An Armenian Family in Bordeaux

     We had just arrived in Bordeaux and we were taking public transportation (as is our custom) into town. We took a bus and then were waiting at a tram stop to continue when Patricia began to chat with a fellow passenger. She was speaking to a middle-aged woman who knew no English but to whom our imperfect French was no impediment. After only a few minutes of conversation our new acquaintance was making sleeping gestures, inviting us to stay at her apartment rather than a hotel. We thanked her but demurred, telling her we had already booked a room. She asked where, then began insisting we come at least for dinner. Patricia did her best to put her off, to leave her with a polite "peut-être," but she pressed ever harder. The woman gave Patricia her telephone number and asked her to call. "Peut-être," said Patricia. I confess to a wisp of wonder about just what was going on. We parted with the woman repeatedly wishing that she might entertain us. It certainly seemed a bit fishy. Though we communicated only with difficulty, it was clear that she ardently wished to see us again. We left the tram and located our hotel not far away, checked in and went to our room. The telephone rang. It was our new friend -- she had made her way independently to the hotel . She said that she merely wanted to be sure that we had found the address. When we continued our polite regrets, she said to we should let her know once we have decided to come. Ah, but we had no telephone. Instantly she had her cellphone out and was pressing it on us. Though we managed to refuse the phone, we found ourselves capitulating by way of compromise and agreeing to meet her at four the following afternoon. Her eagerness was so urgent it was a bit off-putting.
     Terez, for that was her name, which she spelled in this rather than the French way, did come by the next day to conduct us to her home in Merignac. She had a pass for the tram, but the system required single-ride passengers to pay before boarding, and none of us had the proper change for the vending machine. She urged us to get on anyway as there was no ticket-taker, though fellow passengers could see that we had not stamped a ticket or flashed a card. Feeling conspicuous and vulnerable, we learned a bit more about our hostess. She had immigrated from Armenia some decades earlier. She and her husband were both on disability and her younger son Émile was a secondary school student while an older son Achot drove trucks, though he found himself at the moment unemployed. Her husband was in the hospital for shoulder surgery. After a time we were relieved to arrive at our stop, but then dismayed to find we had a bus yet to take, again conspicuously ticketless and now with a visible driver. By the time we reached Terez’s place, doubtless a welfare apartment but well-maintained and adequate, we were co-conspirators, anarchist comrades, fellow scroungers after life.
     She immediately poured wine and gestured toward the coffee table, laden with chocolates and fruits and cheeses and pastries. Her younger son was a bit timid at first, but warmed to his role as the family member with the closest thing to some knowledge of English. After a short time her older son appeared with his family. His wife Milena (who had lived in Moscow for some years) was gracious, and their children Iliana and Mike were pleasant. What a fine family, and all welcoming us as though we had been relatives while grinning across the linguistic gap. Achot occasionally enlisted his telephone to turn our French into Russian.
     There wasn't an inch to spare on the dinner table as well, though the principal dishes were as yet unpresented. The repast turned out to be gargantuan: baked pork chops, a casserole of ground meat, eggs, and potatoes, a plateful of fresh coriander stalks, olives, pickled peppers, creamed spinach, a cabbage salad, charcuterie including salami and a preparation of cooked lard (pure white, looking like benign slices of cheese), and half a dozen beverage options beyond the wine. This was eventually succeeded by a grand variety of fresh fruit (including excellent persimmons), cheese, fruits, and hitherto unseen pastries. Fond as we are of cooking, we could not imagine staging a feast on this scale.
     Achot gave us a lift back to the hotel as his mother was asking if we didn’t want to stay the night, and, when disappointed, offering hospitality to us and our relatives for all time to come. We felt still a bit dazed, unable to process the experience as a whole. The family had doubtless been influenced by their alienation in France. “It is hard here for an immigrant,” Achot said, and we later were told that Armenians are considered by some in Western Europe as the next thing to Gypsies. Armenian custom surely played a role as well, and, most of all, Terez’ innate great-heartedness. With such slight acquaintance it is difficult to discern or even to speculate meaningfully about motive. Her liberality was not unique in my experience. I thought of the schoolteacher in a small Algerian town who heard we had been stranded there and turned up suddenly in his car to offer us a bed and a dinner at which he kept urging, "Mangez, mangez!" while we wondered whether his wife and children would have anything to eat after we had left the table with him. And the woman from the German embassy in Phnom Penh where she did what struck even this cynic as humanitarian work, who spread for us a tasty table in her apartment in a towering building overlooking the lights of the city and we ate together and discussed philosophy and art as though time did not exist and we knew we would never meet again. Then there was the ten-year-old boy in Khajuraho who tailed us until we tired of shooing him and in the end he brought us into his home where Patricia sat on the dirt floor with his smiling mother and made parathas. This Muslim and agnostic and Hindu would have understood the millennia-old Hebrew injunction, “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Leviticus 19:34)
     The encounter still seems a bit mysterious. I had been reading Céline's Death on the Installment Plan and relishing his profound pessimism, his disgust with humanity. He is like Henry Miller but lacking Miller's ebullient brand of joy. What carries Céline through the day I do not know, yet he has such propulsive energy in his revulsion that he goes on and on as though he must anticipate something coming of it all in the end. In spite of his fascism and misogyny he seems to me like Swift in his fierce and biting vision (not to mention his scatology), bitter because he cares so much. And even in the riot of vices detailed there, the hatred, lust, irresponsibility, wanton violence, utter selfishness, and absurd arrogance, there is the figure of Uncle Edouard, with no selfish end whatever, trying tirelessly to see that his wild nephew manages to launch himself in life. Such kindness, like other miracles, need not be constant or even frequent. It need not even be wholly pure in motive. It is enough that, now and then, along our progress, be it a day that seems a stroll, a hike, or a laborious trudge, someone look our way with uncalculating love. Surely this is the only grace there is, but if we are fortunate it will suffice.

