The man who lived twice. Or, death and resurrection of a writer who was an anarchic and a racist, a reactionary in his being a revolutionary, very modern yet a denier of the progress, a loose dog with no masters that after much baying at the moon turned into a wolf, showed its teeth, bit and in the end turned from predator to prey, was chased, hunted, caught and punished. But all that did not tame him.  
Hell and return. This is the parable, both human and professional, of Louis Ferdinand Céline emerging from Philippe Almésas' nice biography (Il Corbaccio Ed.). Less than fifteen years elapsed since the post-war Danish exile up until his death on July 1, 1961, but they are enough to bring the most hated, loathed, insulted, slandered author of the twentieth century back on the literary, among the others, scene.  
A river swollen of lies: this is one of the features of Céline's autobiography re-examined by Almésas. Little and big, harmless and mean, these lies rarely are the fruit of a complete invention, they almost always are based on an operation of subtraction or of accumulation of existing things. He was of a lower middle class extraction with a local nobility past, but built himself a proletarian and / or popular identity. And of course the people he loved to stay with were poor, exploited, wretched, unlucky, outcasts, workers and losers. He met them, he studied them, he recorded them in the great book of memory; but he was never one of them.  
He was a disabled serviceman and could have proudly shown his mutilations, his decorations, the newspapers articles that told his courage. But that was not enough for him: he added a trepanation that was never performed on him to his suffering arm; he worked with glue and scissors and transformed newspapers' reports into covers on him. He was a general practitioner and could not resist the idea of enriching his own curriculum with experiences at Ford's works in the United States that he recently had visited. And behind the cliché of the “doctor of the poor”, the image of the good-looking man, wearing well-cut suits made with English cloth, fair-haired and blue-eyed, who knows the world and high society had trouble disappearing.  
The falsification, or the rewriting of himself, was systematic, and did not just concern readers and critics: it also involved friends and relatives.  
The passage from Germany on fire to Denmark, where he later was trapped, lasted three days. When he told it to his trusted interlocutors, he transformed it into a three-week epic... The arrest in his Copenhagen's house, a modest police episode, with Ferdinand refusing to open the door because he thought the Communists had come to arrest him, became some sort of Helzapopping on roofs, whistling bullets, cries, threats...  
The game of the real - unreal, of the likely that turned real, of the real that became non-existent, continued even when he was forced to cope with the accuse that branded him with iron after the war: collaborationist. Today we know that, according to some documents, that title was right.  
Céline “collaborated”, he did not just wrote some letters to the newspapers: he claimed that he had understood before the others the disaster looming up in his country; he claimed that he had called for an alliance between France and Germany; he claimed the need of a battle to the death against Bolshevism and liberal democracies; he claimed a resolute policy against the Jews; he hoped that France could become racially pure, Nordic, physically separated from the half-caste and Mediterranean South... His line of defence claiming that “he had not collaborated”, however, was partially true: he was never on the newspapers and movements' payroll; the critics who supported Nazism thought that his ideas were too nihilist because of his sudden explosions in which he prefigured catastrophic scenarios and biblical days of reckoning; he tried hard to save some lives and neglected to report some not too shrewd gaullist. Finally, he seemed the only one who had fornicated in the worldly and intellectual Tout Paris that had lived with the Germans.  
In the summer of 1950, Céline returned to France after five years of forced exile in Denmark and he prepared his last, brilliant disguise, the last great performance of a writer who felt offended against everything and everybody, full of anger towards his homeland, yet too French to leave it. And once again, the character that after a few years' “quarantine” resumed his role as a leading spirit which he kept until death, is partly real and partly built up, the outcome of a careful mixture of truth and figment. It was true that in Denmark Céline had suffered, was put in prison, fell sick, his body broke down and the vigour and the rashness he had had before the war became but a faint memory.  
Yet, a dispassionate calculation will tell us that he was in jail only for six months and spent the remaining six in a hospital... It is true as well that he was economically done for with respect to the economic possibilities he had had before the war: his books were not being reprinted, and when they were being reprinted they were not selling... Yet, his house at Meudon where he went to live, cost him some two million francs of that time (which he paid by selling his wife's estate), Gallimard guaranteed him an advance equal to today's 300 million lira, the gold that preceded him when he fled and that was not requisitioned by the Germans allowed him to survive and to pay more than just a lawyer...  
Thus once again, the border between reality and figment is uncertain, vague, a source of mistakes. Sympathetic people are easily let down when they find out that the object of their compassion actually is a person who is always calculating, controlling everything and never makes any mistakes. Those who believe there is a fraud underneath, discover an unexpected pride, a noble behaviour, a sovereign contempt for ease and comfort, a supreme indifference towards fashionable (as today) “values”: success, ease, comfort...  
The last Céline had just one aim that he declared and denied and / or played down at the same time: to be given back his dignity as a writer that had been considered as unworthy because of his collaborationist period. The game looked difficult: everybody was out pointing their rifles and waiting for him to make a false step in order to throw him back to the circle of the damned writers. By claiming the invention of a “petite musique”, a little music of style, Céline managed to belittle in order to magnify himself. It would be a mistake to believe those who give Céline's modern language the value of a pure experimentation and thus separate style from contents. It is quite the opposite as Céline wrote in that way because his writing hid a Welthanschaung where the emotional, irrational, fantastic and primeval are the basic elements.  
It is the regret and the extolling of a world dominated neither by reason nor by progress, where the instinctive sphere wins over the built up one, where physical beauty takes us back to a state of pre-modern grace, when spontaneity and the natural element were the cornerstones of existence. The only way to build these states of being and feeling was by demolishing the Cartesian French, a language both inspired by the Enlightenment and enlightened, proud of its clarity achieved in the last three centuries. Céline used the battering-ram of style not to go on but to go back.  
After erecting his own stylistic monument, Céline answered all ideological traps by skipping, digressing, attacking: “People stubbornly continue to consider me as a slaughterer of Jews. I am a relentless defender of the French and Arian races, and at the same time, of the Jewish one... My fault was that I believed in the pacifism of Hitlerians, that's what my crime was all about”.  
After turning anti-semitism into a faint rather than rejected pacifism and orienting himself differently, in the end Céline seems to be the only real humiliated, offended and persecuted Jew. That's the umpteenth transformation where truth and lie mingle for an hallucinated genius.