Albert Camus: A Good Man

MY LIBERTY is absolute,” said the nihilist to the Englishman. “There is nothing which prevents me from punching you in the nose if I wish to.” “Oh, yes, there is,” replied the Englishman, “Your liberty ends where my nose begins.” That each man’s liberty has as its frontier the liberty of others is the hub of the humanist values which Albert Camus has been restating and revitalizing in terms of the intellectual framework of contemporary Europe. First known to us as a novelist vaguely associated with the French literature of despair, he is today Europe’s foremost critic of ideologies which he finds rooted in despair — ideologies which treat man as the slave of abstractions such as history, the state, or the class struggle.

Born and raised in Algeria “on the shores of a happy sea,” Camus opposes to the frenzied North and its demons of the absolute the pensée solaire or solar thought of the Mediterranean tradition: the Hellenic notions of measure, proportion, and limits. For Camus, the most instructive of the ancient deities, Nemesis, is the Goddess not of Vengeance but of Moderation. “There can be no attitude so free from error,” Camus holds, that men should give it their total allegiance. “I’ve had enough,” he says, “of people who die for an idea. What interests me is to live and die because of what one loves.”

Albert Camus is the second youngest man ever to have been awarded the Nobel Prize; Kipling received it at forty-three, Camus at forty-four. The generation to which he belongs “grew up to the drumbeat of the First World War, and [its] history has not ceased to be murder, injustice, and violence.” The European intellectuals most intimately involved in this history have been exposed to a host of corruptions — fascism, Communism, defeatism, collaborationism, reactionary nationalism — and few have emerged wholly uncompromised. One of the few is Albert Camus. He stands out, as did the late George Orwell, as a resonant spokesman for decency, a thinker of intransigent integrity and bracing independence — in sum, a good man.

Camus, who abhors self-righteousness and refuses to be counted among the moralizers, dislikes being called a moral force. He once said wryly that if he were to rape his grandmother in a public garden, somebody would argue that it was a moral act. However uncomfortable it may make him, he has come to represent, to his numerous admirers on the Continent, the conscience of his age. In the Nobel Prize citation, even that circumspect body, the Swedish Academy, honored Camus — ostensibly an atheist — not only for “his important literary production,” but also for illuminating “the problems of the human conscience in our time.” Some years earlier, when The Rebel first appeared in Europe, Sir Herbert Read wrote: “With the publication of this book, a cloud that has oppressed the European mind for more than a century begins to lift.”

Another token of Camus’s importance is that at least six critical studies of his work have already been published. The two written in English — The Thought and Art of Albert Camus by Thomas Hanna and Philip Thody’s Albert Camus — are excellent jobs of interpretation, which should help to make Camus better understood on this side of the Atlantic.

AN AMERICAN novelist said to me recently: “If a Frenchman was in line for the Nobel Prize, why didn’t it go to Malraux or Sartre? I can’t see what’s so great about Camus.” That a number of American readers should have doubts about Camus’s stature is hardly surprising. To begin with, one of the things that is great about him is his handling of the French language, and fine stylists lose in translation. With its combination of lucidity and lyricism, its controlled passion, its flashing turn of phrase, and its arresting aphorisms, Camus’s prose presents almost as many difficulties to the translator as poetry. Justin O’Brien has been scrupulously faithful (too faithful at times) to the wording and sentence structure of the original, but inevitably some of the luster has been rubbed off in the transition into a foreign language.

Although all of Camus’s most important books have been published in English, six volumes of nonfiction and two plays — roughly half of his output—remain untranslated; and they reveal attractive aspects of the man and of his thought which are not familiar to us. Camus is best known to Americans through his fiction, and in his fiction he is sometimes highly enigmatic. One of America’s best critics failed so completely to understand The Stranger that he sized up Camus as a hardboiled writer of the stripe of James M. Cain. And most reviewers candidly admitted that they found The Fall something of a riddle. The trouble is that Camus’s imaginative work is partly incomprehensible without a grasp of his philosophic thought, which he has expounded in two books of nonfiction, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, not widely read by Americans, and in essays and editorials which remain untranslated. Camus, who regards himself as “an artist, not a philosopher,” may be said to have felt his way into philosophy guided by the emotions which govern him as a creative artist. Thomas Hanna rightly emphasizes in his study of Camus that the “interplay between [his] philosophical and literary concerns is largely responsible for the richness and value of his writings.”

