Rage Against Life

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, translated by Ralph Manheim. 592 pages. New Directions. $7.50.

For more than 30 years, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who died in disgrace and obscurity in 1961, has been both a scandal and a paradox. This new translation of the second of his two black classics suggests that Death on the Installment Plan should be discovered by a new generation of readers--and reread by those still scandalized and baffled by Celine.

He was a demented anti-Semite, sentenced by a French court to "national degradation" as a Nazi collaborator. Reprieved but unforgiven, he lived his last years as a recluse in a Paris suburb, seeing only his loyal wife. Yet this same man was a hero of World War I for a voluntary exploit in which he suffered a severe head wound. Brain injury left him hallucinated, plagued by noises in his head, an insomniac whose sanity was often questioned. Despite this, he became a physician and, under his real name, Dr. Henri-Louis Destouches, he chose to live among the poor of Paris, often practicing without fee.

Was he a Gallic Streicher or an urban Schweitzer? His books illustrate rather than resolve the paradox. When Journey to the End of the Night detonated on the French literary scene in 1932 (there were riots when it did not receive that year's Prix Goncourt), it was like an explosion of excrement. The doctor who had a profound vocation for healing wrote of his pitiable patients with derision and rage. If he was antiSemitic, he also detested Christians.

Journey was a semiautobiographical story of a doctor, known in the book as Ferdinand Bardamu. "I have spent so many years as a doormat in the service of so many thousands of madmen that my memories alone would fill a whole insane asylum," Celine said. The novel was such an asylum. It seemed less a novel than a charade by a troupe of epileptics--convulsed by spasms of lust, rage, fear and disgust but denied the unconsciousness that is the mercy accorded the epileptic. It was clear to most critics that it was a work of genius.

"Speak? Speak?" Death on the Installment Plan (1936) records an earlier stage in Ferdinand's life and should be nicer reading, but it is not. It is even more painful, coming as it does, closer to the heart of Celine's anguished theme: innocence violated by life. It is the story of one of the most desolate boyhoods in all fiction. The key incident comes at the end of Ferdinand's stay at an English school to which his parents had sent him. He brutally seduces the only person who had shown him affection--Nora, the headmaster's wife--and records her suicide by drowning in the Medway. During the whole time at this school, Ferdinand refuses to utter a single word but raves to himself ferociously: "Speak? Speak? About what? . . . Christ! and all their stinking rottenness, and my buddies and the fags and the floozies and all their lowdown tricks . . ."

Death is no Dickensian satire against a Dotheboys Hall; the boys are as rotten as the masters. Ferdinand's only friend is a cretin named Yongkind who alone is incapable of malice or treachery. But he is made otherwise disgusting: gibbering, fouling his clothes, drinking ink, slavering over his food like a dog; his answer to everything is "Don't worry," or "Right as rain."

Hot Gases. Back with pere et maman in Paris, young Ferdinand's grotesque adventures continue in mad spate. Father is a clerk, a monster of suspicion and self-pity; Mother deals in junk, which she tries to sell as antiques. They are failures, and Ferdinand thrashes them frightfully for it. He throws himself on the mercies of an uncle, who is a friend of Courtial Des Pereires, a prince of crackpots.

Courtial takes on Ferdinand as a "secretary" in a business that becomes the mecca for every meccano-minded nut in France. It is the world of popular mechanics fictionalized. Courtial himself is an idealist and charlatan, infatuated with the possibilities of lighter-than-air travel. For modest fees, he demonstrates balloon ascents to mobs of gawping yokels.

This comic picaresque stuff is so easy to read that the reader might fail to notice Celine's didactic intentions. Courtial is Yongkind, grown up and equipped with a degree from the polytechnic, but the same optimistic cretin. In the person of Courtial, Celine pours all the vitriol of his prose on an age that believed science and progress would confer inestimable benefits upon mankind. Courtial's windy rhetoric on the subject of these benefits is mocked by the hiss of hot gases from his chronically punctured blimp. By the time the first great technological war breaks out, the point of Journey to the End of the Night has already been made: science has many unpleasant surprises as well as goodies in store for all.

Root of Rage. The new Manheim translation makes more accessible to U.S. readers the astonishing virtuosity of Celine's style, which broke out of the formal gavotte of French grammar and syntax--and used all the resources of thieves' argot, slum slang, and the shoptalk of pimps, prostitutes, bums, and pickpockets--to demonstrate the power and quality of his love of life and hatred for those who must live it. Coprological images--excrement, pus, gangrene, all the humiliating ironies of bodily decay--crowded this doctor's mind. Still, his language no longer shocks; today's black comedians, Genet, Burroughs and Terry Southern, seem like mere comics compared to Celine, who has more colors than black.

He makes the reader pick over acres of some vast garbage dump; yet he leaves him with the belief that the mutilated body of someone of great value lies buried in the stinking trash. In English, there has been no one like him since Swift, and in French, there has been no one like him at all. Mad doctors both--in their different ways. Only moral simpletons who have not understood that pity is the cruel emotion will fail to grasp the root of the rage of either man.

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