Fragmentary, Relevant, Disturbing: On Louis‑Ferdinand Céline's "War"

By Eric Vanderwall on June 25, 2024

In June 1944, shortly after the Allied landing at Normandy, Louis Ferdinand Destouches (better known by his nom de plume, Louis-Ferdinand Céline) fled Paris with his wife Lucette and his cat Bébert. The three departed in haste, leaving behind most of their possessions, including several manuscripts. Céline, Madame Destouches, and Bébert survived the war, living for a time in Denmark before returning to France in 1951. After something of a literary comeback in the late 1950s, Céline died in 1961. Lucette Destouches survived him by nearly six decades, dying in 2019 at the age of 107.

Note the timing of the flight from Paris: not in 1940, when the Nazi occupation began, but in 1944, when Allied victory seemed imminent. Céline was an antisemite, a Nazi supporter, a close associate of prominent Nazis, and a contributor to fascist publications. Between 1937 and 1941, Céline published three pamphlets–Trifles for a Massacre, School for Corpses, and A Fine Mess–that advocated a French alliance with Hitler and expressed a rabid, deranged antisemitism. From School for Corpses: "I find Italian anti-Semitism too tepid for my taste, meek and insufficient. I find it dangerous. A distinction between good Jews and bad Jews? It makes no sense." The pamphlets sold well and even earned accolades from literati, such as André Gide, who praised the style and considered the antisemitism satirical—which it was not. Although antisemitism was not uncommon in France in the period leading up to and including the Occupation, and the pamphlets were never banned, Céline's views were considered extreme, even by the fascists and collaborators with whom he socialized during the Occupation.

After the war, Céline and his wife lived in secrecy in Denmark until they were found out, and charges of collaboration were brought against Céline. (If found guilty, Céline would have met the same fate as many contemporaries: execution.) Years of legal wranglings followed, and Céline was briefly imprisoned before being granted amnesty and allowed to return to France in 1951. In the last decade of his life, he published several new works to some success, but he never got over the loss of the manuscripts left behind in 1944. He remained—and remains today—a controversial figure.

And then what was long thought lost emerged from the tenebrous past. The survival of those lost manuscripts—drafts, partially complete works, notes, and more—running to thousands of pages was announced in 2021, followed the next year by the publication in France of Londres (London) and Guerre (War), the latter of which has been translated into English translation by Charlotte Mandell and is now available from New Directions. War, such as it has survived the vicissitudes of the 20^th century, is a novella about the First World War, told in first-person by a narrator sometimes called Ferdinand, sometimes Louis or the diminutive Loulou. References to other works (such as to the fictitious King Krogold romance, parts of which appear in Death on the Installment Plan) and reappearance of characters (such as Kersuzon, who also appears in the wartime scenes of Journey to the End of the Night) suggest that the narrator of War is the same Ferdinand as in the other works and that War was intended as part of this larger cycle of autobiographical fiction, and specifically as an expansion of the war chapters in Journey.

Like Céline's best work, War opens with a jarring immediacy that is worth quoting at some length. "I must have been lying there for part of the following night too. 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 the noise and then it rained, hard. [...] It made me scream at the top of my lungs every time and then it got worse." These disorienting, almost hallucinatory opening pages, in which a severely wounded Ferdinand navigates the war-ravaged Western Front, are the strongest in the book and stand up well alongside, and maybe even above, other literature that emerged from the Great War, such as Hemingway's self-conscious, mannered parataxis. The descriptions of Ferdinand's tinnitus, visual and auditory hallucinations, and chronic physical pain, (all of which Céline too lived with for over forty years) create the oppressive effect of experiencing these maladies, and doing so through Ferdinand's enraged consciousness. "I couldn't hear him well because of the uproar clamping my head like an almost impenetrable helmet of noise. It was only through these whistlings and as if through a door with a thousand echoes that his words reached me all oozing and venomous."

Despite its bellicose title, much of War takes place behind the front, in a hospital. Ferdinand falls in with a misanthropic schemer, whose name varies from Bébert (the same name as the author's cat, as the editor's notes point out) to Cascade, one of the signs of the unfinished state of the text. Bébert/Cascade's charismatic hold on the narrator is reminiscent of Robinson's on Ferdinand in Journey. The manuscript ends with Ferdinand on his way to England, the period covered in Guignol's Band and London Bridge. War, even more than in Céline's previously published works, is a work of style, attitude, and atmosphere more than plot. Not much happens in terms of story; Ferdinand's consciousness is the principal interest.

War, as the publisher's prefatory note explains, is not a completed manuscript. Brackets mark numerous illegible passages and gaps as well editorial interpolations and interpretations. Some passages seem to shift from fiction to journal, from narration by the alter ego Ferdinand to confession by the author Céline. "I've learned how to make music, how to sleep, how to forgive, and, see, how to write fine literature as well, all with little pieces of horror ripped from the noise that will never end." That the text lacks cohesion and polish, though, provides insight into Céline's composition process, showing, by contrast, how artfully constructed is the apparent disorder of novels such as Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan. Most obviously absent are the famous ellipses, a hallmark of Céline's style from Death onward, suggesting that the seemingly chaotic ellipses and fragments were a deliberate stylistic choice, carefully placed late in revision for effect.

Aside from the visceral power of the opening battlefield pages and some comic scenes in the hospital, though, War, being an unfinished work, pales in comparison to Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, the major works. Next to Conversations with Professor Y, War is now among the shortest of Céline's works available in English, and, with it being less experimental than his other works, War is potentially a good introduction to Céline for new readers. The novella will likely be of most value to scholars and writers, not as a work in its own right, but as a historically significant text that provides insight into Céline's composition and revision process.

War has come to light in an era, like the one in which it was composed, of turmoil, darkened by wars, extremist ideologies, and profound uncertainty. To encounter Céline now is to encounter an author at once relevant and disturbing. And this is as it should be. It is possible to appreciate the greatness and the influence of Céline's body of work without excusing or ignoring his antisemitism and his support of fascism. For writers, Céline's colloquial, frequently profane, earthy style (a major influence on authors such as Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Miller, and Michel Houellebecq) remains instructive and fresh. Indeed, the part of him that is cruel, cynical, demented, grandiose in his senses of greatness and persecution, may provide some insight into the minds of disgruntled men acting out their pathologies in social media posts and in comment sections, or, more violently, in schools or shopping malls with guns. And like many disgruntled, deranged men, behind the screeds and spittle-spewing and ranting, is the sort of man who, in a 1914 letter to his parents from the front, wrote, and then crossed out, "I am very worried."