DEATH ON CREDIT LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE eens) ae aDeath on Credit Louis-Ferdinand Céline Translated by Ralph Manheim Preface by André Derval a A+ ek 1 ONEWORLD CLASSICSONEWORLD CLASSICS LTD London House 243-253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2LL United Kingdom www.oneworldclassics.com Death on Credit first published in French as Mort a Crédit in 1936 This translation first published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1989 This revised edition of Death on Credit first published by Oneworld Classics Limited in 2009 Copyright © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1952 English translation © Ralph Manheim 1966, 2009 Preface © André Derval, 2009 Printed in UK by MPG Books, Corwall ISBN: 978-1-84749-04 1-4 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 I Translator’s Introduction vu Death on Credit 1 Notes 491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 1DEATH ON CREDIT 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 Valles). 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 Bléme-le-Petit. Surprisingly, Céline derived several characteristics of this episode from his own experience: thanks to Edouard 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, Euréka, 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 "PREFACE colloquial phrases and coarse language, knowingly woven into more formal sentences. Céline justified this in a letter ro 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. | 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, 1T DIFS ALL THE TIME, IT MUST pIF. 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, Livep. That is all. Everything 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 Denoél 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, of at least the disapproval, of all those who mattered in the world of letters in 1936. The influential communist school of critics, itDEATH ON CREDIT 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 colunies, 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 Denoél 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 Emile 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 Epoque”, 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 IvPREFACE 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, 2009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 vilDEATH ON CREDIT 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 makes 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 VillPREFACE 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!...” 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 Francois Villon. Unlike IxDEATH ON CREDIT 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 xPREFACE, 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 Frencly 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 punc- tuation, 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 XIDEATH ON CREDIT 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 xuDeath on CreditH ERE WE ARE, ALONE AGAIN. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad... 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 1 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... Thaven’t always practised medicine... this shit. Ill 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, 1 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... Pll 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 3LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE, 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. ’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. aoe 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 1 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. | hurry through my consultation. Islip 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 4DEATH ON CREDIT 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!...” 1 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. | 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? Ill 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 5LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE, and diagnoses. Grown-ups are a pain in the arse! 1 won’t treat a single one until next day. 1 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 com- plimentary. 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 Asniéres comes La Jonction, and then my cousin’s. But the dog is limping heavily. He’s staring at me. | 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 Bineau, 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 1 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 1 had always slept properly, I’d never have written a line...DEATH ON CREDIT “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... 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, | 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... The Linuty Foundation was across the way from the bronze balloon at the Porte Pereire. Almost every day when I’d finished with my patients, she’d come up to deliver my typescripts. A little temporary structure that’s been torn down since. I wasn’t happy there. The hours were too regular. Linuty, who had founded it, was a big millionaire, he wanted everybody to have medical treatment and feel better without money. Philanthropists are a pain in the arse. I'd have preferred some municipal dispensary... a little vaccinating on the side... a modest racket in health certificates... or even a public bath... in other words, a kind of retirement. Well, so be it. I'm nota Yid, or a foreigner, or a Freemason, or a graduate of the Ecole Normale; I don’t know how to promote myself, I fuck around too much, my reputation’s bad. For fifteen years now they’ve seen me struggling along out here in the Zone;* the dregs of the dregs take liberties with me, show me every sign of contempt. I’m lucky they haven’t fired me. Writing picks me up. I’m not so badly off. Vitruve types my novels. She’s attached to me. “Listen,” I say, “listen, old girl, this is the last time I’m going to give you hell!... If you don’t find my Legend, it’s the parting of the ways, it’s the end of our friendship. No more intimate collaboration!... No more grub and bub, no more dough.” She bursts into lamentations. She’s a monster in every way, Vitruve, her looks are awful and her work is awful. She’s an obligation. I’ve had her on my neck since I was in England. She’s the fruit of a promise. 7LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE We go way back. It was her daughter Angéle in London who made me swear to look after her for ever. I’ve looked after her all right. That was my vow to Angele. It dates back to the war. Besides, come to think of it, she knows a lot of things. Okay, She’s tight-lipped in principle, but she remembers... Angéle, her daughter, was quite a number. It’s amazing how ugly a mother can get. Angéle came to a tragic end. I’ll explain all that if I’m forced to. Angéle had a sister, Sophie, a big tall screwball, settled in London. And Mireille, the little niece, is over here. She has the combined vices of the whole family, she’s a real bitch... a synthesis. When I moved from Rancy to Porte Pereire, they both tagged along. Rancy has changed, there’s hardly anything left of the walls or the Bastion. Big black scarred stones; they rip them out of the soft ground like decayed teeth. It will all go... the city swallows its old gums. The bus — the RQ. bis they call it now — dashes through the ruins like a bat out of hell. Soon there won’t be anything but sawed-off dung-coloured skyscrapers. We'll see. Vitruve and I used to argue about our troubles. She always claimed she’d been through more than I had. That’s not possible. Wrinkles, that’s for sure, she’s got a lot more than me! There’s no limit to the amount of wrinkles, the creases that the good years dig in their flesh. “Mireille must have put your papers away.” T leave with her and escort her out to the Quai des Minimes. They live together, near the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, it’s called the Hétel Méridien. Their room isan inconceivable mess, a junk shop full of miscellaneous articles, mostly underwear, all flimsy and extremely cheap. Mme Vitruve and her niece both do it. They have three douche bags, as well as a fully equipped kitchen and a rubber bidet. They keep it all between the beds; there’s also an enormous atomizer that they’ve never succeeded in getting to squirt. | wouldn’t want to be too hard on Vitruve. Maybe she has had more trouble than I have. That’s what makes me control myself. Otherwise, if I were sure, I’d lick the hell out of her. She used to keep the Remington in the fireplace; she hadn’t finished paying for it... So she said. I don’t pay her too much for my typing, I’ve got to admit that... sixty-five centimes a page, but it mounts up in the end... especially with big fat books, When it comes to squinting, though, I never saw the like of Vitruve. It was painful to look at her. That ferocious squint gave her an air when she laid out her cards, that is to say her tarot cards. She sold the little ladies silk stockings... 8DEATH ON CREDIT the future too, on credit. When she puzzled and pondered behind her glasses, she had the wandering gaze of a lobster. Her fortune-telling gave her a certain influence in the neighbourhood. She knew all the cuckolds. She pointed them out to me from the window, and even the three murderers — “I have proof.” I'd also given her an old blood-pressure contraption and taught her a little massage for varicose veins. That added to her income. Her ambition was to do abortions or to get involved in a bloody revolution, so everybody would talk about her and the newspapers would be full of it. Tll never be able to say how she nauseated me as I watched her rummaging through that junk pile of hers. All over the world there are trucks that run over nice people at the rate of one a minute... Old Vitruve gave off a pungent smell. Redheads often do. It seems to me that there’s an animal quality in redheads; it’s their destiny: something brutal and tragic; they’ve got it in their skin. I could have laid her out cold when she went on about her memories in that loud voice of hers... Randy as she was, it was hard for her to find enough gratification. Unless‘a man was drunk and it was very dark, she didn’t have a chance. On that point I was sorry for her. I myself had done better in the way of amorous harmonies. That, too, struck her as unjust. When the time came, I'd have almost enough put by to settle my accounts with death... { had made my aesthetic savings, What marvellous arse I’d enjoyed... T’ve got to admit it, as luminous as light. I’d tucked into the Infinite. She had no savings — that could be sensed very easily, there was no need to go on about it. To earn her keep and get a little enjoyment on the side, she had to take a customer by surprise or wear him out. It was hell. By seven o’clock the good little workers have usually gone home. The women are doing the dishes, the males are tied up in radio waves. That’s when Vitruve abandons my beautiful novel and goes out in pursuit of her livelihood. She works her way from landing to landing with her slightly damaged stockings and her crummy lingerie. Before the crash she managed to get along, what with credit and the way she terrified her customers, but today the identical crap is given away at street fairs to stop the gripes of losers at the shell game. That’s unfair competition. | tried to tell her it was all the fault of the Japanese... She didn’t believe me. I accused her of doing away with my wonderful Legend on purpose, even of throwing it in the garbage... “It’s a masterpiece!” I added. “We'd better find it...” 9