Book Diary (right-wing edition)

Céline, Jünger, Mishima, and others

Photo by Izis Bidermanas

I’ve read a certain amount of right-wing literature over the past few years. Both highbrow and non: reactionary intellectuals, yes, but also online racists and misogynists, antisemitic conspiracy theorists, raging xenophobes, Nazis. Why? Probably no good reason. Titillation, shock value. The urge to touch fire. I’m hardly the only one interested. I feel like several respectable writers have read and written about Curtis Yarvin’s manifestos because they had to confirm for themselves that they were indeed drivel. And just about every prestigious East Coast magazine has by now had a feature on Bronze Age Pervert. You just get tired of leftish orthodoxy, whether that means tedious wokism, grad-school Marxism, or pious liberalism. The New York Times, that upper-middle-class lifestyle magazine. The London Review of Books, with its old-fashioned dandruff-on-the-lapels leftism. The Potemkin village of Netflix. God, it drives you nuts! It’s so smothering and boring.¹ Give me the poison, the intellectual gasoline canister or crack pipe. At the very least, let me cut class occasionally and go outside to smoke cigarettes with the bad kids.

Where to begin? Well, where did I begin. Years ago I read Ernst Jünger, an NYRB edition of The Glass Bees. I found the book totally uninteresting, dry and pretentious with nothing memorable except its faint whiff of fascism. I think this whiff was simply the narrator’s proud soldierliness, coming as it did from an author who had served with the Nazis. From what I know of Junger’s biography he seems to have been what you could call an aesthetic fascist: cold, self-disciplined, an intellectual whose natural vocation was war. Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I, is really pretty good. A first-hand account of the the trenches doesn’t have to be very well written to be worth reading, and Jünger writes very well. Storm of Steel is lively and vivid and recounts battle and the soldier’s life with great clarity and a minimum of affectation. You can actually tell what’s happening in the battles. And the book is full of all the astonishing details one would expect. At the Somme, Lieutenant Jünger notices “great clumps of monstrous blue-black flies basking in the sun…like velvet cushions.” Later, he’s wounded in the head and wakes up “staring down at a pool of blood that was growing alarmingly fast on the floor of the trench. The blood was running down so unstoppably that I lost all hope. As my escort assured me he could see no brains, I took courage, picked myself up, and trotted on. ”

It’s all vivid, gripping, and – jolly. The war is full of horror, but it doesn’t get young Jünger down. There’s no degradation, no despair, no sense that this is all a monstrous waste. For someone used to the British version of the Great War (or to Erich Maria Remarque’s version), it’s strange to read an account of the conflict that isn’t anti-war and in fact almost makes you wish you’d been there. It’s adventure of a high and terrible kind. After a breakthrough in the spring assault in 1918 that cost his unit most of its men:

The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.

Beyond the persona of the brave, intelligent, and patriotic soldier, Jünger’s character has no personality, and so Storm of Steel is thrilling but curiously empty. Despite containing so many electrifying scenes, the book can’t help getting repetitive and even almost boring, since there is nothing – no private reflections or personal drama or references to the postwar present – to break the monotony of the daily life of war and no forward movement except the succession of battles. The book ends with Jünger in the hospital recovering from yet another honorable wound and being notified that he will receive the order Pour le Mérite. And that’s it: there’s no sorrow, no summing-up. It’s almost like the way a young boy would end a story written for school: “And in the end, the King awarded him the highest medal.”²

I put Yukio Mishima into the same general category as Jünger, an aesthetic fascist, although as a personality and a writer he was more neurotic and more interesting. I’d still like to read his best-known work, the Sea of Fertility books, but so far I’ve only read one early work of his, Forbidden Colors, which I think is his most explicitly gay novel and must be one of his more eccentric. It’s about an aging and unhappy writer, Shunsuke, who becomes obsessed with Yuichi, a handsome young man he meets one day in the countryside. When the young man confesses he’s gay, Shunsuke, embittered by a lifetime of betrayal by women, takes him under his wing and arranges a sham marriage for him with the aim of using him to inflict revenge on the female sex. Inspired by this new project, the heretofore heterosexual Shunsuke explores Tokyo’s underground gay nightlife. There is some kind of love triangle and power struggle between Shunsuke, Yuichi, and Yuichi’s wife Yasuko, in which Yasuko gets the worst of it. For me, Forbidden Colors is summed up pretty well in this passage:

On that summer day when he saw the youth appear in the foam on the beach, for the first time in his life an idea had come to dwell in his mind. To cure diseases of life he would impart the steely health of death. This was what, in artistic productions, Shunsuke had always dreamed of as the ideal manifestation.

