Albert Camus: Elements of a Life

ELEMENTS OF A LIFE

ROBERT ZARETSKY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

FOR TED ESTESS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Regarding Camus

1939: From County Mayo to Kabylia

1945: A Moralist on the Barricades

1952: French Tragedies

1956: Silence Follows

Epilogue

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This small book is the work of many people. At the University of Houston, the provost, John Antel, and the dean emeritus of the Honors College, Ted Estess, conspired to provide me with a semester’s leave that allowed me to meet my deadline. William Monroe, dean of the Honors College, and Joseph Pratt, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, also offered critical support. Colleagues at Houston—Sarah Fishman, Ted Estess, and Dorothy Baker—read and commented on parts of the manuscript, as did my friend John Scott. My French publisher, David Gaussen, has been an enthusiastic and sharp-eyed reader. Jeffrey Isaac spoke up for the book when it was still just an idea, while David Carroll saved me from making a number of historical and textual errors. My copyeditor Jane Todd did a superb job, as did Cornell’s editorial team, led by Susan Specter and Susan Barnett. Peter Potter has, as always, gracefully balanced the demands of friendship and criticism. This is no less true of my wife, Julie Zaretsky: she knows how much I owe her. Finally, I am indebted to Tzvetan Todorov, Alice Conklin, and David Mikics. Despite their own busy lives, they read and reread the entire work, sharing their excitement and hesitations, encouragement and doubts, insights and corrections. They made this a far better book than it otherwise would have been, and I alone am responsible for the remaining weaknesses.

For more than twenty years, my friend and mentor Ted Estess has shown those around him what it means to attend to the world and to others. I dedicate this book to him.

REGARDING CAMUS

We live with a few familiar ideas. Two or three, Albert Camus once wrote. We polish and transform them according to the societies and the men we happen to meet. It takes ten years to have an idea that is really one’s own—that one can talk about.¹ By the same token, the world has long had a few familiar ideas about the author of The Stranger and The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Rebel. There is the idea of a Camus who probed the notions of freedom and justice, who reflected on the dangers of either notion becoming an absolute claim, and who tried to reconcile their conflicting characters. There is also the idea of a Camus who wrote about the nature of exile both from one’s native land—in his case, French Algeria—and from a world bereft of a god. And there is the idea of a Camus who gave voice to an entire spectrum of silence: the silence of childhood innocence, the silence of the political prisoner or disenfranchised native, the silence of tragic conflicts, and the silence of a cosmos indifferent to our need for meaning.

These ideas about Camus not only constitute elements of his life but also explain the abiding relevance his work has for our lives. Like many others of my generation, I first read Camus in high school. I carried him in my backpack while traveling across Europe, I carried him into (and out of) relationships, and I carried him into (and out of) difficult periods of my life. More recently, I have carried him into university classes that I have taught, coming out of them with a renewed appreciation for his art. To be sure, my idea of Camus thirty years ago scarcely resembles my idea of him today. While my admiration and attachment to his writings remain as great as they were long ago, the reasons are now more complicated and critical.

One constant in my understanding of Camus’s significance over these many years is how, until his untimely death in 1960, he wrestled with certain ideas and shared this struggle with readers. The quality of that struggle—engaged in with an intellectual integrity that led to a fortifying hopelessness—has marked all who have read him. If there is one conviction that scholars and nonscholars share, it is that Camus is still an indispensable companion in our intellectual and ethical lives. He appears to us, in a way that few other writers do, as someone who wrote for his life and for our lives as well.

This book is neither a full biography nor a scholarly commentary. It is an essay in which I trace the ways these familiar ideas weave through Camus’s life. Each chapter is devoted to a specific event: Camus’s visit to Kabylia in 1939 to report on the conditions of the local Berber tribes; his decision to sign a petition to commute the collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach’s death sentence in 1945; his famous quarrel with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; his silence over the war in Algeria after 1956. Given the importance of each of these moments, I take the liberty of moving back and forth across time and space in order to explore the many layers of its significance. Moreover, I deliberately bring to the fore individuals and ideas that other accounts often leave in the background. The reader will find discussions of the Greek writers Thucydides and Aeschylus, the religious thinkers Augustine and Rousseau, the French essayists Michel de Montaigne and Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, and even the Irish nationalist playwright J. M. Synge. Some of them, like Synge and Chamfort, gave Camus unexpected ways to express his own concerns; others, like the ancient Greeks, exerted a greater influence than is usually recognized. These thinkers are not walk-ons in the story of Camus’s life; instead, Camus turns to them during the most critical moments.