Like so many twentieth-century writers, Camus accepted, yet was anguished by, the picture of a world without God or justifiable values that was handed down by nineteenth-century science. The absurdity of this universe was heightened for Camus by the very bounties of nature and the keen physical joys amid which he grew up. To the youthful Camus — as he has told us in his first two books, L’Envers et L’Endroit and Noces — the sun and the sea were an insistent invitation to happiness. The naked bodies on the beach, the uncomplicated sensuality of the young couples in the dance halls — everything around him, in fact — celebrated the physical life as the sole reality and simultaneously proclaimed its brevity. “I learn,” he wrote in his early twenties, “that there is no superhuman happiness. . . . The world is beautiful, and beyond it there is no salvation. . . . Not that one must be an animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels.” Faithful to this experience, Camus has refused to seek meaning on any suprahuman plane. He has summed up his quest in a single, telling sentence: “I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only with that.” What makes his conduct of this quest so original is that, as Philip Thody has acutely noted, Camus has “the feelings of the common man and the mind of an intellectual.” In his feelings there is a distinct penchant toward the normal, in his mind an abnormal rage for lucidity.

When Camus came of age, the European Zeitgeist was steeped in despair, and in the years that followed he “lived nihilism, contradiction, violence and dizzying destruction”; he shared the prevailing sense that man is a spiritual exile in a hostile world. Thus he found it necessary to create from scratch his own logical foundation for an ethic which was, so to speak, somewhere in his blood. “It is always easy to be logical,” he has said. “It is almost impossible to be logical all the way to the end.” Carrying logic all the way to the end, he posed in its most radical form the problem of la non-garantie des valeurs — the impossibility of justifying moral values; and on this foundation of systematic doubt, he started to erect a humanism of his own, akin to the lost humanist tradition.

Painfully involved in the dilemmas of his age, Camus is an artist in whose fiction and theater there is certainly a strong personal element. He has warned us, however, against identifying him with his protagonists or taking their reasoning as a literal transcription of his thought. In an essay published in the Atlantic, he wrote: “I am not a painter of the Absurd. . . . What else have I done but reflect on an idea I found current in the streets? That I nourished this idea, like the rest of my generation, goes without saying. But I have kept my distance in order to treat it and determine its logic. ... A man often retraces the history of his nostalgias or temptations — almost never his own biography.” Here Camus furnishes us with an important clue to an understanding of his work. His method as an artist, like Gidc’s, might be described as the experimental method: he takes an idea (which holds for him an element of “nostalgia” or “temptation”), carries it, fictionally or theatrically, to its logical conclusion, and leaves the reader to judge it by its consequences. Thus the whole body of Camus’s literary creation has a well-defined pattern of exploration and evolution, which can best be charted by chronicling his life together with the development of his work.

ALBERT CAMUS was born in the Algerian town of Mondovi on November 7, 1913, the son of a Spanish mother and of an Alsatian agricultural worker who was killed in the Battle of the Marne. In the preface to his first book, Camus wrote: “Poverty was not a calamity for me. It was always balanced by the richness of light. . . . Circumstances helped me. To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.” Camus has remained strongly attached to his origins: North Africa, the world of the underdog, and his mother’s country, Spain. He felt passionately involved in the Spanish Civil War, and long after it, in 1952, he resigned from UNESCO as a protest against the admission of Franco’s dictatorship.

