CÉLINE, LOUIS-FERDINAND

Life

Born Louis-Ferdinand Destouches at Courbevoie in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine) on May 27, 1894. From a poor family, after receiving only a basic education he joined the French cavalry. He fought in WWI and was decorated for his actions in a battle where he was gravely wounded in the head. The subsequent physical and mental suffering had lifelong effects on him.

He was discharged from the Army and after the war studied to obtain a medical degree. He worked in France as a doctor then travelled to the United States where he was the staff surgeon at the Ford Motor Company plant in Detroit, Michigan. Next, he worked in Africa and for the new League of Nations before taking up a permanent position as a doctor to the poor in Paris. He then started to write in his spare time.

His best known work is also his first: Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932 - translated most recently and successfully by Ralph Manheim). It broke many literary conventions of the time, using the rhythms and, to a certain extent, the vocabulary of slang and vulgar speech. The book was a public success but Céline was not awarded the Prix Goncourt, although the voting was controversial enough to become the subject of a book (Goncourt 32 by Eugène Saccomano, 1999).

In 1936 he wrote Mort à credit that was considered innovative, chaotic, and antiheroic visions of human suffering.

Openly anti-semitic and a nazi proponent during WWII, he escaped judgment by fleeing to Germany (Sigmaringen, 1944) along the Vichy government and latter to Denmark (1945). He was condemned by default (1950) in France to one year of imprisonment and declared a national disgrace. Amnestied, he went back to France in 1951, earning his living as an old and almost forgotten doctor.

Fame came back to him in his late days with a trilogy telling his exile: D'un château l'autre, Nord and Rigodon. Céline died on July 1, 1961 of a ruptured aneurysm and was interred in a small cemetery at Bas Meudon (part of Meudon in the Hauts-de-Seine département).