In artistic works, there is a twofold possibility of existence, he believed. Just as an ancient lotus seed will flower again when dug up and replanted, the work of art that is said to possess everlasting life can live again in the hearts of all times, all countries. When one touches an ancient work—of space art, or time art—his life is captured by the space or the time of the work and abandons the rest of its existence. He lives another life. However, the internal time which he expends in this other life has already been measured, already settled upon. That is what we call form.

To sum up: I have no idea what the hell Mishima is talking about. Considering much of the book consists of writing like this, Forbidden Colors is actually surprisingly readable. Maybe the inscrutability is partly the fault of the translator. But inscrutable it is. What does come through – for example, when Yuichi and Shunsuke pull a switcheroo on one of Shunsuke’s old lovers, who, seduced by Yuichi, spends the night with him in a dark room only to wake up and discover Shunsuke in her bed – is a furious, almost murderous woman-hating that makes the misogyny of someone like John Updike look cozy and domestic by comparison.

I also picked up at some point (just to make sure all the Axis powers were heard from, I guess) The Flame, by Gabriele D’Annunzio. I don’t know much about D’Annunzio except that he’s considered to be on the right, and on the right in a high-living, airplane-flying, monocle-wearing way. Really famous in his time, dashingly bald, he was, according to Wikipedia, briefly the de facto dictator of a small Italian state as a consequence of one of his many political adventures. I like the figure of the writer as man of the world – you think of Stendhal, La Rochefoucauld – and was prepared to like The Flame, but unfortunately it’s not good:

The woman he called Perdita did not reply, though her face was wrapt in concentration and she felt the indefinable shudder right through her body that her young lover’s voice always produced when he suddenly opened up his tumultuous, passionate soul, to which she was drawn by boundless love but also by utter terror.

I got through about 20 pages of this and then quit.

D’Annunzio was an Italian irredentist and a big influence on Mussolini. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as everybody knows, was just an out-and-out Nazi. The verdict on Céline seems to be, yes he was a shit, but he was also a genius. I’m half-Jewish, which is plenty Jewish enough to nurse a grudge against antisemites, so I’d accepted this verdict from afar but figured I’d put him off until after I’d read all the writers who weren’t Nazis. But I got curious. When I finally read – swiftly, one after the other – his two major novels, Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan, I was almost disappointed to find that they contained not just zero antisemitic content but not even any fascist style or recognizably right-wing atmosphere. The atmosphere of his books is the opposite of the high-tone warrior ethos of the aesthetic fascists. Céline doesn’t make you want to lift weights. It’s low life from beginning to end. His novels are scatalogical and rude in a way that made me laugh out loud the way I used to at Beavis and Butthead. For some reason, vomit scenes in literature and film just make me lose it like nothing else, I don’t know why, and Céline includes an absolutely untoppable one in Death on the Installment Plan. The narrator and his parents are on a ferry in rough waters:

A fierce wave beats down on the rail, smacks against the deck, rises, gushes, rolls back, sweeps the steerage… The foam stirs up the garbage and spins it around between us… We swallow some of it… We spit it up again… At every plunge the soul flies away… at every rise you recapture it in a wave of mucus and stink… It comes dripping from your nose, all salty. This is too much!… One passenger begs for mercy… He cries out to high heaven that he’s empty!… He strains his guts!… And a raspberry comes up after all!… He examines it, goggle-eyed with horror… Now he really has nothing left!… He wishes he could vomit out his two eyes… He tries, he tries hard… He braces himself against the mast… he’s trying to drive them out of their sockets… Mama collapses against the rail… She vomits herself up again, all she’s got… A carrot comes up… a piece of fat… and the whole tail of a mullet…

This passage could stand for many equally graphic and exaggerated scenes of sex and violence. With Céline you have your nose rubbed in it, in all the world’s filth and misery, and you like it. I enjoyed these novels, and the recently rediscovered fragment, War, very much. But I couldn’t quite think of them as masterpieces, especially Death, which has no plot and really no ending (it just stops) and in which Céline’s fevered, hectoring style overshadows the action and almost seems a little mannered. Houellebecq, who’s sometimes compared to Céline (and who even looks a little like him: their faces have the same intelligent, goblinish quality) gets asked about him in interviews and always says that Céline is good but overrated. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I’m inclined to agree. “Overrated” in this case means he was a terrific writer, just possibly not the deathless genius he’s sometimes made out to be.

