Death on Credit Read online

One critic calls Céline’s world a river of muck with a luminous surface. True, the grime and the glow are both present, but especially in Death on Credit, one is inclined to ask: which is the body of the stream and which the surface?

  For all his insistence on truth Céline was not a realist. André Gide once said that he wrote not out of reality but of the hallucinations provoked by reality. Céline himself spoke of transposition “to the plane of delirium”, of a method of capturing emotions, not objects. He never describes, never relates “objectively” what happened. Things and events become inseparable from the emotions they arouse – hate, disgust, suspicion, wonderment, naive enthusiasm, tenderness, nostalgia, even love – and laughter, a great deal of laughter, intermingled with everything else, enhancing, tempering or calling into question. Céline spoke of his manner as “comic lyricism”, and this lyrical attitude toward fact is characteristic of him. Once when questioned about the details of his early life, he said “That’s of no importance. Anyway you can find it all in Journey and in Death on Credit.” But in Journey Bardamu-Céline makes the trip from Africa to New York in chains, aboard a galley! In Death on Credit, to cite only one example, Ferdinand refuses with striking success to learn English during his stay in England, whereas young Destouches, who also spent some months in England, learnt the language very well. Almost all Céline’s books are, in form at least, “autobiographical”; his biography remains obscure except for the barest framework.

  In the opening pages of Death on Credit Céline states his intentions by introducing the narrator, the “I”, who will be telling the story of Ferdinand’s childhood and early adolescence. This “I” appears to be Céline’s literary personality or pose, a prolongation of the Bardamu of Journey to the End of the Night. He is gloomy, downtrodden, disabused, a doctor but also a poet, a latter-day François Villon. Unlike Dr Destouches, who by all accounts was devoted to medicine and his patients, the narrator looks on medicine as a fascinating nightmare at best, and regards his patients as “pests”. Ferdinand is this man as a child – though one wonders in view of his recalcitrance and bewilderment how he ever got through medical school.

  A head wound incurred in the war has left the narrator with a tendency to delirium, reflected in such hallucinations as the orgiastic stampede from the Bois to the Place de la Concorde and the sea voyage over the rooftops of Paris. Further on, Ferdinand has similar delirious visions, so similar that one wonders whose delirium it is – whether it is brought on by Ferdinand’s fever or by the narrator’s wound. But the narrator’s delirium is programmatic: its function goes far beyond Ferdinand’s explicit fevers. It is a manifesto for Céline’s “comic lyricism”, his method of transposing “to the plane of delirium”.

  The narrator is a storyteller. He entertains Mme Vitruve and her niece Mireille with his stories, and he is at work on a book, The Legend of King Krogold, a mock-medieval romance. It too, with its delirious pageantry, its lyricism, its mixture of persiflage and monumental horror, is a statement of the author’s intention. The narrator – and the boy Ferdinand, who inherits the Legend from his adult self – escapes into it from the meanness and boredom of daily life. In Céline, however, legend is far more than an escape: it engulfs all life, the daily as well as the exceptional. “There is no softness or gentleness in this world,” says Death to Prince Gwendor. “All kingdoms end in a dream.”

  Another programmatic trait in the narrator is his persecution mania. He suspects all manner of plots against him at home, in the neighbourhood, at the clinic where he works. Ferdinand in turn is a victim. If we take his story of his childhood – it is “his” story because by a magical effect of style the narrator becomes Ferdinand – at its face value, he never did anything wrong. Others, the crumminess of people, are responsible for all his troubles. Yet he feels guilty. He knows – though he never stops projecting his guilt outwards – that his laziness and mulishness have something to do with it. He makes fun of his father, who blames everything on the Jews, the Freemasons and the Japanese, but his own outlook, the suspicion and distrust that make him so unyielding, is not very different.

