“IThere comes a spurt in a certain country, at a certain time, represented by three, four guys, and then, afterwards, a swarm of good people who mean nothing, a myriad of droppings which are everywhere. Well, it’s a bit like what happened in France for Impressionism. There are ten big impressionists, especially three or four very big ones, and then, afterwards, imitators. It’s like fireworks. After that there is nothing. »
So spoke Céline in 1960, a few months before her death. These words, the author of Death on credit hold them to a journalist from Paris Match, Roger Mauge, came to interview him in his house in Meudon, near Paris. Extensive extracts from the interview, which remained unpublished, have just been published by Le Figaro to whom its transcription was entrusted. Céline is on the side of “giclées” and fireworks, certainly, and he does not doubt his genius. He says he dreams of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is understandable. But also the Nobel Peace Prize, which is more daring. “It would get me out of trouble […]. I asked, I ask everywhere. It doesn’t come. But the two Nobels, that would get me out, I would be happy. »
“Nitroglycerin”
We rediscover it here obsessive, logorrheic, vindictive, capable of all excesses, of all absurdities sometimes. We rediscover it brilliant too, very funny in places, and moving. We hear, above all, his raw words. Not the one, underlined in Le Figaro the specialist David Alliot, whom he then reserved for his radio and television appearances, where he took care not to say anything that was (too) compromising. Not that of his correspondence, worked as finely as his literary work. But the words he allowed himself to deliver to curious print journalists during this last period of his life (Céline died on 1er July 1961), to come and see “the beast in its lair”.
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In 1960, however, recalls David Alliot, “Céline was nitroglycerin that the media handled with tweezers”. The war was still recent, the Gaullists were in power: at the same time, an announcer was fired for having mentioned her name on the radio, a deprogrammed literary television program for having considered mentioning her work. Nothing very surprising, too, that the interview given to Match gives rise, in the weekly, to an article which largely waters down the subject and appears under the title “Céline the plague victim no longer speaks except with Coco” (his parrot). Nor is it surprising that it is signed with a pseudonym.
“Anatomically, man is unhappy”
What is the writer talking about in this interview? Of his great obsessions, first. The nullity of his contemporaries in literature, starting with “poor little Sagan”: “There are only favouilles, filthy, filthy. Nothing. “Money, too. The one that Céline claims to miss, the one that would flow freely, according to him, among the authors of “popular novels”, the one of which he asks his interviewer out of the blue if there “are any, Paris Match “.
It is also about war. Of Hitler, whom Céline compares without flinching to Napoleon and on whom he allows himself to dissertate in perfect casualness. “He was an empiric, Hitler. An empiric, he must win. He missed his case the day he did not fall on England right away. He had what it took. He could have succeeded. […] He was a mutt. He was doing well. He was a star but he had no military genius at all. »
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Céline still talks about women, sex, and the difficult conquest of grace. Dance, which fascinates him – his wife, Lucette Destouches, is a dancer and teaches in their house in Meudon. “Anatomically, man is unhappy,” says the writer. He is unhappy because he is compelled by nature to stand upright. Namely that it is the only animal that stands on its legs. Then, on two feet, gravity takes him down. The tits inevitably tumble, the buttocks the same. So when he dances, it complicates everything. »
It is dance again that he cites when he defends emotion in the face of the verb and reason – to start talking, he says, is to start “chattering”, to “bavasser”, and to stop speaking. ‘observe. The French, he adds, were brought up by the Jesuits: “It always smells of the pulpits, the eloquence that falls from the pulpit”, “There is good. There is evil. Solid common sense, isn’t it. […] We are quite far from the East where all the arts came from, basically, where you know that everything that was logical was erased. We didn’t want it. Only the irrational mattered. We are the opposite. First there is the reasonable. It’s not true though, because at the sources of life… Oh! It’s a big word… I mean: coitus. Well ! I challenge a man to coitate reasonably. […] Without that, the reason is the cold, it’s death, it’s the slab. Céline wanders off, perhaps, but as an artificer.