Ill-mannered, vile, genius brat

We are talking about French. to the writer Louis-Ferdinan Detouche Selin, one of the greatest of the 20th century. Who has read the masterpieces Journey to the end of the night i Death on credit knows everything there is to know about Selina. The rest is irrelevant. And yet, no matter how hard we try to ignore and put aside this unimportant thing - the so-called writer's life - no matter how much we convince ourselves, or, like the signatories of these lines, are completely convinced that we cannot learn anything about his work from the life of the writer, that the key to the work is not in the writer but in what he wrote, nothing will stop us from sticking our nose deep into the writer's life and reading that life with the same passion as we read his genius Romance. With great writers, it matters little whether their life was seemingly boring and monotonous like Proust's (but would we have so many biographies of Proust if he was really boring?), or was it, like Selin's, a thriller of horror, horror, inconsistency and hard consistency of stupidity and his work. To that extent, Céline's correspondence with the French publisher "Galimar" - i.e. correspondence with editors, members of the Galimar family (employees in the publishing house), but also the big boss and owner Gaston Gallimar himself - is a first-class testimony of Céline's impressive idiocy, but also of his equally impressive writing genius.

Celine is neither the first nor the only great writer whose biography is full of problematic places. In addition, he was not the only one who sneered and drove his publishers crazy. Thomas Bernhard was equally awkward, and Siegfried Unseld, his editor at "Zurkamp" (the most influential German publisher), spat blood trying to restrain him. Both writers were convinced of their genius (rightfully so) and both told their publishers the same story: you live off of us, and you pay us poorly and treat us like we're marwa. Both of them blackmailed their publishers, were late in handing in manuscripts (so they got angry when editors reminded them of deadlines), interpreted contracts extremely freely, pretended to be crazy when it was in their interest, and, in general, were perfectly intolerable, while both Unzeld and Gallimar, on the other hand, showed precisely inhuman composure. Far from it, of course, that they were poorly paid - both Céline and Bernhard lived more than comfortably in houses bought with generous royalties, and by certain standards it can be said that they were quite well-off - but, also, it cannot be denied that the publishing houses got rich on their works, while they received a small part of that money. (Danilo Kish, in this respect, was their antipode, which is clearly seen in the correspondence with the publishers: lordly in his poverty and utterly incapable of handling serious money.)

SUFFER SELINA

...

Selin's correspondence with the publishing house "Galimar" lasted for thirty years, until the writer's death in 1961, and for the most part was reduced to money-grubbing, insults and blackmail, and proving that he was the only one right and the only one smart, and all the others were incompetent, untalented, fools and, in general, jerks. Insults range from the most terrible simpletons, which even Sešelj would not be ashamed of, through dosed and poisonous comments (he will write about the employees of "Gallimar" that they are a cabal of pretentious jackasses), to hilarious formulations: he will call Gaston Gallimar a lustful roasted hake, while, in another place, he says that he will not write to Gallimar until his period has passed. In addition, a severely wounded and decorated soldier from the First World War, Céline discovered anti-Semitism in the period before the Second World War and devoted a part of his eruptive talent to writing anti-Semitic pamphlets, which is why he almost lost his head and land after the war, he fled to Denmark, spent some time in prison, but the Fourth French Republic forgave him for his sins - apart from barking against Jews, hanging out with French fascists and playing the fool, it has not been determined that he collaborated with the occupier - which the Minister of Culture Andre Malraux, in a letter to Claude Gallimard (May 1951), summed up with the following words: "Despite the fact that he is a sufferer, he is certainly a great writer." Do we even need to say that Céline previously insulted Malraux (and he rarely missed the opportunity to bite publicly).

