Guignol's Band Read online

  Other books by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  published by Alma Classics

  Death on Credit

  Journey to the End of the Night

  London Bridge (Guignol’s Band II)

  Guignol’s Band

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline

  Translated by

  Bernard Frechtman

  and

  Jack Nile

  ALMA CLASSICS

  alma classics

  an imprint of

  alma books ltd

  3 Castle Yard

  Richmond

  Surrey TW10 6TF

  United Kingdom

  www.almaclassics.com

  Guignol’s Band first published in French in 1944

  This translation first published in the USA by New Directions Publishing Corporation in 1954

  First published by Alma Classics in 2012. Repr. 2017

  © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1952

  Translation © New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1954

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  isbn: 978-1-84749-199-2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Guignol’s Band

  Notes

  Introduction

  Readers, friends, less than friends, enemies, Critics! Here I am at it again with Book I of Guignol! Don’t judge me too soon! Wait awhile for what’s to follow! Book II! Book III! It all clears up! Develops, straightens out! As is, three quarters of it’s missing! Is that a way to do things? It had to be printed fast because with things as they are you don’t know who’s living or dead! Denoël?* You? Me?… I was off for 1,200 pages! Just imagine!

  “Oh! It’s good he’s letting us know! We’ll never buy the rest of it! What a crook! What a botched book! What a bore! What a guignol! What a slob! What a traitor! What a Jew!”

  Everything.

  I know, I know, I’m used to it… that’s my music!

  I give everyone a pain in the arse.

  And what if they study it in school in two hundred years, and the Chinese too? What’ll you say then?

  “Take it easy! Wise guy! What about the three dots? Ah! All over the place again! An outrage! He’s butchering the French language! It’s scandalous! Into jail! Give us back our dough! Nauseating! He’s damaging our complements! The pig! Ah! Things are bad!”

  An awful session!

  “Unreadable! Sex maniac! Damned Loafer! Crook!”

  For the time being.

  Here comes Denoël, beside himself!…

  “See here, I don’t understand it at all! It’s terrible! Impossible! All I see in your book is brawling! It’s not even a book! We’re heading straight for disaster! Neither head nor tail!”

  I could bring him King Lear so he could see massacres.

  What does he see in existence?

  And then it cools off… everyone gets used to it!… It all works out… Till the next time!

  The same cackle every time. A lot of yelling and then it calms down. They never like what you give them. It hurts them! Oooooh! Or it’s too long!… It bores them!… always something!… It’s never what they want! And then they suddenly go wild about it! Try to figure them out! Go get all hot and bothered! All a matter of whim! I expect it to take a good year to ripen… let everyone have his say, spit out his bile, shoot his mouth off, overflow… Then silence… and a hundred, two hundred thousand buy it… on the sly… and read it… and squabble… twenty thousand adore it, learn it by heart… it’s the Panthéon.

  The same scenario every time.

  Death on Credit was received, please remember, by a barrage of intensity, snarling and spleen, such as you seldom see! The whole works, the dregs of criticism, out-and-out swearing, churchgoers, masons, Jews, men and women, four-eyes, whisperers, athletes, arse-scratchers, the whole Legion, all standing up, wild-looking, foaming gibberish!

  The finishing shot!

  And then it subsides and now, you see, Death on Credit is more popular than Journey. He’s even gobbling up all our paper! He’s outrageous!

  So it goes…

  “Oh! But there’s the word ‘shit’! Coarseness! That’s what attracts your clientele!”

  “Oh! I see you a mile off! It’s easy to talk! Got to know when to say it! Just try! Not everyone can shit right! It would be too easy!”

  I’m giving you some idea of how things stand. I’m taking you backstage so you won’t get any illusions… I had some in the beginning… but not now… experience…

  It’s even funny, they jabber and get all worked up… arguing yes and no about the three dots… whether you’re making damned fools of them… and now one thing and then another… what airs he puts on!… The affectation… etc.… and so on… and the commas!… But no one asks me what I think!… And they make comparisons… I’m not jealous, please believe me!… I really don’t give a damn! So much the better for other books!… But I just can’t read them… I find them sketchy, not written, stillborn, neither finished nor likely to be, lifeless… they’re not much… or else they live on phrases, all hideous and black, ink-heavy, phrasish deaths, rhetorish deaths. Ah! It’s pretty sad! Matter of taste.

  To hell with the invalid! you’ll say to yourself… I’ll let you have my ailment, you won’t be able to read a single sentence! And since we’re on secrets, I’m going to let you in on another one… appalling, oh my, horrible!… Really, absolutely deadly… that I’d rather share right away!… And that warped my whole life…

  Got to admit to you about my grandfather, named Auguste Destouches, he went in for rhetoric, was even professor of it at the lycée in Le Havre, and was brilliant at it, around 1855.

