And no, it's not Dion I refer to, but someone much more destructive. That would be Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Nazi collaborator, Hitler enthusist, anti-Semite. It also happens that he was a writer of genius who produced a couple of superb modernist novels, Mort à credit ( Death on the Installment Plan) in 1936, and Voyage au bout de la nuit ( Journey to the End of the Night) in 1932.
For years, I'd been almost willing to overlook his virulent fascism and racism on the grounds that great art need not be made, often is not made, by good persons. But a review by Karl Orend of three Céline works in the Times Literary Supplement of June 19, and a responding letter in the July 3 issue (and subsequent correspondence) have made me reassess whether the continuing presence of this monster's work in my library is polluting. And, logically, I suppose, whether to take a moral inventiory of other writers.
In the late 1930s and early '40s, Céline wrote three ferociously anti-Semitic pamphlets which have never, for reasons good and plenty, been translated into English: Bagatelle pour un massacre, École des cadavres and Les Beaux Draps, which, collectively, more or less approve Hitler's extermination program for Jews.
In his review, Karl Orend seems to attribute Céline's attitude to his pacifism, but the letter from Ramona Fiotade of the University of Glasgow seems to me to undermine that argument fatally.
In Les Beaux Draps (1941), she points out, Céline is unequivocal in his support for the Nazis and Hitler: "The clause of the true pact, the only one respected: Vote for the Aryans. Urns for the Jews."
And this from a man who, just months before the Nazis left Paris in 1944, begged the German embassy for documents to get him out of the country. Ugh!
mlevin@globeandmail.ca