My Imaginary Brooklyn

Happy Birthday to Jürgen Habermas, who is 84 today.

{Now go read some Public Sphere theory.}

Céline’s Journey to the Cutting Edge of Literature

If the French demand bad behaviour from their novelists, they got more than they bargained for with the antisemitic Céline. But they were also getting the prose stylist of the century 

Tibor Fischer

‘I’d give all of Baudelaire for an Olympic swimmer,” Céline insisted. It’s a provocative statement, typical of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, who used the nom de plume of Céline. Doctor, linguist, shagger of showgirls and noted antisemite, Céline is now widely acknowledged as the greatest French prose stylist of the 20th century, despite, or perhaps partly because of, the controversy that still dogs the man and his work.

I have French friends who point-blank refuse to read Céline because of the antisemitism, but there is a strong tradition in France of not just indulging, but almost demanding bad behaviour and outrage from its writers (I refer you to Houellebecq, Gide, Cocteau, Colette, Genet and Baudelaire). It tells you a lot about France, in terms of both literature and politics, that after disgracing himself during the Hitler years, Céline was back on the shelves in 1949.

Céline has always had a loyal if small, following in the US with the beats and other beardy counterculture intellectuals (they like to skip over the Jew-bashing, but hey, Ezra Pound got away with it too).

His popularity was based on two opposing elements in his work. The often colloquial, coarse and simple vocabulary he employed (his man-of-the-people credentials, the telling-it-like-it-is, although Céline also has a Captain Haddock-like talent for recherché invective) is heightened by the absence of long, aristocratic, Proustian sentences. But the straightforward language is coupled, especially in the mid-period work, with a modernist disdain for clear exposition and holding the loathsome bourgeois reader’s hand. So, boosted by his antiwar spleen and snarling at authority, Céline pulls off the trick of being Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and James Joyce all at the same time.

In Guignol’s Band and its sequel London Bridge, you really have to pay close attention to the action to know exactly what’s going on, although it’s the ride with language that you’re paying for – what the French critics often refer to as Céline’s “délire”.

Journey to the End of Night is Céline’s first novel. Published in 1932, it made him an instant literary star. With typical immodesty, Céline felt he was robbed of the Prix Goncourt (won by the now obscure Guy Mazeline) but it didn’t matter. Trotsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were fans (how the left loved him then).

Journey to the End of Night is the most novel-like of Céline’s writings. It has a huge scope, full of pent-up experience and dark lyricism, starting off with the first world war (where Céline served as a professional soldier), encompassing the French African colonies and the industrial might of Detroit (again drawing on the author’s own travels). It’s like All Quiet on the Western Front, Heart of Darkness and The Grapes of Wrath squeezed into one budget edition. All this is served up with Céline’s wit and cynicism, although his characteristic slangy style isn’t operating at full power, and there is a stab at a plot. The narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, follows a character called Robinson (a nod to Crusoe), through these locations. It’s one of the longest road-trips in literature.

For all the vulgarity and argot present in Journey, the most striking aspect of the book is the energy and industry involved. In some of his later interviews Céline suggested that he wrote for money. There’s no doubt that, in common with many individuals with little money, Céline was concerned with cash, but Journey wasn’t an attempt to produce a bestseller; it was an attempt to be number one, to take over, to kill everyone else in the room.

The book’s triumph is in its tone. Writers had used it before, but I’d maintain that Céline’s great contribution to modern literature is the elevation of sarcasm, of a mordant, sneering cynicism (what the French call narquois) to an art form, a tone that would become a staple of late-20th-century writing, through to Johnny Rotten gurning at his audience.

I’ve never been able to find any evidence for the influence, but JD Salinger studied French and was in France during the time of Journey’s success. Maybe it’s just synchronicity, but I have this feeling that Holden Caulfield has a fragment of Bardamu in him, although, of course, his disaffection is much kinder and more soulful than Céline’s.

Mea Culpa, Céline’s denunciation of the Soviet Union after a tour in 1936, cut off most of his support from the left, but it was his “pamphlet” of 1937 that was to do him considerable damage. Always referred to as a pamphlet (overlooking the sense of “lampoon” in French usage),Trifles for a Massacre is in fact a novel-length text, parts of which are some of the weirdest things I’ve ever read, seemingly predating postmodernism, William Burroughs and the theatre of the absurd, and truly deserving of the title “delirium”. It’s out there with Finnegans Wake(although two years earlier), and but for the fact it hadn’t been synthesised yet, you’d be wondering if Dr Destouches hadn’t scored a tab of LSD.

