Frédéric Vitoux

"Celine" was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, a viciously anti-Semitic, but brilliant (not my judgment,) French writer.

During WW I he was seriously wounded (although there is some dispute about the nature and severity of the injury). His fans have attributed his callousness and hatred to the insufferable headaches and mental noises that plagued him until his death in 1961. "I've learned to get along with my ear noises....I listen to them become trombones, full orchestras, marshaling yards....If you move your mattress...show some little sign of impatience...you go crazy." So he wrote in his autobiographical novel North, finished in 1960.

Most of his writing, after his most famous novel Journey to the End of Night, is viciously cruel and racist. So suggest reviewers of Frederic Vitoux's recent biography of Celine entitled appropriately Celine.

You wonder, "Where is this going?" Well, George Steiner, in his review of Vitoux's book in the New Yorker, August 24, 1992, ponders the value of such vituperative literature. "The liberal case against all censorship is cant. If serious literature and the arts can educate sensibly, exalt our perceptions, refine our moral discriminations, they can, by exactly the same token, deprave, cheapen, and make bestial our imaginings and mimetic impulses."

Steiner makes the same mistake that Medved does. Surely no one would ever suggest that anyone reading a "good" book would immediately run out and commit all sorts of "good" works. The inverse must also be valid.

It seems to me we need the literature of the racists and fascists out in the open where it can be read and its flaws exposed. The contrast to literature exalting the best in humanity becomes all the more stark and valid.

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