A teacher helped Camus to win a scholarship to secondary school, and he financed his university education with a variety of jobs. He stamped driving licenses for the Prefecture, checked barometric pressures for the Meteorological Institute, sold automobile parts, and worked for a ship broker. A newspaper advertisement led him into what was to become one of the great passions of his life, the theater. He applied for the job of male lead in a touring company, got it, and for two-week stretches traveled around Algeria playing the French classics. Fortified by this experience, he formed his own theater group, L’Equipe, and adapted for the stage The Brothers Karamazov and Aeschylus’s Prometheus. He has since written four plays of his own, and he has translated and adapted works by Calderon, Lope de Vega, and William Faulkner —his version of Requiem for a Nun ran for three hundred performances in Paris. Camus usually directs his own plays and adaptations — he greatly enjoys the camaraderie with actors at rehearsal — and when one of the performers in Requiem had an accident, Camus stepped into the part himself. All of his plays have been performed in Paris; but only one of them, Caligula, has proved effective on the stage. Critics have complained that Camus’s theater is “too intelligent” and that it sacrifices showmanship to content.

Another enduring legacy of his youth is Camus’s enthusiasm for football (soccer), which he played for many years. He still goes regularly to soccer matches on Sundays, and he believes that the code of good sportsmanship is a fine teacher of decency. “It was on the playing fields,” he once said, “that I learned my only lessons in moral ethics.”

While he was at the University of Algiers, Camus had a serious attack of tuberculosis. He completed his studies, however, and obtained a master’s degree with a thesis relating Hellenism and Christianity. His first book was the fruit of travels, hobo style, to Italy, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. It was quickly followed by Noces, essays about the Mediterranean world whose themes were referred to earlier. At the outbreak of war Camus was engaged in crusading journalism in Algiers as a supporter of the rights of the Arabs. He went to Paris in 1940 and later founded the underground paper, Combat, which became one of the leading voices of the Resistance. Meanwhile, in 1942, Gallimard had published in Paris the two books that were to establish Camus’s reputation: The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. These works — together with Caligula and another play, The Misunderstanding (written, respectively, in 1938 and 1942) — represent a phase in Camus’s career which might be summed up as the exploration of the Absurd.

CAMUS’S analysis of the Absurd begins by noting that normally man finds it easy enough to accept his daily routine, but one day there arises a “why,” a questioning of whether life has any meaning. One finds oneself “in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights . . . an alien, a stranger.” Nature, even other men appear hostile and inhuman. Ordinary gestures, the soundless movements of a man’s lips behind the glass door of a telephone booth, assume the aspect of a “meaningless pantomime.” Finally, one is filled with a horrifying awareness of death as a mathematical certainty. The source of this malaise is that, in an irrational world, reason cannot satisfy man’s “wild longing” for meaning — “and beyond reason there is nothing.” The Absurd, then, is the result of thinking about the human condition. The impossibility of reconciling death and the desire for eternity, misery and the desire for happiness, separateness and the desire for union, the mystery of all existence and the desire for clarity — all this is the Absurd.

Malraux, Sartre, and others had developed this line of thought before Camus. His originality lay firstly in finding the world’s absurdity not a cause for despair but, paradoxically, a spur to happiness. In his eyes, mortality and senseless suffering — perhaps his most haunting preoccupation — actually enhance the value of life: they invite men to live it more intensely.

Camus also refused to draw the nihilist conclusion that because the world is irrational, the irrational is the only logical principle of conduct. This is the theme of Caligula. Discovering that the world is absurd, the emperor imagines that he can somehow transform it for the better by becoming the prophet of absolute absurdity. He inaugurates a capricious reign of terror and topsy-turvy morality, rewarding crime and debauchery and punishing innocence. What gives the play its disturbing tension is that Caligula, in his dreadful way, is awakening his subjects to a truth: life is absurd; and at this stage in his career, Camus can invoke no values by which Caligula could be condemned. Nevertheless Caligula is destroyed by a revolt, prompted by the instinctive recognition that his conduct has exceeded life’s absurdity.