  Death on Credit – this lyrical autobiography in which impressions and emotions overshadow fact and in which the distortions of memory, far from being corrected are jealously preserved, witness the mounds of artichokes in the food shops of Rochester, England – is the story of a boy who grew up with this century of progress. Department stores, motorcars and airplanes are coming in. Fine craftsmanship, small shops and spherical balloons are going out. The boy is avid for freedom, a notion there is very little place for in his home or in the shops where he tries to earn his keep. His struggle with his parents and his bosses ends in disaster. He is temporarily saved by his encounter with a different kind of boss – a bohemian, an editor, a universal inventor – who opens up the heavens and the streets of science to him, though in his character and way of life he is no better than anybody else. But progress is inexorable; forces real and occult carry the universal genius to his doom.

  Céline often said that he regarded himself primarily as a stylist. He wrote with great care and the apparent disorder of his style is a well-laid trap. He held that the French literary language was stiff and spent with age, that classicism and academicism had emasculated the language of Villon and Rabelais, and that in our age emotion could be captured only in the spoken tongue. He regarded his use of popular French as his chief contribution to letters. In Journey to the End of the Night the style – sentence structure, vocabulary – is still relatively literary, though there too a strong popular admixture lends a tone that had never before been heard in French prose. In Death on Credit this spoken style is perfected. It is also in this book that the three dots, which so infuriated academic critics at the time, appear in force; they mark the incompleteness, the abruptness, the sudden shifts of direction characteristic of everyday speech, and signify a declaration of war on the flowing prose period.

  English-language readers who are bored with this brand of punc­tuation, which has unpleasant associations especially in American letters, will observe that in Céline its use is not a sign of vagueness or sloppiness, but rather reflects the agitation, the fast-flying emotion he wished to convey.

  Céline was in love with argot – underworld slang – which in French is extraordinarily rich and hermetic, a complete language; he called it the language of hatred. But Céline’s language is not argot: if it were, only the underworld would be able to read it. It is the language of the common people of the Paris region, a language that continuously absorbs words and phrases of argot, usually after they have been discarded by the underworld. In his use of this medium he is faithful to the spirit, but by no means realistic. He embroiders, transposes, invents new words and corrupts old ones for his own purposes. He employs this richly imaged, down-to-earth, lowdown language in incongruous upper realms, in scientific and philosophical disquisitions, and he mixes it with noble discourse in parodies of noble discourse or for other purposes.

  A more detailed discussion of Céline’s style would have to deal with technical matters of French morphology and syntax, which would be of little interest to English-language readers, or with problems of translation, which would interest only translators. Still, there is one question that may call for an answer: why a new translation?

  I have said that people thirty years ago were shocked by Céline’s subject matter and style. The previous translator was an able craftsman, but he too seems to have been shocked, at least by the style, which he evidently regarded either as a mistake or as conceivable only in French. The three dots and what they stand for are largely eliminated; the swift abrupt ejaculations are transformed into the flowing periods that Céline had rejected; and the language is to a considerable extent ennobled. I have tried to give an idea of Céline’s style.

  – Ralph Manheim, 1966

  Death on Credit

  Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad… I
’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve talked. They haven’t said much. They’ve gone away. They’ve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

  Yesterday, at eight o’clock, Mme Bérenge, the concierge, died. A great storm rises up from the night. Way up here where we are, the whole house is shaking. She was a good friend, gentle and faithful. Tomorrow they’re going to bury her in the cemetery on the Rue des Saules. She was really old, at the very end of old age. The first day she coughed I said to her: “Whatever you do, don’t stretch out. Sit up in bed.” I was worried. Well, now it’s happened… anyway, it couldn’t be helped…

  I haven’t always practised medicine… this shit. I’ll write to the people who’ve known her, who’ve known me, and tell them that Mme Bérenge is dead. Where are they?

  I wish the storm would make even more of a clatter, I wish the roofs would cave in, that spring would never come again, that the house would blow down.

  Mme Bérenge knew that grief always comes in the mail. I don’t know whom to write to any more… Those people are all so far away… They’ve changed their souls, that’s a way to be disloyal, to forget, to keep talking about something else…

  Poor old Mme Bérenge, they’ll come and take her cross-eyed dog away.

