I was a little shaken...in fact, I'd had a rotten shock!...that's right, a shock...the whole of Europe on my ass...yes, the whole of Europe...plus my friends...my family...all competing to see who could grab more away from me...not leaving me time to say booo...my eyes!...my nose!...my fountain pen...the ferocity of Europe!...the Nazis were no lovebirds, but don't tell me about the sweet gentleness of Europe...
Castle to Castle is even less plot-driven than Death on the Installment Plan and feels even more like the rambling complaints of a bitter old man interspersed with his stories of his trials and sufferings during and just after the end of the Second World War. The structure and form are conversational, the text appearing much like Céline's side of a conversation or interview taking place in the second half of the 1950s--one topic of conversation is this very book, which is in the process of being written.
Céline and his wife, the dancer Lili, live in a rural area near Paris where the author has started up a medical practice; as chronicled in Death on the Installment Plan, as a child at the turn of the century, little Ferdinand and his parents would hawk lace and make deliveries of antiques in this very neighborhood. Céline complains bitterly about his poverty. When it looked like the Allies were going to overthrow the German occupation and the Vichy government in 1944, Céline, famed as a racist and anti-Semite and closely associated with Vichy regime, fled the country and in his absence his belongings, including many manuscripts, were stolen by criminals or seized by the government. His books don't sell, and Céline accuses his publishers of hiding his books in cellars and hoarding his stolen manuscripts, waiting for him to die so they can make a killing when his writings rise in value upon his demise. He declares he will foil them by outliving them, and has extended fantasies about the deaths of both his "friends" and his enemies, vividly--and repetitively--imagining them on Charon's boat, where Charon beats them with an oar so brutally that their eyes hang out of their sockets.
As for his medical practice, Céline also has few patients, maybe because of his reputation as a collaborator, maybe because he is barely presentable. Céline writes quite a bit about social status and status markers in the first quarter or so of Castle to Castle, and suggests people have no interest in his medical services because, for example, he wears old clothes and is seen to carry his own trash to the curb. In particular, he talks about how automobiles are a sign of status, and how one reason nobody respects him is that he can't afford one, and has to walk everywhere--people expect a doctor to have a car, and the fact that he lacks one marks him as a loser.
(Celine loves boats and ships, and becomes entranced by watching harbor activities, but he hates automobiles, and delivers a long angry rant about them.)
The picture of post-war France, and Europe broadly, painted by Céline early in the novel is one of a place wracked by crime and threatened by violence; there are many references to the tumultuous current events of 1950s France and larger Europe: the development of the H-bomb, the Suez crisis, the Poujadists, the Hungarian Revolution, the fellaghas--there is no explanation or context for these references, Céline presumably assuming readers know all about them, as presumably readers would have when the book was published in 1957; we current readers luckily have google and wikipedia to get us up to speed on any of these capers and controversies with which we might not already be familiar. Céline, reviled in public and accused (apparently unjustly) of selling military secrets to the Germans, fears for his life and for the security of his wife. In the interest of defense, he and his wife own a pack of vicious dogs which irritates the neighbors and presents a threat to Céline's few patients. (Céline, fulfilling one of those stereotypes of misanthropes, loves animals, and in this 1950s period has a whole menagerie, including a hedgehog.)
Around the 90-page mark (the edition of Castle to Castle at the internet archive is like 360 pages, but, unlike the densely massive wall-of-text of Death on the Installment Plan, there are separate, though unnumbered, chapters here in Castle to Castle and the blank space in between them cuts down the word count a little) we get our first of several surreal sequences, probably the most surreal. Céline is on a house call at night--you know, so his enemies can't see him--and has a hallucination, perhaps connected to a relapse of the malaria that he has carried with him since his days in Africa in 1917. Always fascinated by the river and watercraft, he spots one of the excursion boats on the Seine that caters to tourists--bizarrely it is on the move at night, and he can see it despite the dark; the reason: the tour boat has been commandeered by Charon and is ferrying the dead! From it disembark some deceased friends of Céline's, fellow collaborators including Emile, a guy who fought with the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism and was lynched by a vengeful mob after his return home to France, and the actor Robert Le Vigan, who like Céline spent some time in prison thanks to his collaborationist activities and after his release went to Latin America.
After this we get some anecdotes about Céline's interment in a Danish prison after the war, where he worked in the cancer ward, having been assigned the job of alerting the staff when a patient died and helping them cart the corpse away.
Before he was in Denmark, while the war was in its closing stages, Céline spent time in Germany, in the town of Sigmaringen, to which the Vichy government and other collaborators had fled. The over one thousand pro-Axis French people there (one of Céline's little jokes, one that he uses again and again, is that he knows exactly how many collaborators were at Sigmaringen, 1,142) were provided by the Germans quarters in and around an old castle which Céline describes as labyrinthine and decrepit and full of old paintings and furniture. The collaborators do not live in comfort: they are menaced by the ever present possibility of an Allied air raid, terrified by the approaching Free French Army--in particular the famously brutal Senegalese troops--and are not impressed by German hospitality; Céline talks at length about the quantity and quality of the food provided the French refugees. What I am thinking of as the main part of Castle to Castle is the series of absurd and surreal anecdotes and character sketches set in Sigmaringen that takes up like two-thirds of the book. As I guess I have already complained, this novel is weak on plot, and these anecdotes don't build up to anything--there is no climax or resolution, these episodes are basically self-contained, and the book just ends all of a sudden.
