Stinking Boyhood

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN--Louis-Ferdinand Celine -- Little, Brown ($2-75).

"In the course of my life," Celine once confessed, "I spent so many years as a bard, a hero, an official, and a doormat in the service of so many thousands of madmen that my memories alone would fill a whole insane asylum." Readers of Journey to the End of the Night, which at 40 turned Celine (real name: Louis Des-touches) from an obscure municipal doctor to the most sensational of contemporary writers, may have thought that savage autobiographical novel was enough to fill a whole insane asylum by itself. But the Journey had left untold the story of Celine's childhood and adolescence.

Death on the Installment Plan fills in the nightmare to his 20th year. It provoked less excitement in Paris literary circles than either his Journey, which started riots when it lost the 1932 Goncourt Prize, or his anti-Semitic "exercise," Trifles for a Massacre (TIME, May 30), which shocked even Nazis. Death on the Installment Plan was merely expurgated and called the work of a communist, an anarchist and a maniac. As the U. S. edition follows the French, most readers' imaginations are probably not strong enough to figure out what French publishers expurgated. English publishers threw out plenty.

The opening 36 pages consist of slum vignettes, gangrenous clinical talk and last-ditch confessions derived from Celine's medical practice in a Paris charity clinic. (He still clings to this job, which pays about $60 a month, although he has salted away some $25,000 in royalties.) These pages give readers a sickening jolt. But Celine's purpose is apparently to show that neither Ferdinand (his autobiographical main character) nor the world has improved since his boyhood.

Ferdinand's earliest memories are only slightly less poisonous than his later ones. Son of an insurance clerk (''a drivelling great ape, with his head full only of fury, pretences and louder and louder yellings: a whole clattering chaos of idiocies"), and a well-meaning but uncherished mother who runs a dilapidated antique shop, Ferdinand recalls malicious neighborhood gossip, scandals, a murder, a tough playmate who taught him much smut, another playmate who went to the country and died of fresh air. But these are among his lighter reminiscences. Most haunting memory is of his father accusing him of monstrous vices, and, because his trousers were usually dirty, predicting "a dung-coloured future in store for me."

When, after his shuddering seduction by his boss's wife, he is falsely accused of robbery, his family sends him to a private school in England. During his eight months there, he refuses to say a word--his comment on human trustworthiness. His only companion is a cretin who tries to swallow the silverware, drinks ink, knows only two sentences: "Don't worry" and "Right as rain." The night Ferdinand is leaving he is frenziedly seduced by the headmaster's wife, who then jumps in the harbor.

A Paris brat again, Ferdinand beats his father and mother to a pulp, takes refuge with his Uncle Edward, a tolerant windbag who sells bicycle pumps. Through him, Ferdinand gets a job with a half-crackpot, half-genius inventor named Courtial, who fills the last 250 pages. For long stretches Celine here writes almost straight comedy; his invective becomes almost rollicking as Ferdinand and Courtial try every dodge from selling smut post cards to electrical machines for growing vegetables, from balloon derbies to a col ony for brats. But in the end, on the eve of the World War, Celine's comedy turns the usual grotesque, and Ferdinand is at loose ends among the maggots again.

For writing such stuff, Celine has given one simple physiological reason. As the result of a head wound in the War, his ears ring unceasingly with a maddening "colossal hullabaloo. . . . But I've raved on ahead and outdistanced it. . . ." Readers not similarly afflicted will finish Death on the Installment Plan with heartfelt thanks for their unringing ears.

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