Promenade Littéraire #6: Louis-Ferdinard Céline, Le Havre, Seine-Maritime (76)

#6, Louis-Ferdinard Céline (1894-1961), Boulevard Clemenceau. Céline wrote a part of his novel Mort à crédit in the former Hôtel Frascati. In this book Auguste, inspired by Céline's father, comes from Le Havre and has a passion for boats.

We couldn't find the fifth bench on Boulevard Clemenceau, dedicated to Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) who set his novel Pierre et Jean in Le Havre.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit | Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

I read Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit many years ago, so don't remember too much of it, although as the novel is known by so many people and can hardly in any way be described as 'obscure', I shall limit my comment here. I have, also, and probably on more than one occasion, written about the odd fact that Guy Mazeline, rather than Céline, scooped the 1932 Goncourt with Les Loups.

Suffice to say that essentially the book is in four parts: the protagonist's experience of war, Africa, America, and then his experiences (partly as a qualified doctor) back in France. Throughout the book, which is only loosely autobiographical, Ferninand Bardamu has brief flings with various women, and keeps meeting Léon Robinson (who appears to have some kind of relationship to Bardamu's self), who is killed very near the end by Madelon, Robinson's jealous lover, who's shortly before suggested (anonymously) that Robinson and Bardamu are in a gay relationship, and even says that they're in a threesome with Bardamu's current lover Sophie.

But all this has been written about many times before, and the essential is that Voyage au bout de la nuit is a fierce criticism of war, of the violent and racist colonial system, and of the extremes of capitalist society witnessed in New York and Detroit. More importantly, though, it's the way these criticisms are made, because the novel introduces popular speech not only into the quotations of its characters (very frequent slang and 'taboo' words, the negative 'ne' missed as in ordinary spoken French, ellision as in 'T'as raison', etc), but this kind of language is also used by the narrator himself. Céline's writings had a great influence on a great number of people, and he is considered by many critics to be, along with Proust, one of the two greatest writers in French in the last century.

There. And I didn't even mention anything about pamphlets.

Paris 2017: Cimetière parisien de Bagneux, Hauts-de-Seine (92) #1: J.-H. Rosny aîné

J.-H. Rosny aîné was the pseudonym of Joseph Henri Honoré Boex (1856–1940), a French author of Belgian origin who is considered one of the founding figures of modern science fiction. Born in Brussels, Rosny spent most of his years in France. Rosny was an influence on Arthur Conan Doyle, the plot of his Force mystérieuse (1913) being adopted by Doyle for his The Poisoned Belt. Les Navigateurs de l'infini (1925) is generally considered as Rosny's best work, and his use of the word 'astronautique' is a first. However, I suspect that, in spite of a prize existing in his name, Rosny will be most remembered for his disagreements with Lucien Descaves, particularly for the, er, scandalous winning of the Goncourt in 1932 by Guy Mazeline's Les Loups, rather than Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit, which received the 'compensatory' Renaudot.

Guy Mazeline: Les Loups | The Wolves (1932)

It hardly seems possible to mention Guy Mazeline's Les Loups without also mentioning the fact that Mazeline triumphed in the 1932 Goncourt at the expense of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's masterpiece Voyage au bout de la nuit, and how this was an outrage, a scandal, a travesty of justice, etc. And of course it was all of this: Les Loups doesn't come anywhere near the category of masterpiece. But does the novel really deserve all the opprobrium that's been thrown at it? Certainly much ink has been used over it, and in 1999 Eugène Saccomano published a novelisation of the dispute (Goncourt 32), with a publisher's band 'Le Duel Céline–Mazeline' across the lower part of the cover. Much more recently Les Loups has been called 'illisible' (unreadable) in Figaro and 'Voyage au bout de l'ennui' in a particularly sarcastic article in Le Parisien. Why all the hatred? Have the people who criticise Les Loups actually read it?

