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literary lives for the Advancement of Science. Tresch also demonstrates that most 19th-century scientists held white-supremacist views and that many tacitly supported eugenics – dismaying facts that allow us to see Poe’s own ‘average racism’ as representative of his time. Tresch wears his expertise lightly. In an endnote, for example, he documents Poe’s purchase of a solid gold pocket watch from France during a rare moment of financial solvency, and adds that ‘one can’t help wondering what it sounds like when wrapped in cotton’, recalling Poe’s description of the noise his narrator hears in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Tresch has skilfully retold the story of Poe’s life while greatly expanding our knowledge and awareness of the many interpretive possibilities suggested by his texts. In its combination of suspenseful narrative, elegant structure, impressive research, imagination and appeal to both popular and academic readers, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is a worthy tribute to Poe’s own literary craft. andrew hussey Styling It Out Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journeys to the Extreme By Damian Catani (Reaktion Books 400pp £27) Journey to the end of respectability: Céline in Meudon, 1957 Although he died sixty years ago at the age of sixty-seven, the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing trouble in France. This is because, although he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative French prose stylists of the 20th century, he was also a ferocious anti-Semite. Céline came to sudden and immediate fame, apparently out of nowhere, without belonging to any clique or movement, with his first two great novels, Voyage au bout de la nuit (‘Journey to the End of the Night’) and Mort à crédit (‘Death on Credit’), published in 1932 and 1936 respectively. These works were hailed as masterpieces by both the Right and the Left for their depiction of the misery of life at the bottom of society and the coarse and scabrous language in which this existence was described. Leon Trotsky was one of the first to declare Céline a modern master. He wrote, ‘Louis-Ferdinand Céline has entered into the hall of great literature as others walk into their own home.’ Between 1937 and 1941, however, Céline began to sabotage his reputation, especially with the French Left, by publishing a series of polemical texts expressing support for the most savage, virulent and murderous form of anti-Semitism. He denounced Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracies, praised Hitler and called for war and eventually the extermination of the Jewish race. This was all before the German ‘Final Solution’ had even been designed, let alone put into motion. Suddenly for many of Céline’s admirers, the problem was how to separate his undoubted artistry as a writer from his noxious political opinions. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that even Céline’s most demented and paranoid texts were often brilliantly written. The ‘Céline question’, as Damian Catani points out in this book, is still very much alive in France. As recently as 2017, the same dilemma that confronted Céline’s readers in the 1930s provoked a standoff between the publisher Gallimard, which wanted to reprint his anti-Semitic works as an artistically important part of Céline’s oeuvre, and the French government, which was opposed to any such publication, unless the texts could be published, like Mein Kampf, as historical documents framed with scholarly apparatus. This controversy is still simmering away. In this new biography of Céline, Catani tackles these issues head-on. He gives us, for example, a detailed account of the debates among leading Céline scholars in 2018 about where and how Céline could ever fit into the canon of French literature. Early on in the book, Catani discusses ‘cancel culture’ in the Anglo-American world, referring to Black Lives Matter and the Rhodes statue controversy in Oxford. This section could easily have felt contrived. Happily, however, Catani is aware of the potential snares of entering these arguments and emphasises that his focus is on the specifically French context of the debate over Céline. Catani opens his book with an arresting and evocative scene, not written by Céline but described by his lover, the American dancer Elizabeth Craig, in an interview with the Franco-Romanian scholar Alphonse Juilland. On a walk through the red-light district of Amsterdam, Céline takes Craig Literary Review | september 2021 10
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literary lives to a street where Dutch women sell their children to men as prostitutes. The refined young woman is horrified and asks why they are even looking at this vile trade, especially if they can do nothing to stop it. She quotes Céline’s response and rationale for taking her there: ‘I just wanted you to know. You who think that everybody is so beautiful and nice, that life is so simple, that all you have to do is have a happy attitude and life will be a beautiful journey.’ Céline was not famous when he said this to Craig, but Catani points out that this could easily be a scene from one of his novels, which commonly confront the reader with the evil acts of human beings, offering no explication. For this reason, Céline has often been described as a nihilist. But Catani argues the opposite. Céline’s world-view is certainly dark and pessimistic, he states, but it is often laced with compassion for the suffering underdogs of the world, whether they are the victims of a pointless war, colonial brutality or American capitalism, or simply rotting away in poverty in the more wretched parts of Paris. This world-view was shaped by Céline’s own life experiences. Catani takes us on a straightforward journey through this life, from his upbringing in what George Orwell (another admirer of Céline) would have called the ‘shabby-genteel’ universe of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie, who are only ever a short step away from falling into financial ruin, his experience of the First World War, his travels in London and Africa, his career as a doctor working for the League of Nations based in Geneva, to his finding fame as a writer and then infamy in the postwar period as a Nazi collaborator, leading to a prolonged exile in Denmark. He eventually returned to Paris, where he quietly practised as a doctor while writing his final novels in the tranquil suburb of Meudon. Catani’s account of this extraordinary life is as admirably detailed and forensic as any Céline biography I have read, in French or English. It is also far more readable than most, capturing the same picaresque tone as Céline’s early novels. At one point, Catani ponders why Voyage au bout de la nuit was never made into a film: it is, after all, a supremely cinematic novel. Yet all attempts to bring it to the screen have been failures, including early treatments written by Céline himself. Catani does provide, however, a fascinating precis of Emmanuel Bourdieu’s 2016 film Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Deux clowns pour une catastrophe. This is a semi-fictional account of a journey to meet and interview Céline in exile in Denmark made by the Jewish academic Milton Hindus. The question at the heart of the film is whether Hindus as a Jew can defend Céline as a writer, despite his politics. The relationship between the two men breaks down when Céline learns that Hindus is planning a book based on their encounters and launches into an antiSemitic rant that undoes Hindus’s admiration for the writer and leaves him confused and, finally, despising the man. Catani has written a fine biography of Céline that, as with most of its predecessors, leaves the reader feeling a little like Hindus. What is important here, however, is Catani’s final argument that literary brilliance and evil can coexist in the same person. In our own age, when so many subscribe to the neo-Victorian idea that all writing must be morally uplifting, this is a bold thing to say. Subscribe or give a gift subscription and receive a FREE set of Literary Review postcards celebrating 500 issues. Subscribe: +44 (0) 1778 395 165 www.literaryreview.co.uk quote code: lr500 for people who devour books september 2021 | Literary Review 11

