French Lessons: A Memoir (14 page)

Agonizing over his visit, still fascinated, Hindus begins to
draft a literary essay on Celine; his working title is The Monstrous Giant. Now, at last, he's the writer. He puts down on the
page his most passionate thoughts about literature, the
product of graduate school and teaching the Great Books at
the University of Chicago, linking all his insights to the universal themes in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Celine. He
poses the problem of Celine's work and Celine's person ality. He narrates the voyage to Denmark-his first trip to
Europe. He speculates about Celine's power, madness, and
human shortcomings.

Since returning to the U.S., Hindus has switched jobs
from the University of Chicago to Brandeis. Working in the
first Jewish-sponsored university in the United States, with a
Jewish-identified faculty and staff, his choice to work on the
most infamous anti-Semitic writer in Europe in the aftermath of the Holocaust is conspicuous, to say the least.
Hindus struggles in his mind to justify himself. He does so
in the name of literature.

On January 12, 1949, Hindus tells Celine about his new
job at Brandeis, enclosing a clipping from Look magazine,
making a boyish remark about the pretty girls featured in the
photo illustrations. He signs off by cheerfully reporting that
he has gotten a lot of spleen off his chest by writing about
his trip; it's made him feel better to write about it. Would
Celine please read it? He must promise not to be offended.

(The article in Look is a public relations fluff piece about
Brandeis, illustrated with pictures of college girls at play.)

Grotesque, Hindus! You are so fatuous, two-facedyou're anything but naive, which is what the French accuse
you of being. You are insidious, provocative. Why are you
sending a guilt- and paranoia-crazed anti-Semite an article
about Brandeis University? You're playing him like an instrument; seeing what the evocation of long-legged Jewish
girls doing ballet exercises is going to do to the polemicist
whose most violent racist work, Bagatelles pour un massacre,
consisted of responses to Jewish newspapers, Jewish theater groups, Jewish politicians.

It's the equivalent of giving crack to an addict.

Celine writes back to Hindus on January 20, maintaining his charming banter: what a perfect job it would be for his
wife, Lucette (a dancer), to teach dance at Brandeis! But
please, Hindus, don't sent me your travel writing-send
coffee instead!

January 29. Hindus dutifully promises coffee, insists that
his sketch of Celine isn't really so bad. If only his friend Celine were with him at Brandeis-the place is so utterly lacking in wit.

Why is Hindus telling Celine he wishes he were at
Brandeis? Is he idiotic, or subtly sadistic? What is going on in
your head, Hindus?

February I o. The remark about "wit" sends Celine over
the edge. Sour, suspicious, provoked by the disingenuous
promise Hindus wants to exact from him not to be offended
by his sketch, Celine lobs back a Celinian grenade. What's
wrong with those Jews at Brandeis? Celine asks. The girls
have great thighs (he's looking at Look)-it's a compensation. He'd like to be there himself, really he would. What a
good joke: he'd make himself out to be a Nazi to really turn
them on. They'd be in the clouds, those Brandeis girls, getting screwed by a Nazi, even an old one. He'd pant into their
ears-"Just like in Buchenwald."

There is nothing in the archives to tell us what Hindus felt
in February 1949 when he read Celine's letter.

I had read Celine's February io letter first. It made my
stomach turn, my insides curdle. This is what language can
do; this is evil! I read Hindus's January 12 and January 29 letters hours later: "You asked for it, you jerk," was my first response. You provoked it. You sent Celine the words you
knew would make him respond as only Celine could respond. You elicited his worst hate language-you wanted
the proof, all over again, of how hateful he was.

VI

Celine was emotionally accurate in his cruelty. He knew
just where to hit when he struck back at Hindus. Babbitt
plus Judas, he later called him, in October 1949. A weakling
in search of literary glory at any cost. Hindus only liked
novels that were tailor-made for professors of stenography.

Celine read the manuscript that Hindus sent him, finally
entitled The Crippled Giant. Wine's reaction was due not only
to the fact that he could dish out insults, but not take them;
he was genuinely panicked, convinced that Hindus's analysis would prejudice his legal defense in France. The way
Celine saw it, any criticism at so delicate a moment could be
a death sentence.

