never read a word he’s written can fly into apoplectic spasms at the mere mention of his name. See, Celine had a few issues which, sixty-three years after his death, continue to overshadow his towering achievements as a novelist.
Beginning in 1937, as it was clear another major European war was imminent, Celine published a series of tracts urging France to stay out of it. He’d experienced the brutality of war first hand, and knew the one that lay ahead would be devastating. He railed against any number of groups he felt were jockeying to become the next generation of war profiteers. He hurled scalding invective at communists, freemasons, the French, the Church, the English and dozens of others, but reserved a bottomless pit of venom for the Jews. His rabid anti-semitism flowed freely through his essays, personal correspondence and the letters he sent to leading collaborationist newspapers. His screeds were so over the top that some people were convinced they had to be parody, while other anti-semites feared he was giving them a bad name. Knowing he’d be charged with treason for his activities during the Occupation, he fled France in 1944 as the war was approaching an end. He was later captured and imprisoned in Denmark, tried in abstentia in France, found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was eventually commuted, but Celine was officially branded a national disgrace [1]. Today he is remembered far more for his anti-semitism than his writing.
There’s no denying, ignoring, whitewashing or rationalizing away the fact Celine was a yucky human being who fiercely clung to some abhorrent ideas, but I’ve long held a clear distinction should be made between an artist’s personal life and the art he or she creates. If you would like a long list of revered artists who were abominable human beings I’m happy to provide you with one. In Celine’s case his strident anti-semitism was never reflected in his novels, and a few even feature sympathetic Jewish characters. This excuses nothing, but points up that his life and art are two different animals, and the ugliness of the former doesn’t diminish the brilliance of the latter.
Okay, that was all just a long prelude to get the basics down.
In 1934 Celine wrote a short novel titled “Guerre” (“War”), a fictionalized account of the months he spent in the hospital after being wounded at Flanders in the early days of WWI. The novel opens with an inimitably Celinian flourish:
“I must have stayed there for part of the following night as well. My whole left ear was stuck to the ground with blood, my mouth too. Between the two there was an immense noise. I slept in this noise and then it rained, hard.”
Whether Celine considered “WAR” a finished novel is unclear, though some marginal notes and narrative quirks (character names that abruptly change, etc.) would indicate it’s an early draft. There’s quite a bit of furious scholarly debate going on now about whether it’s a mere scrap, the second half of a much longer novel, or a sketch for a much longer novel destined to be the second volume of a massive trilogy. There are a few other guesses too. It doesn’t really matter much, but at least it gives academics something to do. That’s always good. Whatever the case Celine set it aside with several other unpublished works.
When he, his wife Lucette and cat Bebert fled in a mad rush as Allied forces were closing in on Paris, he left behind over five thousand handwritten pages of unpublished material.
During the Occupation Oscar Rosembly was a journalist and a member of The Resistance who was later arrested for looting collaborationist’s homes. After Celine fled, it’s believed Rosembly was the one who broke into the author’s apartment and pilfered those abandoned manuscripts [2]. For the next eighty years it was assumed all those papers were gone forever. Celine himself publicly mourned the loss to the very end. Which brings us back to that June 2020 phone call.
François Gibault and Véronique Chovin were the executors of Celine’s literary estate, and Thibaudat had gotten in touch to let them know he was in possession of all 5,324 pages of the purloined manuscripts. How exactly the material made it from Rosembly to Thibaudat, how many hands it passed through intact over the course of eight decades remains a mystery. Thibaudat had apparently been in possession of the papers for some time, but explained he was obligated to hold onto them until the death of Celine’s widow Lucette, who finally passed away in 2019 at the age of 106. For all the mystery and skullduggery, what mattered was the manuscripts—including three unpublished novels—were back where they belonged. In literary circles this was what’s technically known as (if you’ll forgive the academic jargon) “a big honking whoop-dee-doo.”
The French publishing house Gallimard, which had been Celine’s publisher long before his death in 1961, released “War,” the first of the three rediscovered novels, in 2022. On June 28th New Directions will be releasing Charlotte Mandell’s translation in the States.
In the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, anti-semitism has become a flashpoint in American politics and culture. This makes the publication of a newly-discovered novel by a notorious anti-semite a touchy call. There’s not a whiff of anti-semitism within “War”’s pages, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Even before the current situation America’s major publishing houses were too squeamish to go anywhere near Celine. In some cases it’s taken half a century or more after their original French publication for some of his major novels to appear in the States, usually released by indie or academic presses. The squeamishness had nothing to do With the quality of the work and everything to do with the character of the author. I don’t like throwing the word “hypocrisy” around, so I won’t even mention that Walt Disney and Henry Ford were equally horrible anti-semites, yet people still happily watch Disney movies and drive Fords. I also won’t note that F.D.R. has been canonized and T.S. Eliot was given a Nobel while Celine’s books remain verboten. Fortunately New Directions, which has released several Celine titles in the past, has chosen to put art above politics.
Once the initial hype has faded, far too often the general consensus is that rediscovered lost novels by literary giants like Hemingway, James Baldwin and Henry Miller were, yeah, probably better off lost. This isn’t the case with “War,” a rare instance in which the novel more than lives up to the hype surrounding its rediscovery.
