The Insane Metropolis

GUIGNOL'S BAND (287 pp.)--Louis-Ferdinand Celine--New Directions ($5).

A Beethoven fan once said that the only way to get the real "feel" of his master's voice was to turn the phonograph up to maximum volume, lie on the floor, fasten one end of a rubber hose over the bellowing speaker, the other into one's ear. A simpler way of being pounded to jelly is to read a novel by France's Louis-Ferdinand Celine. No rubber hose can convey the feel of Celine, nor can his own favorite exclamations, such as "Bam!", "Bang!", "Zoom!", "Zimm!", "Rrpp!", "Rrooo!", "Rraap!", "Rrango!", "Whah!"

Says Celine: "Mumblers and cowards." or hypocrites who are content to remain "flashy gangrenes, vested in elegant, bloody brocades," need not read his books. They can simply go to hell and be "munched with tongues of flame . . . slaking your thirst . . . with a skinful of vinegar, of vitriol so hot that your tongue peels, puffs, bursts . . . and so on through eternal time . . ."

What is all the munching and puffing about? For many years Celine has been the ogre of French literature, a man whose abomination of the civilized world is so great that he has dedicated his life to dynamiting the pillars of society.

Apachefied Dickens. Born in 1894, Celine as an adult became a doctor in the Paris slums, a perfect apprenticeship for a writer who saw everything in terms of filth, corruption and decay. Two novels, boiling with ferocious vitality and humor, Death on the Installment Plan (TIME, Aug. 29, 1938) and Journey to the End of the Night (TIME, April 30, 1934), established Celine's literary reputation; but World War II, in which he became a vigorous Nazi collaborator, made him a social pariah, who had to run for his life after the Liberation. On Feb. 21, 1950, a French court sentenced Celine, in absentia, to national degradation for life. He has since received amnesty.

Time has mellowed Celine's grisly humor without muting his jungle screams or lessening his power to describe gutter-snipery with the force of an apachefied Charles Dickens. Gnignol's Band depicts the life of French crooks in the underworld of London during the First World War. The book's hero, Ferdinand, is a victim of a German strafing attack, which leaves him feeling as if ''nailed to the shutter like an owl." He has a deafening singing noise in one ear. a gnawing migraine, a mere stump of a left arm. Honorably discharged but too beaten up to realize the fact. Ferdinand goes to London, where he makes a beeline for the French "colony" on the river ("That's what they call the Thames"). In a dockside pub he teams up with Boro, a sleazy French pianist "who was in the habit of wearing plum derbies."

Trouble with Boro is that he has never learned British police "etiquette," i.e., that no matter how much of a crook or tramp you are, "they won't hound you" so long as you don't try and step out of character. So when Sergeant Matthew of Scotland Yard spots Boro playing the pub piano in a top hat instead of the usual plum derby, all hell breaks loose. "Where did he get the idea of wearing a topper in that dirty bar? . . . Where did he think he was? At the Derby? In the House of Lords?" Within minutes, angry Sergeant Matthew is flat on the floor, "covered with drunks . . . a mountain of them high as the chandelier." Boro and Ferdinand scuttle into the street, and from then on, Author Celine shows them on the run from one crazy hideout to another:

P: "The Leicester Boarding House," a brothel run by Frenchman Cascade, whose steady, unchanging pimpery has won the respect of "even the worst bulls of the Yard." Unlike Boro, Cascade would never dream of rousing the Yard's ire by cutting off his famed spit curl or altering the tattooing on his buttocks ("A rose on the right . . . a wolf's face on the left"). Suddenly all the other French pimps in London have turned patriotic and gone home to fight, leaving their girls for Cascade to "look after." "We're widows, Cascade! We're widows!" they croon, climbing into his lap. "I can't pimp for all of you," bellows Cascade. "Where am I going to hide [you] all?" At one point Sergeant Matthew appears in the doorway, one of the girls gets stabbed, and Boro and Ferdinand rush her, wrapped in a tablecloth, to

P: "The London Freeborn Hospital," a masterpiece of Celinic architecture. In this vast warren of iron beds, the coal smoke and fog are so dense that Intern Dr. Clodowitz cannot see a patient's face without holding a lantern over the pillow. Leaving "Clodo" (who is in the pay of Cascade) to patch up the bawling prostitute, Boro and Ferdinand scuttle down the river to

P: The Greenwich home of Pawnbroker Titus Jerome van Claben, who dresses like an Egyptian pasha and sleeps in a bed piled up with pawned fur pieces. Junk fills the Claben hockshop from floor to rafters: one false step and the unwary visitor is crushed under an avalanche of "pianos . . . harps and trombones . . . baby carriages, women's bicycles . . . mattresses . . . top hats . . . bottle baskets." Excited by smoking reefers, old Claben swallows a whole bag of gold sovereigns, doesn't disgorge a one of them when Boro and Ferdinand hold him upside down and bang his skull vigorously on the floor. GREENWICH TRAGEDY! bellow the newspapers next day: "Body of . . . well-known pawnbroker . . . found . . . badly mutilated . . . Might be due to foul play." Off runs Ferdinand once again, the Yard right on his tail.

Yellow and Raspberry. Ferdinand escapes Sergeant Matthew by becoming "Master of the Horse" to a French magician and his assistant, a lady named "The Flower of San Francisco." ("He sawed off my head every evening . . ." recounts the Flower, "and two matinees besides Rrr! . . . Rrr! . . . The blood flowed down to the orchestra . . . The spectators would faint!") But by this time Ferdinand has almost decided that the trenches of Flanders are safer and cozier than the walks of Lambeth.

The pace and din of Guignol's Band are too fast and deafening to hold up to the very end, and the string of fantastic adventures grows increasingly limp and raveled. By then Celine has, as always, succeeded in hammering his sharpest hallucinations deep into the reader's head. Spit-curled Cascade, lantern-bearing Dr.Clodowitz, sovereign-stuffed Titus van Claben--such characters are engraved in the memory for keeps. No visitor since Thomas Wolfe has described London with such off-beat perception and passion--not the London the tourist or the Briton has ever seen, but the insane metropolis "painted like fog with some yellow and raspberry added" that Celine alone is capable of seeing.

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