Death on the Installment Plan

[Little, Brown,, $2.75]

THE talent of this Paris doctor has been rightly compared to that of the painter Balthus; both are notable for an exact and malicious naturalism, and the texture of their creations is morbid. Thus Céline, Naturalistic writer of the French Tradition, is injected with the modern virus, and his imagination, to complete the summing up, is ferocious and grotesque.

Death on the Installment Plan will bring to readers of The Journey the boyhood of its confessor. The first section pleases the traditionalist because it bears unmistakable earmarks of the Gothic— in a revised form, of course, but sufficiently apparent to reassure one that its violence is part historical-minded.

The remainder is the story of Ferdinand, and the poor of Paris. There have been other novelists who came out of the slums and brought its humor and humors to their interpretation of life, and in this respect Céline has been called a French Dickens, but he lacks the snobbery and the nineteenth-century sentimentalism. It is as if in writing the Death the author set out to remember everything and forget nothing: ‘This is my true confessional,’or words to that effect.

Setting aside the awkwardness of a rambling construction, what remains is fascinating; and, perhaps because the scene is in a boy’s eyes, there is greater drama to the small things, and an unsuspected illuminating pathos to Ferdinand’s own character. On the surface he is a despicable egotist. Even when he tries to the utmost he loses his job; he abuses his absurd footling papa, clerk in an insurance Moloch, and suffers that excruciating pain of childhood, to be ashamed of and yet fiercely to understand the crippled, never-say-die hardihood of his mother. In the Paris pages Céline’s great talent shows to advantage; the life of his family and the Passage where they live is sordid, frequently disgusting, but in the telling it becomes one of those irresistible guffaws that hurt, though laugh one must. Ferdinand’s is the humor of Dostoevski’s old soldiers, in the beholder’s eye, and as such the mark of an artist.

If it were not so real, one might call Céline’s Paris the Paris of an intoxicated imagination. Every character is a caricature, from the fantastic genius of the balloonist-editor, Courtial, and his bearded wife, to the English schoolmaster. But the boy, sniveling and bitter, dominates the scene. The book will be remembered for its individual passages; the experimental farm school in the provinces is a touch of genius, with its germ-rotten, electrically charged vegetables, the light-hearted pilfering students, learning to steal à la Fagin, and the shock of the inevitable catastrophe.

This is a better, though more brutal, book than its predecessor and shows an advance in literary technique. Of its political significance, each to his fancy; it has none, absolutely none, and that is the secret of Céline’s honesty.

JOHN WALCOTT