Sixty years after the death of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, an unpublished book by the writer known for his anti-Semitic positions, will be published Thursday, May 5 by Gallimard. This short novel titled War is one of some 6,000 unpublished sheets by the writer that have reappeared in incredible circumstances. Other manuscripts like London, direct result of War is due out in the fall. No one hoped to find these texts. “At the start, we didn’t know what [en] was the qualityexplains Wednesday May 4 on franceinfo Pascal Fouché, historian, author of several works concerning Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
franceinfo: What is the story of these manuscripts?
Pascal Fouche: These manuscripts disappeared when Louis-Ferdinand Céline left for Germany at the end of the Occupation. He left in his apartment [du quartier de Montmartre] a number of manuscripts, either those of published books or manuscripts on which he was still working. It was long thought that they had disappeared. Many people investigated to find out what had become of them. We knew that the apartment had been visited, even looted by several people, including resistance fighters. There were reports that the janitor next door saw pages flying through the air. So one would have thought that some manuscripts had ended up in the dumpster. But we were surprised in August to learn that someone had recovered them and kept them all this time. This person had given them to a former journalist from Release who himself returned them to the rights holders last summer.
How did you work for this book?
There was a whole set of manuscripts including several unpublished texts. A sorting was done and the manuscript of War, with 250 sheets, was the smallest. Once the rights holders agreed with Gallimard to publish it, I was asked to transcribe it. Gallimard had all the pages of the manuscript digitized. I still had them in hand and it’s very moving. He has a doctor’s handwriting, very angry. He writes very quickly, he crosses out, it’s a first draft manuscript. Initially, we did not know what the quality of this manuscript was.
Did you have to make choices, imagine what he meant?
The least possible. With a little practice, we manage to read what he says. He uses a lot of abbreviations, erasures from time to time, rewrites between the lines and that’s where it gets a little tricky. Sometimes you guess what he meant more than you actually read it. The work is precisely to render what he has done without distorting it, without inventing the words.
This book recounts his convalescence in 1914 in a northern field hospital. It is a raw book. But particularly violent. Can you explain this to us?
It’s partly autobiographical. The book begins when Ferdinand, Celine’s character, is wounded and wakes up on the battlefield among his dead comrades. He drags himself through the countryside to join his unit, he is picked up by soldiers and taken to the hospital where he is going to be treated. In this novel, what is very present is death, war. He hears the shelling in the distance, he has been injured in the head and he feels a buzzing in his head that he will feel all his life. Céline said it, there is a large part of reality. “
He writes: ‘I caught the war in my head’. This sentence sums up the work as it is.”
Pascal Fouché, historianat franceinfo
He is very deeply marked by this episode. We think he wrote it around 1934, so 20 years later, and we feel that it is still deeply marked. We know that he feared the arrival of the Second World War.