A few of the derogatory swipes against Jews here might be interpreted as a sort of Swiftian satire (Gide apparently thought Céline was joking), but in case the reader was in any doubt we get the hackneyed charges of an international Zionist conspiracy from Hollywood to Moscow again and again, and Céline does actually liken Jews to “bugs”, although he states that as individuals he has no problem with them. Publishing an antisemitic harangue in 1937 with the word “Aryan” in the text and “massacre” in the title is a tough one to explain away, especially as he wrote two more similar fulminations.

Was Céline a fascist? Not quite, although his rabid antisemitism (and by extension his anticommunism) made him popular in those circles. Was he a collaborator? He was convicted for it after the war, although with calm hindsight you could argue he wasn’t; but many of his associates were collaborators, and he was just standing too close to them. During the war he actually wrote to the Germans asking for help in obtaining tons of paper so his work could be printed (an act of ego comparable to PG Wodehouse taking up the mike for the Boche while interned).

Guignol’s Band was published in 1944, and like much of Céline’s work revolves around the first world war. Céline was lucky to get out of it early on, receiving a “Blighty one” and being posted to London, whereGuignol’s Band is set. Curiously, the narrator is also called Ferdinand, and he gives a foreigner’s view of wartime London, as the low-life characters he meets in pubs and brothels are seldom English.

It’s no surprise that Irvine Welsh is a fan of Céline; if you added a nae or two, some heroin and a sprinkling of four-letters words, Guignol’s Bandcould be his new novel.

Céline’s artistic manifesto is promulgated in a preface to Guignol’s Band. He announces, among other things, “I annoy everyone” and “Jazz toppled the waltz … you write ‘telegraphically’ or you don’t write at all.” Guignol’s Band is almost the final stage of Céline’s “telegraphic” style, the nearly complete reliance on ellipses and exclamation marks. It’s not easy to write a pastiche of Gide, Proust, Giono, Mauriac, Sartre or Camus, but you could teach a six-year-old to do Céline. It’s a simple, but highly effective invention.

Guignol’s Band assures us that there are some things that never change. “He couldn’t be employed,” Ferdinand says of a Slav, “and then he really drank too much, even for England.” One of the pimps makes the joke that has survived to this day. The weather’s not that bad in England: it only rains twice a year … for six months at a time.

London Bridge continues Ferdinand’s story as he gets involved with a gas-mask project and an underage girl (preempting Nabokov, althoughLondon Bridge didn’t get to the bookshops until 1964). Céline’s account of a Zeppelin bombing raid is one of the highlights of the book.

Alma’s reissued editions rely heavily on past American translations, so some of it may sound odd to British ears, given the British setting. There is also a particular problem with Céline in that he falls very much into the untranslatable bracket; much of his appeal is in the tone and musicality of his language, and its vast register. He needs a translator of genius rather than mere skill.

London Bridge had to wait 20 years to reach the bookshops because Céline chose to decamp with the Vichy government and ended up incarcerated in Denmark for 18 months. He toyed with the idea of doing a third volume of Guignol, but got no further than an outline, which is in the Pléiade edition of his works, the ultimate accolade for a writer in France.

The period on the run and in chokey gave Céline the inspiration for his final great performance, the Château trilogy (and of course, a trilogy without an ounce of repentance – Céline just doesn’t do repentance – but rather a lamentation on his persecution).

Here, because, I assume he was revelling in the freedom of not caring about popularity any more, and because the story as such consists of Céline wallowing in himself, along with undramatic incidents and conversations, his style stands naked. Pure style, nothing else.

For me, Céline’s best work is at the beginning and the end, Journey to the End of Night and the Château trilogy (he badly needs an editor in both Guignol’s Band and London Bridge, which I find a bit meandering and overwritten). Born in the shadow of entrenched realism and naturalism, Céline ripped up the textbook. He wasn’t the first French writer to use a colloquial style, but he was the first to use it so relentlessly and powerfully, to create a brand, the rant, whether it was delirious, lyrical or raging. If you read French, his prose is simply mesmerising.

There is a shamelessness and an uncrushability about Céline that many successful writers have (in an Anglo-Saxon context Daniel Defoe and Jeffrey Archer come to mind). Part of Céline’s appeal is that you can’t imagine him holding back, not saying something for fear of offending. Offending was his business. And he worked for it. If you listen to recordings of his interviews, you hear the rapid, insistent speech of a determined man.