The Lyricism of the Ugly: Céline's Mort à Crédit

Page references to quotations from Death on the Installment Plan are enclosed in parentheses and refer to the Signet edition, New American Library, 1966. Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.


     The twentieth century was the great age of irony. One of the period’s masterworks, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Mort à Crédit (expertly translated by Ralph Manheim [1] with the title Death on the Installment Plan) seems built largely of inversions and conundrums. For the author, the ugly is beautiful. According to Céline, “That's what Death on the Installment Plan is, symbolically, the reward of life being death. Seeing as . . . it's not the good Lord who rules, it's the devil. Man. Nature's disgusting, just look at it, bird life, animal life.” [2] The book resembles comedy in its depiction of everyman’s worst sins and faults and failings and in its emphasis on the physical with particular focus on shit and vomit, yet the tone is anything but light. It seems an autobiography, yet the book's protagonist is far more filthy and incompetent than the author, his relationships with family and others far more dysfunctional. We tend to call pictures of the seamy side “realistic,” yet the book is highly fanciful and full of hallucinations, delusions, and visions. The author’s celebrated ellipses, which one might expect to slow the narrative to a contemplative pace, instead accelerate it in a relentless onslaught on the reader's sensibilities. Much of the book’s early notoriety arose from its apparent perverse reveling in the nastiness of people and in their surroundings.
     Contradictions extend into the political realm. Céline was a committed fascist and a vicious anti-Semite, whose opinions, far from private, were published in inflammatory pamphlets before and during the Nazi occupation [3] yet my popular Signet edition from 1966 features blurbs from both Trotsky and Gide (a Communist at the time of the book’s publication). The author (like Heidegger) saw no contradiction in consistently maintaining Jewish friends and lovers while calling for the ruination of “international Jewry” and later drew the admiration of Allen Ginsberg [4] and Philip Roth who called him, pointedly, “a great liberator.” It helps little that even the Nazis were uncomfortable with Celine as an ally. [5] While he consistently portrays the common people as vicious and ignorant, he spent his medical career treating them in what amounted to charity clinics. He had an abiding sympathy for the poor and an anarchist’s distaste for bosses, police, and other authorities. He ridicules father Auguste in the novel for his paranoia in which Jews and Freemasons are responsible for his family’s suffering, yet he practiced precisely the same sort of ignorant scapegoating himself.
     In his narratives people act as though blind, doing their blundering best to pursue self-interest but helplessly in thrall to exploiters, who, though more comfortable, are no less benighted. His everyman is subject to an inexorable torrent of experience which will never slow sufficiently for one to gain a firm footing and which threatens at any moment to overflow in a riot of chaos. The tone is clear from the outset. The book begins as bleakly as anything in Beckett : “Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad . . .I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over.” (15) But this emptiness soon turns into a plenitude that boils over out of control. Before long he is having sex with Mireille in the Bois de Boulogne (39) and all hell breaks loose as countless spectators gather, requiring twenty-five thousand police to clear the area in a fully Rabelaisian scene. This hallucination is rationalized as a fever, but similar eruptions recur again and again. When the family attempts to have a nice vacation in England, the project collapses in disaster on the passage over with everyone is slipping and sliding in each other’s vomit (124-5) in what seems more a diabolical rite of passage than a catharsis. Angry crowds descend more than once on des Pereires’ Genitron offices just as multitudes of vermin erupt from his sorry attempt at a scientific potato garden.
     Céline’s political derangement had in common with Pound’s a revulsion with modernity, including that cash nexus that forms the basis for human relationships under modern capitalism. In his Paris Review interview he says “I really saw the world was ruled by the Golden Calf, by Mammon!” Ferdinand’s parents cannot adapt to a changing world. In his mother’s shop she sells lace of an outmoded style. In an attempt to keep up with contemporary fashion, she buys boleros, only to see them fall out of favor. Des Pereires is an inventor of the old school, an individual fiddling about in his workshop, clinging to his lighter-than-air balloon, a universal genius able only to devise one hare-brained scheme after another in the manner of Bouvard and Pécuchet.
