Celine: A Biography

This biography starts off with "the first forty years," then gives you an overview of how the major works (Voyage/Journey and Mort/Death) fit into the little known of the earlier span of the author. The professor writes clearly, without jargon, and incisively. His sentences simply declare his findings, and the book flows well. McCarthy diligently has surveyed every scrap relating to Celine/Destouches, and he alternates chapters on the reality--as best as can be reconstructed--and the fictions that Celine built out of his experiences and his imagination. Certainly, more than many other authors, these two realms overlap willfully due to Celine's penchant for revising his own life even as he lived it! A great strength of this study is how McCarthy places Celine's impact within the larger intellectual, literary, and political currents of the era. His knowledge of Beckett especially sheds much light upon Celine's analogous characters. At times, the circumstantial detail overwhelmed me, as this dense context depends upon a better knowledge of French rivalries and movements in the 1930s/40s than I (or I imagine less specialised readers) possess. This is no fault of McCarthy, but the reliance upon an enormously complicated set of machinations around French collaboration, fascist and far-right activity, existentialism, and party and partisan strife makes for a heady background added to an already challenging Celinian effort on paper and in person during these confusing decades. As his biographer stresses throughout, the pamphleteer and the novelist cannot be separated, but the work done in each genre can be relegated at least to different shelves, and analyzed accordingly. The good and the bad, the noble and the skulking are as mixed in Celine as in all of us, and those who patronisingly condemn him too often echo the calculated revisionism of many in post-war France who claimed, contrarily, that they--of course--were always on the side of the Resistants. Celine's refusal to placate any side made him a pariah by all, and he liked this role. He's infuriating, and the decline in his prose despite its energy and brio depresses as the biography continues into the 1950s. Still, as ever, he refused to capitulate. That he died hours after he finished the draft of his final novel, Rigadoon, seems appropriate. Also that by then the self-righteous opprobium he sought and earned yet did not fully deserve (a typically Celinean stance) insured his end gained far less attention than Hemingway's suicide the same day. Celine courted and incited his foes, and then bewailed their attacks. He may have been mistaken and proud of his stubborn, sometimes inchoate mentality, but he did manage to prove himself a modernist: he defied any standard, any restriction, any PC-stance, to his doom or his credit, or, as McCarthy would judge, both.