Lettres et premiers écrits d'Afrique

Destouches sails from Marseille in May 1916, arrives at Douala, and travels upriver into French Equatorial Africa to the Sangha-Oubangui basin. He is employed by the Compagnie Forestière as a trading-post agent responsible for gathering rubber and forest products from the interior.

The letters to his parents in Paris are frequent, detailed and — in the early months — cheerful. He describes the climate, the food, the mail schedule, the price of a horse and the price of a shirt.

Illness arrives quickly. Dysentery and malaria dominate the middle letters. The isolation of the post and the racial hierarchy of the colonial administration take up more and more of the correspondence.

The earliest surviving prose experiments date from this year. They are short, fragmentary, and mostly descriptive — the first pages of a writer testing what he can do with a French sentence when nobody is looking.

By late 1916 the letters home are asking about repatriation. Destouches's health has deteriorated. In April 1917 he is discharged from the Compagnie Forestière on medical grounds and sails back to France.

Edited by Jean-Pierre Dauphin for Gallimard's original Cahiers Céline sequence and published as vol. 4 in 1978.

The volume is a year in the life of a not-yet-writer, told in the letters he sent home and the fragments he wrote for himself.

The African year is where Céline's later material begins to accumulate — the trading post, the isolated white manager, the fake ledger, the fever, the racial cruelty of the colonial administration, the sense of an ambition collapsing in on itself in a place that will not cooperate.

The letters are not the novel; they are the raw material. Reading them next to Journey to the End of the Night is the closest look the record gives of Céline transforming his own experience into fiction.

The earliest prose fragments are more interesting as evidence than as literature — a young writer trying out sentences, most of them still conventional.