The short answer in almost all cases is certainly 'No': in fact I doubt if more than a few people alive today have read it. I resolved to come to my own conclusions, take a deep breath and dip into it. You have to take a deep breath because it's 622 pages of minutely-packed print, or a roomier 775 in the English translation The Wolves. After all the scorn that's been poured on it I scarcely expected to wade through all of it, and yet – to my immense surprise – I not only read it all but in fact really enjoyed it.

Les Loups is not a quick read, and not only due to its sheer bulk: it's so crammed with characters, shifting allegiances and subtle plotting that it demands to be read carefully – if you want to take full advantage of its subtleties, that is. And there certainly are subtleties: this is what I'd call a psychological novel, in which what is going on in the mind of the characters is all-important.

Most of the main characters, though, aren't particularly likable, or at least not a great deal of the time. Pride comes over as a central theme, as does lust for money, and in the dog-eat-dog world of this book – set in Le Havre (where Mazeline was born) towards the end of the nineteenth century – appearances are vital.

Maximilien Jobourg has inherited his father's business and at the beginning of the story lives (financially) comfortably enough with his wife Marie-Jeanne and his children Didier (a lover of the sea), Vincent (who has a limp due to a childhood accident), Benoît (who's headstrong, given to violence and of the three brothers the one most addicted to prostitutes), Geneviève (who's engaged to the wealthy Gilbert), and Blanche (who's married but still lives at home along with her ferociously ambitious banker husband Georges, whom the younger sons accurately call the 'Hypocrite'.

Maximilien has long grown tired of Marie-Jeanne, who is largely concerned with the way things look, and who is exasperated that her husband has no interest in business. Maximilien's mother Virginie hates the working-class-born Marie-Jeanne, whom she insists on calling by her maiden name 'la Bretot' – when she's speaking to Maximilien, that is, which is not often at all: the two don't get on, which seems par for the course in the Jobourg family.

In fact Virginie (it seems) hates Maximilien too, as she plots with her grandson-in-law Georges to bankrupt him by getting him to move all his money into shares which are in fact worthless: a very bad psychologist as well as a very bad businessman, Maximilien can't see through the many faces of his son-in-law: in any case, why should the banker be working against his own interests, thinks Maximilien?

The appearance of Valérie in Le Havre radically changes Maximilien's life. He believes in self-renewal, which he sees as impossible in a family: how can his own family, for instance, ever see him as anything other than lazy, incapable of holding onto his fortune and his prestige? Valérie, though, is his secret daughter, the child his lover Pauline had after she left Le Havre for Martinique twenty years before, when she married Labrête and Valérie was brought up as their child. But Labrête drowns himself on learning Valérie isn't his daughter, and now a dying Pauline has sent Valérie to her 'uncle' Maximilien in Le Havre. Maximilien hides her with a former servant of his and comes to love her more than his children by Marie-Jeanne.

The end is dramatic, with Valérie – on learning that Maximilien is her real father and being incapable of living with the fact that her previous life has been a lie – killing herself with the 'ornamental' weapon her father has unthinkingly furnished her room with, and Maximilien lining his pockets with stones and jumping into the sea.

This may make the narrative sound a little melodramatic, but it isn't portrayed that way. Guy Mazeline can write and can write well, and although we can criticise him for stretching credibility (a twenty-year-old girl not realizing Maximilien is her father, after all he's done for her?), and for writing maybe a few hundred pages in excess and creating several characters too many, but so what? OK, Céline definitely should have won the Goncourt in 1932, but that's no reason to take it out on Guy Mazeline: clearly, this is not the best ever Goncourt, but nor is it the worst by any means.

Guy Mazeline's grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse:

Héléna Marienské: Le Degré suprême de la tendresse (2008)

In the Prologue to Héléna Marienské's Le Degré suprême de la tendresse – the title being taken from the macho Salvador Dalí's definition of cannibalism – the narrator relates a fait divers or news item she heard about a drunken couple leaving a bar in the Bastille area. We are told to remember the place, the passage des Taillandiers (a taillandier being a maker of cutting tools). The young woman is forced to perform fellatio on the man, but she uses extreme force and gives him a glansectomy, cutting off his glans penis (or bell-end in common parlance), letting it roll into the gutter for the pompiers to retrieve. Yes, this is a feminist book to make men wince in parts.

