Death on Credit
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Translated by Ralph Manheim
Preface by André Derval
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Death on Credit first published in French as Mort à Crédit in 1936
This translation first published in Great Britain by
John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1989
A revised edition first published by Alma Classics in 2009
This new edition first published by Alma Classics in 2017
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1952
English translation © Ralph Manheim 1966, 2009
Preface © André Derval, 2009
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
isbn: 978-1-84749-634-8
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
Preface
Translator’s Introduction
Death on Credit
Notes
Preface
Death on Credit or the Oeuvre Born Again
Four years after Journey to the End of the Night, which had resoundingly marked his entry into the literary world, Louis-Ferdinand Céline published Death on Credit. In the author’s own words, “it is a monster this time”. Considering that Journey was greeted by unprecedented praise and violent polemics, and even resulted in some journalists being sued for having questioned the integrity of certain members of the Prix Goncourt jury, one might wonder about the kind of reaction Céline was expecting… A “monster”, as in monstrous labour, from which the author emerges exhausted, having lost eleven kilos. A “monster” depicting minutely and energetically a social and psychological reality about which good manners and moral order dictate that silence should be respected. A “monster” with regard to correct literary practice, the novel disobeying, in its themes and its style, all the rules of propriety and stylistic orthodoxy.
The efforts expended during the lengthy writing of this second novel should have, to Céline’s mind, helped him escape the curse of the “successful first novel”, readily considered unsurpassable by critics inclined towards facile assumptions. The intention was to start everything from the beginning, as part of a projected novelistic cycle starting with the author’s childhood in late-nineteenth-century Paris, then describing his enlistment into the army, leading to the First World War, before stopping with the young protagonist Ferdinand’s stay in London in 1916 as a disabled war veteran. It is striking to note that the novel on the War (Cannon Fodder) was not carried through as the author wished, the tension produced by the escalation of the perilous circumstances of the 1930s stifling any possible literary activity, something which resulted in his political writings, his anti-Semitic theses, which permanently stamped a seal of infamy on their author. Pursuing his fictional endeavours nonetheless, Céline managed to publish the first volume of his London-based novel, Guignol’s Band, in 1944… after having attempted a few ballet outlines, film and cartoon scripts and a “Nordic legend”, The Wish of King Krogold, from which several passages are provided at the beginning of Death on Credit.
On the run, shortly before the Liberation, first in Germany then in Denmark, where he was eventually arrested and detained, Céline continued writing Guignol’s Band, the second volume of which was published posthumously in 1964 under the title London Bridge. He embarked on a new cycle, which opened with the Allied bombing of Montmartre and the preparation for flight under the growing menace of the reprisals announced by the Resistants (Fable for Another Time and Normance) and closed with the arrival in Denmark (Rigadoon).
Let us return to Death on Credit, which as we have mentioned is an introductory novel, starting off a cycle and presenting several characteristics of the Bildungsroman (modelled on Werther or, even more so, The Child by Jules Vallès). The reader follows the young Ferdinand through the shopkeeping intrigues of the Passage Choiseul, impressed by his grandmother’s authority, disconcerted by his mother’s claudication, exasperated by his father’s threats, and faced with the various dangers posed by trips to England and apprenticeships in the cloth and jewel trades. Finally the reader accompanies him throughout the unusual training he receives from the inventor Courtial des Pereires, first for his Génitron magazine, then in his phalanstery in Blême-le-Petit. Surprisingly, Céline derived several characteristics of this episode from his own experience: thanks to Édouard Benedictus, a peculiar individual he met in London during the war, he actually encountered an inventor called Henry de Graffigny – whose real name was Raoul Marquis – the author of a number of works of scientific popularisation. Céline published translations from these in his journal, Eurêka, and collaborated with him on a tuberculosis-prevention tour financed by the Rockefeller Foundation…
Representations of primitive scenes, of themes of transgression, even of the murder of the father, all these elements of the narrative are deliberately staged according to Freudian interpretation. From 1933 Céline and his writing had fallen under the influence of Freud, reading up widely on the subject of psychoanalysis and meeting various leading figures in the field, most notably Annie Angel and Annie Reich in Vienna.
Meeting with an embarrassed or indignant reception, Death on Credit compounds its scandalous effect by the overabundance of colloquial phrases and coarse language, knowingly woven into more formal sentences.