Both in Caligula and in The Misunderstanding — the most somber of Camus’s works — there is a spirit of revolt against the hostile aspects of the world’s absurdity. In The Stranger, the revolt is against man-made standards of absolute morality. This short novel is written in a style which owes something to the early Hemingway. Each spare sentence forms a self-enclosed whole, with the result that life is registered as a succession of perceptions with no meaning beyond themselves. Camus’s goal is to reproduce a feeling of the Absurd: nothing is explained.

Meursault, the hero of The Stranger, a clerk in an Algiers office, is a man completely indifferent to everything except his immediate physical sensations: he has the Absurd in his blood but no awareness of it. The death of his mother, the offer of a promotion, the love of the girl he is sleeping with — they have “no importance” to him. In due course he drifts into a situation in which, dazed by the blazing sun, he kills an Arab who seems to be menacing him with a knife. His lawyer assures him of an acquittal if he pleads self-defense and expresses the right sentiments. But Meursault is incapable of pretending to emotions he does not possess. His complete honesty at his trial makes him appear a monster, and he is sentenced to be guillotined. The imminence of death makes him conscious of what he had always taken for granted: life is meaningless. “Emptied of hope,” he realizes that he had been happy and “was happy still.” Meursault is an improbable, at times an exasperating character, but the ironic tenderness with which Camus has portrayed him subtly wins our sympathy.

A masterly piece of storytelling — every detail has impact — The Stranger satirizes the concept that human conduct can be judged by fixed moral standards. It is not the killing of the Arab which dooms Meursault. He is found guilty because he is a stranger to the ethical absolutes of the court, and by this token all men are guilty.

The Myth of Sisyphus likens man’s fate to that of the myth’s hero, doomed forever to push a heavy stone up a hillside with the certainty that it will roll down again. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Camus states at the outset, “and that is suicide.” He finds the answer to it in the attitude of Sisyphus, who confronts his condition without illusions yet without despair. Sisyphus surmounts the Absurd through a rebellious defiance which brings with it passion and freedom. The essay ends: “The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

This treatment of the myth is Camus’s rough draft of a doctrine of metaphysical revolt, rooted in the spirit of the average man who, always and everywhere, has braced himself against his fate with injunctions not to “take it lying down.” In his preface to the American edition of Sisyphus, which did not appear until 1955, Camus observes: “Written ... in 1940, amid the French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism, it is possible to proceed beyond nihilism.” Despair, to Camus, has always been the ultimate sin, and he argues this point stirringly in Lettres a un Ami Allemand. These letters to an imaginary German friend — originally published in the underground press — develop the viewpoint, nourished by Camus’s experiences in the Resistance, that by revolting against oppression men affirm that they have a value in common, thereby establishing human “solidarity.” This outlook is dramatized in The Plague.

CAMUS’S major novel to date, The Plague, describes an epidemic that ravages Oran. It is an allegory of man’s fate — “plague ... is just life” — and each character represents a way of responding to the problem of misery and evil. The physician Rieux (who is not disclosed to be the narrator until the end — Camus delights in a touch of mystification) devotes all of his energies to fighting the epidemic, as does Tarrou, a former revolutionary whose insights anticipate the criticism of violence in The Rebel. Other characters illustrate how bourgeois complacency, or cowardice, or greed aid and abet scourges. And the Christian acceptance of suffering as the wages of sin is fiercely repudiated in a scene in which, after seeing an infant tortured to death by the plague, Rieux rails against Father Paneloux for preaching resignation to God’s will.

Rieux acknowledges, however, that he and the priest are on the same side, the side of “victims.” Camus has said that what concerns him most is, “How should one behave?” and The Plague gives what thereafter remains his answer: we cannot be sure of doing good, but we can exercise the utmost vigilance not to do anything which increases suffering, and this involves tolerance for everything except suffering itself. The temper of The Plague is resolutely anti-heroic. Rieux and Tarrou, in exposing themselves to exceptional risks, are “merely logical” — they have understood that resisting scourges is “everybody’s business.” The man referred to at one point as the story’s hero is a minor municipal clerk who keeps the statistics of the epidemic and spends his spare time endlessly writing the first sentence of a novel. Through this slightly daft character — his name, Grand, is both ironic and suggestive, as are others in Camus’s work — Camus expresses his affection and regard for the ordinary man whose eccentricities are harmless and whose devotion to his job makes him, in effect, a mute, inglorious Sisyphus.