  Which means I distrust it bad! Maybe an innate tendency!

  I’ve got all of Grandfather’s writings, his bundles of them, his rough drafts, drawerfuls! Terrific! He used to write the prefect’s speeches, I assure you, in one hell of a style! What a hand with adjectives! How he stuck in the flowers! Never a faux pas! Moss and vine leaves! Sons of the Gracchi! Maxims and everything! In prose and verse alike! He won all the medals of the French Academy.

  I keep them with strong emotion.

  That’s my ancestor! So I know something about the language, and not since yesterday like lots of others! I’m telling you right away! Down to the fine points!

  I crapped out all my “effects”, my “litotes” and my “pertinences” into my nappies…

  I’m through with them! They’d be the death of me! My grandfather Auguste agrees. He says to me from up above, he calls down to me from the sky, “Child, no phrases.”

  He knows what’s needed to make it tick. I’m making it tick!

  Ah! I’m intransigent, something fierce! If I ever fell into “full stops” again… three dots! Ten! Twelve dots! Help! Nothing at all if necessary! That’s how I am!

  Jazz knocked out the waltz, impressionism killed “fauxjour”, you’ll write in “telegraphic” or you won’t write at all:

  Excitement’s everything in life!

  Got to know how to use it!

  Excitement’s everything in life!

  When you’re dead it’s over!

&nb
sp; Up to you to understand! Get hot! “There’s nothing but brawls in all your chapters!” What an objection! What crap! Watch out! Dopiness! By the yard! Fluttery twittering! Go get God excited! Rub-a-dub-dub! Jump! Wiggle! Bust out of your shell! Use your bean, you little hustlers! Break open! Palpitate, damn it! That’s where the fun is! All right! Something! Wake up! Come on, hello! You robot crap! Shit! Transpose or it’s death!

  I can’t do any more for you.

  Kiss any girl you please! If there’s still time! Here’s to you! If you live! The rest’ll come all by itself! Happiness, health, grace and fun! Don’t worry too much about me! Set your little heart going!

  It’ll be whatever you put into it! Storm or flute! As in hell! As in heaven!

  Guignol’s Band

  Boom! Zoom!… It’s the big smash-up!… The whole street caving in at the waterfront!… It’s Orléans crumbling and thunder in the Grand Café!… A table sails by and splits the air!… Marble bird!… Spins round, shatters a window to splinters!… A houseful of furniture rocks, spurts from the casements, scatters in a rain of fire!… The proud bridge, twelve arches, staggers, topples smack into the mud. The slime of the river splatters!… Mashes, splashes the mob yelling choking overflowing at the parapet!… It’s pretty bad…

  Our jalopy baulks, shivers, squeezed diagonally on the pavement between three trucks, drifts, hiccups, it’s dead! Fagged engine! Been warning us since Colombes that she can’t hold out! With a hundred asthmatic wheezes… She was born for normal service… not for a hell-hunt!… The whole mob fuming at our heels because we’re not moving… That we’re a lousy calamity!… That’s an idea!… The two hundred eighteen thousand trucks, tanks and handcarts massed and melted in the horror, straddling one another to get by first, arse over heels, the bridge crumbling, are tangled up, ripping each other, squashing wildly… Only a bicycle gets away and without the handlebar…

  Things are bad!… The world’s collapsing!…

  “Stop blocking the way you lousy pigs! Go take a crap you slimy lice!”

  Not everything’s said! Or carried out! Still things to do!… Pirouette!

  The engineering officer’s preparing something! Another blast of thunder! Sets the fuse at the small end… It’s a demon!… But suddenly his gadget roars out and crackles right between his fingers!… The whole shebang blasts him, pours on him, tears him apart, somersaults him wildly away… The column gets going, the motors are all roaring and spitting in an unhearable din!… Terrifying remarks and blasphemies!…

  Everything! The carcasses! The junk! The tanks! Piles upon the crunching and rattling caterpillar guns that smash all interference under the direction of a quartermaster! It’s the saraband of fright, the fair under the crawling-dislocating thunder! It’s the rubber man who wins! Ah! Hooray for the cosmic scoundrel, the unscrupulous bachelor with the corkscrew bicycle, the armoured stinker!…