I suspect also that the fact that Céline was a Nazi makes his work more interesting, not less, and inclines people to overrate his novels and their significance the way one might be inclined to overrate a serial killer’s paintings. One piece of evidence of this possibly excessive Céline-worship is the publishing house Gallimard’s 2017 decision to reprint his antisemitic tracts. Céline wrote three of these, only one of which, Bagatelles for a Massacre, is available in English, in a nonprofessional but competent-seeming translation available online. The rare combination of great talent and extreme racism gives this document the magnetism of an unholy book or at least an envelope full of crime-scene photos. There must, you think, be something very powerful inside.

But wait! what is it that the Jews are talking about amongst themselves, a constitution? yet another one? It’s all the same to us Hymies who we’ll grab by the sleeve! Communism? But it is perfectly well at hand! We will all become “commissars” on the day that the Stock Exchanges close… The Stock Exchanges are, more than anything else, tiresome…there are some gaps…there are still some goyim taking advantage of the liberties…who insinuate themselves somewhat into the dividends… This decidedly must be brought to an end. This abuse is going to be suppressed!… All of them are going to be brought back into order, into the perfect herd… That is to say, that the pensioners will eat garbage alongside the other dogs… The gold is for us, the Jews! The Jews get the gold! Anyone more would be too many!… The world is ours! …it’s not for the losers… It’s for us Hymies, the most brooding paranoiacs in the Universe! whose voracity is a thousand times as strong…

Oh well! You expected to see the devil at work but instead find you’ve walked in on the great author masturbating. To be fair, not all of the book is like the above passage: Bagatelles also includes the complete scripts for at least two ballets about elves and fairies. There might be gold and diamonds in there as well, I’ll never know, Céline could have put the blueprint for a water-powered car and his grandmother’s recipe for tarte tatin and the numbers to various Swiss bank accounts, they’d be safe within that impenetrable wasteland of text. “Pamphlet” is a euphemism: Bagatelles is more than 250 pages long. I read about one percent of it, which took a solid hour. It was so boring and nonsensical that I almost felt sorry for Céline for having written it: not for having stained his reputation or his conscience or anything like that but just for having had to write, one by one, these sentences devoid of wit or originality, to have spent such time and effort producing this pile of trash. This pity is most certainly wasted: Bagatelles sold 75,000 copies by the end of the war, an awful testament to the power of antisemitism in France at the time, since only rabid Jew-hatred could have inspired anyone who’d bought the book to recommend it to anyone else. It’s hard to believe it’s ever been read all the way through.

Adam Gopnik, in an article in the New Yorker on Céline’s tracts and his novels, says they’re somehow of a piece. “Céline’s subjects,” he writes, “are, according to his editor and a biographer, ‘war, death and sex,’ but those are only his objects; his subject is hatred.” This is very neatly put, but it isn’t true. Céline’s novels, Journey especially, are so readable and even moving because in each of them his alter ego, Bardamu, appears vulnerable as well as vicious. Bardamu just can’t quit people. In Death, he loathes his parents, who appear pathetic and ridiculous to the highest degree, but he doesn’t pretend not to care about them. Journey doesn’t end with bitter laughter but with a profound feeling of sadness and loss, which is connected to an attachment to old friends and enemies that the surly Bardamu is unable to shake. If Céline were just a hater, his novels would be almost as boring as his tracts. He was also an artist, and his novels fall under the purview of an artistic conscience. When he’s not making art, though, there’s only his appalling personality in charge, which was so antisocial that his antisemitic propaganda was offputting even to other antisemites and his personal antisemitism unsettling even to Nazis. In his diary for 1941, Ernst Jünger, by now a Wehrmacht officer in Paris, described with some distaste his meeting with Céline, during which the French author ranted for two hours about how the Nazis weren’t killing Jews fast enough. Hitler, he claimed, must be part Jewish, that was the only explanation.