Allegedly, he died on the day in 1961 when he finished his last book, the final Château volume, Rigadoon (where the Jews have been replaced by the Chinese as his chief bugbear), dedicated “To Animals” (behind the nihilist, a softy with a parrot and a cat). In Rigadoon he makes this prediction: “I’m absolutely Pléiade … like La Fontaine, Clément Marot, Du Bellay and Rabelais eh! And Ronsard! … I tell you if I keep a little cool, in two, three centuries I’ll be helping people sit the baccalauréat …” He was in the schools 30 years later.

theparisreview:

“I can look out at my barn, and at the birds in the winter. Today, the leaves are pale green, and the daffodils in the garden are blooming right outside my window. Plus, there are books all around me. … I don’t read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.”

Founding Paris Review poetry editor Donald Hall at home at Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire.

All Aboard for a Writer’s Views on His Adopted Homeland 

By RACHEL DONADIO

MILAN — “That’s very strange,” Tim Parks, the polymath writer, said recently, waiting at the top of an escalator at the Porta Garibaldi train station in Milan. “Your train didn’t even appear on the board.”

A mystery train — in this case the sleek, high-speed Italo, the first private competitor to Italy’s state-run railway — seemed a propitious start to a conversation with Mr. Parks about his new book, “Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo,” in which he explores his adopted country through its trains, the lifeblood of a fragmented nation. W.W. Norton & Company will release the book on Monday.

Confusing signs and timetables, unexpected flights of stairs, often incomprehensible announcements and impenetrable rules — tickets that need to be validated, others that don’t — can make even the simplest train journey in Italy resemble the Odyssey at best, the Inferno at worst. “Italy,” as Mr. Parks writes, “is not for beginners.”

This sense of disorientation is fundamental to the experience of the country. But Mr. Parks doesn’t necessarily see it that way. “I don’t know if I’m just baffled by Italy or just by life itself,” he said while strolling toward Milan’s main Central Station.

Slim, with close-cropped gray hair and rimless glasses, Mr. Parks comes across as amiable, even as he expounds on what he sees as the terrible mood in Italy, gripped by recession and political stalemate.

After more than three decades of living in Italy, raising a family with an Italian wife and teaching in Italian universities, Mr. Parks, 58, has earned the right to pessimism. Although his works are often lumped with “Under the Tuscan Sun” and others casting Italy in a more sepia-toned light, his vision is much darker.

At one point in “Italian Neighbours” (1992), Mr. Parks contemplates ways to poison the neighbors’ barking dogs. In “An Italian Education” (1996), he writes with unsparing candor about raising his children near Verona, where the customs are so different from his native England’s — from people’s views on money to the ways they relate to gynecologists and their in-laws. He also writes of how a publisher had rejected “Italian Neighbours,” saying that readers wouldn’t like it because it “doesn’t reinforce their stereotypes of the country, whether positive or negative.”

Today, the marriage has ended and the children are grown. Mr. Parks’s daughters are still in Italy, but his son, Michele, 28, whom we meet as a doted-on toddler in “An Italian Education,” is now a scientist in London. He had been reluctant to work abroad but could not find a decent job because of Italy’s high youth unemployment and patronage system.

“He went for professional reasons and says he’s not coming back,” Mr. Parks said. “It’s sad that Italy can’t get its act together.”

Mr. Parks lives in Milan, where he runs a postgraduate translation program at Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne. Living here saves him from the hellish predawn 100-mile commute from Verona, a Dante-esque daily journey that he writes about at the outset of “Italian Ways.” In efforts to secure a commuter pass at the Verona station, he introduces two fundamental Italian archetypes: The “furbo,” or clever person who bends the rules, and the “pignolo,” or law-abiding stickler.

When a “furbo” cuts in line, “there is a slow, simmering resentment, as if the people who have behaved properly are grimly pleased to get confirmation that good citizenship is always futile, a kind of martyrdom,” Mr. Parks writes. “This is an important Italian emotion: I am behaving well and suffering because of that.”

This “national dynamic,” as Mr. Parks puts it, helps explain how former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi continues to have a public role, in spite of his legal woes and the economic decline that occurred on his watch. In “Italian Ways” Mr. Parks writes that Berlusconi’s smile is a combination of “comfortable self-congratulation” and “victimhood.”

But there is another factor at work: “In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real,” he writes. “They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behavior. It’s an enviable mind-set.”

This mix of piercing social observation and undying affection for Italy is classic Parks. He doesn’t wag his finger. “It’s admiration, really,” he said.

Mr. Parks is a rare and prolific hybrid. His 16 novels include “Europa,” shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1997. His nonfiction ranges from “A Season With Verona” (2002), which is nominally about soccer and which he considers “my best book on Italy,” to “Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” a brilliant analysis of the dawn of modern finance. He has also translated Machiavelli’s “Prince” and works by the novelist Alberto Moravia, among others.