Celine fought Hindus the way he knew best, with words.
He threatened a libel suit. He organized friends to write
Hindus. He even wrote to the president of Brandeis University in an outraged bourgeois tone (he could turn it on like a
faucet), accusing young Professor Hindus of indecent behavior toward the ladies (!), cretinism, lying, being a bore,
and not knowing a word of French. "He does not even
know the difference between "le mauvais gout" and "un
mauvais gout."

While his letters to and about Hindus grew nasty and
threatening, Celine's correspondence with Jean Paulhan,
the representative of his powerful new French publisher,
the Editions Gallimard, was sweetening. Celine complains
about foreigners' bad taste in a gesture of literary bonding
with his fellow countryman: "They can only understand
Rolland, Romains, Gide-model Berlitz guides. The foreigners want dead French that doesn't disturb them." When I
read these sentences, I wanted to argue with Celine, play the foreigner to his Frenchman. He's dead wrong about
foreigners-at least about this one. I want to be disturbed by
a foreign language; I want French that's alive. Before Celine, I
knew French for buying groceries and doing well in school.
I was hollow in French, Andre told me so. I got hooked on
Celine because he was the farthest from official French I
could get in a book. There are thousands of American
readers and writers like me; Celine himself, whether out of
self-hate, xenophobia, or ignorance, had us all pegged as
fools.

Celine was wrong, specifically, about Hindus. He thought
Hindus's Crippled Giant would prejudice his trial. Instead, the
book (published in New York in 195o, in Paris in 1951)
brought Celine to the attention of postwar readers in France
and the United States. Placing Celine in a pantheon of "great
writers," it separated Celine the literary genius from the unpleasant person and anti-Semitic polemicist. Readers could
read Celine comfortably, without feeling complicity with
World War II genocide.

Hindus was the first in a long, distinguished line of Celinian drycleaners.

VII

The University of Paris VII, built after the student revolts
of 1968, feels like a high security prison. Inside a small office
lined with notebooks containing Celine's press clippings,
the wind howls past leaky windows. French graduate students, ambitious and expert young men with cigarettestained fingers, are working at two long seminar tables. The
date is June 1986. I'm examining a page of Celine's first and longest racist tome, Bagatelles pour un massacre, with Professor
Godard, who is advising me on my research.

I stop at a word I don't recognize: "gode." Celine has
changed Andre Gide's name to "Andre Gode."

"Andre Gode?" I say, out loud.

"Do you know what it means?" one of the students pipes
up, lifting his chin from his own papers and eying me like a
game show host.

"Yes, of course."

I had no idea what "gode" meant; I wasn't going to admit
it, not at Paris VII, not among Celinians. I assumed it was
obscene.

The glossary to Celine's complete works listed "gode," the
noun, "object imitating a man's sexual organ" and "goder"
the verb, "to reach orgasm or simply have pleasure." It turns
out to be one of Celine's favorite words.

The student was blushing, but there was an "it's mine not
yours" look in his eyes along with the embarrassment. I narrowed my gaze at him to see if I could get him to blush even
more. It worked.

I'm supposed to be the American prude a la Hindus, I
thought happily, only this guy is much more uncomfortable
than I am.

"Rest your voice," Professor Godard said as I was leaving
the office, "you'll need it tomorrow for the colloquium."

I headed from Paris VII to meet Monique, a French friend
from graduate school who had promised to listen to my lecture and check for mistakes. Rachael, a fellow graduate student and my summer roommate in Paris, met us at
Monique's apartment on the rue Monge. Rachael teased me
about getting so worked up over a bunch of Celine specialists. "Those people are nuts-half of them are reactionaries, the others think they're Simon Wiesenthal! Only the linguists are sane, and they don't talk about what interests
you!,,

"But you'll help me, won't you?"

I had twenty minutes to present all I knew about the
cheap anti-Semitic leaflets Celine had scavenged to write
Bagatelles pour un massacre. The research had taken me three
years.

Rachael and Monique timed me to the minute and took
notes.

"It's fine, really," Monique concluded, "except you're pronouncing all the words beginning in 'is' or ending in 'isme'
with a 'z' sound instead of an 's' sound."

