There was now nothing to prevent Celine from becoming richer and richer and more and more celebrated, from growing old respected and honored, as writers still are in France, interviewed by reverent critics to the very last gasp about morals, politics, society and God. What went wrong? Hatred, mostly. He hated foreigners, hated Jews, hated himself. “Celine attacked Jews because he hated them,” says Patrick McCarthy, ‘meeting that particular matter head on. Even Celine's much‐vaunted patriotism was simply xenophobia. He seems torn apart by an inner grenade of spleen; all we can do is identify the pieces—the gifted writer, the kind doctor, the hysterical racist, the restless child of a family clinging for life to the lowest reach of an urban middle‐class. He may have been more than a little mad. Though competent in his professions, medicine and writing, he was subject to fits of real delirium that sound like a form of schizophrenia, if it is possible for such an illness to come and go like a common cold.

The young Ferdinand of “Death on the Installment Plan” suffers from the hallucinations that were Wine's. They remind one of those visited on Virginia Woolf, when strange figures appeared and words rushed faster and faster through her head. Cdline's notorious anti‐Semitic pamphlets contain exactly that lunatic rush: “More Jews than ever in the streets, more Jews than ever in the press . . at the Bar . . at the Sorbonne . . in Medicine . . at the Theatre . . at the Opera . . in industry . . in the Banks . .” He wrote this in 1941 when the Jews of France were excluded from medicine, teaching, law, the civil service, the performing arts, the armed forces (there had for years been a Jewish officer caste) and all the liberal professions. The laws hounding the Jews were purely French, the police enforcing them French too. A gang of male writers, baying in one of the world's most civilized tongues, joined the pursuit. Cdline was no worse than the rest—merely louder: “Jewish bluffer Dirty con, layabout… pimp of the universe… parasite of all time.” Had a French Jew wished to respond to this he could not have done so for Jews were barred from journalism as well.

Today anyone curious about these quotations and their context needs one of two rare books, Cdline's “Lex Beaux Draps,” long out of print, or “Une Certaine France,” an anthology of French anti‐Semitic prose, 1940–44, which Cdline's widow managed to have seized by court order last May. A reason invoked for legal action was that Cdline would not have wished to be remembered for his racist pamphlets. Whatever factual evidence exists for this surprising change of heart has yet to be published. It is true that Céline considered himself unjustly persecuted. When in 1950 he was tried and found guilty of collaboration (in absentia, having followed his royalties to Denmark) he seems not to have grasped what the verdict was about and to have dismissed from his mind all that he had written and said when his country was occupied by a foreign army. His protest, “From the time the Germans arrived I took no interest In the Jewish question,” is so foolish lie that we can only suppose that he believed the abundant evidence to the contrary had vanished, perhaps by means of the Celtic magic that so attracted him most of his life.

All this was a long time ago. Céline, amnestied only a year after his conviction, died in 1961, embittered and unrepentant, and, it must be added, in his own home, in his wife's arms, which is more than can be said for a great many French Jews of his generation, not to speak of Frenchmen tout court. As Patrick McCarthy points out, his death drew less notice than Hemingway's, which occurred the same day. Mr. McCarthy must have completed his book a few years ago, for he speaks of a “self‐satisfied France over which Pompidou now rules” where Celine is all but forgotten. Actually Celine is now widely read. All his novels are in print, in standard and paperback editions, including at least one not mentioned in the bibliography, and with “Journey” quite often sold out. In the autumn the revived NRF, Gide's venerable review, will devote an issue to Celine. It will be interesting to see how his wartime attitude is dealt with in 1976.

Nowadays Celine is read by the young. Occupation arguments bore them. His anti‐Semitic writings are suppressed, and only the most diligent and curious readers are likely to pry them out of the Bibliothèque Nationale, an institution not open to everyone. This means that his new wave of admirers do not know exactly what he was charged with or why he and his cronies thought it prudent to flee to Germany when the army and government protecting them pulled out. Young persons are apt to look upon him as a heroic rebel harassed by stuffy authority or “le systeme,” as if all systems are one. The explanation that he was openly racist at a time when Jews were being murdered on his doorstep will quite often draw a blank. The respectability of French anti‐Semitism is its longest taproot. The educated and intelligent Robert Brasillach wrote, with pride, “AntiSemitism is not a German invention, it is French tradition.” Every country breeds a virus of racist jokes for amusement; a strain circulating in France for about a year now has been based on puns to do with deportation —this in a city where ghosts of deported children haunt the railway stations; ghosts visible, alas, to fewer and fewer of the living. Part of Cline's personal contradiction is that even now, 15 years after his death, one cannot assess his reputation without taking up the matter of his anti‐Semitism. Patrick McCarthy does so scrupulously and at length, but without reaching a conclusion, probably because there is none, but only a question: do we refuse the novels because we disapprove of their author, as Jean‐Paul Sartre decided we must, or do we go as far as Patrick McCarthy, who thinks that everything Celine wrote should be in print? (The question remains unanswered in any case, for neither aline's widow nor, probably, the postwar law forbidding the publication of anything arousing racial hatred would allow “Bagatelles Pour Un Massacre” or “Les Beaux Draps” to reappear.) Rejection is always emotional and capricious. Some people will not listen but do the same people shut their eyes when they go by a Degas in a museum? Turning away from the novels of Celine is shutting one's eyes in the museum.