Céline and Houellebecq get compared, but a better contemporary comparison might really be to Renaud Camus, the founder of the Great Replacement theory. (This is the highbrow version of “white genocide.”) Camus interests me because we have no equivalent figure in the US. All our reactionaries are slobs and opportunists. But before Camus was a right-wing agitator, he was a genuine littérateur, author of well-received novels and nonfiction. Roland Barthes wrote the introduction to one of his early books. I read an essay by Emmanuel Carrère from 2000 defending his then-friend Camus from charges of antisemitism. This now seems a little like defending your friend Al Capone from charges of tax evasion, since although Camus might really not be an antisemite, he’s made anti-immigrant racism his stock in trade for almost two decades. A collection of his essays, Enemy of the Disaster, was recently published in English translation. The passage here is from a talk he gave in Lunel, in the South of France.

So, I was in some old villages in the Hérault, big old villages round and fortified, with narrow streets and tightly packed crooked houses, which in the year one thousand had already, for many of them, a solid experience of the world. Some would say that was before France even existed. Perhaps it was. In any case, it was now afterwards one might have thought: because at the windows and thresholds of these ancient houses, along ancient streets, appeared almost exclusively a population unheard of in these parts and which by its clothes, its attitude, its very language, seemed not to belong there, but rather to another people, another culture, another history… As if during our lifetime, and even less so, France was in the process of changing its people: you see one, you take a nap, it’s another, or several others, which appear to belong to other shores, other skies, other architectures, other mores – that’s what they themselves seem to think, too.

Camus really doesn’t write badly – his earlier books might well be good – and his statements about immigrants in these essays rarely get much stronger than in the passage above. They rarely get much stronger than Annie Ernaux, when she writes in The Years, about African and Arab immigrants in France: “That they called themselves French we privately found absurd, a usurped claim to glory to which they were not yet entitled… In some obscure way, they were the natives of an inner colony we no longer controlled.” But something in the writing makes you understand from the first lines that you are not dealing with Annie Ernaux or another ordinary French Boomer. There is a feeling of insinuation, of barely controlled wrath. Camus’ orotund phrases, his erudition, his elaborate syntax, don’t cover up, or try to cover up, the sense of personal grievance, of rage, and I think even to someone who knew nothing about Camus it would be clear after just a couple of pages that this is a case of someone summoning all his eloquence, all his intellectual powers, all his erudition and force of argument to say: “I don’t like them.” He really doesn’t like them, these African and Arab immigrants, but he doesn’t just come out and say it, and this gives his writing an edge that must be enjoyable to readers who can hear their own feelings echoed without having to feel like they’re wallowing in the gutter. Where he just comes out and says what he thinks, though, is where so many others just come out and say it, Twitter. With his many followers he shares Haitians-eating-cats memes, endless claims of “white genocide,” retweets from the RadioGenoa account that show video clips of black teenagers beating up white ones and proclaim that “Europe is finished.” Right, you think: this is what it’s all about.

What’s interesting is that if his recent book is a kind of self-portrait of a hater, his only other to be translated into English is a record of his career as a lover. This is Tricks, his 1979 memoir of cruising. It’s quite readable, in the manner of an online diary, although better written. The liaisons with various men, hastily arranged in bars or parks, are recounted matter-of-factly and have an innocent quality and even a certain delicacy; and it is funny to compare this youthful exhibition of Camus’ id with the one he now publishes every day on Twitter, which in contrast to his sex life is sordid, undiscriminating, and completely of the gutter.

A gay French octogenerian far-right intellectual who tweets compulsively: a nice curiosity for the right-curious. But it gets curiouser than that. I don’t know if it gets curioser than “Caribbean Rhythms,” the podcast hosted by the somehow-ever-slightly-more-well-known Bronze Age Pervert. The people who write about BAP (as he’s known) are mostly writing about his book, Bronze Age Mindset, and his role as right-wing Twitter personality. I didn’t find his book very interesting, and his Twitter account is a cesspool even worse than Renaud Camus’. His podcast, however, is really something. You can think of it as the Portnoy’s Complaint of racism, an irrepressible eruption of the middle-class id. This is racism of the “Nietzschean vitalist” type, which holds that “mere life,” as represented by the mass of humanity, is not worth preserving and that a civilization’s only value lies in its few finest human and cultural specimens. Nazism, basically, but without any specific obsession with Jews or other racial group (BAP is half-Jewish, like seemingly every other alt-right influencer), just hatred for liberal civilization and an adolescent longing for cleansing violence.