     The hopeless despair of Céline’s world is only heightened and rendered poignant by occasional strange unearthly rays of light. Gazing at the nightlights of Paris from des Pereires’ suburban home, it seems a great appetitive beast, “an enormous animal, sprawled across the horizon . . . they eat . . . every day . . .yes, indeed, they eat . . . It makes a sad sound, a soft rumbling.” (468) Fellowship appears briefly and obliquely, but only to lament the inability of holding on to time, of stopping the rush of reality if only momentarily: “He was bound to be someplace, chasing after his pittance . . .and his fun.” “Ah, it’s an awful thing . . .and being young doesn’t help any . . .while you notice for the first time . . .the way you lose people as you go along . . . buddies you’ll never see again . . . never again . . . when you notice that they have disappeared like dreams . . .that it’s all over . . . finished . . . that you too will get lost someday . . . a long way off but inevitably . . . in the awful torrent of things and people . . . of the days and shapes . . . that pass . . . that never stop.” “They’re in a dream with the others.” (392)
     The tenderness of that unpreventable loss reminds the reader of Villon. [6] Several relatives also seem almost redemptive in their kindness. The narrator’s mother Clémence strives with unfailing will-power but diminishing strength to sustain her family and mollify her husband. “She did all she could to keep me alive. I just shouldn’t have been born.” This model of dogged maternal love is never modified by set-backs, fatigue, or mixed motives. ( 55) During Ferdinand’s teen-age years his Uncle Édouard repeatedly rescues him, offering him a refuge and resources in spite of the boy’s repeated failures.
     Perhaps most suggestive of the book’s acts of love, each more precious for its rarity, is Ferdinand’s grandmother Caroline’s gift to the child of a copy of lllustrated Adventure Stories in which he reads tales of King Krogold that inspire him to invent his own fairy stories as an alternative to an unacceptable reality. The painting done by the narrator’s father is a similar haven, as, one suspects, Céline’s tumultuous and fevered prose is as well, as Greek tragedy had been for an earlier age, a way to keep living even after realizing with Camus, that that task alone is Sisyphean.
     Earlier writers had so whitewashed the grim and nasty human situation that Céline thought it took a new language to reveal it. His claim that “I've slipped the spoken word into print” contains both a bit of a boast and a measure of truth. He influenced Henry Miller, the Beats, hard-boiled fiction, Genet, Queneau, Robbe-Grillet, and Bukowski who called him “the greatest writer of 2,000 years.” [7] “For me,” Céline says, “you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on.” The reader can have no doubt that his story is sufficiently good to warrant a pass into Elysium, a sort of immortality.


1. John H. P. Marks had done a version in 1938. Manheim (whose translation was published in 1966) had begun his career with an edition of Mein Kampf preserving even awkwardness and solecisms in Hitler’s prose. He later did important translations of Brecht, Günter Grass, Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Novalis, and others as well as transcripts of Eichmann’s trial, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” which was illustrated by Maurice Sendak and Henry Corbin's work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi.

2. Paris Review,” The Art of Fiction #33,” winter spring 1964 issue, no. 31. Subsequent quotations from Céline not identified by page reference in the novel are from the same interview.

3. Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) (1937), L'École des cadavres (The School of Corpses) (1938) and Les Beaux draps (The Fine Mess) (1941).

4. According to Ginsberg Voyage a la bout de la nuit was “the first genius international beat twentieth-century picaresque novel written in modern classical personal comedy prose."

5. While WWII was still in progress, he came to believe that both Adolf Hitler and Pope Pius XII must both be Jewish imposters since they were failing to defend the white race with sufficient energy.

6. I think of the “Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis,” “Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière,” the Testaments, and many other pieces. Villon also resembles Céline in his literary use of slang and underworld argot.

7. In Notes of a Dirty Old Man.