And although there are some pretty gruesome episodes in it, the erotically suggestive nature of the cover conceals a very clever, and often very comical, novel. Although many in the Anglophone world would perhaps disagree with the French world's much more flexible description of this book as a 'novel', because it consists of eight very separate parts, each is linked by that particular sex act, and each written in a different pastiche of a French author: Michel Houellebecq, Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean de La Fontaine, Christine Angot, Michel de Montaigne, Vincent Ravalec, and Georges Perec. My aim here is not to comment on all eight pastiches, but simply to comment on a few aspects of the book which particularly captured my attention.

The first – 'Restriction du domaine' – is an obvious comment on Houellebecq's Extension du domaine de la lutte, and the 'restriction' evidently relates to the severing of the organ, so we know where the stories are leading, but we don't know how. Although we know the area when we laugh at the Houellebecqian cynicism, the obsession with sex, and the restricted sex. For instance, the protagonist Pierre Hitkartoff has troubles with getting an erection, although he experiences something of a new lease of life when he becomes a writer. Needless to say, perhaps, there's a particularly violent scene in it when Pierre loses not only his glans penis but also his limbs.

I'm unfamiliar with Tallemant des Réaux (1619–92), let alone his Historiettes, but then Marienské does say in the Prologue that he's little known, and that it's not necessary to be familiar with his work to enjoy the story, and it certainly isn't. Here we have the very sassy fourteen-year-old Marquise Héloïse who's far too independent for her own good, although the reader surely applauds when she bites a few centimeters from the sexually aggressive Capitaine's organ. The king Louis XII has already experienced the young girl's cheekiness, so locks her away in a convent to, er, keep her mouth shut. On pretending to be penitent there though, she asks the Mother Superior for a a crucifix and a hairshirt: she then stuns the Mother with the former, gags her with the latter and runs off to marry a Turkish Sultan!

Another name I was unfamiliar with is the contemporary Vincent Ravalec, whose writing is imitated in this way, with my translation here:

'Virgi's life at the time, it was pure Zola. One stoned evening when we were mates, real mates I mean, Virginia had told us that her father, long-term unemployed embittered by the vicissitudes of his existence, used to sodomize her without Vaseline when he wasn't bashing her mother. She found that really shitty. She was seventeen years old, [...] and no shit, Daddy's perverse practices really stank.'

She goes to see an overworked social worker who just gives her five euros for a tub of Vaseline, so with the male narrator she escapes, becomes a rich high-class prostitute and to cope takes lots of drug cocktails, and the narrative helterskelters into surreal multiple glansectomies, but somehow works its way into a kind of happy ending. Weird.

Next there is the final story dedicated to 'G.P', or Georges Perec, but Marienské couldn't say that because – unlike the previously story mentioned above which has chemical Es in it – this is like Perec's La Disparition in which there are no typographical Es in it. And there are some of the characters in Perec's novel here. There are also, like Perec's novel – many tortuous sentences which abound with foreign words and phrases ('miniskirt' for 'minijupe', 'nada' for 'rien', etc), many slang or familiar words ('toubib' for 'docteur' or 'médecin', 'gus' for 'mec', 'soutif' for 'soutien-gorge', etc), slightly odd expressions ('cubain' for 'cigare', 'RV' for 'rendez-vous') – all to dodge the e-word: inevitably, the plot tends to go adrift as you marvel at the inventiveness.

Yes, a very clever book which all-in-all manages not quite to get too lost in its own cleverness. A book with real bite (although slightly less in the French sense).