The Plague is a bit too obviously a bearer of messages to be an artistic masterpiece, but it is certainly one of the half-dozen most important and finest novels published since World War II. The writing is crisp and vivid, the narrative tone quietly absorbing: a singular fusion of curiosity, emotion, and intense irony. And the novel’s moral urgencies are communicated with an eloquent sobriety.

A play based on The Plague, Etat de Siege, and another play, Les Justes, preceded The Rebel, Camus’s fullest statement of the doctrine of metaphysical revolt and of its application to politics and art. He had already progressed from the lonely and somewhat sterile revolt of Sisyphus to the affirmation that through revolt (against tyranny or simply fate) men lose their spiritual isolation and achieve that sense of unity and meaning which the world’s absurdity denies them. He concludes, now, that man is by nature a rebellious animal — “the only creature who refuses to be what he is” — and that metaphysical revolt is synonymous with freedom and creativity. The supreme example of the metaphysical rebel is the creative artist; he is continually engaged in confronting the Absurd — the world is his raw material — and in rebelling against it through the imposition of form.

The political analysis sets out to inquire why a century of revolt has produced tyrannies and rationalizations of tyranny more vicious than the original evils it refused to accept. Camus’s explanation is that Hegel and other apostles of absolutist thought transformed the spirit of revolt into its opposite, revolution. Revolt is a protest against unlimited power, and its moderate goal is to diminish the sum total of suffering. Revolution seeks unlimited power, and it claims absolute freedom to inflict suffering in order to gain its immoderate ends. The spirit of revolt requires that every man retain the freedom to revolt; and under no circumstances will it legitimize violence. If the rebel is forced to kill, even a tyrant, he must be willing to lose his own life in order to demonstrate that murder is a limit which can only be transgressed once.

The conviction that reverberates throughout the essay is that men cannot live by abstractions conned out of history: ideology corrupts, and absolutist ideologies corrupt absolutely. Not history, which makes men drunk with dreams, but nature, which sobers them with reminders of their limits, is the proper study of mankind. Today’s political ills are the logical result of a despairing Utopianism, which finds life so horribly wrong that it shrinks from no horror to change it and is blind to the truth that nothing can transform the world into the earthly paradise. Because it is so profoundly opposed in spirit to resignation, so richly infused with the spirit of revolt, The Rebel is a singularly stirring statement of a philosophy of moderation.

Shortly after the publication of The Rebel, there occurred a break between Camus and Sartre, who had become close friends during the war. While insisting that he differed from the Communists, Sartre had for some time been taking a parallel stand to them on most issues, including the criminality of criticizing Russia. His journal, Les Temps Modernes, published an attack on The Rebel by one of Sartre’s disciples, and Sartre later seconded it himself. Camus, they said, was an escapist who would not risk sullying his purity by contact with history; and they accused him of giving aid and comfort to the reactionaries. Camus rejoined that the Existentialists claimed to exalt liberty, and “today they exalt servitude . . . [saying] it is the same thing, which is a lie.” Privately he added: “To me they have always been like the planet Mars.” The break between Camus and Sartre was bitter and violent, and now they never meet.

The nature of Camus’s enemies is a measure of his decency: he is as angrily attacked by the former Vichyites and other reactionaries as he is by the totalitarian Left and its followers. Responsible critics, however, have noted that it is easy to find contradictions and troublesome omissions in his thought; for example, the American Revolution, which did not give birth to tyranny, is not referred to in his discussion of revolutions, and it is difficult to square his refusal to sanction killing under any circumstances with his statement, “I am not a pacifist.” Another objection is that his philosophy of political action might serve as a charter for the International Red Cross, but has little application to the political arena, which seldom presents a clear-cut choice between adding to or diminishing suffering. Camus could justly meet the first criticism by pointing out that he has never claimed to be a systematic thinker; and the second by arguing (as indeed he did in The Plague) that, in the present state of world affairs, there is a side which consists in not taking sides.