Céline justified this in a letter to the literary critic André Rousseau in May 1936: “I go to the trouble of rendering ‘spoken’ into ‘written’, because paper doesn’t record speech well, but that’s all. No tic! Nothing to do with genre! Condensation, that’s all. I personally find this the only possible means of expression for emotion. I do not want to narrate, I want to impart feeling. It is impossible to do so with conventional academic language – with fine style. It is the instrument of reports, discussions, letters to your cousin, but it is always a front, something fixed. I cannot read a novel in classical language. Those are all plans for novels, they are never novels themselves. All the work remains to be done. The emotional execution is not there. And that’s all that counts. That is actually so true that without camaraderie, forcing oneself, complacency, scarcity, people would have stopped reading them a long time ago! Their language is impossible, it is dead, as unreadable (in this emotional sense) as Latin. Why do I borrow so much from speech, from “jargon”, from colloquial syntax, why do I refashion it myself if I feel the need to do so at that moment? Because, as you said, it dies quickly, this language. Which means it lived while I used it. Crucial superiority over so-called pure language, properly French, refined, which is always dead, dead from the start, dead since Voltaire, a corpse, dead as a doornail. Everyone knows it, no one says it, dares to say it. Language is like everything else, it dies all the time, it must die. We must resign ourselves to it, the language of conventional novels is dead, dead syntax, dead everything. My novels will also die, soon no doubt, but they will have had that slight superiority over so many other ones, they will have, for a year, a month, a day, lived. That is all. Ever
ything else is nothing but coarse, idiotic, senile boastfulness.”
Nevertheless, the contents of the work, notably the obscene passages, were the object of heated discussions between Céline and his publisher at the time: Robert Denoël refused to print the most explicit passages, Céline refused to rewrite them. A compromise of sorts was found: the words, phrases, paragraphs concerned were left blank in the main edition; only 117 copies appeared, outside the market, with the complete text…
In these conditions, the launch of the book generally attracted the scorn, or at least the disapproval, of all those who mattered in the world of letters in 1936. The influential communist school of critics, via the pen of Paul Nizan, took the author to task for supposed literary shortcomings and for the abandonment of the social conscience that was to be expected after Journey to the End of the Night: “In Journey there was an unforgettable denunciation of war, of the colonies. Today Céline denounces nothing but the poor and the vanquished.” Furthermore, the literary figures who had taken up the cause of Journey were silent this time around…
Most unusually, Céline’s publisher Robert Denoël consequently had a brochure printed, entitled Apology of Death on Credit, establishing an eloquent parallel between the accusations brought against Céline’s novel and those brought against Émile Zola’s works half a century earlier… This very frosty critical reception stirred in Céline, from this point onwards, a profound and almost systematic animosity towards journalists and intellectuals, which led to the charges he brought against them in his first racist pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre. One can measure the extent of the author’s abrupt change of direction, due to Death on Credit’s reception, from the time of the publication of Journey, when he wrote to Albert Thibaudet: “Critics seem not to want to learn anything more about mankind. The ladder has been pulled away. The mighty Freudian school has passed by unnoticed. All racial hatred is nothing but an electoral trick. Aesthetic torment is not even mentioned in whispers.”
Out of step with the times –the attempts in France at social progress by the “Front populaire”’ were top of the agenda, despite the unrest caused by the far right, who were imbued with anti-Semitism and were vilifying Léon Blum’s cabinet – Céline’s subject matter was not understood: the dissection of an entire world, that of the famous “Belle Époque”, seen with surgical precision by a child for whom the words of authority figures were all assaults, attacks on his integrity, obstacles to a harmonious upbringing. Neither was his literary approach appreciated: the adjective “filthy” was bandied about without caution in reviews, as if the language itself had been corrupted by the contact with its subject matter. Yet it is with Death on Credit that the author established certain literary techniques which made his subsequent works instantly recognizable: the dismantling of “normal” sentences via the heavy use of the ellipsis, constantly puncturing and patching up the narration which, in French, mainly scans according to an eight-syllable rhythm. These sequences, shortened and seemingly accelerated by the effect of the ellipses, require increased attention on the part of the reader, especially as they are composed of an ingenious mix of linguistic registers, at times incongruous, the slang or the improper colliding with the educated expression, provoking, while reading, a myriad of small, one might say intimate questionings.
Another characteristic of the Célinian novel initiated by Death on Credit is the opening section, in which the narrator constructs, as it were, his relationship with the reader, in which he takes care to mention that he is the author of Journey, that he practises medicine in the suburbs, in which, in a nutshell, he provides a number of biographical details which allow him to be identified, confused with the physical person assuming the role of author. This section usually ends in a situation of crisis, a scene of trance or delirium, as if to launch the main narrative, the story to tell.
Coming back much later to the topic of the title of the novel, Céline, in one of his final declarations, even explained: “For me, you are authorized to die, you enter, when you have a good story to tell. So you told it and you passed on. That’s what Death on Credit is symbolically. The reward for life being death… since… it’s not God who governs, it’s the Devil… Man… nature is disgusting, so to speak, you only have to see the life of birds, of beasts.” Interspersed with descriptions of death, of “passings”, such as that of the grandmother – so close, it turns out, to the one described by Proust, as Henri Godard, the editor of the prestigious Pléiade edition, correctly points out – this death on credit is indeed the rebirth, the true beginning of an oeuvre, the importance and readership of which continue to grow.
