CAT MAN

GEORGE STEINER

THIS REVIEW OUGHT to be about a cat, the most illustrious, compelling cat in the history of literature. Bebert was a Montparnasse tabby, born probably in 1935. He met his second master in occupied Paris in late 1942. "Magic itself, tact by wavelength," as his master described him, Bebert was to be left behind when the master and his wife, Lucette, decamped for Germany in the dread spring of '44. Bebert refused separation. He was carried in the travelling sack. The voyage led through lunar bomb craters, strafed rail lines, and cities burning like mad torches. Under bombardment, Bebert, almost starving, became lost, but rediscovered his master and Madame. The trio crossed and reclosed the collapsing Reich. In a last, despairing lunge, they reached Copenhagen. When the Danish police came to arrest the unwelcome guests, Bebert slipped out across a roof. Caught, the legendary beast was caged in a pound at a veterinary clinic. When his master was released from jail and was recuperating, Bebert had to be operated on for a cancerous tumor. "But the Montmartre tom had been around the block. He withstood the trauma and made a speedy recovery, with the slower and wiser serenity of aging cats, faithful, silent, and enigmatic." Amnestied, Bebert's patron headed for home at the end of June, 1951. Four lesser cats- Thomine, Poupine, Mouchette, and Flute-accompanied them on the voyage. Sphinx like in years, Bebert, the secret sharer, died in a suburb of Paris at the end of 1952. "After many an adventure, jail, bivouac, ashes, all of Europe ... he died agile and graceful, impeccably, he had jumped out the window that very morning .... We, who are born old, look ridiculous in comparison!" So wrote his grieving master, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, physician, champion of social hygiene among the destitute, wanderer in Africa and the United States, manic crank.

It is Bebert I want to write about-Bebert the arch-survivor and the incarnation of French cunning. But it is a voluminous biography of his wretched owner that I have before me-of that mad doctor who, under the name Celine (taken from his grandmother), produced some of the greatest fiction and documentary "faction" not only in this century but in the history of Western literature. Bebert would be a joy to report on. Celine is not. 

Frederic Vitoux's Celine: A Biography, translated, heavy-handedly, by Jesse Browner (Paragon), details the Destouches family history and the misere of Louis-Ferdinand's parents, living in diverse insalubrious quarters of Paris before the First World War. It chronicles the bewildering plethora of Louis-Ferdinand's sexual imbroglios, affairs, marriages, and morose peregrinations among the brothels of Paris, London, and colonial Africa. (Dr. Destouches appears to have been a compulsive voyeur, fascinated less by his own sexual experience than by the experiences that his lovers shared with others.) Vitoux is relentlessly informative on his hero's incessant quarrels with publishers, with other writers, with Parisian mundanity. Though it draws heavily on previous chronicles, the coverage of the years of German occupation and of Celine's sardonic, coldly hysterical responses is penetrating. As are the pictures of the hunted fugitive, of the struggle against extradition from Denmark, of the ghostly homecoming. The aura of sanctity that attaches to the deeds of the "slum doctor:' of the pathologist struggling against dirt, social injustice, and the ignorance of the destitute, is explored and, to a degree, justified. Frederic Vitoux argues his brief with tranquil warmth.

Yet the key enigmas remain unresolved. (Shades of the elusive Bebert!) The hallucinatory style with which Celine literally exploded into language and literature when Journey to the End of Night appeared, in October, 1932, together with the Jew-hatred first proclaimed in 1937, has always been attributed to a wound Celine suffered on October 27, 1914, when he was on a heroic cavalry mission in Flanders. Celine himself and his apologists cite this wound as the source of the migraines, manic-depressive cycles, and ungoverned rages that subsequently marked Dr. Destouches's private and public pilgrimage as well as the voice and ideology of his writings. The handsome cuirassier, sabre to the wind, had been almost fatally injured, and was thus unhinged into genius and evil. But even Vitoux's careful inventory leaves the facts opaque. It is clear that Sergeant Destouches was wounded in the arm and shoulder, but his captain wrote to Louis's father, "It seems that his wound is not serious." On the other hand, the citation that accompanied the Medaille Militaire awarded him said he was "grievously wounded," and Celine did not return to combat. Was he concussed as he fell from the saddle? Did he endure some psychic shock that thrust him into an abyss of irremediable horror? During convalescence behind the lines, and during the days in London and the Cameroons which ensued, the decorated veteran told of insomnia, of hideous noises in his ears, "whistles ... drums ... blasts of steam" that maddened his consciousness. The strategy of apocalyptic pain, of paranoiac suffering and fury, was born. The factual source remains at the unclairified "end of night."

Nor, despite its labored diagnoses, can Vitoux's book throw decisive light on the font and growth of Dr. Destouches's homicidal anti-Semitism. Distaste for Jews ran rife in the French middle and lower middle classes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Dreyfus affair brought latent hatreds into the open.