  For almost twenty years, all the sadness that comes by mail passed through her hands. It lingers on in the smell of her death, in that awful sour taste. It has burst out… it’s here… it’s skulking. It knows us and now we know it. It will never go away. Someone will have to put out the fire in the lodge. Whom will I write to? I’ve nobody left. No one to receive the friendly spirits of the dead… to speak more softly to the world… I’ll have to bear it all alone.

  Towards the end my old concierge was unable to speak. She was suffocating, she clung to my hand… The postman came in. He saw her die. A little hiccup. That’s all. In the old days, lots of people used to knock on her door and ask for me. Now they’re gone, far away into forgetfulness, trying to find souls for themselves. The postman took off his cap. Me, I could vent all my hatred. I know. I’ll do that later on if they don’t come back. I’d rather tell stories. I’ll tell stories that will make them come back, just to kill me, from the ends of the world. Then it will be over and that will be all right with me.

  * * *

  At the clinic where I work, the Linuty Foundation, I’ve had thousands of complaints about the stories I tell… My cousin Gustin Sabayot makes no bones about it, he says I should change my style. He’s a doctor too, but he works across the Seine, at La Chapelle-Jonction. I didn’t have time to go see him yesterday. The fact is I wanted to talk to him about Mme Bérenge. I got started too late. It’s a tough one our job, seeing patients. At the end of the day we’re both pooped. Most of the patients ask such tedious questions. It’s no use trying to hurry, you’ve got to explain everything in the prescription twenty times over. They get a kick out of making you talk, wearing you down… They’re not going to make any use of the wonderful advice you give them, none at all. But they’re afraid you won’t take trouble enough, and they keep at you to make sure; it’s suction cups, X-rays, blood tests… they want you to feel them from top to toe… to measure everything, to take their blood pressure, the whole damn works. Gustin, he’s been at it for thirty years at La Jonction. One of these days I think I’m going to send those pests of mine to the slaughterhouse at La Villette for a good drink of warm blood, first thing in the morning. That ought to knock them out for the day. I can’t think of any other way to discourage them…

  The day before yesterday I finally decided to go and see ol’ Gustin at home. His neck of the woods is a twenty-minute walk from my place once you’ve crossed the Seine. The weather wasn’t so good. But I start out just the same. I tell myself I’ll take the bus. I hurry through my consultation. I slip out past the accident ward when an old bag spots me and latches on to me. She drags out her words, like me. That comes of fatigue. Her voice grates. That’s the liquor. She starts whining and whimpering, she wants me to go home with her. “Oh, Doctor, please come, I beg of you!… My little girl, my Alice!… It’s on the Rue Rancienne, just around the corner…” I didn’t have to go. My office hours were over, supposedly!… She insists… By that time we’re outside… I’m fed up with sick people; I’ve been patching up those pests all day, thirty of them… I’m all in. Let them cough! Let them spit! Let their bones fall apart!… Let them bugger each other! Let them fly away with forty different gases in their guts!… To hell with them!… But this snivelling bitch holds me tight, falls on my neck, and blows her despair in my face. It reeks of red wine… I haven’t the strength to resist. She won’t go away. Maybe when we get to the Rue des Casses, which is a long street without a single lamp, I’ll give her a good kick in the arse… Again I weaken… I chicken out… And the record starts up again. “My little girl!… Please, Doctor, please! My little Alice… You know her?” The Rue Rancienne isn’t around the corner… It’s completely out of my way… I know it. It’s after the cable factory… She’s still talking, and I listen through my private haze… “Eighty-two francs a week… that’s all we’ve got to live on… with two children!… And my husband is such a brute!… It’s shameful, Doctor!…”

  I know it’s all a lot of hokum. Her whole story stank of booze and sour stomach.

  By that time we’d got to their digs…

  I climb the stairs. At last I could sit down… The little kid wears glasses.