Paris 2015: Guy Mazeline, Cimetière du Montparnasse #2

No winner in the history of the Goncourt (which began in 1903) is viewed with such contempt as Guy Mazeline (1900–96), whose six hundred-plus page novel Les Loups won in 1932: I've not read the book so am unqualified to pass judgement on it, although many people consider it so be badly written and wholly unworthy of such a highly esteemed prize.

In fact in the light of who he was pitched against Mazeline's win was and is still seen as a scandal: his only other real opponent was Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose Voyage au bout de la nuit had to make do with the 'consolation prize' of the Renaudot. The merit of Céline's novel was recognised as an important work, and posterity has seen his novel favourably compared with the work of Proust or Joyce. Céline's novel had been signalled as a major influence, for instance, on the Beats, and although no doubt most of them had to read him in an inferior translation rather than the original, Céline's brilliance showed through.

And even odder is that Céline's later strongly-worded anti-Semitic voice doesn't appear to have been an issue at the time. But Mazeline is now forgotten, apart from when the perceived scandal is mentioned. So forgotten, in fact, that Landru doesn't even mention him on his cemetery website heavily laden with both major and (often very) minor personalities, and on a list of one thousand people of interest in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Mazeline doesn't figure. It was quite an effort finding this grave, and again it wouldn't have been possible without Joseph, who works at the cemetery.

Does it matter that Mazeline is only remembered negatively? Shouldn't he just be forgotten? Well, the Célinians certainly won't allow that, and anyway Guy Mazeline is part of France's literary history, like it or not.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Alphonse Lemerre, and the passage de Choiseuil, 2nd arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #25

The passage de Choiseul is a covered passage between rue Saint-Augustin to the north and rue des Petits-Champs to the south. It was built between 1825 and 1827 first by François Mazois (who died before completion), and then by Antoine Tavernier. It is on the site of four adjoining hotels bought, in a speculative move, by Mallet bank in which the hotels were demolished, with the exception of parts of the Hôtel de Gesvres, whose entrance is now the north entrance of the passage.

At 190 meters in length, this is one of the longest passages in Paris.

Passage Choiseul has a literary history. Alphonse Lemerre was the first publisher of the Parnassian poets and his shop was at number 23. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894—1961) lived here as a child from 1899 to 1907, when his mother had a novelty shop initially at number 67 and then from 1904 at number 64. In Mort à crédit he introduces a representation of it as 'Passage des Bérésinas'.

The south entrance is rather less impressive.

Gen Paul in Montmartre, 18th arrondissement, Paris, France: Literary Île-de-France #21

Gen Paul (1895—1975) has a place in literary history not for writing but for featuring in the works of two writers: very briefly in Marcel Aymé's short story 'Le Passe-Muraille' ('The Man Who Walked through Walls') (1943), and as an important character in his friend Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel Féerie pour une autre fois (Fable for Another Time) (1952).

Gen Paul was born in rue Lepic, Montmartre, and lost a leg in World War II. While convalescing he took up again the painting that had been his hobby as a child, his expressionistic ideas being influenced by many different artistic sources. He was to make his living as a painter for the rest of his life.

 Gen Paul's home and workplace at 2 avenue Junot, Montmartre.

'Eugéne PAUL dit GEN-PAUL

artiste peintre

et graveur français

a vécu et créé

dans cette maison

de 1917 à 1975'

'Eugéne PAUL known as GEN-PAUL

artist painter

and French engraver

lived and created

in this house

from 1917 to 1975'

Unless you actually knew, it would be impossible to tell that this is Gen Paul's grave, as no matter where you look there's no indication of it, no inscription at all.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline in Meudon-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine (92), France: Literary Île-de-France #5

In Meudon-sur-Seine, Céline's house at 25 Route des Gardes is easy to find, although it's hidden behind a wall.

This is the path leading to it.

I don't think a great deal has changed to the appearance since his death.

Even the gates appear to be the same.

