Steve Evans's Blog: The written world - Posts Tagged "tom-wolfe"

Sometime in the 1970s I fell under the influence of a French novelist practically no one had heard of at the time, though he'd been dead since 1961: Celine. He was a revelation to me, and my second novel, Evilheart, was as close as I could get to doing homage to him. Later, in Savonarala's Bones, I returned to him, but not in the detail, or attention to moral nuance.

To my mind Celine was one the great writers of the 20th century - both funny and wise in his way. He is ignored because after his second novel in the 1930s, Mort a Credit, variously translated as Death on Credit and Death on the Instalment Plan, he revealed himself as an anti-Semite in a series of really disturbing works. Not surprisingly after 1945 he was in bad odour among those who used to champion him, to the point where many French literary critics refused to review his later books, though they bore no traces of his crackpot ideas (they did bear all too many traces of his views of the treatment he'd received for holding them). Jean-Paul Sartre, who had dedicated one of his 1930s works to Celine, wrote a scathing essay after the war, "The mind of the anti-Semite", that was directed at Celine while not naming him. Celine gave as good or better than he got, and in his later novels mercilessly pilloried the once-lionised existentialist philosopher and writer - he became "Tartre" and a magazine he wrote for Your Ferrule.

Celine's anti-Semitism troubled me a lot, and it still does. I was far from the only person to find in Celine's "ordinary" fiction a genuinely extraordinary sensibility who seemed to have divined what life is all about, and given it both barrels - a savage view that was ameliorated by humour, somehow salvaged by it.

And I was far from alone, too, in being confused by the writer's revelation that he was, to put it mildly, down on Jews. (A contemporary in the 1930s, when the first of his anti-Semitic ravings was published, thought it was a satire). It seemed contradictory, and Celine himself later admitted as much in a somewhat left -handed way - "I got mixed up in stuff that was none of my business". But he never resiled, never said "I got it wrong". Far from it, he went out of this life as persuaded as ever that Jews were the enemy...

...but the enemy of what? Celine's larger message was one of the futility of life for the individual; his most famous bon mot was "the truth of this life is death". Why care if the Jews are in control of everything if even the Jews who are in control of everything are under the control of the grim reaper? Celine's terrific strength was to juxtapose and even portray as humorous the sad reality of physical life and death. In one of his most famous scenes, a trip over the English channel turns into a vomit parade, in which the deck is awash with the stuff and our hero, the hapless Ferdinand, retches and retches till he has just one something left...out it pops: a strawberry.

Celine delivered this strange amalgam of horror and humour with a vigorous style he refined to deliver through the ellipse (...), a punctuation that few writers since have felt compelled to emulate, at least to the same degree. He scoffed at this invention of his - "my three little dots! All the real writers will tell you what to think of it...". Except that when quizzed as to who the real writers were, he always mentioned three Frenchmen who are even more forgotten than he, presumably for literary rather than political reasons. Since he also said (in his last book), "In two hundred years I'll be helping the kids through high school", it seems that he had a better idea of his ultimate literary reputation than he sometimes let on.

Celine regarded his writing as a form of impressionism, and he sometimes compared his work to the French impressionists, but the virtue of the ellipse in his hands was to a kind of cubist writing, with the perspective of the narrator jumping from phrase to phrase, seemingly "stream of consciousness" but very artfully contrived.

Kurt Vonnegut in a much-quoted and republished essay said that "every writer" is in Celine's debt. I'm not sure this is so. But certainly many writers are, and those whose work bears the hallmark of his sensibility include Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Tom Wolfe, whose non-fiction attack on art criticism The painted word, is written using the ellipse, but whose first novel, Bonfire of the vanities was clearly written in a Celinian style.

I wrote my first three or four novels using the ellipse; I liked it for its ability to shift perspective so rapidly, and, as Vonnegut said, give the writing an instant immediacy. While most of my readers didn't complain, enough of them did that I later went back and reworked those books to remove most though not all of them.

The ellipse was really the least significant of the many ways Celine affected me. He freed me to write more energetically and adventurously, not to fear criticism - his took the savagings he got on the chin, but got his own back in his writing - and to aspire to write the black humour that seemingly so effortlessly flowed off the nib of his pen.

I have been to many of the places Celine put in his books, most notably the sleepy town in Germany, Sigmaringen, where he set his fictionalised account of the last days of the Vichy government, Castle to Castle. I have stood outside his last home in Meudon, outside Paris, and at his grave in the nearby cemetery. The shopping arcade where he spent some of his youth is still there too, and one can see the narrow staircases in the small shops of the type his mother lamely mounted and descended many times a day. And I have puzzled over this man who as a doctor spent much of his non-literary life treating the poor, who worked for the League of Nations as part of what is now the World Health Organisation, aiming to eradicate diseases affecting the poor the world over, who maintained he was a devout pacifist after being decorated for bravery in the First World War, yet volunteered on the outbreak of the second, and before this, had "warned" his countrymen not to fight because the Jews were the cause of it all.

