France unearths another long-lost novel by anti-Semitic author Céline
"Londres", a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was published for the first time this week after laying forgotten for decades. Discovered in 2021, it is the second book published from a massive stack of raw material written by one of France's most controversial authors.
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"Londres" ("London"), published on Thursday by French publisher Gallimard, depicts the shady underworld of the British capital between the two world wars.
The 500-page book is based on nearly 1,200 handwritten pages left behind by Céline, a Nazi collaborator, when he fled Paris for Germany in June 1944, the month that Allied forces launched their decisive invasion in Normandy.
The stack of papers remained hidden for three-quarters of a century, but were found by a French journalist in 2021.
Last May, Gallimard published a shorter novel, "War" (“Guerre”), that features the same protagonist – Brigadier Ferdinand, who is shot in the First World War and eventually makes his way across the Channel.
"Londres" describes his life in the racier venues of the English capital during the interwar years.
"War" and "London" are inspired by Céline's own life. He volunteered to fight in the French army during World War One, but was wounded.
In March 1915, the authorities sent him to London to work in the French passport office. In his spare time, he frequented music halls and the shadier side of the London underworld.
The 1944 novel "Guignol's Band" drew on these experiences – as did "London".
The unpublished manuscripts that formed the basis for "Guerre" and "Londres" were left behind in Montmartre when Céline left for Germany in an attempt to escape the Allies.
The papers then disappeared, but appeared to have been kept in a safe place, and eventually they landed in the hands of a former journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who said he was given them by a reader.
Thibaudat offered them to Céline’s heirs, but they refused to take them. Thibaudat then went to the police, who made them public in the summer of 2021.
Gallimard quickly sought to publish them before Céline’s oeuvre ends up in the public domain in 2032.
Anti-Semitism
The reviews for "War", the first of the novels to come out of the manuscripts, were largely positive.
Many critics seemed keen to make a distinction between "early Céline", the novelist, and "later Céline," a phase marked by the publication of his first openly anti-Semitic pamphlet in 1937.
"Guerre" is thought to have been written in 1934, shortly after the publication of Céline’s first novel, "Voyage au bout de la nuit" ("Journey to the End of the Night") in 1932.
That novel, filled with slang and jabbing at bourgeois sensibilities, brought him to fame, and is still taught in schools today.
(with agencies)
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