  The Fritz is peppering away like mad, swooping down from the skies! The louse! He’s bzzbzzing us! he’s sprinkling us from the summits, he’s enveloping us, he’s whirring at us!… It’s the fury of murder, wild volleys and raging stabs! Ricocheting all about! He’s watering us, spilling us to death! And then he starts us up again, he’s getting a big kick out of our dance! Out of our stung and swaying rage! We’re stuck all right! A shell! Three enormous ones!… Fright! And much too heavy! And one after the other!… The earth’s dying upside down!… Losing strength, shivering, groaning in the distance, out of hearing… as far as the low and gentle hillsides! Bust, echo! Bust, bomb! No mistake! It’s getting worse!… We’re going to die mashed up!… Like bedbugs!… Choking sulphurations! Massed in the saltpetre, ravaging combustions! The dunghill’s raving! He’s eager up there!… He’s sore about our trouble! The awful plane! He’s sugaring us again! And three loopings! And hail falls!… A frying in the atmosphere! The cobblestones full of bull’s-eyes!… The lady who got one in the back hugs a sheep lying there, shuffles off with it under the axles, creeps and convulses… farther off… grimaces, collapses, knocked over, her arms stretched like a cross… groans… stops moving!…

  The ambulance, our ship of grace, can’t make the big cobblestones, skids, shimmies, wobbles, loses all its bolts, bumps into a flock of oxen, stallions, fowls, and then plops… a cart smacks it right in the arse… Bang!… The shock sends two tricycles flying, plus a nun and a policeman… it’s the moment of absolution… all that on the bridge! Look at the poor auto lifted by the wind of the torpedoes twenty yards away! Horrible flight! And then two steps and two burps… There she is rolling down in the whirlwind of the slaughter… The mob catches up with us… squeezes us… The engine’s racing to get the hell away… They’re frisking us, they’re hugging us fiercely! Our vehicle’s getting damned sore… We’re being hoisted in triumph!… Scaling over heads!… Roosting up there over the crowd… Bam!… Bang!… Three tough strikes! We flop! A “twelve-ton” truck full of railmen whacks us from the other side! Ah! made it!… Pushed around, torn from the tide! We’re knocked apart right in the middle of the mess!… The ambulance loses its front wheels!… The surging scatters us to bits!… It’s the turn of a baby carriage being carried away over our heads!… A little soldier’s lolling in it! His leg hanging out in shreds… pretty slick… damned little soldier boy! He’s making obscene gestures… We’re having fun with him! We’re all together in the atmosphere!… All seething in the whirl!… That devil up there’s sore at us… He’s coming back… strafing us like a tornado!… Tobogganing down on us, blazing away, spurting out all his lightning… The savage is cutting our heads off… the swine!… He’s sweeping us into his belly! Into his murderous din!… He’s climbing back very tiny into the clouds!… He turns about on the ceiling! A fly!…

  Who’s that dead in the gutter? They’re stumbling over it, it’s soft!… There’s a belly there! Wide open and the foot and leg twisted, folded in… One of Death’s acrobats!… Blasted on the spot!

  Zoom! Zoom! There’s no time to think!… Two enormous thuds… It’s the big river being hit downstream! The smooth water’s drinking two giant torpedoes!… That makes two wild corollas for it!… Two astounding water-volcano flowers!… It all falls back… cascades over the bridge… We’re crushed under the spout, soaked, rolled, flattened by the cyclone… vomited back… the mob catches up with us, sticks to us… and then they open fire again… It’s cannon getting at us… The parapet’s full of flashes… It must be coming from the little clouds over the church! Must be a reconnaissance flight… Other airmen trying to finish us up!… They don’t give a damn, men, cattle or things!… They’re French or German!… The situation’s getting critical… My soaked clothes feel boiling… Confusion’s at its height?… A mother in tears on the parapet wants to throw herself into the abyss with her three little children!… Seven workmen interfere and hold her back… cool brave chaps… They first finish their ham and brawn!… Just let them dare touch her! she shrieks! Such a terrifying shrill clamour that it blots out the other noises!… You’re forced to look at her!… A shell… Bam! Hitting the bridge!… The main arch blows up, splinters… Digs a hollow in the middle… an enormous gaping… a crater that swallows up everything!… The people melt and ram the crevices… topple beneath the bitter smoke… into a hurricane of dust!… You can see a colonel, of Zouaves I think, floundering in the cataract… He succumbs beneath the weight of the corpses!… Topples down to the bottom!… “Vive la France!” he finally cries… vanquished beneath the pile of bodies!… There’re others alive who grab on to the walls of the gulf, they’re in rags because of the explosion, they make desperate efforts, fall down, they puke, they’re through… They’ve been burnt everywhere. A baby all naked surges up on the hood of a flaming truck. He’s roasted, done to a turn… “Good God!… Good God!… Shit! It’s not right!”… It’s the father in a sweat… Those are his very words… Then he looks for something to drink!… He yells at me if I’ve got anything… Canteen? Canteen?

