Thursday 23 April 2015

Celine: A Biography by Patrick McCarthy (1975)

The quality of a literary biography depends in part on the amount of material available on the author's life and any writings the author has left to us on his craft and influences. In the case of Patrick McCarthy's biography of Celine — the literary name of Louis Ferdinand Destouches —  McCarthy does the near impossible: he manages to find enough material to satisfy the public’s curiosity about the life and art of Celine.
Little is known of Celine's childhood and early life and what is known comes second hand from stories (sometimes contradictory, sometimes false) that Celine told friends as a man. Celine was a famously bristly character, avoiding interviewers and admirers alike until late in his life. When finally agreeing to speak to the public he was his own most ardent apologist, claiming he was a victim, misunderstood, never an anti-semite (even while standing by his contention that Jewish-led conspiracies exist in the financial and literary worlds!).
McCarthy admits that the task he sets out for himself is made difficult because so little verifiable material is available but he reminds us that Celine’s core material - the characters, plots and ideas that inspire his stories - is largely autobiographical. McCarthy suggests that Celine, an almost pathological pessimist, wrote about what he knew but exaggerated the nastiness he found in himself and the world. War in “Voyage au bout de la nuit” is more horrible and dehumanizing than what he really experienced working as an army doctor in the first world war. Childhood in “Mort a credit” is more precarious and stultifying than Celine’s early years ever were.
Celine enjoyed tangling fact and fiction but McCarthy spends three hundred pages separating the two while building a case for his assertion that Celine the man was a complex, troubled figure but that he was also a revolutionary writer who introduced the vernacular and stream-of-consciousness to French literature.