Racism of this kind is the show’s inspiration and philosophy, but it isn’t its main subject. What is the main subject? Well… this varies. Topics include disquisitions on classical music (not neglecting modern composers like Messiaen and Webern), readings from Homer in the original Greek (not neglecting the original pitch accents), white-hot invective against people you never think about, such as Victoria Nuland or Sohrab Ahmari, travel anecdotes from Tokyo and Buenos Aires, and much else, all delivered with the vehemence of a sidewalk orator and in a bad but scrupulously maintained Russian accent, complete with grammatical mistakes. I think he has a PhD from Yale. Honestly this is not such a bad use of it. In an age when social media and streaming video have left us all glutted with novelty, Caribbean Rhythms achieves a level of eccentricity I would have thought no longer possible. Much is lost in transcription, of course, but here’s a sample:

I couldn’t sleep, I went to get fruit. There’s a special fruit store I like a few blocks away, I got watermelon juice, which apparently has certain benefits of sexual power. And I was looking on their daily specials, and they had these small tangerine types. I picked them up, and by the time I get to the cashier, I’m already chortling, I don’t – because I saw these small tangerine, they perplex me, you know, the small oranges. I think these are a mystical fruit. Prokofiev has Surrealist Operetta, The Love of Three Oranges. It’s based on an Italian play, which is in turn based on very ancient Italian Mediterranean fairy tale. I do believe in this, I think that citrus fruit are pregnant with vibrant powers, neon powers, neon grapes and such, I believe in this. So, maybe this why, but I couldn’t stop. When I saw this girl at the check – the cashier – she start to weigh these small tangerine, I just start losing it. And I made fool of myself, hysterical laughing fit – again, she had this upset, offended look on her face. And maybe I’m still imagining it, but maybe she thought I was laughing at her. So, after I walk out, because I’m such a nice guy, I made it worse, I go back to explain to her, I’m not laughing at her, but throughout doing this, I’m hysterical laughing, crying fit, it continues. So, you see, she had exasperated, disgusted look on her face. But it hasn’t stopped me from going back to store, I like small pineapple.

His film reviews are usually right on the money. He claims to have been sexually assaulted by a creature with “glowing pink filigreed wings” behind a dumpster in Milan. Sometimes in the background of the show you notice, loud enough to distract from the harangue, the sounds of surf and seagulls from a loop of seaside sound effects.

This has been quite a bit of right-wing content, hasn’t it! My lungs are burning from all those Marlboro Reds (Browns?) I’ve smoked. Now is when I feel the urge – the obligation, really, the necessity – to wind all this up with a reality check, a reminder that even as I write about literary fascism, aesthetic fascism, eccentric fascism, Trump and his stooges are perpetrating various acts of actual fascism, that Stephen Miller and Tucker Carlson talk openly about “white genocide,” that people like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens have millions of online followers and that really there’s nothing interesting or entertaining or funny about far-right politics. I feel this urge but I think I can resist. These people are all vicious idiots. Why should I let them interfere with my reading? Thoughts are free. I think after this microsurvey of right-wing literature, I’ll just say I’ve learned nothing, can draw no conclusions and will offer no analysis. I suspect I am attracted to these reactionary intellectuals not in spite but because of their pathological qualities, their narcissism and perversity and paranoia, as well as my own healthy and reasonable desire to occasionally fuck off as far away as possible from the leafy campus of the New York Times. I think I’m going to continue, off and on, my reading project. I feel like it keeps me young. Maybe next I’ll check out this Julius Evola I’ve been hearing about. Revolt Against the Modern World – I like the sound of that…

1. And then the antiwokes, who are 100,000 times worse, smugger than the smuggest liberal, these people like Andrew Sullivan or Bari Weiss who can’t write two sentences without congratulating themselves on their free-thinking bravery when in fact they’re just sanctimonious scolds, and that of a particularly vain, careerist kind.

2. The contrast to the memoirs of that English supersoldier Siegfried Sassoon could not be greater. In one scene in Storm of Steel, Jünger and his subaltern brave sniper fire to search the grass for one of his medals that’s fallen off. Sassoon famously claimed to have thrown his own medals into the Mersey.