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literary lives for the Advancement of Science. Tresch also demonstrates that most 19th-century scientists held white-supremacist views and that many tacitly supported eugenics – dismaying facts that allow us to see Poe’s own ‘average racism’ as representative of his time.

Tresch wears his expertise lightly. In an endnote, for example, he documents Poe’s purchase of a solid gold pocket watch from France during a rare moment of financial solvency, and adds that ‘one can’t help wondering what it sounds like when wrapped in cotton’, recalling Poe’s description of the noise his narrator hears in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. Tresch has skilfully retold the story of Poe’s life while greatly expanding our knowledge and awareness of the many interpretive possibilities suggested by his texts. In its combination of suspenseful narrative, elegant structure, impressive research, imagination and appeal to both popular and academic readers, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night is a worthy tribute to Poe’s own literary craft.

andrew hussey

Styling It Out Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journeys to the Extreme

By Damian Catani (Reaktion Books 400pp £27)

Journey to the end of respectability: Céline in Meudon, 1957

Although he died sixty years ago at the age of sixty-seven, the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline is still causing trouble in France. This is because, although he is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most innovative French prose stylists of the 20th century, he was also a ferocious anti-Semite.

Céline came to sudden and immediate fame, apparently out of nowhere, without belonging to any clique or movement, with his first two great novels, Voyage au bout de la nuit (‘Journey to the End of the Night’) and Mort à crédit (‘Death on Credit’), published in 1932 and 1936 respectively. These works were hailed as masterpieces by both the Right and the Left for their depiction of the misery of life at the bottom of society and the coarse and scabrous language in which this existence was described. Leon Trotsky was one of the first to declare Céline a modern master. He wrote, ‘Louis-Ferdinand Céline has entered into the hall of great literature as others walk into their own home.’

Between 1937 and 1941, however, Céline began to sabotage his reputation, especially with the French Left, by publishing a series of polemical texts expressing support for the most savage, virulent and murderous form of anti-Semitism. He denounced Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracies, praised Hitler and called for war and eventually the extermination of the Jewish race.

This was all before the German ‘Final Solution’ had even been designed, let alone put into motion. Suddenly for many of Céline’s admirers, the problem was how to separate his undoubted artistry as a writer from his noxious political opinions. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that even Céline’s most demented and paranoid texts were often brilliantly written.

The ‘Céline question’, as Damian Catani points out in this book, is still very much alive in France. As recently as 2017, the same dilemma that confronted Céline’s readers in the 1930s provoked a standoff between the publisher Gallimard, which wanted to reprint his anti-Semitic works as an artistically important part of Céline’s oeuvre, and the French government, which was opposed to any such publication, unless the texts could be published, like Mein Kampf, as historical documents framed with scholarly apparatus. This controversy is still simmering away.

In this new biography of Céline, Catani tackles these issues head-on. He gives us, for example, a detailed account of the debates among leading Céline scholars in 2018 about where and how Céline could ever fit into the canon of French literature. Early on in the book, Catani discusses ‘cancel culture’ in the Anglo-American world, referring to Black Lives Matter and the Rhodes statue controversy in Oxford. This section could easily have felt contrived. Happily, however, Catani is aware of the potential snares of entering these arguments and emphasises that his focus is on the specifically French context of the debate over Céline.

Catani opens his book with an arresting and evocative scene, not written by Céline but described by his lover, the American dancer Elizabeth Craig, in an interview with the Franco-Romanian scholar Alphonse Juilland. On a walk through the red-light district of Amsterdam, Céline takes Craig

Literary Review | september 2021 10

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