PENGUIN BOOKS
NORTH
Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was born in Courbevoie, France, in 1894 He studied medicine after serving in World War I, during which he had suffered severe head injuries. His thesis on the nineteenth-century immunologist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was accepted at Rennes, and in 1928 he began general practice. In 1932, under the name Celine, he published Journey to the End of the Night—a summa of alienation and despair and a turning point in world literature because of its barbaric language, torrential imagery, and unrestrained bitterness. His second novel, Death on the Installment Plan (1936), was hardly less pessimistic. Before and during World War II Celine supported certain Nazi ideas, and as the war ended, he fled to Germany and ultimately to Denmark—an experience recreated in Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon, all published by Penguin Books. He, who had said, “The truth of this world is death,” died near Paris in 1961, dishonored yet recognized as one of the century’s major writers.
Ralph Manheim is distinguished for his translations of Céline, Gunter Grass, and Hermann Hesse. Mr. Manheim won the National Book Award in 1970 for his translation of Celine’s Castle to Castle.
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Originally published in French under the title ,
Nord by Librairie Gallimard 1960
English translation first published in the
United States of America by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence 197a.
Published in Penguin Books 1976
Copyright © Librairie Gallimard, ig6o
Translation copyright © Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1972
Introduction copyright © Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1975’
All rights reserved
ISBN 0 14 06.434a X
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CHRONOLOGY
1894 Louis-Ferdinand Destouches born in Courbevoie (Seine), son of Ferdinand Destouches, minor employee of an insurance firm, and Louise-Céline Guillou, lace-maker.
1905 Certificat d’Studes. Starts work as an apprentice and messenger boy.
1912 Enlists for three years in the 12th Cavalry Division.
1914 Wounded in Poelcapelle, Flanders. High military honors. Severe head and arm injuries resulting in 75 percent disability rating and withdrawal from active service.
1916 Trip to Cameroons with Occupation Services. Malaria. Amoebic dysentery. Travels to London for Armament Service.
1917 Obtains baccalaureate degree. Work completed on his own.
1918 Begins medical studies in Rennes.
1919 Marriage to Edith Follet, daughter of the director of the medical school.
1920 Daughter, Colette, born.
1924 Diploma from the Faculte de Médecine in Paris. Doctoral thesis on Semmelweis.
Missions for Rockefeller Foundation in Geneva and Liverpool.
1925 Further travel in Cameroons, United States, Canadaand Cuba. Divorced.
1928 Sets up practice in Clichy. General practitioner, specialist in children’s diseases.
1932 Voyage au bout de la nuit published by Denoel and Steele.
1933 L’eglise, Céline’s only play.
1936 Mort a crédit. Trip to Russia financed by royalties from Russian translation of Voyage by Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet. Upon return, denounces communist society.
1937 Bagatelles pour un massacre, racist pamphlet, followed by two similar works (1938, 1941).
1939 Attempts to enlist rejected due to ill health. Ship’s doctor, then runs dispensary in Sartrouville. Leaves Paris. Ambulance service. Returns to practice in Montmartre.
1942 Trip to Berlin.
1943 Marriage to Lucette Almanzor, a dancer.
1944 Guignols band published by Gallimard Leaves Paris in an attempt to reach Denmark, accompanied by his wife, his cat Bébert, and a movie actor, Le Vigan. Imprisoned in Berlin, then goes into exile in Siegmaringen.
1945 With his wife and cat, crosses Germany on foot amid bombardments. Hides in Copenhagen. French legation asks for his arrest Fourteen months in the prison of Vensterfangsel.
1947 Released. Lives in an attic on the Princessgade, then in a hut on the Baltic Sea.
1950 Condemned by a French court to a year of prison, fine of 50,000 francs, and the confiscation of half his property.
1951 Exonerated by military tribunal.
Sets up practice among the poor in Meudon on the outskirts of Paris.
1952 Féerie pour une autre fois published by Gallimard, as are all his subsequent works.
1954 Normance, Féerie pour une autre fois II.
1956 Entretiens avec le professeur.
1957 D’un château l’autre.
1960 Nord.
1961 Death and burial, kept secret from the press.
1969 Rigodon published posthumously.
He was in the worst possible taste, by which I mean that he had many educational advantages, becoming a physician, and he was widely traveled in Europe and Africa and North America—and yet he wrote not a single phrase that hinted to similarly advantaged persons that he was something of a gentleman.