Celine’s novels paralleled events in his own picaresque life to the point at which readers and critics make the mistake of reading them as straight autobiography. As they’ve done with Henry Miller, too many scholars have spent too many hours scouring Celine’s fiction—FICTION, mind you!—eager to find details that, um, aren’t true in strictly biographical terms. Still, in biographical terms “War” takes place in a paragraph break early on in “Journey to the End of the Night.” Even if the book was an early draft or the outline of a larger novel, quirks and all it holds together as a solid stand-alone work. What’s more its uncharacteristic brevity not only increases its impact, but also offers a distillation of Celine’s fundamental themes. The hypocrisy of those with the tiniest shred of power, the baseness of human motivations, a world in which everyone’s got a grift, and above all else the stupid and useless madness of war are all here, delivered with a humor and slapstick that’s black as tar.
Staggering away from the scene of a battle after suffering a serious head wound, Celine’s alter-ego Ferdinand deserts, or at least attempts to desert, the army. He stumbles around the countryside sliding into and out of delirium, played by the inescapable clanging and whistling in his head. “I caught the war in my head,” he writes. “It’s locked up inside my head.” That excruciating Tinnitus, which shifts and morphs and blends with the other sounds around him, becomes a character in itself, tormenting him throughout the book.
He eventually lands in a crowded military hospital in the small town of Peurdu-sur-la-Lys, where he’s cared for by Mademoiselle L’Espinasse. Sometimes gentle, sometimes sadistic, Mademoiselle L’Espinasse’s caregiving swings between hand jobs and deliberately painful catheterizations. (As Ferdinand discovers later, she’s also a necrophile!) Meanwhile he has to fend off an inexperienced doctor’s efforts to operate on him simply to get a little practice.
“As for the other guys in the room,” Ferdinand muses about his fellow patients, “there were enough wounds for every taste, on every surface and at every depth, reservists for the most part but idiots all of them. Many of them did nothing but enter and exit, to the earth or heaven.”
Much of the story take’s place during Ferdinand’s regular sojourns into town with his friend Cascade, a ward-mate who’d been shot in the foot. Relieved to be freed from the hospital for a few hours, they hang out at a popular bar, wander about, and Ferdinand gets an earful about Cascade’s love-hate relationship with the wife he’s forced into prostitution. Whether in town or the hospital, there remains no escape from the war. In the distance the sound of gunfire and mortar shells is unrelenting, the hospital is overflowing with new casualties, and glittering regiments of fresh-faced cannon fodder are always parading through the streets.
While he fully expects to be executed for desertion, things take an unexpected turn when Ferdinand is instead presented with a medal for some fictional battlefield heroics. Acutely aware he’s a fraud, he nevertheless wears the medal with swaggering pride to earn the respect and admiration of the townsfolk and his fellow patients.
“You have the medal, it’s great,” Celine writes. “In the battle of loudmouths you’re finally winning in a big way, you have your special fanfare in your head, you’re half-gangrened, you’re rotten that goes without saying, but you’ve seen battlefields where they don’t decorate carcasses and you’re decorated, don’t forget that or you’re an ingrate, you’re gross vomit, dribbling ass scrapings, you’re not worth the paper they wipe you with.”
In many ways this is a summation of the bitter contempt that runs through most of Celine’s novels, a rage aimed at the hypocrisy of the politicians and generals who wage wars, as well as the civilians who cheer them on and fawn over medals (deserved or not), without ever directly experiencing war themselves.
While “War” is an early and comparatively straightforward work written before Celine developed the shattered impressionistic style for which he’s known, his use of Thirties slang and other narrative idiosyncrasies has made him one of the most daunting translation challenges in modern literature. I’ve read more than my share of godawful Celine translations, hoo-boy, so Charlotte Mandell deserves special mention here. The recent recipient of both the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation, Ms. Mandell does a masterful job with “War,” deftly capturing Celine’s tone and rhythm while preserving the eccentricities that made him such a singular stylist. This is why it’s such good news that Ms. Mandell will also be translating “Londres,” the next of Celine’s rediscovered novels, which New Directions plans to release in 2026.
“War” is both an important and timely novel, as well as a perfect introduction for readers who may be hesitant to dive into Celine’s heftier works like “Journey to the End of the Night” or “Death on the Installment Plan.”
Like clockwork, in recent days war has once again become a popular spectator sport, a stimulating and euphoric entertainment, with the standard binary Good vs. Evil storyline cemented securely in place. With the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine threatening to devolve into WWIII at a moment’s notice, Celine’s unflinching cautionary portrait may be precisely what the world needs. More likely it will simply give people one more reason to despise a man who refuses to choose one side over the other because he knows both are repugnant.
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FOOTNOTES
[1] This has always confused me a little, considering France, Occupation or no Occupation, has historically been one of the most thoroughly anti-Semitic nations in Europe. But that’s another tedious digression for another time.
[2] Who nicked the manuscripts and the circumstances surrounding their disappearance is also a point of some contention among scholars and literary historians. Several have concocted elaborate speculative tales pointing accusatory fingers at any number of dead, sticky-fingered rapscallions. It reminds me of the ongoing debates over the true identities of Jack the Ripper or the author of Shakespeare’s plays. I went with the Rosembly story because it’s easier.
by Jim Knipfel