Finding Céline's grave is another matter. The Cimetière des Longs Réages is difficult enough to find anyway (I had to ask two locals who certainly knew, but the entrance, although quite large, is obscure), and then there's the problem of finding the grave, as the office appears to be permanently closed, or perhaps only during the time that the workmen re-build the toilet block, etc.

I don't know how long exactly I spent walking round, but eventually I found a shady spot to power up my netbook to look at an old photo I'd downloaded from the net. I've no idea how old this photo is, but if anyone objects to an infringement of copyright, please post a comment at the bottom of this post and I'll remove it as soon as I see it. But I must admit the photo was very useful, and even I could spot the cemetery gates on the right and then deduced more or less where the grave is.

The Société d'études céliniennes had placed a (now almost illegible due to sunning - its metal parts rusted) band around it, which I temporarily removed so that I could take a photo of a more original state of the grave.

Here at least, Céline is recognized: earlier this year, I wrote here about the spinelessness of the French government kowtowing to the Jewish lobby in the form, I believe, of only one tedious but noisy guy, thus backtracking on its original intention to celebrate the fifty years since the death of this brilliant and highly influential writer who was admittedly anti-semitic, therefore in some ways insane like all racists.

The engraving of the ship is an interesting feature.

I'm a little unclear about the existence of the small cross to the top left: Céline was an atheist up to his death as far as I know, so there must be some story here. Maybe someone more knowledgeable of this area of Céline's life can enlighten us.

Translating Louis-Ferdinand Céline

There's a fascinating article in this month's Magazine littéraire, titled 'How do you spell "rouspignolles" ?', which is written by Pascal Ifri and concerns the two English translations of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932)  - Journey to the End of the Night (1934 and 1988). Céline called his distinctive writing style his 'little music', and encouraged his first translator John Marks to try to convey a similar impression of the 'dancing' rhythm of the text, which Marks didn't do at all, which is clear from his early version of Céline's highly influential novel.

However, Ralph Manheim's second translation does pay closer attention to the original style of the text. Manheim had to correct many errors made by Marks, and made it more in keeping with the spirit of Céline's work by Americanizing Marks's British English. Censorship - or simple coyness - would also have been a problem for Marks, and the later version set about restoring, for instance, 'shit', 'frustrated vaginas', and even masturbating soldiers where they had been completely excised.

The effect of Manheim's restoration certainly gives a better idea of what Céline's French should read like, but translation of course always poses problems. Add to this the particular difficulties that such an original and ground-breaking work must bring, and we have at least an idea of the colossal problems such a translation task must have involved.

Ifri is obviously forced to conclude that Manhiem's version isn't ideal, but... But for 54 years English readers of Journey to the End of the Night had to make do with a far more inferior version. How then is it that Céline had such an impact on American writers, most of whom (I assume) must have been reading John Marks and not Céline? Ifri believes it was Céline's 'vision of the world' rather than his writing style that caused the influence. (Céline was obsessive about his French being correctly emended for publication, but as for his translations, well, it was just the money that interested him.)

And 'rouspignolles'? Well, 'balls' or 'ballocks' convey the idea, but, as ever, the difficulty of exact translation rears its ugly head again.

Céline and the French Government's U-turn

Frédéric Mitterrand*, the French culture minister - under pressure - backed down last Friday and decided to remove Louis-Ferdinand Céline's name from the list of 'national celebrations' this year. Although undoubtedly a great and influential writer most noted for his novels Voyage au bout de night (Journey to the End of the Night) and Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), Céline still carries the stigma of the three savagely anti-Semitic pamphlets he wrote.

A number of people - notably the writer Philippe Sollers - have expressed their great disappointment at the French government's U-turn.

*Mitterrand - nephew of the former French president François Mitterrand - is himself no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he published La mauvaise vie (The Bad Life), an autobiographical novel containing revelations of his love of paying young Thai boys for sex. And he has been a strong defender of Roman Polanski, the film director wanted in America since 1977 for, among other charges, the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl.