The Life of Celine: A Critical Biography

Louis–Ferdinand Céline was one of the foremost European writers of the twentieth century, the author of ten novels of undeniable stature and importance. Yet his life and work remain relatively unknown outside France, obscured by his reputation as a violent anti–semite during the 1930s and the Occupation, when he became a leading figure in collaborationist circles. Nicholas Hewitt′s important new biography explores its controversial subject′s life and work through the places and times in which he lived and in which he grounded his fiction. Céline was brought up in the old center of Paris during its last years, in the Belle Epoque, the only son of petit–bourgeois parents. He later worked as a doctor in the capital′s impoverished industrial suburbs, breeding ground during the inter–war years for political militancy of Right and Left. Both episodes feature powerfully in his fictions and are crucial to our understanding of the man. Hewitt pulls no punches in recounting the violence and vile extremity of Céline′s anti–semitic politics. At the same time he positions his subject in a wider cultural context and milieu. The legacy of post–Napoleonic Romanticism and its importance to French intellectual life in the 1920s are traced in absorbing detail, as is the history of French modernist fiction and the key role played in its development by Marcel Proust. Hewitt provides a fascinating account, especially of Montmartre, where Céline lived, between the wars, and its Bohemian culture, in which engagement in artistic experiment often went hand in hand with reactionary politics. No less fascinatingly he pursues Céline through the murky world of Occupied Paris, on to his retreat to Germany with the Vichy Government, and his subsequent imprisonment and exile in Denmark, before he was allowed to return to live in obscurity in France for the remaining years of his life. This invaluable book not only assesses the life and work of one of Europe′s most important and innovative writers, it also casts revealing light on crucial areas of French cultural, social, and political history.

List of Illustrations. Preface. 1. A Parisian Childhood. 2. National Service: The Army and the Colonies. 3. The Student of Medicine. 4. The League of Nations. 5. Clichy and Montmartre. 6. Voyage au bout de la nuit. 7. The ′House of Literature′. 8. 1936. 9. Anti–Semitism. 10. Phoney War. 11. The Occupation. 12. Exile. 13. Meudon. Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Nicholas Hewitt is Professor of French at the University of Nottingham, and has taught previously at the universities of Hull, Southampton and Warwick. He has written widely on French literary and cultural history from the end of the First World War to the 1960s, including studies on Troyat, French interwar "malaise", Céline, and the postwar French literary Right.

"Throughout his excellent, comprehensively documented critical biography, the best yet available in English, Hewitt contextualises his subject expertly." Times Higher Education Supplement "Taking advantage of recent biographies written in French and of newly available materials, Hewitt skilfully uses – and, at time, abuses – the available sources. At its best, Hewitt′s clear and understandable prose takes the reader inside Céline′s novel. He points out what to look for, explains what is important, and makes interesting connections." Choice "Very elegantly written book, which is also an intriguing presentation of French social and political life in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first two–thirds of the twentieth." MLR