Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

I began to realize that my mother would always regard me as an unfeeling child, a selfish monster, a little brute, capricious, scatterbrained…They had tried everything, done everything they could…it was really no use.  There’d never be any help for my disastrous, innate, incorrigible propensities…She could only face the facts, my father had been perfectly right…

Years ago, during my New York days, I read Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. I can’t remember much about it and can’t say I enjoyed it very much; I think maybe I took Céline’s attacks on America too seriously and they got my back up—maybe I had a softer skin then.  Despite this past experience, when I saw a fat (600 pages!) paperback edition of the man’s Death on the Installment Plan, translated by Ralph Manheim and published by New Directions, going for one dollar at a West Virginia antique mall, I decided to buy it.  The back cover of this copy says it is the sixth edition and that this translation is copywritten 1966 and first appeared as a New Directions Paperbook in 1971.  According to wikipedia the novel first appeared in 1936. 

I started Death on the Installment Plan while on a road trip to the Middle West where reside many of my in-laws, and finished it back at HQ; it took me kind of a long time to finish it partly because I was busy and distracted and partly because after 300 pages or so I got a little tired of it--the plot of the novel doesn't really pull you along, it is a series of anecdotes, all of which have sort of the same tone and achieve the same effects and make the same points, and it sort of got a little stale.

Death on the Installment Plan is a sort of fictionalized memoir written in a breathless style, consisting of short, pithy sentences separated by thousands of ellipses.  Exactly why there are ellipses in every paragraph, and how much this reflects the original French, I do not know.  The text includes many cliches and colloquialisms as well as lots of slang, adding to the feeling given by the short direct sentences and all those ellipses that the book is the transcription of the rambling monologue of some old and bitter man instead of an actual written literary artifact that has been carefully polished.  A good example of Céline's (or the translator's) use of stock phrases and cliched metaphors comes on page 464 when a woman delivers a speech full of ellipses denouncing her husband; her philippic incorporates, in the space of less than half a page, "He's coming apart at the seams," "He doesn't know where the next nickel is coming from," "I know the score," "He won't get away with it," "He'd better watch his step," and "I won't stand for it."  For long stretches I found Céline's style engaging and appreciated its economy and the way it sounded like real ordinary people (who are excited or angry) talking, but a steady diet of it began to wear on me.

The first 40 or so pages depict the novel’s present, in which an adult Ferdinand is a doctor working at a clinic in Paris, constantly in some kind of trouble with his colleagues and superiors; he does his writing on the side.  This portion of the book I found sort of vague and confusing, and much of it consists of a surrealistic dream sequence and tiresome digressions in which Ferdinand tells other characters fantasy stories about a King Krogold.  But then we flashback to the turn of the century, to Ferdinand's childhood, and this section I found vivid and compelling.  

The young Ferdinand lives on a dirty and smelly Parisian street, a covered passage, a sort of shopping arcade with apartments over the shops that is covered by a glass roof that keeps off the rain but also keeps in smells and heat.  Ferdinand is the only child of a man who works at an insurance company by day and on his off hours makes deliveries for the shop run by his wife, who sells antiques and lace articles.  Death on the Installment Plan is a long series of anecdotes and vignettes, all of which are disgusting and depressing, depicting life as a war of all against all and expressing the narrator's misanthropy and self-loathing.  Almost all the characters, the narrator not least of all, are pathetic (e.g., mom has a bad leg and limps constantly) and/or callous or even cruel (there are a multitude of scenes of domestic violence and sexual exploitation), and the incidents described generally conclude with people sobbing, vomiting, or being injured in some way.  The climax of the novel is a suicide and a long description of the challenging effort to deal with the shattered body.  Everyone is desperate, living on the edge of physical and/or financial destruction, taking desperate risks to make a little money and then seeing their enterprises come to disaster.  Father is always in fear of getting fired, the shop never sells enough to make a real profit, and little Ferdinand is so frazzled and put upon that he doesn’t have time to wipe his ass properly and so never stops smelling of shit.

I had a depraved nature…It was inexplicable…There wasn’t a speck or straw of honor in me…I was rotten through and through…repulsive, degenerate!  I was unfeeling, I had no future…I was as dry as a salt herring…I was a hard-hearted debauchee…a dungheap…full of sullen rancor…I was life’s disillusionment…I was grief itself.

The episodic novel's central plot, such as it is, consists of Ferdinand’s parents and uncle trying to find a place in the world for the smelly boy, get him a job in another shop or apprentice him to some artisan or something.  Bad luck, the ruthlessness and cruelty of others, and the narrator’s own questionable character conspire to render their early efforts a fiasco.  Along the way, little Ferdinand has grotesque sexual experiences with adult women and ugly girls closer to his own age, as well as homoerotic experiences with boys his age.    

At the same time that all this is pretty disgusting, it is often also pretty funny.  Céline describes everyone’s problems and their reactions to defeat—their rage and agony--in a hyperbolic fashion which is quite amusing.  Maybe I am cold-hearted, but the over-the-top nature of many passages transforms the tragedies they retail into extravagant farcical hilarity.

I had the best position in the football game, I kept goal…that gave me a chance to meditate…I didn’t like to be disturbed, I let almost everything through…When the whistle blew, the brats flung themselves into the battle, they plowed through the muck till their ankles cracked, they charged at the ball, full steam into the clay, they plastered themselves with it, their eyes were full of it, their whole heads were covered…When the game was over, our little angels were nothing but molded garbage, staggering hunks of clay…with big wads of pigeon shit sticking to them.  The muddier they were, the shittier, the more hermetically sealed, the happier they felt…They were wild with joy under their crusts of ice, welded into their clay helmets.  

