Black Angel

By Melvin Maddocks

CELINE by PATRICK MCCARTHY 352 pages. Viking. $10.

One morning in 1932, Robert Denoel, partner in a small Paris publishing house, found on his desk an anonymously delivered brown paper parcel. The 500-plus-page manuscript it contained proved to be quite possibly the most vital --and certainly the most controversial --French novel since Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (translated as Journey to the End of Night) is as un-Proustian as a novel can be. Its scenes are the battlefields of World War I, hospital wards, lunatic asylums. The mysterious author's protagonist-narrator is a most reluctant soldier and postwar wanderer named Bardamu. Murderers, wife beaters and abortionists appear as ordinary characters in Journey. Its language--French jangled into street argot--is a kind of frenzied shorthand of pain, terror and hate.

What night is Bardamu journeying toward? Some ultimate darkness, some ultimate evil in the world, or perhaps in himself. A death-beyond-death--an annihilation not only of the body by war but of the personality by peace. "The truth of this world is to die," says Bardamu. But he wrestles with his black angel so fiercely that the result is art --showing that violent, capering, irresistible energy that the 20th century accepts as an enormous attachment to life.

When Denoel, bludgeoned and awed by his unsolicited masterpiece, finally tracked down its author, he turned out to be equally original. In this persistent rather than brilliant biography, British Scholar Patrick McCarthy (who now teaches at Haverford College) patiently matches the manuscript to the man.

Petit Bourgeois. At the time he finished Journey, Celine, born Louis-Ferdinand Detouches, was nearly 40. A doctor, he worked the night shift at the municipal clinic in the poor district of Clichy, attending to prostitutes and alcoholics and patching up men smashed in street fights. Nobody looked less like a novelist. "A big devil with an inscrutable face and a scornful mouth," he reminded acquaintances of "a cafe owner on holiday."

The facts of Celine's life can be read more or less surrealistically in Journey and in his second masterpiece Mort a Credit (translated as Death on the Installment Plan), which is, among other things, a merciless recollection of boyhood and family life. "I was born in a shop," he liked to say, referring to his mother's modest lacemaking establishment; for all his rebellion, an incorrigible petit bourgeois, pinching every franc, lived within Celine. At 14 he dropped out of school and worked at a silk shop and as an errand boy. In the evenings, eyes "burning with lack of sleep," as he recalled, he studied on his own, managing to pass the difficult exam for a baccalaureat degree.

In 1913, when Celine was 19, he enlisted in the cavalry and was wounded --in the arm, not the head, as he often claimed. After World War I he worked on a Rockefeller Institute project in France as an anti-TB propagandist, screaming at Breton villagers to boil their milk. He got into medical school, it was rumored, only by marrying the daughter of the head of the faculty.

Like his characters, Celine traveled feverishly--to Africa, to the U.S., to the Soviet Union. His apartments were disorderly way stations, dark, impersonal, temporary. He was married twice, the second time in 1943 to a dancer named Lucette Almanzor. But he moved from woman to woman, including prostitutes, with a restlessness not to be accounted for by sexual appetite. He even wrote like a transient, pinning his pages together by clothespins, then tossing them into boxes.

Anti-Semitism. During World War II, after serving briefly as ship's doctor, Celine became a man without a country by collaborating with the Nazis to a still debatable extent. What is beyond debate: Celine's virulent antiSemitism. When the Third Reich collapsed, he fled to Denmark, but spent more than a year in prison anyway. (All this provided the material for a final trilogy, Castle to Castle, North and Rigadoon.) Granted amnesty in 1951, he returned home and settled down to practice medicine and write in Meudon, a suburb of Paris where Rabelais once lived. The Chinese replaced the Jews as his scapegoats. He also hated De Gaulle, television and Franchise Sagan. He died in 1961.

All his life he was consistently kind only to patients and animals. He ended up with five dogs, two cats and an unrecorded number of parrots, living behind a barbed-wire fence, half-crippled by arthritis, as if in a state of siege. With impressive fairness in the face of the provocation that is Celine, Biographer McCarthy concludes that just as there is a destructiveness to even the best of Celine, there is a life-force to even the worst. Celine equally deserves the epitaph McCarthy gives him: "He tells stories, he refuses to die."

Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.