French Lessons: A Memoir (13 page)

What drew me first to Celine's language were wandering
rhythmic phrases, like this one:

Comme si j'avais su ou j'allais, j'ai eu fair de choisir encore et j'ai
change de route, j'ai pris sur ma droite une autre rue, mieux
eclairee, "Broadway" qu'elle s'appelait.

As if I knew where I was going, I put on an air of choosing
and changed my direction, taking a different street on my
right, one that was better lit. "Broadway" it was called.

Sundays in Bordeaux I walked alone down the Cours de I'Intendance, the Cours Victor Hugo and the Quai des Chartrons. The shops were closed, the bourgeois families locked
away in their houses; the only people on the streets were
foreigners-students and workers, mostly North Africans:

C'etait comme une plaie triste Ia rue qui n'en finissait plus, avec
nous au fond, nous autres, d'un bord a I'autre, dune peine a l'autre,
vers le bout qu'on ne voit jamais, le bout de touter les rues du monde.

That street was like a dismal gash, endless, with us at the
bottom of it, filling it from side to side, advancing from
sorrow to sorrow, toward an end that is never in sight, the
end of all the streets in the world.

What exquisite misery I felt! Disconnected, not belonging, desiring every house, imagining every happy scene behind every stone wall, taking in the lewd empty glances,
given and received. Celine could express it all in a sentence
through the sound of his words as much as their meaning. When I read him I luxuriated in despair, dark thoughts, and
a commitment to eternal exile.

II

The same writer who, in Journey to the End of the Night,
wrote elegies to society's marginal characters, to foreignness
and the common path towards death, came under the grip
of a mad anti-Semitism in the 1930s, claiming his writing
style was the expression of his pure French blood, his "native rhythm." His music was in his genes, he said; no foreigners were capable of genius. Fellow writers were nothing
but Jews and robots, standardizing the language, destroying
French literature.

Celine may have liberated the French language, but not
himself. His most excited, violent, rhythmic, effective writing was sparked by everyday anger and resentment. His
well-honed technique-developed directly from the hundreds of pages of racist diatribe he spewed out in 1937 and
1938-was to brood on a newspaper article or an attack on
him until he got really steamed, picked up his pen, and let
fly.

When he was most reviled in France, at the end of the
German occupation, Celine's hate language was linked in
the public mind to everything that had happened since
France fell to the Nazis in i 94o. French Jews had been
stripped by the Vichy government of their professions and
businesses and rights, forced to wear yellow stars on their
coats, deported to Drancy and beyond, to die in German
and Polish camps. French officials first deported foreign
Jews, then French nationals. Seventy-six thousand Jews
went to camps from France; 3 percent returned. Celine fled Paris at the Liberation, crossed through Germany, and spent
the years 1945-5o in exile in Denmark. He was tried in absentia by the French in 1950 and given amnesty in 1951 under a clause pardoning World War I veterans. The judge
didn't know that the Dr. Destouches mentioned in the amnesty was the same man as the writer °Celine."

In 1974, my junior year abroad at the University of Bordeaux, reading a Celine novel was still suspect.

III

Under the spell of a Drycleaner lecture detailing the polemics between Celine and Jean-Paul Sartre-who had accused Celine after the war of having been paid to spout Nazi
theses-I wandered into the Museum of the Resistance,
down the block from the Bordeaux gendarmerie. I told the librarian I had started studying the author of Bagatelles pour un
massacre: what could she tell me about him?

She led me from the front desk into a room in back of an
exhibition space where she kept her files. She raised her
voice. "How can you work on a collaborationist when we
have so many fine resistance writers to offer-Aragon, Triolet, Vercors-each of them so lyrical, so inspiring! A young
person like you shouldn't be thinking about this fascist!"

I emphasized that I wasn't in favor of fascists; my father
had prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg. It was important for
me to know why writers had gone wrong, especially a good
one like Celine.

Her voice softened immediately. The line about my father
worked. Except I was lying. I had made myself out to be a
literary prosecutor, my interest in Celine "official." That was
only part of what drew me to Celine. The rest had to do with what happened while I was reading him, the music I felt in
my heart, a sense of lightness and magic, as well as a total
confidence in this writer's knowledge of the depths of individual human suffering. Our literature professor wanted us
to hear that music; the Resistance museum official was implying that people who celebrated Celine's prose style were
whitewashing an evil man of all responsibility for his
language.

