GUIGNOL'S BAND (287 pp.)—Louis-Ferdinand Cèline—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 Cèline. No rubber hose can convey the feel of Cèline, nor can his own favorite exclamations, such as "Bam!", "Bang!", "Zoom!", "Zimm!", "Rrpp!", "Rrooo!", "Rraap!", "Rrango!", "Whah!"
Says Cèline: "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 Cèline 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, Cèline 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 Cèline'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 Cèline, in absentia, to national degradation for life. He has since received amnesty.
Time has mellowed Cèline'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."