In the 1930s, Jewish refugees from Hitler had spoken
French this way, substituting "z"s for "s"s. It was a mistake
Celine would have loved to imitate in his depiction of the
foreign hoards who were weakening France. The specific
words I was mispronouncing-"communisme," "fascisme," "anti-semitisme," and "israelite"-weren't random.
They were the key words for any debate about Celine.

My phonetic unconscious was hard at work.

VIII

The 1986 Celine colloquium began early in the morning
in a large Paris VII auditorium. After the first speech, people
started yelling at each other: "Are you suggesting that Celine
was fascist!" "You call that evidence!" "I will not accept ignorance in the place of argument!" I was scared. More was at
stake than at the American conferences I was used to.

A man came up to me at the morning coffee break and
said that if I gave him a copy of my paper he'd footnote me
in his important book on Celine's politics, currently in galley proofs. He'd make a special effort to include me.

I gripped my briefcase until my knuckles were white.

When my time came at the podium I pronounced
"issraelite," "fascissme," "communissme" according to Monique's coaching. The unnatural composure I get making
speeches had come over me; I looked at my audience
calmly, measuring my pace and intonation:

Beaucoup des questions que nous nous posons sur Ia composition de
Bagatelles pour un massacre et les forces culturelles qui ont faconne celui-ci trouvent leur reponse dons les pages de ce livre. Car
c'est dons Bagatelles que Celine a commence a utiliser systematiquement le trait narratif qui devait devenir le label de ses chroniques d'apres-guerre: trait que Godard appelle "un discours en train
de se faire" et qui se caracterise par de constantes references de la part
de Celine a son contexte quotidien . . . a des textes que le narrateur
affirme avoir Ius a l'instant, et qui semblent etre l'aiguillon qui I'a
incite a ecrire... .

We can find a response to many of the questions that have
been raised about the composition of Bagatelles pour un
massacre and the cultural forces that shaped it, right in the
pages of the book. In Bagatelles, Celine inaugurated the
systematic use of a narrative technique that was to become the trademark of his postwar novels-a technique
Godard has called "discourse in the making," which we
can characterize by the constant references on Celine's
part to his immediate daily context ... to texts the narrator claims to have read at that very instant, provoking him
to write... .

Halfway through my talk, Milton Hindus's face came looming into my head-or rather not the Hindus face itself,
which I had never seen-but the image Celine had given it: An iceberg with glasses.

My plan for the lecture had been to be icy-dry and scholarly. I didn't want any interpretation in my analysis, only
facts. I would be "scientific" (in French the adjective "scientifique" is often applied to literary research); I would be beyond reproach. It had to be perfect, or they were going to
attack me the way they attacked Hindus, who let his
personality-his weakness-show in his book on Celine.

A postcard I picked up in Texas the week I spent with the
Hindus-Celine correspondence convinced me that I was
closer that June 1986 morning to being a Texas armadillo
than an iceberg: "This burrowing mammal is covered with a
bony shell. When attacked, the armadillo may roll up like a
ball and depend upon its own armor for protection." When
I read the Hindus-Celine correspondence, six years after
making my scientific speech, I understood that not wanting
to be Hindus-not wanting to show my horror and desire
for Celine-had made me a latter-day Hindus, cool and repressed. I also understood that my disdain for Hindus's
project-for his "Americanness"-made me a latter-day
Celinian xenophobe.

I love Celine for language and emotional directness I
don't have. But in the end-I always want to put a "but" at
the beginning of every sentence I write about him-he was
paranoid; his reactions distorted the harsh realities he
sensed so acutely, but couldn't tolerate. He didn't see that
Hindus was helping him by painting him as a great flawed
writer. He never understood that Hindus's portrait of him,
Hindus's publication of their literary correspondence, did
as much to "pardon" him for future generations of readers
as the amnesty given to one Dr. Destouches by an absentminded French magistrate.

Hindus, for his part, was phony in his letters to Celine, trying to please him with silly regrets that Europe's most infamous anti-Semite wasn't a professor at Brandeis. He was
two-faced as well, because at the same time he was inviting
Celine to Brandeis, he was devastating the Celine personality in his own writing. Writing in the most passionate "literary" style he could muster, he was competing with Celine,
the way critics invariably compete with the writers they're
supposed to be analyzing.