Barbara's sobriquet for our teacher-the Drycleanerwas more appropriate than we knew.

IV

Irreconcilable positions like the museum official's and
the Drycleaner's stances on Celine made the writer even
more appealing to me. I read him in college and in graduate
school. It wasn't until I started teaching, after my Ph.D., that
my French was good enough to work on his postwar novels,
webs of historical allusion so complex I needed an annotated edition to follow them. I found music and tenderness
and delicacy in the postwar Celine, too. His sentences got
shorter, his rhythms bebop; he made his reader more and
more present, closer and closer to the scene, such as this
moonlit Allied bombardment from Rigadoon, the last book
Celine wrote:

]e me dis: Lili, le to retrouve, t'es la! . . . Bebert aussi! . . . oh, mais
les sirenes . . . que de sirenes! . . . autant qu'a Berlin . . . ici ils devraient avoir fini, assez ratatine tout! . . . enfin, it peu pres . . . ou
alors! . . . uuuh! . . . alerte encore . . . d'un bout du Clair de June it
l'autre ... j'oubliais de vous dire, it faisait un de ces clairs de June!
... uuuh! . . . brang! . . . braoum! . . . des bombes ... des
bombes, oui! . . . elles pouvaient ecraser quoi? Liens, et Felipe? .. . I tell myself Lili, I've found you, you're here! ... Bebert
too! ... oh, but the sirens ... nothing but sirens ... as
many as in Berlin ... they should be done around here,
they've wrecked everything! ... or pretty nearly ... uhhoh! ... uurrh! ... another alert ... from one end of the
clair de lune to the next ... I forgot to tell you, it was one of
those incredible moonlit nights! ... uurrh!! whamm! ...
vroomm! ... bombs ... more bombs, yes ... what's
there to smash? hey, where's Felipe?

I'm right there with him, waiting for a bomb to drop on my
head. I hear him, I light a match in the dark with his words; I
see the flash of moonlight on three scared people and a cat
scrambling in the dark, breathing hard, listening for each
other: Celine, Lili, Felipe, and Bebert the cat.

When I finally heard Celine's voice on a tape recording I
was shocked; what I had imagined from passages like this
one from Rigadoon was a lilting poet. His "real" spoken voice
was raspy and croaking, broken.

How could somebody so bitter, so broken, make light
and magic and music on the page? If he could transform his
hideous voice into music, think of what I could do.

Celine made me want to write.

V

I'm not alone in this reaction. Since Henry Miller, Americans have been drawn to the mixture of spleen and fantasy
in Celine and have tried to get something of his rhythm and
emotional directness into their own prose. Even Jewish
writers, women writers, have been able to bracket the biographical fact of his racist diatribes and his misogynist lust and humor: Philip Roth claims Celine as his Proust (" I feel
called by his voice"); Vivian Gomick prefers his "radiant poison" to Miller and Mailer's more everyday misogyny.

In addition to these appealing writers who have spoken
out for Celine, there is one man whose relationship to Celine has appalled and fascinated me: Milton Hindus. I've
identified with him, completely; I've disdained him; I've
wanted nothing more than to be unlike him in my scholarly
relationship to Celine. Like me, he was a literature professor, a Jew; like me, he wanted to write after reading Celine. For years I refused to read Hindus's book on Celine, The
Crippled Giant, because Celine scholars I talked to in France
said it was "moralizing psychology, American style"-I certainly didn't want to do any of that! I quickly leafed through
Celine's letters to Hindus, published as an appendix to The
Crippled Giant. The two men had corresponded while Celine
was in exile in Denmark. Hindus, a young professor at the
University of Chicago, had signed a petition with other
American intellectuals arguing that Celine was guilty of unpopular opinions-not political collaboration-and that
the Danes shouldn't extradite him to France. The petition
worked and Celine answered Hindus's first letter in a spirit
of genuine gratitude.

