Reader's Choice

BY OSCAR HANDLIN

The second volume of ALBERT CAMUS’S NOTEBOOKS (Knopf, $5.00) covers the years between 1942 and 1951, the period in which he was at his most productive. The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, and Caligula, the works which won him the Nobel Prize in 1957, were in the forefront of his attention while he jotted down the intimate thoughts here presented in an excellent translation by Justin O’Brien. The book offers luminous glimpses of a sensitive mind grappling with the problems of a world at war.

“The Ancient Philosophers,” Camus reflected enviously, “meditated more than they read.” That was why they clung so closely to the concrete, while their successors produced merely commentaries. The notebooks were Camus’s instruments of meditation. Here, in all candor, he examined himself, his ideas, and his perceptions of the universe about him.

The passages appear as he set them down — sometimes a stark sentence or a paragraph, occasionally an idea spelled out over several pages. Camus plays with words or reacts to literature; he argues points of philosophy or makes notes on the historical research preparatory to his writing. Yet there is a coherence to his observations which reflects an orderly, disciplined mind.

Camus is introspective about his own work. At first he smarts under hostile criticism. “Three years to make a book, five lines to ridicule it, and the quotation is wrong.” Later he is dismayed by excessive praise. “I withdrew from the world not because I had enemies, but because I had friends. Not because they did me an ill turn as is customary, but because they thought me better than I am. It was a lie I could not endure.” He is not a genius, he repeatedly tells himself, but “an average man with an exigency.” Again and again he reviews the course of his work, attempts to sum up his achievement, to map out what remains to be done.

His anxieties are deeply personal. As he passes his thirtieth birthday he becomes conscious of his age and mortality. The tubercular disease from which he suffers “is a convent which has its rules, its austerity, its silences, and its inspirations.” He suspects that he has lived too long and sometimes contemplates suicide.

Often he feels isolated, not only in the sense that war has cut him off from his family but also in his detachment from the experience of other men, for he has neither borne arms in battle nor been deported in the occupation. He cannot even play an active political role because he is “incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.” He must therefore be “merely a witness” — that is, “merely an artist” who creates myths to fit his passion and his anguish.

From the detached perspective of the witness, Camus views a world, the lack of clarity of which makes art possible. His heated imagination rehearses scenes, some of which will be discarded, while others will pass, intact or transformed, into his novels. His concern revolves about the relationship of the individual to others. When he thinks about justice, for instance, Camus tries to put himself in the place of the criminal in order to visualize the process of arrest. He imagines a fugitive who regularly frequents smart public places, creating bonds of solidarity with the people there as a defense. Again and again Camus returns to the theme of separation and unity, of rebellion and social obligation, for this subject is also the core of his fiction. He is probing, in his notebooks as in his novels, for the meaning of liberty, seeking to understand man’s desire to stand unshackled, yet embraced in some larger unity.

All the while, Camus observes not abstractions, but the concrete world about him. The workingmen of Sainte Etienne, the landscape of Algeria evoke the moving reflections of an artist who refuses to be a pessimist and confronts life with a wry sense of involvement in it.

Two quite different volumes by regular contributors to the New Yorker illustrate the variety of its reportorial styles. In PARIS JOURNAL (Atheneum, $7.95), William Shawn has assembled a goodly selection of the reports Janet Flanner wrote for the New Yorker under the name of Genet between 1944 and 1965. The result is a useful, although limited record. Miss Flanner is knowledgeable and writes with a sharp and occasionally witty pen. Her cornments range over political, literary, dramatic, and artistic affairs and touch upon all the well-known personalities of the country.

Read in sequence these pieces are less satisfying than when they stood alone. The same style is not altogether appropriate to the France still suffering in 1944 from the shock of occupation and to the nation of 1965 intoxicated by prosperity and Gaullist grandeur. And there are gaps in Janet Flanner’s comprehension. She is aware of Camus’s existence, of course; he is “fashionable.” But she cannot understand why Caligula is popular or what Parisians see in his rather disagreeable novels. The world in which she moves is entirely different from his, less real in many respects.

THE BIT BETWEEN MY TEETH (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $7.50) brings together a collection of EDMUND WILSON’S perceptive essays. Wilson’s talents are impressive; to sensitive literary judgment he joins a sound knowledge of the historical and social context of the works with which he deals. He has enjoyed the personal acquaintanceship of the important figures of American culture in the past forty years. And somewhat unexpectedly he has a flair for scholarship that enables him to pick apart an index or check a reference with deadly accuracy. Unfettered by deadlines, Wilson has been able to treat whatever subjects he chooses and has enjoyed enough space to probe them as fully as necessary. Among the memorable essays in this collection are the series on de Sade, on Scott Fitzgerald, and on Theodore Roosevelt.

