Lousy person, Great Writer

I first heard of Louis-Ferdinand Céline from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. When I got to prison,I thought I would try to finally read Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, but whatever New Jersey library had a copy of the novel would not send it into Fort Dix FCI. Which probably increased my interest. What could be so bad about the book that we, the criminal element, needed protection from its influence. Yes, I knew about the author's anti-semitism. His Wikipedia entry describes his anti-semitism. So,I started poking around the internet to see what I could learn about Celine.

The piece written by Vonnegut on Celine here and what probably caught my attention at the time:

I know when he began to influence me. I was well into my forties before I read him. A friend was startled that I didn’t know anything about Céline, and he initiated me with Journey to the End of the Night, which flabbergasted me. I assigned it for a course in the novel which I was giving at the University of Iowa. When it was time for me to lecture for two hours about it, I found I had nothing to say.

The book penetrated my bones, anyway, if not my mind. And I only now understand what I took from Céline and put into the novel I was writing at the time, which was called Slaughterhouse-5. In that book, I felt the need to say this every time a character died: “So it goes.” This exasperated many critics, and it seemed fancy and tiresome to me, too. But it somehow had to be said.

It was a clumsy way of saying what Céline managed to imply so much more naturally in everything he wrote, in effect: “Death and suffering can’t matter nearly as much as I think they do. Since they are so common, my taking them so seriously must mean that I am insane. I must try to be saner.”

*** 

Introduction to Penguin paperback editions of Céline’s novels Castle to Castle, North and Rigadoon Reprinted in Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

The Beings Akin blog has a several posts on Celine here that I have not had time to read. Millions.com has a very short post on Celine and Vonnegut here. Another online biography is here. and the guy has his own society studying him which might be a French thing but I'm going to take it to mean he was a serious writer. I need more than the tatters of my high school French to delve into that site, or for this. 

But it is The Paris Review interview that ought to be paid attention to:

INTERVIEWER

That’s what you call your “little music,” isn’t it?

CÉLINE

I call it “little music” because I’m modest, but it’s a very hard transformation to achieve. It’s work. It doesn’t seem like anything the way it is, but it’s quality. To do a novel like one of mine you have to write eighty thousand pages in order to get eight hundred. Some people say when talking about me, “There’s natural eloquence … He writes like he talks … Those are everyday words … They’re practically identical … You recognize them.” Well, there, that’s “transformation.” That’s just not the word you’re expecting, not the situation you’re expecting. A word used like that becomes at the same time more intimate and more exact than what you usually find there. You make up your style. It helps to get out what you want to show of yourself.

INTERVIEWER

What are you trying to show?

CÉLINE

Emotion. Savy, the biologist, said something appropriate: In the beginning there was emotion, and the verb wasn’t there at all. When you tickle an amoeba she withdraws, she has emotion, she doesn’t speak but she does have emotion. A baby cries, a horse gallops. Only us, they’ve given us the verb. That gives you the politician, the writer, the prophet. The verb’s horrible. You can’t smell it. But to get to the point where you can translate this emotion, that’s a difficulty no one imagines … It’s ugly … It’s superhuman … It’s a trick that’ll kill a guy.

I still think there is something to be learned stylistically and substantively from Celine. When I get working or get a library card, his Journey to the End of the Night will be first or second on my reading list - depending on whether i get my hands on Dos Passos first.