Around page 200, Ferdinand having blown all his job opportunities in Paris, is sent to a school for boys in England, his relatives thinking that knowledge of English will be a skill that can open up to him new job opportunities in the City of Lights.  For me, Ferdinand’s time at the English school is a highlight of the novel, as Céline satirizes the English weather and the English mania for sport and presents some crazy English characters: the ugly schoolmaster and his beautiful wife; a horny student who can’t get enough of Ferdinand’s cock and semen (this kid enjoys pretending to be a dog!); and a retarded student who has to be watched like a hawk lest he eat inanimate objects or walk off a cliff or into traffic due to his horrible eyesight (at night they keep this moron in a cage!)  Ferdinand is bigger and older than his English classmates and physically dominates them; he also steadfastly refuses to cooperate with the schoolmaster—Ferdinand acts like a mute, declining to speak for weeks, even months, at a stretch.  He stops going to class and instead spends all his time with the schoolmaster’s wife, helping her chaperone the imbecile (sometimes Ferdinand jerks him, you know, to calm him down) and run errands in the town, where Ferdinand takes the opportunity to shoplift from all the stores.  Our hero is crazy with lust for the schoolmaster’s wife, but when she hints at the possibility of indulging his desires, Ferdinand, a thorough-going misogynist, doesn’t take advantage of her openness—women, he is sure, are all vampiric backstabbing liars, and instead he dreams about her while that horny canine of a student jerks him and sucks him off.

It wasn’t easy to resist…The harder it was for me, the stronger I became…She wasn’t going to soften me, the bloodsucker, even if she were a hundred times as pretty.

After the English episode, halfway through the novel, Ferdinand returns to Paris, where he severs relations with his parents after a ferocious hand-to-hand fight with his father.  An uncle takes him in and gets him a sort of internship with one of the smartest men in France, a science writer who not only edits a magazine that caters to inventors and writes books that explain scientific and engineering concepts to lay people, but flies his own hydrogen and methane balloon and drives experimental race cars.  Death on the Installment Plan is full of hyperbole and this character, who has written hundreds of books and throws around all kinds of scientific terminology, is like a comic figure from an early science fiction story, a genius in every field of science and engineering when it comes to theory but a physical klutz who can't drive a single nail without harming himself.  The second half of Céline's novel is all about Ferdinand's relti0nship with this guy, and over its 275 pages we learn how vice-ridden, mercenary and corrupt this genius really is, eventually meet his masculine, pipe-smoking, domineering wife and then witness all his publishing, scientific and financial projects come to absolute disaster.  It is his suicide and its gruesome and lachrymose aftermath that brings the novel to a close. 

For me, Death on the Installment Plan is too long and unvaried in tone and theme.  After four hundred pages or so the novelty of its fever pitch, of the characters' long shrieking tirades full of self pity and outrage, wears thin.  I probably would have enjoyed it more if it had come to me as two or three separate books--one on life among the shops of the covered passage, one on the school in England, one on life with the science writer--and I had taken a break of months or years between each book.        

I have to provide a trigger warning for my readers who were born in the 21st century or who were born in the 20th century but have embraced the current values of all right-thinking people who don’t want to lose their social media accounts.  Céline uses the dreaded “n-word” and calls Chinese people “Chinks” and says crummy things about women, and he doesn’t explicitly condemn men’s striking of women.  Céline is famous for being a Jew-hater and a sympathizer with fascism and Naziism, but that sort of thing is essentially under the surface here.   

Lefties (as well as anti-capitalism right-wingers) might appreciate Death on the Installment Plan as a stark portrait of life in the market economy, a dramatization of the ceaseless pressure in a market society to please customers and employers, to adapt to changing market conditions.  Ferdinand’s parents’ small shop suffers from competition with large stores and their fortunes are tied to unpredictable changes in taste—they are in real trouble when lace goes out of style or when the hats they purchased in bulk similarly lose popularity and become unsalable.  Céline satirizes the ideas of progress of the middle-class people of the industrial democracies, portraying changes in technology as a challenge or a trap rather than a boon or benefit—the narrator’s father struggles, with limited success, to learn how to use a typewriter, and the science writer's balloon is dangerous and out of control and his racecars even more so--one of them mysteriously explodes, blowing a female admirer to bits.  The second half of the book portrays inventors as well as investors in new technology as grasping maniacs who destroy themselves and everybody around them.  A disgruntled mob of inventors, readers of the magazine the science writer and Ferdinand publish, destroys the office of the magazine, forcing our heroes to move to the country, where they experiment, disastrously, with using radiation to increase crop yields.  And as the novel's title (Mort a credit en francais) suggests, buying things on credit and going into debt and being pursued by those to whom one owes money are recurring themes of the book.  If you hate Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and your credit card company, maybe this book is for you. 

I've told you it is too long and kind of wears out its welcome with its monotony, but I will still recommend Death on the Installment Plan to people who enjoy down-and-out narratives in the voices of creative types who act like jerks and describe their struggles to find and keep ordinary jobs, complain about their poverty and detail their sexual experiences, like those of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski.  Much of it is pretty funny and it provides a window on life and attitudes of the past.  And Céline is supposed to be important (the article at this link ranks him alongside Proust and Joyce) and he was in the news last year, sixty years after his death, so you can tell yourself reading this thing is educational.