My research on Celine's influence on American writers
took me to Carlton Lake's collection of correspondence
and manuscripts at the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. I
had gone to study Celine's letters to his American editors at
Little Brown. As an afterthought I ordered the complete
Hindus-Celine archive (including the original Celine letters,
in French, and typed copies of Hindus's English-language
responses). Once I began reading both sides of the famous
correspondence, unedited, I was hooked.

Hindus sent Celine coffee and tea by the poundful from
Macy's, financed by the advances from James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, on reissues of Celine's work.
Hindus called Celine his master; Celine called Hindus an
angel. Hindus sent questions about contemporary literary
figures: Morand, Ayme, Claudel in France; Dreiser, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis in the U.S. Celine obliged with page
upon page of reflection about literature that have since become the cornerstone for all studies of his art. I sympathized both with the young professor wanting to please and
profit from his literary mentor and with the ravaged exile,
isolated, fearing for his life, seeking contact with a more innocent world-and absolution through friendship with a
Jewish intellectual who adored him.

In the course of their correspondence, Hindus encouraged Celine to articulate his ideas about literature, most famously the notion that to make writing sound like the
spoken voice, you have to distort language, much the way
you have to bend a stick to get it to look straight in a glass of
water. Bend it, but not too much!

Hindus had gotten Celine to reveal the complexity of his
thinking about art. What Hindus himself had to say, as far as I
was concerned, was secondary-he was handmaiden to
Celine's genius.

As I read both sides of the correspondence, I was overwhelmed by the image of a dutiful tortoise straining to
keep up with a hare. Celine sends Hindus one funny, brilliant, ribald letter after another; Hindus looks for ways to
match his master. The U.S. publication of the Kinsey Report
spurs Hindus into an attempt at bawdiness. He confesses
a voyeuristic dream to Celine, in which window shades are
pulled up to reveal human licentiousness (he's vague, even when he's trying to be scandalous, so that we aren't sure
what the actual licentiousness is). His dream reminds him
of one of his favorite scenes in Voyage. Aren't all real novelists voyeurs, he asks, wishfully? He risks a reference to homosexual voyeurism in Proust. In a postscript, he requests
that Celine not show his letter to Madame Celine; such talk
must remain between men.

Hindus is making love to Celine-or trying.

In 1948, Hindus travelled to Denmark to visit his pen pal
in person. Hindus was shocked by Celine's appearance,
habits, moods. The powerful writer drooled, harping monotonously on the same themes; he showed no interest in
the kind of civilized literary dialogue Hindus had fantasized.
Celine was impatient and irritable with a guest who, instead
of sparring back, became more and more awkward, fussy,
annoying.

Each French critic who has told the story of Milton
Hindus's trip to see Celine is obliged to point out the American professor's naivete, his academic rigidity, his lack of
imagination and charm: the American was incapable of understanding a "real" writer! Many recount scenes where Celine and his wife, Lucette Almasour, greet Hindus in the
nude in front of their Danish hut-nudity, they add with
ethnographic precision, being a normal aspect of Danish
life that skittish Hindus, the American puritan, couldn't
take.

When I first read those stories I thought-"I would never
have behaved that way around Celine!" It was a ridiculous
thought, because in 1948, as a woman, I probably wouldn't
have had a Ph.D., would never have been considered for a
teaching job at the University of Chicago, would never have traveled to Denmark to interview him. But my mind
wouldn't quit trying to identify with Hindus. Today when I
reread the same passages in the biographies, I'm still indignant at the ethnocentrism of the French: why do you have
to paint all Americans as naive and prudish? Why do you
think we can't appreciate the depths of your world, your nakedness? Why do you have to make Milton Hindus a scapegoat for the utter failure of Celine-your failure-to face the
dark places in your own history?

Hindus returned to Chicago in September 1948,
"burned," he said in a last letter he sent to Celine on the continent, by the force of Celine's personality. The two men
kept up the pretense of correspondence for another year.

There's a box in the Ransom Library in Texas marked "uncatalogued," containing the correspondence between Celine and Hindus in 1949, after Hindus has returned to
America. The final exchange between the two men is as
vivid to me as though it happened yesterday-the speed
and energy with which I switch my sympathy from one correspondent to the next makes me suspect I've found two
parts of my own personality in these letters-two feuding
parts. Here's how I reconstruct the story around Celine and
Hindus's final exchange: