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Albert
Camus, 50 years on In search of
the real Camus Jan 7th 2010
| From the print edition
Timekeeper Albert
Camus: Solitaire et Solidaire. By Catherine Camus. Michel Lafon; 206
pages;
€39.90. Buy from Amazon.fr Les Derniers
Jours de la Vie d'Albert Camus. By José Lenzini. Actes Sud; 144 pages;
€16.50.
Buy from Amazon.fr Albert
Camus, Fils d'Alger. By Alain Vircondelet. Fayard; 396 pages; €19.90.
Buy from
Amazon.fr In this
section
Powerhouses
American dreamer
Curves and waves
Prince of the absurd
Short and thin
Flying high Reprints Albert
Camus. By Virgil Tanase. Gallimard; 416 pages; €8.10. Buy from Amazon.fr WHEN Albert
Camus was killed in a car crash 50 years ago on January 4th, at the age
of 46,
he had already won the Nobel prize for literature, and his best-known
novel,
“L'Etranger” (“The Stranger” or “The Outsider”), had introduced readers
the
world over to the philosophy of the absurd. Yet, at the time of his
death,
Camus found himself an outcast in Paris, snubbed by Jean-Paul Sartre
and other
left-bank intellectuals, and denounced for his freethinking refusal to
yield to
fashionable political views. As his daughter has said: “Papa was alone.” Today, by
contrast, the French are proud to consider Camus a towering figure,
while
Sartre's star has faded. Even President Nicolas Sarkozy, from the
political
right, has proposed transferring the writer's remains from Provence to
the
Panthéon in Paris. Several new books mark the anniversary of his death,
including an elegant illustrated volume by Catherine Camus, one of his
twin
children and custodian of her father's estate. The reader
in search of literary criticism, or even the origins of absurdist
thought, will
not find it in the three new biographies. That by José Lenzini, a
French former
journalist, is the most unusual, retracing Camus's last journey from
Provence
to Paris as a series of imaginary flashbacks through his life. The
other two
are more conventional but both finely drawn, digestible portraits of
the
football-playing “little poor child”, as Camus called himself, from
Algiers,
who came to leave such a mark on literature and moral thought. A double
haunting presence looms throughout all the books: that of Algeria,
where Camus
was born, and of his mother, Catherine. Before he was a year old, the
infant
Albert lost his father, an early settler in French Algeria, in the
battle of
the Marne. His mute and illiterate mother, and her extended family,
raised her
two sons in a small flat in Algiers with neither a lavatory nor running
water.
Alain Vircondelet writes movingly of the “minuscule life” in the
apartment with
nothing: “those white sheets, his mother's folded hands, a handkerchief
and a
little comb.” Her purity and silent dignity marked her son, as he
struggled to
confront his own shame at such poverty—and his shame at being ashamed.
“With
those we love,” he once said of her, “we have ceased to speak, and this
is not
silence.” That the
young Albert went to the French lycée, and then to university in
Algiers, was
thanks to two inspiring teachers with whom he kept in touch throughout
his
life; he dedicated his Nobel prize to one of them. Camus began writing,
as a
reporter and dramatist, in a land that was then part of France—and yet
apart.
His was the solitude, self-doubt and restlessness of dislocation and
displacement. The young man who emerges from Virgil Tanase's biography
in
particular is seductive, funny and loving, but constantly on the move:
between
the raw, sun-drenched Mediterranean and cramped, grey Paris, ever in
search of
respite from crippling bouts of tuberculosis, as well as comfort from
the
various women he charmed and loved with a passion. History
finds Camus on the right side of so many of the great moral issues of
the 20th
century. He joined the French resistance to combat Nazism, editing an
underground newspaper, Combat. He campaigned against the death penalty.
A
one-time Communist, his anti-totalitarian work, “L'Homme Révolté” (“The
Rebel”), published in 1951, was remarkably perceptive about the evils
of
Stalinism. It also led to his falling-out with Sartre, who at the time
was
still defending the Soviet Union and refusing to condemn the gulags. Camus left
Algeria for mainland France, but Algeria never left him. As the
anti-colonial
rebellion took hold in the 1950s, his refusal to join the bien pensant
call for
independence was considered an act of treason by the French left. Even
as
terror struck Algiers, Camus was vainly urging a federal solution, with
a place
for French settlers. When he famously declared that “I believe in
justice, but
I will defend my mother before justice,” he was denounced as a colonial
apologist. Nearly 40 years later, Mr Lenzini tracked down the Algerian
former
student who provoked that comment at a press conference. He now
confesses that,
at the time, he had read none of Camus's work, and was later “shocked”
and
humbled to come across the novelist's extensive reporting on Arab
poverty. The public
recognition that Camus achieved in his lifetime never quite compensated
for the
wounds of rejection and disdain from those he had thought friends. He
suffered
cruelly at the hands of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their snobbish,
jealous
literary clique, whose savage public assassination of Camus after the
publication of “The Rebel” left deep scars. “You may have been poor
once, but
you aren't anymore,” Sartre lashed out in print. “He would
remain an outsider in this world of letters, confined to existential
purgatory,” writes Mr Lenzini: “He was not part of it. He never would
be. And
they would never miss the chance to let him know that.” They accepted
him, says
Mr Tanase, “as long as he yielded to their authority.” What Sartre and
his
friends could not forgive was the stubborn independent-mindedness
which, today,
makes Camus appear so morally lucid, humane and resolutely modern.
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