One other thinker, though not discussed in the book, is nevertheless present: Simone Weil. After World War II, Camus, under the auspices of the publishing house Gallimard, founded a series called Espoir (Hope). He published Weil’s L’enracinement, subsequently translated into English as The Need for Roots, in this series. A recurrent concern in Weil’s thought is what she called the work of attention. This elusive yet crucial human activity is not simply paying attention, drawing an object closer to us and placing it under a magnifying glass. It is not even necessarily seeing with one’s own eyes. Instead, it is stepping back and waiting for the object to draw closer to you. It is apprehending the world and others, as free as possible from the psychological scrims our egos are forever building. Weil compared the attentive individual to a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains.² While her (unorthodox) Christian faith, along with her transcendental grounding of the work of attention, separated her from Camus, in her description of the activity itself she closely mirrors Camus’s sensibility. One of the great constants in Camus’s work and life is precisely this kind of attentiveness. It is a quality that marks not just his fictional characters but often their creator as well.

When we attend to others, we tend to listen rather than talk. For this reason, the other side to the coin of attentiveness is silence. Camus’s artistry and morality are, in part, expressed by such silences. There are the silences that shimmer like mirages in the austere Algerian landscapes, and those in which so many of his characters are steeped as they regard the world. There is also the silence in which Camus wrapped himself in the late 1950s as French Algeria collapsed into war. Born in Algeria and raised with the values of republican France, Camus was torn between the competing and ultimately irreconcilable claims represented by French imperialism and Algerian nationalism. Finally, in 1957, he declared he would no longer speak about the war in public—a vow that, with two exceptions, he kept until his death three years later.

Much noise has inevitably swirled around this silence ever since. So, too, for a different kind of silence that hovered over Camus during his last years. By the early 1950s, Camus felt stifled and emptied; he feared he had fallen silent because he no longer had anything to say as an artist. The violent public quarrel with Sartre over Camus’s philosophical essay The Rebel led not just to the end of their friendship but also to deepening doubts on Camus’s part about his art. As he told one friend, I feel like ink absorbed by a wad of paper.³ The subsequent publication of his novel The Fall lifted these doubts, but only for a time. When Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, some critics thought he was too young for the award (he had just turned forty-four). For others, however, Camus was too old and washed up: the prize, they concluded, confirmed that Camus was a literary relic who had nothing more to say. Camus shared these doubts: in his short story Jonas, or the Artist at Work, he portrays an artist whose life slowly empties of creativity, an artist reduced to staring at a blank canvas. Though first written several years before, the story was published in his 1957 collection of short stories, Exile and the Kingdom, and spoke clearly to Camus’s predicament.

Camus’s emphasis on silence, in his art and in his politics, mirrored his determination to speak for others who, in various ways, were condemned to silence. In his Nobel address, Camus declared that art’s nobility is rooted in the refusal to lie about what one knows, and the resistance to oppression.⁴ Camus described and denounced the plight of French Algeria’s Arab and Berber populations at a time when these peoples were all but invisible to most French citizens. Immediately after the war, he no less forcefully decried France’s use of torture in Algeria, horrified by the ways in which the French, so recently oppressed under the Germans, had become the Arabs’ oppressor. Then there was his stubborn battle against French government censors during the early months of World War II, when he tirelessly combated the sophistic claim that a nation’s morale entails the sacrifice of its freedoms.⁵ This claim, along with his condemnation of the French republic’s outlawing of the Communist Party after the declaration of war—law concerns us all and cannot be applied selectively—apply not just to other crises in Camus’s time but also to those we confront in our own.⁶ The urgency of Camus’s voice still claims our attention, and his lucidity still serves as a model.

