Céline on the run
Sir, – Readers who have waited for the English translations to read
Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s work will no doubt have been moved by the image of
the hounded author on the run in June 1944 that Karl Orend so convincingly
painted in his article (June 19). A mainly anglophone readership would still
be easily persuaded that Céline’s virulent anti-Semitism sprang from his
pacifist convictions and that he was turned into a scapegoat and victimized
for having, “like Sade, held up a mirror to all that was base and ignoble”,
such as the time “when he said that no matter how fast the terrified
civilians ran fleeing the advancing Wehrmacht they could never catch up with
the retreating French army”. Unlike his celebrated novels (Journey to the
End of the Night and Death on the Instalment Plan), Céline’s ferociously
anti-Semitic pamphlets (Bagatelle pour un massacre, École des cadavres and
Les Beaux Draps) have never been translated into English, and indeed have
never been reprinted in French since 1942–3. Orend can thus sweep under the
carpet Céline’s wild exhortations to racial hatred and extermination of the
Jews in books that went through several successful reprints (with Denoël’s
German-sponsored publishing company) during the war. Orend also forgets to
mention that the self-righteous author (hero of the First World War) who
pointed the finger at the hasty retreat of the French army before the
advancing German troops did so in a book (Les Beaux Draps, 1941) which
affirms his pro-Nazi beliefs in unambiguous terms: “The clause of the true
pact, the only one respected: Vote for the Aryans. Urns for the Jews”, “Fix
the Jew to a post!”. This came from a man who, two months before the German
withdrawal from Paris in 1944, rushed to the German embassy to ask for the
travel documents to flee the Allies and the just retribution awaiting him at
the hands of former Resistance fighters whom he had described as “hooligans,
half-breeds, . . . profit-seekers”. In the words of Ernst Jünger, then a
German officer stationed in Paris: it is “curious to see how people capable
of demanding the heads of millions of men in cold blood worry about their
dirty little lives. The two facts must be connected”.
While praising Céline’s literary talent, Karl Orend has every reason to worry
that “the danger to his reputation will come when his pamphlets leave
copyright protection”. But long before that happens, it would be worthwhile
recalling the polemic that opposed the author of Les Beaux Draps to his
critic, the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, in the pages of the journal
Aujourd’hui. Having dared to judge Céline’s diatribe against the Jews as
boring and unreadable, Desnos was accused of leading a “pro-Yids campaign”
(“une campagne philoyoutre”). “Nature signs all his works. ‘Desnos’ means
nothing”, added Céline. In a lapidary reply, the poet passed comment on the
“original theory” according to which a critic had only one alternative:
either to shout “Death to Céline” or “Death to the Jews”. The responsibility
for this illogical argument, he concluded, was entirely with M Louis
Destouches, aka Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Signed: Robert Desnos aka “Robert
Desnos”.
But the epilogue to this story came a few years later. An active member of a
clandestine Resistance network, Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo and
deported to Buchenwald, then to Terezin. While Céline was making his way to
the relative safety of Germany and Denmark in June 1944, Desnos died of
typhus in a concentration camp. As the years go by, it will become
increasingly difficult to ignore the full impact and consequences of
Céline’s anti-Semitism. Perhaps it is already high time we stopped
exonerating his support for Nazi ideology and racial cleansing on account of
his “brilliantly inventive” style and misguided peace-keeping strategy
during the pre-war years.
RAMONA FOTIADE
French Section, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of
Glasgow, 16 University Gardens, Glasgow.
Schoenberg’s politics
Sir, – I would like to clarify a few points in response to Marina
Frolova-Walker’s review of my book Jewish Identities: Nationalism, racism,
and utopianism in twentieth-century music (June 19). I had no intention of
damaging Arnold Schoenberg’s reputation. Rather, I wanted to replace the
hagiographic image of the composer with one more cognizant of the
cultural-historical context in which he developed his ideas about music.
Like many Jewish intellectuals, Schoenberg identified completely with German
culture – his banishment from that culture understandably caused an identity
crisis manifested in his political fantasies about his leadership position
in an imaginary Jewish state. But it would be an exaggeration to call him a
German supremacist or an admirer of fascism. Growing up in a politically
tumultuous time, Schoenberg, like many other European intellectuals, was
attracted to some aspects of fascism. In other words he was a victim not
only of Nazi persecution, but also of its poisonous ideology.
Similarly, Ernest Bloch did not model his Jewish identity on Houston Stewart
Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, although he, like
most intellectuals of his time, admired the book’s comprehensive
presentation of the cultural history of Europe. What I hoped to demonstrate
in my book was the insidious power of ideologies such as anti-Semitism and
racism, which were absorbed even by people who were their victims. As
Frolova-Walker observed, I do not pass moral judgement, and I hope the
reader will not, either.