Selin's anger at the whole world, his resentment, volleys of insults, obstinate adherence to nonsensical attitudes, twisting of meaning, failure to recognize the obvious, impudence, incessant nagging, slandering, spreading rumours, can quickly become satiated despite occasional self-deprecation, unceasing wit or displays of pure literary genius. That is why the editor's answers are a pure respite in the seething anger of Céline, and several of Gaston Gallimard's responses, colored with cold irony, reach Céline's playfulness. Of course, not everyone was able to endure him. Jean Pollan, the agile editor at Gallimar, not only endured almost a decade of collaboration and correspondence with Celine, but, immediately after the war, publicly defended Celine against unjustified accusations, which was anything but easy. Of course, although at first he was infinitely grateful to Pollan, when he returned to France and got a little stronger, Celine hated Pollan the most, to the extent that the latter gave up cooperation. Gaston Gallimard, however, did not, although the letters testify that he knew how to be on the edge. Why did Gallimar put up with it? One answer could be that Gallimar knew he had a golden cock, and that his trouble with Selina would pay off sooner or later. After all, as an experienced businessman, he was not intimidated by Celine's threats that he would go to another publisher: he knew that Celine knew that he would not get as much money from anyone as he gets from "Gallimar", he kept him firmly to himself with contracts. There were no serious negotiations. The second answer, however, is more interesting. As an educated and experienced reader, of course Gallimard was aware of Céline's genius, and he put up with all those letters because, basically, Céline entertained him, like a spoiled, vile, genius brat. After all, when Céline stopped writing to Gallimard after being insulted, he received, after some time, a letter from the editor, Roger Nimieux, in which there is a sentence like this: "It seems to me that Gaston is a little sad that he no longer receives insults from you. Remember him".

RAT

...

No matter how interesting, crazy, irritating or revealing (it depends on the reader) what has been said so far, Selin's literature is the only thing that matters in all of this. Manuscript of a small novel Steering, found 60 years after Céline's death and some eighty years after it was written (published in France in 2022), is a testament to Céline's unadulterated talent. It is about the first hand of the manuscript (on which, therefore, he hardly worked) which the editors, with minimal interventions, prepared for publication. The main character of the novel is named Ferdinand, and there is no doubt that a good part of the novel stemmed from Selin's personal experience from the First World War.

Ferdinand is a corporal who, seriously wounded, wakes up on the battlefield, in the middle of his destroyed unit (he is the only survivor). With his injured arm limping lifelessly beside his body and his damaged ear causing a sonic inferno, he stumbles towards the French positions, falls, faints and falls asleep, but does not give up, until he is met by an English soldier on horseback, at which point he experiences a fit of frenzy and loses consciousness. It should be said that Selin was really seriously wounded in the war, and that the damage to his ear (tinnitus) drove him crazy throughout his life. This time, Ferdinand wakes up in an improvised hospital a little further from the front line, and when a train puts him in to transport him to the rear, he falls out of the train and, in the end, more dead than alive, ends up in a hospital in a small Belgian town where he begins a long and painful recovery, marked by horrors that can only be seen in military hospitals. Of all the striking characters, the middle-aged sister Espinas, who likes to play with the genitals of barely alive soldiers (and they, despite their condition, don't mind), the soldier Beber with whom Ferdinand befriends, and Beber's fiancee Angel, actually a prostitute who comes to visit her wounded fiance, quickly realize that she could earn something along the way. This is where the love and sexual plots begin, but the reader will find out about that himself.

The novel is Selinian to the core: fierce, witty, self-ironic, merciless, with thick layers of eroticism and deep penetration into the complex structures of the characters. And all this on about 120 pages of large type, not counting the preface and afterword, photos and list of characters. Whether it is a description necessary to outline the context, a line or what goes through the hero's head, it is always the most direct possible statement, a dense text in which there is no idleness, and the density of expression does not at any moment stop the flow of the text. And again and again the reminder that Ferdinand hears the noise in his own head without interruption and without sparing, that he hardly manages to fall asleep for a short time, and that this noise is mixed with the cannon fire, the thunder of artillery pieces or carts passing by on the cobblestones. In such circumstances, it is easier to go crazy and commit suicide than to think.

Celine doesn't trust people too much, so his characters are usually damaged, even when they seem normal or comfortably situated. At the same time, Ferdinand is a loyal friend to the extent that, due to his own physical and mental impairments, it can be, so the relationship with the other Bebel, with whom he does outrageous nonsense, intensifies to such an extent that it creates a kind of literary miniature about friendship that cannot end other than tragically. In order, again, on the other hand, to nullify the weight of that (rough) relationship, to depathetize it - even though Céline is pelted against commonplaces - and to establish a literary balance, Ferdinand will find himself in the first row of the comforter of the proud fiancee Angel. Except that Angel is anything but happy. From their relationship marked by subtle erotic details (as opposed to non-subtle ones), a semi-successful business cooperation based on sexual services to English officers will be born.

No matter how you look at it, Selin was a writer's prodigy, a Steering is a miracle of a story that, in a way, won the status of a novel.