Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [109]
As for the words I quoted: They don’t, after all, imply an apology or a wish to be forgiven. They are envious, and little more.
Since he is punished and dead, and since the Nazi nightmare is so long ago now, it may at last be possible to perceive a twisted sort of honor in his declining to speak of remorse or to offer excuses of any kind. Other collaborators with the Nazis, of whom there were tens of thousands in France and millions in all of Europe, had stories to tell of how they were forced to behave as badly, as they did, and of daring acts of resistance and sabotage they committed, at the risk of their lives.
Céline found that sort of lying ludicrous in a very ugly way.
I get a splitting headache every time I try to write about Céline. I have one now. I never have headaches at any other time.
As the war was ending, he headed for the center of the holocaust—Berlin.
I know when he began to influence me. I was well into my forties before I read him. A friend was startled that I didn’t know anything about Céline, and he initiated me with Journey to the End of the Night, which flabbergasted me. I assigned it for a course in the novel which I was giving at the University of Iowa. When it was time for me to lecture for two hours about it, I found I had nothing to say.
The book penetrated my bones, anyway, if not my mind. And I only now understand what I took from Céline and put into the novel I was writing at the time, which was called Slaughterhouse-Five. In that book, I felt the need to say this every time a character died: ’So it goes,’ This exasperated many critics, and it seemed fancy and tiresome to me, too. But it somehow had to be said.
It was a clumsy way of saying what Céline managed to imply so much more naturally in everything he wrote, in effect: “Death and suffering can’t matter nearly as much as I think they do. Since they are so common, my taking them so seriously must mean that I am insane. I must try to be saner.”
Which has brought us back to our old friend insanity again. Céline claimed from time to time to have been trepanned in the First World War, as the result of a head wound. Actually, according to his fascinating biographer Erika Ostrovsky (Voyeur Voyant, Random House, 1971), he was wounded in his right shoulder. And, in his final novel, Rigadoon, he tells of being hit in the head by a brick during an air raid in Hannover. So it might be said that he found it necessary sometimes to explain a head that so many people found unusual.
He himself must have become thoroughly sick of his head occasionally, and I will guess as to its chief defect. I think it lacked the damping apparatus which most of us have, which keeps us from being swamped by the unbelievability of life as it really is.
So perhaps Céline’s style isn’t as arbitrary as I’ve thought it was. It may have been inevitable, if his mind was so undefended. There may have been nothing for him to do, as though he were caught in an artillery barrage, but to exclaim and exclaim and exclaim.
And his works cannot be called a triumph of the human imagination. Almost everything he exclaimed about was really going on.
He was wonderful about inventors and machines.
The inscription on his tombstone is the one with which I began this essay. Erika Ostrovsky calls it a “terse summary of a double life.”
Good for her.
He expected his writings to live on and on. He described himself when he was about to die like this: “… by your leave, a writer, a terrific stylist, the living proof: they put me in the ’Pleiade’ with La Fontaine, Clement Marot, du Bellay … not to mention Rabelais! and Ronsard! … just to show you that I’m not worried … in two or three centuries I’ll be helping the kids through high school …”
At the time I write, which is the autumn of 1974, it has become apparent even to ordinary people, with their mental dampers operating perfectly, that life is in fact as dangerous and unforgiving and irrational