In the spring of 1944, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) was a hunted man. Close to collaborationist circles, a violent anti-Semitic pamphleteer, the author of journey to the Edge of the Night (1932, Renaudot prize), one of the strongest novels of the XXe century, smells like hot soup. Since the beginning of the year, the Allies have been bombarding Paris, rumors of a landing on the coasts of France are multiplying and Rome is about to be liberated.
Céline, who does not have a clear conscience, now moves through the streets of Paris with a gun and plans to flee. Switzerland ? Spain? It will rather be Denmark, via Baden-Baden, in Germany.
To give the impression that he is going on vacation – with his wife Lucette, their cat Bébert and two ampoules of cyanide – Céline leaves her apartment in Montmartre on June 17 with very little luggage, leaving above a cupboard a pile of unfinished manuscripts (more than 6,000 leaves), including those of The Ilegend of king krogold and fragments of pipe breaker.
All these manuscripts will disappear when Paris is liberated. Almost 80 years later, in the summer of 2021, they will resurface in circumstances that are both mysterious and bizarre.
A missing link
A year later, the publication of War is indeed a major event. A sort of missing link in Céline’s work, which fills a void in the author’s life. Two hundred and fifty feverish and largely autobiographical pages, written, it seems, in 1934. Gallimard has already announced the publication of LondonFollowing Warfor next fall.
There showing all the horror and the absurdity of the war, Céline comes back longer than in the opening of the journey to the Edge of the Night on his experience of the First World War, when he was a young quartermaster, seriously injured in the arm and head in November 1914 in Flanders.
“I caught the war in my head”, says Ferdinand, the narrator, at the very beginning of War, as he wakes up lying on the ground, bloody, in the middle of “a molasses full of shells whistling past”. Corpses, disembowelled horses, smells of “advanced meat” and burning, tinnitus.
Hospitalized after this little apocalypse, closely consoled by a nurse, L’Espinasse, who comes to jerk off her favorite patient at night, Ferdinand slowly recovers from his injuries, while being afraid of going to a court martial and being shot. — what will happen to Cascade, his roommate, a vaguely anarchist pimp, for willful mutilation.
“I had learned in two months almost all the noises of the earth and of men”, he writes about this experience which sounds the death knell of his youth: chaos, absurdity, moral flexibility. Sometimes salacious novel, pornographic limit as in Death on credit (1936), sexuality is omnipresent there, like an antidote to death and physical suffering.
It’s worth reading and it’s great. And it’s in tune with the war as Céline already told it in the Travel “An immense, universal mockery. »