I don't have a way to explain Celine. I wish I did. Henry Miller, a writer who took much of his style from Celine, said that Celine lived within him and always would. He was that powerful a personality, shining through his work.

Certainly the last twenty years have seen his reputation, if not restored, certainly altered for the better. Many of his later works have been translated into English, there have been numerous biographies and literary studies, and if they all try to grapple with his hatred of Jews, none succeeds in explaining it to my satisfaction anyway. And recently the first of his anti-Semitic broadsides, Bagatelles for a massacre, was translated into English and made available in e-reader format, with "trifles" instead of "bagatelles" beginning the title. Non-francophone readers can now read it for themselves, and make up their own minds.

For me nothing can undo Celine's terrible attacks on Jews, not least because he was such a gifted writer he was more effective than most turgid anti-Semitic lunatics.

People try to explain away other anti-Semites - Wagner, for example. Yet when I listen to Wagner, I feel I hear in his music the limitation, the thwarting of potential, that is implied by something so self-evidently foolish as anti-Semitism. Perhaps Wagner was a great composer, but he was not as great as he may have been had he overcome his demons.

I guess that is how I feel about Celine - a powerful writer, able to transform our understanding of the world, but how much more powerful might he have been had he seen his hatred of Jews for what it was, and laugh at it as he laughed at his father's anti-Semitism in his second novel.

At least an eight star effort. Give yourself more if you like, and paste them into your notebook.

"Stoa" is the Greek word for porch, and the Stoic movement in philosophy stems from the alleged fact that its founder, one Zeno, taught outside in the shade of a porch of a public building in Athens. Zeno is reckoned to have been a pupil of a pupil of Socrates, leading the Stoics to claim Socrates as the originator of their school - they were not alone, as my previous post on Plato says.

Legend has Zeno living till the age of 99, when he hung himself after a hangnail got infected; Diogenes Laertius* says he actually held his breath till he died when he stubbed his toe. Neither of these seems a very compelling advertisement for the virtues of a philosophy, though the infected hangnail story only suggests that he knew he was going to die so made quicker work of it.

Whether any of this is true is probably irrelevant. Stoicism gained in popularity till it was practised widely during the Roman era, and one of the emperors, Marcus Aurelius, was a follower. His Meditations are still worth reading. Seneca, a playwright, statesman and philosopher, was also a Stoic.

But for me the greatest of them all was Epictetus, and not just because of his philosophy. His teachings were recorded in shorthand** by one of his pupils, Arrian***, and later published, and it is that, the immediacy of his teaching rendered as he more or less spoke, that is so attractive. What Plato pretended to do in his dialogues Arrian really did do - wrote down what Epictetus said, and later published it.

Of course what Epictetus had to say matters. He was a dab hand at exploding his pupils' arrogance and putting the case for a virtuous life, and how to live it. As we now understand the word Stoicism isn't an easy option in life, and Epictetus is an exemplar. He was a slave who was freed because he didn't turn on his master when he was tortured about the master's possible treason; it must have hurt at least a little bit...

That really grabbed me when I first encountered Epictetus about fifteen years ago in an 18th century translation by Elizabeth Carter. He was so passionate about life, about thinking, about goodness...self-denial was in his bones. It wasn't because the worldly was bad, at all, but because goodness was elsewhere...it was actually preferable to be good, not some kind of penance.

And Epictetus admitted frankly that he failed on a regular basis to live up to his teaching, and I liked that. It gave me hope for my own sometimes dissolute life.

For a while I thought to write a book incorporating this great man, till I discovered that Tom Wolfe had already done it. But he's been a guide to me in a way other classical philosophers have not been: an existential example of how to live. He helps me to focus, to concentrate, when I am writing, to keep at it when I have lots of reasons to wander off and sink myself in the pleasures of life (and yes, the flesh).

* Diogenes Laertius wrote a history of philosophy to his own time - ca the third century AD - that is worth reading. Its most interesting bit is the long excerpt from the writing of Epicurus, as we know of this philosopher's writing effectively only through it.

** Arrian apparently devised his own shorthand to take down what Epictetus said. He published the notes when someone else put some of them out, having originally intended only to publish a digest of his teacher's thought.

*** Arrian also apparently wrote a history of a military campaign.

Five stars and a smile. Put the stars on the back of your monitor...it is ok to do this.