Lettres à des amies
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Cahiers Céline 5 — Céline's correspondence with the women in his life beyond Lucette: the American dancer Elizabeth Craig, Karen Marie Jensen, Cillie Pam and others, from the pre-Journey years through exile.
This 1979 Gallimard volume in the Cahiers Céline documentary series, edited by Colin W. Nettelbeck, prints Céline's surviving correspondence with women friends outside his marriages: chiefly the American dancer Elizabeth Craig, to whom Journey to the End of the Night is dedicated; Karen Marie Jensen, his Danish contact from the exile years; and Cillie Pam and Erika Irrgang, Viennese friends from the 1930s. The letters cover roughly twenty years of the private register — travel, dance, money, the writing of Journey and Death on the Installment Plan, the years in Denmark. Together with the Marie Canavaggia and Albert Paraz volumes they form the small archive that survives of the correspondence Céline actually kept and posted.
The Elizabeth Craig letters are the volume's centre of gravity. Craig — American, a dancer, born in California — was Céline's companion from 1926 to 1933, the years across which Journey to the End of the Night was written. The novel is dedicated to her.
Karen Marie Jensen was Danish, a dancer, a friend of Lucette Almanzor's, and one of the very small number of people who could receive letters from Céline in Copenhagen without endangering him or themselves. Her correspondence documents the exile years from the inside.
Cillie Pam and Erika Irrgang were both Viennese, and the correspondence with them survives from the 1930s. Pam was a psychoanalyst who left Vienna for New York in 1938.
Shorter correspondences with other women friends are printed alongside — a documentary sweep rather than any single relationship.
The letters are practical: travel plans, dance work, money, health, publishing, and the ordinary business of maintaining a friendship at a distance.
Edited by Colin W. Nettelbeck for Gallimard's original Cahiers Céline sequence and published as vol. 5 in 1979.
The volume is really a small archive: four or five surviving epistolary friendships, each fragmentary in its own way, printed together as one book because the individual runs are too short to publish alone.
The Elizabeth Craig letters are the most literary — a young writer between the Semmelweis thesis and Journey to the End of the Night writing to the woman the novel was for. The tone is affectionate, funny, close.
The Danish correspondence with Karen Marie Jensen sits at the other end of Céline's life — exile, illness, surveillance, and the small kindnesses that made the years bearable.
The Viennese letters give a middle register: Céline in Paris in the 1930s writing to friends abroad about what he was reading, what he was watching in the dance world, what he thought was coming in Europe.
There is no single ending. The volume closes when its documents close — the correspondences trailing off in different years as people moved, married, died, or lost touch.
What survives is a portrait of the private register: Céline as a correspondent to people he liked, before and outside the fame and the notoriety.
The Elizabeth Craig correspondence is the closest documentary record of the years Journey to the End of the Night was being written. Reading it means reading over the shoulder of the person the novel was dedicated to.
The letters are private, funny, affectionate, and unposed. They belong to a register the novels and the public statements never touch.
The Danish letters to Karen Marie Jensen show what daily life in Copenhagen actually looked like from the friend who could visit and bring things.
Lettres à Marie Canavaggia
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Cahiers Céline 9 — the 758-page scholarly edition of Céline's letters to his literary secretary Marie Canavaggia, twenty-four years of the working relationship that saw the novels into print.
Read our takeLettres à Albert Paraz
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Cahiers Céline 6 and 10 — Céline's ten-year correspondence with the writer Albert Paraz, from the Danish exile years through the return to France, and the surviving public campaign to have Céline read again after the war.
Read our take
Louis-Ferdinand Céline's 1932 first novel, which follows one man from the First World War through colonial Africa and industrial America to the Paris slums.
Read our takeChiefly Elizabeth Craig (American dancer, Céline's companion 1926–1933), Karen Marie Jensen (Danish dancer, friend from the exile years), Cillie Pam and Erika Irrgang (Viennese friends from the 1930s), with shorter surviving runs to other women.
Yes. The 1932 dedication of Voyage au bout de la nuit reads À Elizabeth Craig — the same American dancer whose letters are the centre of this volume.
Colin W. Nettelbeck for Gallimard's original Cahiers Céline sequence. Published as volume 5 in 1979.
The Canavaggia correspondence is a working relationship (Céline to his literary secretary). This volume is friendship — the private register outside publishing and outside Lucette.
A separate 1990 volume, Letters to Elizabeth, gathers a related selection of the Craig letters. The full Cahiers Céline 5 edition has not been translated.
No. The Céline–Lucette correspondence sits in a separate volume, Lettres de prison à Lucette Destouches et à Maître Mikkelsen (1998), covering the Danish imprisonment years.
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