Summary
Komins profiles Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a writer of contemporary literature. Accounts detailing his works that ask people to consider the intricate ways in which fiction both conditions and participates in the production of biographical and historical facts are also presented.
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps . . . they're either one or the other! . . . and inventors, the worst kind of job-holder! . . . they stand condemned! . . . the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!
-L.-F. CélineConversations with Professor Y. . . (25)Louis-Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches was born on 27 May 1894 in the town of Courbevoie, in the Seine department outside Paris. His father, Ferdinand-Auguste (Fernand), worked for an insurance company, eventually retiring from his firm as a vice president. His frugal mother, Marguerite-Louise-Céline, ran a successful lace business in Paris's Passage Choiseul, earning "quite a bit of money [so that] she even bought diamonds, which her granddaughter still wears to this day" (Knapp 6). Later, Louis-Ferdinand would assume his mother's name as his nom de plume. By many accounts (and despite the lurid myth that Céline carefully cultivated throughout his life), the Destouches family was comfortably middle class with higher social aspirations-at times flaunting supposed aristocratic origins. One critic goes as far as describing Louis-Ferdinand's up-bringing as "bourgeois amongst the people, according to aristocratic principles and with proletarian means" (qtd. in Vitoux 16).Céline went to local schools in the Seine department until 1907, when he was sent (for the first of several long visits) to Germany and England: "In his mother's thinking, such knowledge would eventually come in handy in the lace business" (O'Connell, "An Introduction" 100). Thus at an early age Louis-Ferdinand had exposure to other languages and cultures, influencing perspectives that would surface later in his work. After his visits abroad, the adolescent Céline worked for several small local businesses, drifting about until he began his military service in 1912. At the advent of the First World War, he was in the midst of fulfilling his compulsory three-year duty in the French cavalry. In 1915 Céline was seriously wounded at the Flanders front, sustaining neural damage in his arm, ear, and head. These severe wounds, which would affect him for the rest of his life, earned him both an honorable discharge and the Médaille Militaire for bravery. "The crash of exploding shells henceforth rang like a distant echo in Louis Destouches' battered head," according to Frédéric Vitoux. "He [began to put] distance between himself and the horror" (79).After his discharge in 1915, Céline took a position at the French consulate's passport office in London. There he met and married the barmaid Suzanne Nebout. he quickly tired of London and the first Madame Céline, leaving them behind in 1916 when he took a position with the Sangha-Oubangui lumber company in the former German colony of Cameroon. O'Connell explains, "In search of adventure and to earn a living, he spent the next year in West Africa working as a trader in the bush for a French forestry company" ("An Introduction" 101). This African sojourn was disastrous for Céline; in Cameroon, he contracted dysentery and malaria-conditions, like his war injuries, that would plague him for the rest of his life. In 1917 he returned to France after spending several torturous months in a colonial hospital. Largely because of his fluency in English, Céline was offered a position with the American Rockefeller Foundation in Paris to lecture on tuberculosis awareness and prevention. Several biographers have argued that this experience deeply affected Céline. he found his professional calling during his tenure with the foundation, choosing to pursue the field of medicine."Louis had a passion for medicine .. ." (Vitoux 115). Céline began his accelerated medical studies at Rennes in 1921; he received his degree two years later with a doctoral dissertation entitled The Life and Work of Philippe Ignace Semmelweis. During his medical studies, he had a daughter, Colette (his only child), with his second wife, Edith Follet. The second Madame Céline was the daughter of a professor of clinical medicine at the University of Rennes who was also an officier of the Legion of Honor and an important member of the public education board. Dr. Follet ...See the full content of this document
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