The cover of this book has such an archaic, indistinct image of the author’s lost-looking face. The title is a little wit on buying on margin and the over-blown credit systems in practice at the time the book was written (the 1930’s), just after making purchases in installment payments came into existence and, due to abuse, crashed the stock market. But just that mention of “DEATH” with its foreboding cover gives it this artistic pretension that I can’t help but love — like a portrait of a figure lying all sprawled out in a sewer with their wrists cut and eyes wide open like a zombie clutching a Kafka book. It’s a little bit thick on the gloom, but I still love it.
I get the same heavy-intellectual aesthetic sense when I read some Existentialist book describing the “mind numbing scepter of Totalitarianism sweeping across the face of Europe”. This isn’t to say I have no genuine interest in such writings or topics. But it’s often that over-all feel, the heaviness, that captures my thoughts most.
Céline wrote with a relentless cynicism that hardly vindicated itself with any adjacent human warmth. There is not a great deal that occurs in his works, as far as plot, character exploration, or even statement, that can’t be discerned in a few pages of descriptions of how full of vomit, dishonesty, weakness, and gas he considers his countrymen. Everything to Céline is crummy, lousy, falling apart. I don’t completely relate to him in any direct manner, but, rather, my main interest lies in the plain experience (perhaps beginning with that book cover) in taking in such discontent, harsh words from a long past decade. I think a part of most of us can relate to the author’s bitterness for everyone around him. (He even refers to suburban homes in harsher terms than I’ve heard any contemporary author use: “arrogant, bandy-legged … emaciated … a collection of toys plunked down in the shit!”) But how many other works, novels, movies, songs etc., can a person still connect with from the 1930’s? He’s just interesting to me, not a great deal more.
But that cover … seeing such a blurry, dim illustration is similar to having a memory of an event you weren’t a part of. It’s like peering into a color video tape of Abraham Lincoln walking around your backyard; it’s mysterious and utterly inexplicable.
[Incidentally, this Celine design has some interesting origins. According to Jeffrey Yang at New Directions Books, the cover was “a bit of a mystery. However, after some digging, it turns out that the cover was designed by James Laughlin’s last wife, Gertrude Huston.”]