Many critics have rightly observed that Camus’s stubborn humanism looms especially large today. If we are not careful, however, we will miss just how extraordinary his stance was and remains. This does not mean he was a saint—on the contrary, Camus’s colleagues, friends, and family offer ample witness to his flaws. Looking back on his quarrel with Sartre, we are torn between horror at Sartre’s attack of his former friend in the pages of Les Temps Modernes and unease over the intellectual and personal shortcomings in Camus that Sartre rightly identified. Paradoxically, some of Camus’s virtues also blur his significance. His battle against totalitarianism, courageous in his own day, has since become orthodoxy. His loathing of the Algerian nationalist movement, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), has been largely justified by the subsequent history of an Algeria ruled by a single party. His efforts to lay a foundation for morality, viewed as quaint by many of his contemporaries, have since been joined by many thinkers. And who today would dispute his passionate defense of the necessity for direct and sincere dialogue? In a way, the world—or, at least, those who devote their lives to analyzing it—has caught up to Camus.

The problem, however, is that most of us are quite comfortable with these positions: our morality and our humanism seem easily learned but scarcely earned. I doubt that Camus, were he alive today, would feel at home in the company of either the neoliberal or the neoconservative thinkers who claim him as an inspiration. Instead, he would still be an exile and an outsider—a moralist who, as Tony Judt remarks, is by nature uneasy with himself and his world.⁷ In part, this stems from Camus’s insight into the fundamental nature of life. His work touches on the mystery—for better or worse, he called it the absurdity—of the human condition and its resistance to meaning. It is the human being’s confrontation with the universe, not something inherent to the universe itself, that leads to absurdity. The absurd, Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, depends as much on man as on the world.⁸ At such moments, wading in a sea we thought we knew, we are suddenly knocked off our feet by a kind of metaphysical riptide.

Camus insisted that absurdity does not lead to a nihilistic life. On the contrary, the very ability to acknowledge the absurd requires a moral effort. All I can hope to do, he said shortly after World War II, is show that generous forms of behavior can be engendered even in a world without God and that man alone in the universe can still create his own values. That is, in my opinion, the sole problem posed by our era.⁹

And it remains one of the great problems of our era. Camus’s writings have become guides for the perplexed—a status that left Camus uncomfortable. I speak for no one, he insisted. I have enough difficulty speaking for myself. I don’t know, or I know only dimly, where I am headed. While an element of false modesty was at play, there was also a deep element of sincerity. Camus became the voice of a generation with dizzying speed: he published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and existentialism. Little more than a decade later, in 1957, he won the Nobel Prize. Then, on January 4, 1960, he was killed when a car in which he was riding in southern France swerved off the road and slammed into a tree.

° ° °

When Camus died, he was carrying a briefcase that contained a handwritten text of nearly 150 pages. It was the manuscript of Le premier homme (The First Man), a novel he had begun writing in earnest after winning the Nobel Prize. Early in the unfinished novel, the hero, Jacques Cormery—like Camus, a middle-aged French Algerian—visits a military cemetery in the Breton town of Saint-Brieuc. Guided by the caretaker, Cormery finds the reason for his visit: a simple gravestone with the inscription Henri Cormery, 1885–1914. Jacques Cormery was scarcely a year old when his father was killed in the Battle of the Marne. As he gazes at the stone, Cormery automatically did the arithmetic: twenty-nine years. Suddenly he was struck by an idea that shook his very being. He was forty years old. The man buried under that slab, who had been his father, was younger than he.¹⁰

At this point, both Cormery and Camus begin the search for their pasts. But while The First Man is Camus’s most personal work, it is not unique in that respect. Throughout his short life as a writer, Camus implicated himself in his art: behind his sharp and chiseled phrases throb powerful memories, experiences, concerns, and passions. One of his close friends, Jean de Maisonseul, found that Camus used the first-person je too often in his first collection of essays, L’Envers et l’endroit—a gentle accusation that Camus accepted: a writer needs to remain behind the scenes, he admitted.¹¹ In a preface he wrote to a new edition of the essays in 1958, Camus insists on their personal nature: This little book has considerable value as testimony.¹² And this is no less true of his last work, The First Man, which Camus used the way others use memoir, as an effort to cast his past into meaningful shape.

Camus once confessed he never recovered from his harsh and spare childhood.¹³ Camus’s family resided in the Belcourt neighborhood of Algiers in an apartment with three small rooms and a kitchen, no plumbing, no electricity, and just one toilet shared by the three families in the building. He lived there from infancy until high school with his grandmother, mother, brother, and uncle; as for Camus’s father, Lucien Camus, he, like Henri Cormery, had died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914. All that his widow retained was a photograph and a fragment of the shell that had killed him. Camus and his older brother,