NINE years elapsed between The Plague and Camus’s next novel, The Fall (1956), which readers have found the most ambiguous of his books. The only work by Camus with a northern setting (Amsterdam), it is the confession of a Parisian lawyer, brilliantly unfolded as a philosophical suspense story. The narrator has resolved a spiritual crisis by becoming what he calls a “judgepenitent.” He has regained his sense of superiority, and is able to indulge his need to dominate others, by going around confessing that he is the lowest of the low, thereby provoking his listeners into judging and abasing themselves. Camus has described the narrator—Jean-Baptiste Clamence (John the Baptist, vox damans) — as “the hero of today,” and his summation of the novel is as follows: “Europeans are no longer believers; they are agnostics or atheists. (I have nothing against that. I am more or less a pagan.) But they have retained their sense of sin. They can’t unburden themselves by going to confession. So they feel the need to act. They start passing severe judgments, putting people in concentration camps, killing. My ‘hero’ is the exact illustration of a guilty conscience. He has the European resignation to a feeling of sin.” The “fall” referred to in the title is failure to rebel, and it makes Clamence a disseminator of corruption. Since Camus himself has warned against putting too simple an interpretation on the novel, it seems probable that, for all his ironic detachment, Camus is expressing “nostalgias” and “temptations” he has known.

His latest book, Exile and the Kingdom, is a collection of six stories strikingly varied in style and subject, but with a common theme: all are concerned in some way with man’s sense of exile and yearning for unity. “The Renegade” is an allegory of the power-worship which makes men converts to philosophies of nihilism. It is cast in the form of a horrifying monologue by a dying man, a power-obsessed missionary who has set out to convert fearsome barbarians and who, reveling in the tortures inflicted on him in the name of their idol, becomes its abject slave. “The Guest” reflects Camus’s feelings about the Algerian tragedy. A schoolmaster who represents the civilizing and humane aspects of the French administration — he loves the country and feels he belongs to it — tries unsuccessfully to save an Arab murderer from being handed over to the police. In the climate of fanaticism, his effort is tragically misunderstood, and the Arab’s associates announce their intention to wreak vengeance. “Artist at Work” amusingly charts the progressive demoralization of a dedicated painter, assailed by the intrusions and distractions that attend success. Its point is that it is through solitude that the artist achieves solidarity with his time: a dig at Sartre’s insistence on “commitment.”

Camus lives in Paris now, in an apartment near the Luxembourg gardens. He does his writing in the morning — always either standing at an upright desk or lying down — and in the afternoons works at Gallimard as editor of a series of books introducing young writers. He is married (to a pianist) and has twins, a boy and a girl. Like Faulkner, he resents intrusions into his privacy, and he refuses to be lionized or to play the social role expected of a leading intellectual in Paris. Paris is a bad place for an artist, he says, because it is a stage: it forces him to assume a posture. Though inaccessible to celebrity hunters and busybodies, Camus welcomes visitors from Algeria and keeps his door open to students.

A man of medium height, slim, dark, and muscular, he has an intense but controlled vitality which gives him an outward appearance of calm. He is capable of sitting silent in a group for long stretches or of seducing a room full of people with his gaiety and charm. His trench coat, habitual slouch, and cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth give him a slightly proletarian air, which accords with his sympathies.

The event that has most moved Camus since the war was the Hungarian Revolt — “It blew to bits the biggest lie of the century” — and it will serve as the concluding point of the novel on which he has started work: an account of a man’s life, tentatively entitled The First Man. It warrants the highest expectations. Still relatively young, Camus already has to his credit fine achievements as an artist, and as a thinker he has traveled far. He wrestled long and hard with nihilism, and cannot be accused of facile optimism when he says, “There is more to admire than to despise in men”; when he talks of the prospects of a European “renaissance”; when he declares, “In the midst of winter, I discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Albert Camus has found his real voice.