 
The music’s not over, another archangel’s peppering us, swooping down from the sky at full speed… He tires us with his ravaging… We’re so crammed that we stop moving… The bridge is rumbling… wobbling on its arches!… And then tick-tock! Rrooo! Rrooo!… It’s the music of the big slaughter! The sky’s rattling with rage against us!… The water from underneath… And then the abyss!… It all blows up!…

  Everything I’m telling you’s exact… There’s a lot more besides!… But my memory’s out of breath! Too many people have walked over it… like the bridge… over the memories… as over the days!… Too many people yelling battle!… And then the smoke again… And I dive under the car… I’m telling it the way I’m thinking… Going down towards the floodgates, they were carousing something fantastic as far as the Orléans ramp!… They were dancing worse than on the other, a hundred thousand times worse than the one in Avignon!… In the forge of God’s Thunder!… And boom! And zimm! And St Mary! And dead and dead! In the Hurricane Ball!… Look!… Look!… Unimportant!… Even the world there turned inside out, an old, soft, broken-down umbrella!… It drifted in the cyclones!… Too bad!… Rrpp!… And Bing!… Boom!… I saw it passing over the Grand Hôtel! It was going fine! I saw it drifting… swaying up there… frolicking in the clouds!… The brolly and the main span! They were spinning around in the flurry… together!… Among the massacring, purulent planes, squirting gunfire… Rraap!… Whah!… Rraango!… Whah!… Rroong!… That’s about the noise made by a real molten torpedo… the most enormous! In the heart of a black and green volcano!… What a burst of fire!… Another bomb grazing us! Goes exploding right into the current… The blast rocks us… Your guts all ripped out… Your heart popping into your mouth!… Palpitating like a rabbit… What shame, shitting with fright… crawling… under the ammunition trucks with three… four… five legs all wound up… Arms everywhere all mixed up… smashed, melted into jitters! Into a pulp of panic-mad slugs everyone for himself!… Sunk, wallowing, hiccuping, you come to, tossing in the air, ripped apart, shrunk, shot the hell away! Head over heels! It’s a motor about to catch fire!… We scale a mountain of wounded… Thick groans beneath our feet!… They puke… We’re lucky! It’s a favour!… We emerge! Groggy, smiling… Another one attacking us! He’s swooping down, a death drum! He smashes the clouds with bullets… His little tongues of fire shoot forth everywhere!… I see all his flames pointed at us… It’s grey and black!… And cursed from head to tail!… He’s looking for us… He catapults from the sky with a volley of rage!… He’s bewitching us!… He’s damning us!… We throw ourselves on our knees… We beg the Virgin Mary!… With big fervent signs of the cross!… God the Father… the north winds! The arsehole!… Mercy upon us! Which fails us in our gurgling drawers… It’s the fall of the Spirits!… He keeps shooting away at us, volley after volley each one worse! Hanging from the angels!… He flits about… bolts forward… wavers… He’s closing in inside his cyclone… Ffrroo!… He’s gliding again… A silky noise!… We stop seeing him… He’s enchanting us!… A sign of the cross!… Three… four… five!… That doesn’t stop the horrors!… The murderous atrocities!… No conjuring him away!… He sugars us again from leeward! We’re going to get the whole works!… He’s at the height of his passion… He’s hailing us… blasting us… on the wing!… It’s the ricochets of the massacre!… The sheet metal’s drumming away!… The suppliants swoon and collapse!… The mob’s capsizing!… The convoy gives way!… The parapet splits!… The string of trucks starts kicking up… rioting… and pitches into the water!… Ah! I’m still being spared!… Got away from an awful upset!… It’s been that way for twenty-two years!… It can’t last for ever!… I take a stance with Lisette, a girlfriend who’s not scared… between the wheels of the ambulance… you see the cavalcade from there!… All of it! All!… Capsizing in all directions… We also see Largot the barber, he hasn’t left us since Bezons, he’s been following us with his bike… He’s been drunk since Juvisy, he wanted to kill a German, but he hasn’t talked about it since Étampes… There he is against the parapet… He’s squeezing a grandmother in his arms… He kisses her at every explosion… In the throbbing of the motors… An old woman with white hair… in wisps, braids and curl papers… Her whole head’s bleeding red… Largot’s gentle with her… He’s drinking her blood… He’s lost his sense of respect… but he’s stubborn, greedy…