Anti-Semitic Exercise

For U. S. readers, Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night made strong reading, even in its greatly expurgated translation. But that violent and gory novel is a model of Puritan self-restraint compared with Celine's new, untranslated and probably untranslatable Trifles for a Massacre, current sensation of French literature, in which the novelist's genius for invective, hatred of modern civilization and fertility in cursing it have exploded in an anti-Semitic tirade calculated to end all anti-Semitic tirades, to make Nazis turn green with envy.

What made M. Celine an anti-Semite is explained with Gallic candor in the first 40 pages of Trifles for a Massacre. It appears that at 43, a successful novelist, War hero and practicing physician, Celine suddenly felt a great liking for dancing girls. To get acquainted with these attractive creatures he composed a ballet, filled with dancing shepherds, pure emotions, sweetness & light, and consequently much different from his usual pessimistic and obscene prose. It was rejected. Jewish musicians, actors and production managers, he decided, wanted the girls themselves. For the next 337 pages of Trifles for a Massacre he pours forth his wrath in a prose style of the highest order, bold and original imagery, and Rabelaisian curses no one of which could be printed in the U. S. Hitler and Goebbels are too shy and inhibited to satisfy him; to their usual charges that the Jews control the Communist International and the democratic countries, he adds the unkindest cut of all, says they probably control the fascist countries too. They organize wars, revolutions, panics, famines, inflation and deflation. Growing more lyrical, Celine damns as Jewish, Cezanne, Charles Chaplin, Lenin, Madame Curie, Racine, Montaigne, William Faulkner, Stendhal, Zola, the Vatican, the French general staff, the Catholic clergy, critics, propagandists, politicians, movie producers and the people who rejected his ballet.

When Trifles for a Massacre was published, horrified Left critics who had praised Celine's Journey to the End of the Night damned him as a Fascist. Dissenting, Novelist Andre Gide declared the book should be taken as a joke, although a dangerous one, being virtually a satire on the absurdity and vulgarity of genuine antiSemitism. Bystanding critics found another explanation in the detachment of modern French literature from French life, the tendency of writers like Celine to regard writing as a disinterested mental game, to be played without thought of the social values implicit in their work. In Manhattan last week, big, broad-shouldered, nervous Celine partly confirmed their view, described Trifles' for a Massacre as an "exercise." Admitting that he had written it in the hope of delaying preparation for war, he said it would not delay war a minute, would probably only bring it on a little sooner.

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