Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Author:Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780811200172
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Published: 2011-04-25T05:00:00+00:00

Courtial’s little handbooks were translated into a good many languages, they were sold even in Africa. One of his correspondents was a real nigger, the chief of a sultanate in Upper Ubanghi Shari-Chad. That boy was wild about elevators of every kind. They were his dream, his mania … We’d sent him all the literature … He’d never actually seen one. About 1893 Courtial had published a regular treatise, On Vertical Traction. He knew all the details, the many varieties, hydraulic, balistic, ‘“electro-recuperative” … It was an excellent work, absolutely irrefutable, but it constituted only a slight and modest fraction of his opus as a whole. His knowledge definitely embraced every possible field.

The official world disapproved of him, looked down its nose at him, but the crustiest pedant couldn’t very well do without his handbooks. In a good many schools they were actually a part of the curriculum. You couldn’t imagine anything handier, simpler, easier to assimilate, all pre-digested! You could remember it, you could forget it without the slightest effort. We reckoned by and large that in France alone, at least one family out of four owned a copy of his Family Astronomy, Economy Without Usury, and How to Make Ions … At least one in twelve had his Color Poetry, his Roof Gardening, his Poultry Raising at Home. So far I’ve been speaking only of his practical works … But he had to his credit a whole series of other volumes (in numerous fascicles) that were real classics. Hindustani Revelation, The Story of Polar Voyages from Maupertuis to Charcot. Ponderous tomes. Reading matter for several winters, pounds and pounds of stories …

Everybody had commented, examined, copied, paraphrased, ridiculed, and looted his famous Be Your Own Doctor, his True Language of Herbs, and his Electricity Without a Bulb … All of them brilliant, attractive, definitive popularizations of sciences which in their pure form are exceedingly difficult, complex, and hazardous and which without Courtial would have remained beyond the reach of the general public, in other words, highfalutin’, hermetic, and, to sum up without undue flattery, as good as useless . , .

Little by little, what with living in the closest intimacy with Courtial, I really got to know his character … Way down deep it wasn’t so hot. The fact is he was pretty mean, petty, envious, and sneaky … Still, to be fair, I’ve got to admit that the work he did was a nightmare, struggling desperately, year in year out, to hold his own against that gang of raving maniacs, the Genitron‘s subscribers …

He spent ghastly, absolutely devastating hours … in a hotbed of asininity … And he had to bear up, to defend himself, to return blow for blow, to sweep away all resistance, to make a good impression on them, so they’d all go away happy and want to come back …

At first Courtial was reluctant to take me on. He didn’t go for the idea … He thought me a little too tall, a little too broad-shouldered, a little too husky for his shop.

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