He did not seem to understand that aristocratic restraints and sensibilities, whether inherited or learned, accounted for much of the splendor of literature. In my opinion, he discovered a higher and more awful order of literary truth by ignoring the crippled vocabularies of ladies and gentlemen and by using, instead, the more comprehensive language of shrewd and tormented guttersnipes.
Every writer is in his debt, and so is anyone else interested in discussing lives in their entirety. By being so impolite, he demonstrated that perhaps half of all experience, the animal half, had been concealed by good manners. No honest writer or speaker will ever want to be polite again.
• • • • •
Céline has been praised as a stylist. He himself mocked the endlessly repeated typographical trick that made every page he wrote easily recognizable as being his: “Me and my three dots … my supposedly original style! … all the real writers will tell you what to think of it!…”
The only writers who admire that style enough to imitate it, as far as I know, are gossip columnists. They like its looks. They like the sense of urgency it imparts, willy-nilly, to any piece of information at all.
• • • • •
With no special help from his eccentric typography, in my opinion, Céline gave us in his novels the finest history we have of the total collapse of Western civilization in two world wars, as witnessed by hideously vulnerable common women and men. That history should be read in the order in which it was written, for each volume speaks knowingly to the ones that came before it.
And the resonating chamber for this intricate system of echoes through time is Céline’s first novel, Journey to the E
nd of the Night, published in 1932, when the author was thirty-eight. It is important that a reader of any Céline book know in his heart what Céline knew so well, that his writing career began with a thundering masterpiece.
• • • • •
Readers may find their experience softened and deepened, too, if they reflect that the author was a physician who chose to serve parents who were mainly poor. It was common for him not to be paid at all. His real name, by the way, was Louis-Ferdinand Auguste Destouches.
His sympathy may not have lain with the poor and powerless, but he surely gave them the bulk of his time and astonishment. And he did not insult them with the idea that death was somehow ennobling to anybody—or killing, either.
He and Ernest Hemingway died on the same day, incidentally, on July 1,1961. Both were heroes from World War I. Both deserved Nobel Prizes—Céline for his first book alone. Céline didn’t get one, and Hemingway did. Hemingway killed himself, and Céline died of natural causes.
All that remains is their books.
And Céline’s slowly fading infamy.
• • • • •
After years of unselfish and often brilliant service to mankind in literature and medicine, he revealed himself as a fierce anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. This was in the late 1930s. I have heard no explanation for this, other than that he was partly insane. He never claimed to have been insane, and no physician ever declared him so.
He was sane enough, at any rate, to virtually exclude his racism and cracked politics from his novels. The anti-Semitism appears only flickeringly here and there, and usually in a context of his being absolutely ga-ga about all the varieties of treacherous and foolish human beings.
For what it may be worth, he wrote these words only a few days before he died: “I say that Israel is a real fatherland that welcomes its children home and my country is a shithouse …”
• • • • •
His words are contemptible to anyone who has suffered from anti-Semitism. And so, surely, were the amnesty and exoneration he received from the French government in 1951. He was punished with heavy fines and imprisonment and exile before that.
As for the words I quoted: They don’t, after all, imply an apology or a wish to be forgiven. They are envious, and little more.
Since he is punished and dead, and since the Nazi nightmare is so long ago now, it may at last be possible to perceive a twisted sort of honor in his declining to speak of remorse or to offer excuses of any kind. Other collaborators with the Nazis, of whom there were tens of thousands in France and millions in all of Europe, had stories to tell of how they were forced to behave as badly as they did, and of daring acts of resistance and sabotage they committed, at the risk of their lives.
Céline found that sort of lying ludicrous in a very ugly way.
• • • • •
I get a splitting headache every time I try to write about Céline. I have one now. I never have headaches at any other time.
• • • • •
As the war was ending, he headed for the center of the holocaust—Berlin.
• • • • •
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.”
• • • • •
Which has brought us back to our old friend insanity again. Céline claimed from time to time to have been trepanned in the First World War, as the result of a head wound. Actually, according to his fascinating biographer Erika Ostrovsky (Voyeur Voyant, Random House, 1971), he was wounded in his right shoulder. And, in his final novel, Rigadoon, he tells of being hit in the head by a brick during an air raid in Hanover. So it might be said that he found it necessary sometimes to explain a head that so many people found unusual.
He himself must have become thoroughly sick of his head occasionally, and I will guess as to its chief defect. I think it lacked the damping apparatus which most of us have, which keeps us from being swamped by the unbelievability of life as it really is.
