Seamy Side

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT--Louis-Ferdinand Celine--Little, Brown ($2.50).

''There is nothing frightful in us and on earth and perhaps in heaven above except what has not yet been said. We shall never be at peace until everything has been said, once and for all time; then there will be silence and one will no longer be afraid of being silent. It will be all right then." Author Celine has done his bit for universal peace by saying violently some things that remained to be said, or at least had not been so savagely repeated. Year before the Stavisky scandal set the Seine afire, Journey to the End of the Night was causing a little uproar of its own. When L'Academie Goncourt, fearful of the book's brutality, awarded the 1932 Prix Goncourt (France's No. 1 literary prize) to a less controversial novel (Guy Mazeline's Les Loups), Academicians Leon Daudet and Lucien Descaves walked out of the assembly. Paris cafes buzzed and sputtered with delighted indignation.

Author "Celine"' (real name: Destouches) quickly reaped the reward of literary martyrdom, was translated into the paradise of a European bestseller. Excitable and undiscriminating adherents compared him to Rabelais, Montaigne, Flaubert, Anatole France, Strindberg, Huysmans, Joyce, Hemingway, Dos Passos. Calmer readers will admit that he is as brutally realistic as Zola but far more up-to-date, as cynical as Montaigne, as earthy as Rabelais. But though it rouses visceral emotion, belly-laughs are notably absent from Journey to the End of the Night. The almost-unwhitewashed story of a failure, it shows little but the seamy side of human nature, but shows it with such bitter fidelity that only a desperate optimist would deny its truth.

"Hero" Bardamu had sufficient intelligence to disbelieve in heroes, including himself, not enough ambition to rise above his destiny of underdog. Immediately after being very sarcastic about patriotism he was swept off his feet by a military band, rushed off to join the army. War soon showed him that the only important thing was saving his own skin. But a U. S. mistress he picked up while on leave in Paris was patriotic enough for the two of them. "In Lola's mind France was a sort of chivalrous entity, not very clearly defined either in space or time, but at present grievously wounded and for that very reason extremely exciting. But when people talked to me about France, I thought at once of my guts, so that of course I was rather reserved and not very prone to any access of enthusiasm."

From an unwilling soldier-hero Bardamu became a determined malingerer, then a semi-mental case. After the War he drifted into a nightmare job in a remote trading post in French Colonial Africa, then to the U. S., where he cadged awhile in Manhattan, worked in the Ford factory in Detroit, lived in uneasy clover as a harlot's fancy man. Back in Paris, he finished medical school, practiced in a slum, got mixed up in an attempted murder, and ended as the unwilling locum tenens of a lunatic asylum. Daring Author Celine makes Bardamu tell his story himself, lets him show himself a cowardly cynic, timeserver, hypocrite, liar, tacitly defies the onlooker to cast the first stone. Many a reader will find nothing handy to throw. Shocking to the Goncourt Academicians mainly for stylistic reasons (says Defender Daudet: ''It is written in Parisian colloquial speech, a very special language, superficially lazy yet fundamentally exact"). Journey to the End of the Night will shock many a U.S. reader by its almost unrelieved unsentimentality. Physiological rather than pornographic, Author Celine might rest his case on a remark of his hero's. "A body is always something that's true; that is why it's nearly always sad and repulsive to look at."

The Author's career roughly parallels that of his ''hero," but he enters the usual demurrer against jumping to conclusions. Like Bardamu, Author Destouches fought for France, was wounded, decorated with the Medaille Militaire. After a job in French Equatorial Africa as agent for a lumber company he returned to France, got his medical license, satisfied a desire to see the U. S. by working as ship's doctor on a transatlantic liner. A more serious medico than his creature, he wrote a brilliant thesis on a pioneer in obstetrics, was sent to Africa again by the League of Nations to make a study of sleeping sickness. Now a respected 40-year-old, he works in the tuberculosis clinic of a hospital in the Paris slums. Though his language is racy, writing comes hard to Dr. Destouches. He is already at work on his next book, does not hope to finish it before 1938.

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