One of my favorite anecdotes is about how, even though every third or fourth page Céline is telling us that the sky is full of British and American bombers and the Luftwaffe has no means whatsoever to interfere with them, and that everybody in Sigmaringen is quaking in his or her boots because the merciless black soldiers of the Free French Army are going to strike at any moment, some pro-German Frenchies in the castle or its environs are still confident of an Axis victory. One batch of people sits around plotting the future government of France, who will get what post, who will be executed, even what sort of statues will be erected in Paris after the war is over and the Western Allies and the Soviets have been vanquished. One guy has developed a modern and efficient means of executing people, and spends his time training a squad of executioners in his technique because he wants to be ready to get to work at once exterminating all the Frenchmen who tried to sell France out to the English, the Americans and the Commies upon the reconquest of France by the Wehrmacht--he has calculated that it will take three months to liquidate everybody on the list of 150,000 traitors.
One of the first surreal scenes in Sigmaringen has the leader of Vichy France, Phillipe Petain, responding to an R.A.F. attack with total sangfroid, saving the collaborators from death from British bombs and machine gun fire so they can risk the death penalty in front of a French court after the war. In a somewhat similar scene, another prominent figure of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, prevents a riot in a train station where an international cast of soldiers, female locals and Frenchwomen forced to work in Germany are having a sort of orgy. I have no idea to what extent Céline, by portraying the most famous people convicted of betraying France as heroic lifesavers, as the dei ex machina of absurdist scenes of terrible danger, is sincerely expressing admiration for Petain and Laval, reminding people that Petain and Laval were widely admired before World War II, or just trying to offend his own critics and public opinion at large.
Another surreal scene in Sigmaringen centers not on physical violence and danger but on scatology. Céline, his wife and their pet cat are housed in a hotel, in a room across the hall from the toilet. Céline, who is long-winded and repetitive, describes at great length how everybody in the entire town comes to use this toilet, so that there is a long line of people in the hall at all hours, right in front of Céline's door; many people can't hold it long enough (we are told German food has a laxative effect) so the floor is covered in human waste that seeps under Céline's door so he and his wife and any visitors have to wade through it:
...the hallway was a geyser!...and our room!...a waterfall down the stairs!...the devil take the hindmost!...catch-as-catch-can in shit!
(We can see, as in Death on the Installment Plan, Céline's characteristically pervasive ellipses and extensive employment of cliched phrases like "devil take the hindmost" and "catch-as-catch-can.")
In Castle to Castle we see more of the racism for which Céline is famous than we did in Death on the Installment Plan; allied to this is a belief in biological determinism and physiognomy or morphopsychology. Céline, in an anecdote about a police commissioner caught trying to cross the border, he having been betrayed by a smuggler or "runner" he had hired to guide him, asserts that you can tell just by looking at some people that they are untrustworthy:
...falling into a trap like that...even an ingenious trap! oh, oh, he [the doomed police commissioner] must know a thing or two about those things! it's his job! he had only to look at the mugs on those "border runners"! Those faces...the treachery, the villainy, the degeneracy, the stigmata!...regular carnival masks!...nature goes to the trouble of putting masks like that on people! and it doesn't wise you up...that's your hard luck!
Céline features some characters who are of mixed parentage, the children of one parent from Western Europe and one from Eastern Europe or the Middle East, and warns us that such "hybrids" who can move within multiple cultures are dangerous ("cross-breeding is full of peril.") He uses the dreaded word that we are all afraid to say--the word we are all afraid to type!--the career-ending "n-word," to refer to the Senegalese, as well as "coon"--did French people in the 1940s and 1950s really use this term for black people? (Reading this book and Death on the Installment Plan, I sometimes wondered if Manheim might be introducing inappropriate Americanisms or Anglicisms into the translation.)
As with Death on the Installment Plan, I like Castle to Castle more now that I have finished it than I did while I was reading it. This is especially the case with this one because Céline finishes the novel with two particularly interesting episodes, one in which he rides a dilapidated train to Berlin and back as a member of a French delegation to the funeral of a Vichy official who died under mysterious circumstances while in German custody--this episode has some of the most engaging images in the novel--and the other a surprisingly emotionally affecting anecdote about one of Celine's 1950s patients.
So, the book is long and repetitive and can be hard to follow unless you are constantly looking up stuff in the footnotes and on wikipedia, but there are good parts in there--funny jokes, memorable images, World War II trivia, surprising turns of phrase. Céline wrote two more novels about his adventures after fleeing France, North and Rigadoon, and I will probably get around to reading those as well.
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