During Celine's years in obscurity, notably at the Clichy clinic, he had noted with rancor the seeming professional and social success of what he took to be a freemasonry of Jewish physicians and literati. His anarchic pacifism-his conviction that France could not survive another bout of mass slaughter-persuaded him that European Jewry was the principal menace: it, and it alone, could by its internationalism, by its opposition to Hitler, plunge the Continent into a second Armageddon. "Above all, war must be avoided," he wrote. "War, for us as we are, means the end of the show, the final tilt into the Jewish charnel house." Like so many of his generation, Destouches the public-health epidemiologist had imbibed diverse fashionable theories on racial pollution and eugenics. Notoriously, the Jew was the bacillus whose resistant ubiquity infected, with miscegenation, the blood (weakened by war) of nobler breeds. And what of the manifest Jewish role in the birth and dissemination of Bolshevism, the red spectre in the East?

However, even if we mix this potent brew, much remains puzzling in the cry for massacre which rings through Bagatelles pour un Massacre and L'Ecole des Cadavres. Adjuring Western civilization to eliminate all Jews-men, women, and children-and to eradicate their very shadow from mankind, Louis-Ferdinand Celine in these voluminous tracts exhibited virtuosities of detestation, of incitement for which there are, fortunately, few analogues in literature and political rhetoric. It is, physically and mentally, well-nigh impossible to read those many hundreds of pages. And yet. As one forces oneself to leaf through this or that passage, the flashes of stylistic genius, of verbal incandescence strike one as might a brusque shiver of light across the sheen of a cesspool. (Coleridge noted the transient sparkle of starlight in his brimming chamber pot.) These writings are not the momentary aberration of a crank lamed in brain and body, visited by tormenting headaches and humming in his ears. Their sick and sickening power is that-momentarily, at least-of Journey to the End of Night and of the masterpieces to come.

Two conjectures may be worth making. As in Jonathan Swift, so in Celine the wellspring of imagination, of unleashed eloquence, is hatred. Normally, and in respect of aesthetic form, hatred is short of breath; it does not fill major spaces. But in a handful of masters-Juvenal, Swift, Celine-an enraged misanthropy, a nausea in the face of the world, generates full-scale designs. The monotone of loathing becomes symphonic. As Sartre, a close student of Celine, remarked, there is about the urban Jew something that concentrates to a singular pitch the infirm humanity of man. The Jew is not only human but a touch more human than most. In this murky light, hatred of Jews is the natural distillation of a generalized contempt for the human race. Seeking a visible target for his hatred of human ugliness, corruption, greed, vanity, myopia, Destouches swerved onto the Jew. Put l'homme where a demented sentence reads le youpin ("the kike"), and you have passages of a Biblical greatness-edicts of damnation issued over the Sodom and Gomorrah we have made of our world.

The second point is harder to get in focus. Celine's private manner and literary work are immersed in a black laughter of Rabelaisian proportions. There is in this Cyclopean mirth the notorious merriment of the medical student at his first cadaver. It has a precedent in the riddling, near-hysterical sendup of the tragic plots (which the audience has just experienced) in the Greek satyr plays. Dante lets drop a few mordant jests in Hell. Franz Kafka, having read his "Metamorphosis" to an appalled, speechless group of intimates, doubled over with helpless hilarity. It is at some bizarre level possible to apprehend Celine's anti-Semitic outpourings as parodist, as some sort of practical joke gone mad. A surrealist clowning, a death's-head Mexican carnival are not far off. Guignol's Band is a characteristic Celine title; the "massacre" goes with the "bagatelle" (a word that Celine took to originally signify the tricks and turns of a buffoon or mountebank). A guest at a glittering assemblage of Nazi masters and collaborators, the unkempt Celine did an imitation of Hitler; at the climax, a ranting Fuhrer assured the Jews that he was herding them into camps only so that he might more readily come to a secret agreement with them and share world hegemony. In short, there could be near the rabid heart of Celine's dance for genocide a deranged tomfoolery, the impishness of a child vandal. This is no apologia. It may well make matters worse.

Celine's flight and exile occasioned two further classics. Castle to Castle narrates the grotesque twilight of the Vichy regime in Sigmaringen, an operetta town set aside by the retreating Germans for their unwelcome guests. The famous telegraphic and filmic techniques that made the Journey a pivot in modern fiction and prose are fiercely compacted here. As only great works of art can, Castle to Castle realizes a supreme concision within an extended, open-ended construct. (Observe the economy, the elision, and the breadth in the counter-grammatical French title, D'un Chateau l'Autre.) The depiction of Petain's miniature court in Sigmaringen Castle between November, 1944, and March, 1945, is incomparable in its hollow laughter. When we follow the scene in which a lone RA.F. fighter, droning overhead, threatens to scatter the Marechal's quaking retinue during a ceremonious morning constitutional-Petain himself, of course, continued to promenade upright, unflinching and cretinously majestic-the sense of a Shakespearean register in Celine becomes insistent.