So perhaps Céline’s style isn’t as arbitrary as I’ve thought it was. It may have been inevitable, if his mind was so undefended. There may have been nothing for him to do, as though he were caught in an artillery barrage, but to exclaim and exclaim and exclaim.
• • • • •
And his works cannot be called a triumph of the human imagination. Almost everything he exclaimed about was really going on.
• • • • •
He was wonderful about inventors and machines.
• • • • •
The inscription on his tombstone is the one with which I began this essay. Erika Ostrovsky calls it a “terse summary of a double life.”
Good for her.
He expected his writings to live on and on. He described himself when he was about to die like this: “… by your leave, a writer, a terrific stylist, the living proof: they put me in the ‘Pleiade’ with La Fontaine, Clement Marot, du Bellay … not to mention Rabelais! and Ronsard! … just to show you that I’m not worried … in two or three centuries I’ll be helping the kids through high school…”
• • • • •
At the time I write, which is the autumn of 1974, it has become apparent even to ordinary people, with their mental dampers operating perfectly, that life is in fact as dangerous and unforgiving and irrational as Céline said it was. There is some question as to whether we have two or three centuries remaining to us in which to prepare civilization for the teaching of Céline in high school.
Until that day, if it comes, I suspect that fellow writers will keep his reputation alive. We are especially shocked and enlightened by what he says. We are filled with a giddy sort of gratitude.
• • • • •
I have heard it suggested that Céline may live on far longer in English than in French—for technical rather than political reasons. The argument goes that Céline’s gutter French was so specialized as to time and place that gobs of it are incomprehensible to Frenchmen.
Those who have translated it into English, however, have used more durable crudities, which will be clear enough still in, God willing, one hundred years.
As I say, this is not my idea. I heard it somewhere. I pass it on. If it turns out to be true, it seems that simple literary justice would eventually require that his translators be acknowledged as coauthors of Céline. Translation is that important.
• • • • •
There is at least one significant document by Céline that is out of print in English. And it would be more punctilious of me to say that it was written not by Céline but by Dr. Destouches. It is the doctoral thesis of Destouches, “The Life and Work of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis,” for which he received a bronze medal in 1924. It was written at a time when theses in medicine could still be beautifully literary, since ignorance about diseases and the human body still required that medicine be an art.
And young Destouches, in a spirit of hero-worship, told of the futile and scientifically sound battle fought by an Hungarian physician named Semmelweis (1818-1865) to prevent the spread o
f childbed fever in Viennese hospital maternity wards. The victims were poor people, since persons with decent sorts of dwellings much preferred to give birth at home.
The mortality rate in some wards was sensational—25 percent or more. Semmelweis reasoned that the mothers were being killed by medical students, who often came into the wards immediately after having dissected corpses riddled with the disease. He was able to prove this by having the students wash their hands in soap and water before touching a woman in labor. The mortality rate dropped.
The jealousy and ignorance of Semmelweis’s colleagues, however, caused him to be fired, and the mortality rate went up again.
• • • • •
The lesson Destouches learned from this true story, in my opinion, if he hadn’t already learned it from an impoverished childhood and a stretch in the army, is that vanity rather than wisdom determines how the world is run.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Sure, I tell myself, it’ll all be over soon … whew! … we have seen enough … at sixty-five and then some what difference can the worst H … Z … or Y superbomb make … they’re zephyrs! … nothings! the only terrible thing is this feeling of having wasted all my time and all those myriatons of effort for that hideous satanic horde of alcoholic cocksucking flunkeys … lady, lady! have pity! … “Shut up and sell your gripes!”… hell, why not? … I’m willing, but to whom? … The buyers are down on me, it seems … they don’t like me, they only buy authors that are practically the same as they are, plus that snippet of colored ribbon … head flunkey … head wipe-this-and-lick-that … skullduggery, holy water, lechery, bribery, guillotines … that way the reader feels at home, senses a kindred soul, a brother, indulgent, understanding, who’ll stop at nothing …
“That’ll do! … even among the galley slaves there were ten percent of volunteers. You’re one of them.”
You don’t need to vote to have an opinion … several in feet … it’s the privilege of old age … a time comes when you stop reading the articles … just the ads… they tell yon the whole story … and the death notices … you know what people want … and you know that they’re dead … that’s enough … all the rest is blahblah-blah … left, center, right! … “Licensed enterprises” like the brothels in the old days … for every taste … little quirks and big ones …
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