– André Derval
Translator’s Introduction
In an article on Journey to the End of the Night, Céline’s first novel, a French critic – Robert Faurisson – puts forward a humanistic definition of great literature: It “should appeal not only to man’s heart, intelligence, love of truth, but to the whole man; however pessimistic, it should help him to acquire an acceptance of life. A work excellent in other respects but inculcating a disgust with life is not great literature”. Faurisson goes on to ask how it comes about that, for all its horror, bitterness, hatred and general blackness, Journey to the End of the Night is still, thirty years after its original publication, widely regarded as one of this century’s greatest novels. The question applies equally to Céline’s second novel, Death on Credit.
The intense blackness in Céline’s work converges from several sources. As a physician Dr Destouches (his mother’s first name was Louise-Céline, hence the pseudonym) was obsessed by death and human suffering. A wound received in the First World War left him with insomnia, headaches and a continual roaring in his ears. His childhood in the world of small Paris shopkeepers may have been less sordid than the picture painted in Death on Credit: unlike Ferdinand, he was a studious child with an aim in life – his medical vocation came to him at an early age; a friend from his medical-school days goes so far as to say that his parents lived in perfect harmony; and a number of Céline’s own utterances show that he felt a good deal more affection for his parents than one would gather from Death on Credit. Be that as it may, he was profoundly affected by the mentality of the petits bourgeois and lumpenproletariat among whom he grew up, by their cynicism, their deep distrust of their fellow men, their persecution mania. On leaving elementary school he began to earn his living at odd jobs, and his experience of “business” and bosses in the “good old days” before the First World War never left him. He often came back to it in letters and interviews. In Death on Credit he writes: “If you haven’t been through that you’ll never know what obsessive hatred really smells like… the hatred that goes through your guts, all the way to your heart…” And “my main pleasure in life is being quicker than the boss when it comes to getting fired… I can see that kidney punch coming… I can smell it a mile off… Bosses are all stinkers, all they think about is giving you the gate…” And he generalized his experience; he saw no reason to suppose that anyone would be better than the people he had known. On the point of setting out for England, he wonders “if the English weren’t going to be meaner and crummier, a damn sight worse than the people around here”.
The blackness is further intensified by his literary attitudes and by the literary personality he composed for himself. He believed that literature had sidestepped man’s baseness as he knew it, that writers had resolutely embellished man, that his experience was the truth, which it was his mission to tell. His purpose in writing, he once said, was to blacken himself and others; we should all be freer if the whole truth about human “crumminess” were finally told.
He succeeded quite well in his mission and yet – to go back to Faurisson – he does not, at least in his early books and specifically in Death on Credit, disgust us with life. Far from it. Perhaps, indeed, we do feel freer.
Even in Céline’s explicit statements there are certain exceptions to his overall view of humanity: he m
akes no secret of his tenderness towards children and whores, as well as animals. But although this might suffice to redeem Céline the sinner, it would hardly lead us either to accept life or to accept Céline as a great writer.
The explanation seems obvious today: the vision set forth in the first novels is not such as to destroy the world under our feet. This was much less evident in the Thirties, when the books first appeared. At that time many readers and critics, even among those whose opinion was generally favourable, were too shocked by the nightmare, by Céline’s directness of expression and his revolution in style, to notice anything else. Since then, however, a great deal has happened – both in history and literature. We are no longer shocked; we can see more clearly. And there is hardly a page of Death on Credit that does not reveal Céline’s deep attachment not only to the world – to places, colours, clothes, furniture, boats and barges, lights in the distance – but to people as well. “A man’s real mistress,” he had said in Journey to the End of the Night, “is life.” His feeling for his mistress is expressed with the utmost diffidence and suspicion. He distrusts her as Ferdinand distrusts Nora in the second book. He vilifies and derides her. She is futile, a brief quiver in anticipation of death, insidious in her blandishments, always on the lookout for new ways to take us in. But he is always awake to her beauties, and the vigour of the disgust or derision with which he reacts to her ugliness only underscores his passion.
This seems a rather tall order, but here is an example from Death on Credit. A cluster of suburban villas in the early morning: “All kinds, rocky, flattened, arrogant, bandy-legged… pale, half-finished ones, skinny, emaciated… staggering… reeling on their frames!… A massacre in yellow, brick-red and semi-piss colour… Not a one that can stand up right!… A collection of toys plunked down in the shit!…”
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