Here, as in Shakespeare's history plays, the pageant and the proximate ordure, the magnificence of sovereign postures and the underbelly of common need, the monumental and the intimate interact in counterpoint. Here, also, no less than in the masters of the sixteenth century (Montaigne, Rabelais, Shakespeare), a peculiar sensuality of thought is at work: Celine modulates the complex dynamics of political and social debacle into smell, into sound, into the touch of skin and fabric. The despair of the condemned hooligans, the heightened erotic compulsions of fugitives on the rim of the abyss literally leave a taste in Celine's, and the reader's, mouth. And, far more than Shakespeare, Celine uses the electrified sennsibility of animals, Bebert first and foremost, to enrich the range of perceptions. (Hence the marvelous encounter between Field Marshal von Rundstedt and Tomcat von Bebert in "Rigodon," the weakest of the three memoirs of exile.) "North" takes up the wild narration of escape, hiding, and Danish incarceration. It excoriates the trial that Celine was subject to in absentia and his official relegation to national disgrace: "Ministers, satraps, Dien-Pen-Hu everywhere! tail-turning and pink underwear!" Vitoux believes that North is perhaps Celine's greatest book. Unquestionably, it contains visions of Inferno-of human decomposition on the spectral flatlands of Brandenburg, in blazing Berlin, at the Danish border, and in the papier-mâché aura of Elsinore-that border on Dante. The panoramas of the apocalyptic in Gunter Grass, in William Burroughs, in Norman Mailer, and also in the most convincing Vietnam War films and in the journalistic vignettes of black skies over Kuwait all come after Celine.

The preludes to his art are less evident. Rabelais is always invoked. King Lear and Timon of Athens may have mattered, together with the insight that there are elective affinities between Shakespeare's clowns and his sadists, between Falstaff and Iago, between Malvolio and his merry tormentors. Dostoyevsky remains a possibility. He was much read, dramatized, and imitated in the Paris of the twenties and thirties. Something of the oracular sweep of Victor Hugo's leviathan novels and historical-philosophical epic poems seems to have resonance in the Journey. There is the elusive background noise of Rimbaud's lyric execrations. On the whole, however, a pedantic hunt for precedents is futile. Journey to the End of Night poured lavalike out of the deeps and crust of language as these had been dislocated by world war. In a Europe in which upward of twenty thousand men had been pounded to mud in a single day of battle, in which a third of a million corpses lay unburied between the lines at Verdun, traditional discourse, the similes of reason, the stabilities of the literate imagination had become a mockery. The shrill in Celine's ear somehow brought with it the new grammars of hysteria, of mass propaganda, of self-deafening. The rock beat, the hammering of heavy metal, of sound as a drug, first detonate inside language in the "Journey." Their suffocating echo has not ceased.

But the bigger question nags. Does aesthetic creativity, even of the first order, ever justify the favorable presentation of, let alone systematic incitement to, inhumanity? Can there be literature worth publication, study, critical esteem which suggests racism, which makes attractive or urges the sexual use of children? (Dosstoyevski stands at the edge of this very penumbra.) The liberal case against all censorship is often cant. If serious literature and the arts can educate sensibility, exalt our perceptions, refine our moral discriminations, they can, by exactly the same token, deprave, cheapen, and make bestial our imaginings and mimetic impulses. I have wrestled with this conundrum during some forty years of reading, writing, and teaching. The Celine "case" (as Henry James might have called it, with unquiet fascination) is exemplary either way. By comparison, Ezra Pound's cracker-barrel Fascism, the deeply incised anti-Semitism of T. S. Eliot, and w. H. Auden's call for "the necessary murder" (this time at behest of the left) are thin stuff. It is the sheer weight of Celine's racist vituperations, their material summons to slaughter, the absence of any but fitful or sardonic regrets, in woven with a structural genius for psychological revelation and dramatic narrative, that press the question. Would that Vitoux had faced these issues.

As luck would have it, the naked savageries come after the Journey and do not disfigure, except in an almost farcical, perhaps deliberately loony guise, the best of Castle to Castle and of North. It is these inventions which, rightly, secured Celine's inclusion in the Pleiade edition, apex of the French Parnassus, at the time of his death. Nonetheless, there is no escaping the gargantuan trash of the middle years or the unison of hatred, of contempt for woman and Jew, at the backbone of Celine's achievement. In his case, at least, we make out the causal relations, all too taut, between the man and his creations. The dilemma posed by his admirer, contemporary, and fellow-collaborator Lucien Rebatet is even thornier. Both the Germans and Vichy found Celine an embarrassment-they could make nothing of his lacerating drolleries. Rebatet was a true killer, a hunter-down of Jews, Resistance fighters, and Gaullists. Waiting for execution (he was subsequently amnestied), Rebatet completed Les Deux Étendards (as yet un-translated into English). This ample novel is among the hidden masterpieces of our time. It is, moreover, a book of unfailing humanity, brimful of music (Reebatet was for a spell France's foremost music critic), of love, of insight into pain. The young woman at the pivot of the tale is no less informed by the radiant pressures of maturing life than is the Natasha of War and Peace. What can possibly give us any intelligible grasp of the connections between the abject, twisted Rebatet and the wonders of his fiction? Where are the bridges in the labyrinth of that soul?

I have no answers. My instinct is that Death on the Installment plan and the Bagatelles should molder in library stacks. Recent reissues strike me as an unforgivable exploitation for political or market reasons. The great "fact-fictions" stand. Their wild song makes the language live and makes it new. The man Destouches remains inexcusable. But even on this point Bebert might beg to differ.

August 24, 1992