KLÁRA MÓRICZ
Music Department, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts 01002.
Sir, – In her review of Jewish Identities by Klára Móricz, Marina
Frolova-Walker refers to a post-war “English-language article” in which
Arnold Schoenberg “laid down a fascistic interpretation of his own
twelve-tone system”. It is helpful to read the relevant sentence (“In a
‘fascist’ interpretation, the basic set accordingly would represent the
leader, the Duce, the Fuehrer, on whom all depends, who distributes power
and function to every tone . . .”) in context: a single-page, 300-word piece
for Music in California and the West, a kind of yearbook for the performing
arts in the western United States and Canada, which was hastily compiled by
Richard Saunders in 1948 (his name is misspelled on the front cover). In it,
Schoenberg complains that his serial method has been described as
“bolshevik”, on the grounds that each member of the twelve-note set is
supposedly of equal importance, and he merely points out that an explanation
from the opposite end of the political spectrum would be equally valid, i.e.
equally stupid. The allusion to Mussolini and Hitler is surely a play on
words: in contrapuntal theory written in Latin, the subject of a fugue is
called the dux; in German it is called the Führer.
WILLIAM DRABKIN
93 Highfield Lane, Southampton.
Alexandrines
Sir, – In her review of the recent production of Phèdre (Arts, June 19), Maya
Slater has made a no doubt uncharacteristic error in her remarks on the
metrical construction of the alexandrin. The alexandrin classique does
indeed have twelve syllables, but only four stresses, not six. Consequently,
the rhythm is not iambic, but, by and large, when perfectly regular,
anapaestic. In other words, the alexandrin is a tetrameter, not a hexameter,
and is in fact also known as the tétramètre. Hence what she considers to be
a pointed metrical distortion in the line Tout m’afflíge, et me nuít, et
conspíre à me nuíre is simply an example of the standard construction. (What
is unusual about this line is the internal rhyme and near rhyme of
nuit/nuire/ conspire.) Confusion arose, perhaps, from the fact that the
English iambic hexameter is called – after the French line, but only on the
basis of a syllable count – an alexandrine.
HAMISH ROBINSON
86 Golborne Road, London W10.
Alexandria
Sir, – In her review of my book Vintage Alexandria: Photographs of the city
1860–1960 (June 26), Maria Golia argues that “memory edits the past, and so
do pictures”, suggesting that Vintage Alexandria is long on nostalgia, short
on reality. She says that Egyptians had no part in the cosmopolitan city;
and to say they did is the wilful distortion of “the literati, exiled
residents and members of Egypt’s elite” for whom “Alexandria’s dazzling
‘European’ past inevitably outshines its Arab present”.
According to Golia, such records and images and memories illustrate only what
was lost “by the very, very few”. They were not so few, and their families
had been in Egypt for generations, in some cases for centuries. They had
been welcomed in Egypt for their expertise, energy and capital; they played
a major role in developing the country – they played an authentic part in
Egyptian history. They lost their Alexandria, and in the process Egyptians
lost something of their Alexandria too. Egyptians who were growing up during
those years recall the shock and sadness of classrooms being emptied of
their friends, of neighbourhoods emptied of familiar faces. At the time it
seemed better to forget. But sometimes when politics tries to edit out the
past, pictures restore memories.
MICHAEL HAAG
81A Belsize Lane, London NW3.
Tudors?
Sir, – A year ago the TLS published my Commentary, “A rose by another name”,
arguing that the term “Tudor” was hardly used in the sixteenth century,
either by the monarchs or their subjects (June 13, 2008). I expected a
torrent of refutation. I have not had a single objection and therefore
provisionally conclude that I was right.
I was therefore intrigued to see Anthony Fletcher’s review of Kevin Sharpe’s
Selling the Tudor Monarchy (June 19). Clearly, Sharpe went to press too
early to take note of my point. But I am surprised that Professor Fletcher
has no inhibition in talking about “Tudor monarchy”, “Tudor royal
propaganda”, “Tudor culture” and so on. Does he dispute my basic contention?
Or does he think it of no importance that historians should continue the
indiscriminate use of a term which has acquired massive and misleading
resonance, even though it had little purchase in the minds of
contemporaries?
CLIFFORD DAVIES
Wadham College, Oxford.
Monogrammed
Sir, – I don’t know where it comes from, but there’s a curious error in Sarah
Churchwell’s review of Chaplin’s Girl: The life and loves of Virginia
Cherrill by Miranda Seymour (June 12). Virginia Cherrill, divorced from Cary
Grant, married in 1937 not a non-existent “Earl of Grandison” but the ninth
Earl of Jersey. To glimpse her now and then through the windows of their
monogrammed car, going in or out of the gates of Osterley Park, added a bit
of colour to the life of our suburb.
GEOFFREY BEST
19 Buckingham Street, Oxford.