In recent years he has turned in other directions. In “Teach Us to Sit Still” (2010), his most personal book, he wrote about his experiences with meditation as a way to deal with mysterious chronic pain.

In “Italian Ways” Mr. Parks uses Italian trains to explore recurring themes in his work: how people relate to one another, how nations cohere, the ties between the family and the state. He also explores questions of geographic and economic mobility —in 1840, he notes, Pope Gregory XVI wrote an encyclical against the railway, which he worried would create too much social mobility — and uses trains to illustrate the Italian economy’s inherent resistance to change and competition. The Italian state overstaffed the railway for years, did not take into account hidden costs from complicated ticket prices in calculating the national inflation rate and racked up debts that helped contribute to the euro crisis, he writes.

Above all, Mr. Parks loves riding Italy’s trains and observing his fellow passengers — the way Italians commute, working in one city but living in another, because, after all, home is home, and the way they aren’t afraid to crowd into small spaces, while he himself, the Englishman seeking solitude in a sea of loud strangers, is always looking for a quiet spot to read. (In this, Mr. Parks’s literary godfather is D. H. Lawrence, who recounts his train travels through southern Italy in his marvelous travelogue “Sea and Sardinia.”)

Mr. Parks also writes about the encroachment of English into the train vocabulary and the growing divide between expensive fast trains and beleaguered regional ones. He sees this as a sign of growing class divisions in a once middle-class country, as well as Italy’s ambivalence about its place in the world.

“What we are dealing with here is an ongoing Italian dilemma,” he writes. “Are we ‘part of Europe’ or not? Are we part of the modern world? Are we progressive or backward? Above all, are we serious?”

Asked what surprises him most about Italy after all these years, Mr. Parks doesn’t hesitate. “The resistance of the whole damn thing to change,” he says. “The great vocation of the collective human psyche is denial. In this country they’ve refined it to a subtlety beyond belief.”

Gob Impressive

David Collard

Here is the opening paragraph of Eimear McBride’s debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing:

“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mummy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut around. Wait and hour and day.”

The two-year-old female narrator is, we soon learn, addressing her older brother (anonymously “you” throughout). Within a few pages the reader’s eye and ear have adapted to the surface oddness of the text, seduced by the beautiful syncopations of McBride’s prose as she charts her unnamed narrator’s development from infancy to the age of twenty. This is set against her growing alienation from a pious mother and the harsh demands of Irish Catholicism. Joyce comes to mind, of course, and this could be Molly Bloom’s great-great-great-granddaughter’s soliloquy: the story of a bright young woman who is argumentative, confused, sexually adventurous, sad and angry. Here’s a passage from much later in the book, in which the narrator realizes that her brother may be seriously ill:

“I do not want. I do not want to hear this. But suddenly it’s clawing all over me. Like flesh. Terror. Vast and alive. I think I know it. Something terrible is. The world’s about to. The world’s about to. Tip. No it isn’t. Ha. Don’t be silly. Stupid. Fine. Fine. Everything will be. Fine. Chew it lurks me. See and smell. In the corner of my eye. What. Something not so good.”

A spartan lexicon captures the redundancy, repetition and inconsequentiality of the narrator’s skittering thoughts, as she flinches from the painful truth. Her responses are half-formed, tentatively refined, contradicted and negated; then comes the astonishing flourish: “chew it lurks me”. What McBride pins down here is the headlong, ungrammatical immediacy with which the mind responds to the world. Elsewhere, prepositions are routinely excised and verbs take their uninflected base form (“When they’ve gone out we see sitting prop in the bed”). That this elective spareness does not lead to monotony is down to McBride’s virtuosic phrase-making in passages that are not just memorable but often unforgettable. I was repeatedly (as the author puts it) “gob impressed”. Writing of this quality is rare and deserves a wide readership.

Apart from Joyce, other major influences seem to be Henry Green’sLiving and Party Going and the breathless accumulated fragments of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. But such models are subordinate to the author’s own distinctive voice. The novel is reassuringly conventional in structure – a chronological account of school, adolescent rebellion, loss of virginity (a brilliantly rendered episode), conflicting loyalties, flight from home to college, undergraduate depravity, the death of a grandfather, a wake (also brilliantly rendered), a rejection of religion, and the psychological contortions of love and sex. Above all it explores the narrator’s love for her dying brother, which underpins the most emotionally charged episodes in a very moving book.

The publisher tells us only that the author was born in Liverpool, raised in Ireland, studied in London and currently lives in Norfolk, where she is working on a second novel. This is something to anticipate with interest because Eimear McBride is a writer of remarkable power and originality.