  I sit down beside her bed. She’s still playing with her doll, kind of. I try to cheer her up. I’m always good for a laugh when I put my mind to it… She’s not dying, the brat… She has trouble breathing… She’s certainly got an inflammation… I make her laugh. She gags. I tell her mother there’s nothing to worry about. The bitch! Now she’s got me cornered, she decides she can use a doctor too. It’s her legs, all covered with black-and-blue marks where she’s been beaten. She hikes up her skirts. Enormous bruises and deep burns. Her unemployed husband did that with the poker. That’s the way he is. I give her some advice… I take a piece of string and make a kind of swing for the miserable doll… Up and down she goes, from the bed to the doorknob and back… it’s better than talking.

  I apply the stethoscope. She’s wheezing pretty bad, but it’s nothing dangerous… I give reassurances again. I say the same words twice. That’s what gets you down. The kid begins to laugh. She gags again. I have to stop. Her face is all blue… Mightn’t she have a little diphtheria? I’ll have to see… Take a specimen?… Tomorrow!…

  The dad comes in. With his eighty-two francs they can’t afford wine, they’re stuck with cider. “I drink it out of a bowl,” he says right off the bat. “It makes you piss.” And he takes a swig from the bottle. He shows me… We all say how lucky it is that the little angel isn’t too sick. What interests me most is the doll… I’m too tired to bother about grown-ups and diagnoses. Grown-ups are a pain in the arse! I won’t treat a single one until next day.

  I don’t give a damn that they think I don’t take my work seriously. I drink their health again. The consultation is free, absolutely com­plimentary. The mother brings up her legs again. I give her a last piece of advice. Then I go down the stairs. On the pavement there’s a little dog with a limp. He follows me without a moment’s hesitation. Everything sticks to me today. It’s a little fox terrier, black and white. Seems to be lost. Those unemployed punks upstairs, what ingratitude! They don’t even see me to the door. I bet they’re fighting again. I can hear them yelling. He can stick the whole poker up her ass for all I care. That’ll teach her to bother me!

  Presently I turn off to the left… towards Colombes pretty much. The little dog is still following me… After Asnières comes La Jonction, and then my cousin’s. But the dog is limping heavily. He’s staring at me. I couldn’t stand seeing him drag along like that. Maybe I’d better go home after all. We turned back by way of the Pont B
ineau, skirting the row of factories. The dispensary wasn’t quite shut when we got there… “We’ll feed the little mutt,” I said to Mme Hortense. “Somebody’ll have to get some meat… We’ll call up first thing in the morning. The SPCA will send a car for him. We’d better lock him up for tonight.” Then I went out again, easy in my mind. But that dog was too scared. He’d been beaten too much. Life is hard on the streets. When we opened the window next day, he wouldn’t wait, he jumped out, he was even afraid of us. He thought we’d punished him. He couldn’t understand. He didn’t trust anybody any more. It’s terrible when that happens.

  * * *

  Gustin knows me well. When he’s sober, he has good ideas. He is an expert in questions of style. His judgements are reliable. There’s no jealousy in him. He doesn’t ask much of this world. He’s got an old sorrow… disappointment in love. He doesn’t want to forget it. He seldom talks about it. She was a floozie. Gustin is good as gold. He’ll never change till his dying day.

  Meanwhile he drinks a little bit…

  Me, my trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I’d never have written a line…

  “You could talk about something pleasant now and then.” That was Gustin’s opinion. “Life isn’t always disgusting.” In a way he’s right. With me it’s kind of a mania, a bias. The fact is that in the days when I had that buzzing in both ears, even worse than now, and attacks of fever all day long, I wasn’t half so gloomy… I had lovely dreams… Mme Vitruve, my secretary, was talking about it only the other day. She knew how I tormented myself. When a man’s so generous, he squanders his treasures, loses sight of them. I said to myself: “That damn Vitruve, she’s hidden them some place…” Real marvels they were… bits of Legend, pure delight… That’s the kind of stuff I’m going to write from now on… To make sure, I rummage through my papers… I can’t find a thing… I call Delumelle, my agent; I want to make him my worst enemy… to make him groan under my insults… It takes a lot to faze him!… He doesn’t give a damn! He’s loaded. All he says is that I need a holiday… Finally old Vitruve comes in. I don’t trust her. I have very sound reasons. I light into her, point-blank: where did you put my masterpiece? I had several hundred reasons for suspecting her…