If Wilson’s criticism is sometimes idiosyncratic, it is because he stands as a somewhat lonely and isolated figure in American cultural life. Only in the 1920s could he be considered the member of a group. He has long since freed himself of the assumptions of that earlier post-war generation. But he has developed no coherent alternative framework within which to fit his observations. He conceives it his function to bring into one system the literatures of several cultures, and there is no lack of breadth to his reading. The lack is of focus. As a result, we get from his pages flashes of brilliant commentary but not such a whole view of man and the world as illuminates the fragmentary passages of the Camus Notebooks.

MISSION WITH LEMAY (Doubleday, $7.95), the autobiography of General CURTIS E. LEMAY, written in collaboration with MacKinlay Kan tor, takes its subject from boyhood in a working-class family to his resignation as Air Force chief of staff. This collaboration of novelist and general has produced an exceptionally well written account of the career of a flying man. There are nostalgic reminiscences of the primitive beginnings of the 1920 and 1930s. There is the exciting story of the great strikes at Regensburg and Tokyo during the Second World War. And there is a clear analysis of the evolution of the Strategic Air Command.

The book also has a polemical quality, particularly in its very skillful opening chapter, which General LeMay uses to carry on his losing battle with Secretary of Defense McNamara over the future of the manned bomber. In the argument which came to a head over the RS-70, the Air Force had the support of powerful elements in Congress but met the head-on opposition of the Executive Department. General LeMay does not dispute the ultimate need for civilian over military control, but he believes that a wise Secretary should exercise his judgment in political and economic fields but should yield to professional judgment in technical matters.

General LeMay’s views must have been somewhat different in 1937 when the professional experts in the Navy insisted that a battleship was invulnerable to air attack. He makes the most of the amusing and instructive story of the mock “bombing” on the battleship Utah that year; surely a strong, decisive Secretary of Defense, willing to go beyond the advice of his staff, might have put the United States in a better posture of defense than it found itself at Pearl Harbor.

The truth is that the responsible executive can make no such distinction between technical and political issues as LeMay desires. Every bureaucracy — the Air Force in 1963 no less than the Navy in 1937 — protects its interests by framing all questions as if the issues were technical, and the civilian head of a department must go beyond their views to make his own decisions. Our history from the Civil War onward reveals that we have gained much more than we have lost by the assertion of strong leadership.

The other failings of bureaucracy arc exposed in CLARK R. MOLLENHOPF’S indignant DESPOILERS OF DEMOCRACY (Doubleday, $5.95). The Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington correspondent for the Cowles publications has diligently searched the records of congressional investigating committees and assembled a depressing roster of misdeeds in government during the past decade. Some, like the stockpiling scandals, go back to the Eisenhower era; others, like the affairs of Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker, fall within the subsequent Democratic Administrations.

Mollenhoff’s indignation is justified except in the Otepka Case, in which he underestimates the havoc the old security system caused in the Foreign Service. But he writes as if he were a prosecuting attorney and fails to give a rounded picture of the problem of effective and honest governmental administration. Certainly a good part of the difficulty is bureaucratic; the responsible officials at the top do not learn until too late of misdeeds in the vast reaches of the empires under their control. Yet an open invitation to subordinates to babble to congressmen or to move outside the chain of command not only would be disastrous to morale but also would produce endless organizational confusion. As the scale of government action expands and grows more intricate, the difficulties will undoubtedly increase rather than diminish.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X (Grove Press, $7.50) is a moving and instructive account of a Negro whose involvement with the Black Muslim movement first gave meaning to, and then destroyed, his life. The text was prepared with the assistance of Alex Haley, who fashioned it into a coherent book.

The perspective is that of Malcolm X, who sees himself as the white man’s victim until he earns selfrespect as a follower of Elijah Muhamined. The causes of the break with the prophet and of Malcolm’s subsequent spiritual hegira are less clearly set forth.

Malcolm was not a product of the segregated South. His experience was Northern; he attended integrated schools and had frequent, indeed intimate, contact with whites. His bitterness, directed as much against middle-class Negroes as against whites, was a product not of separation but of the disorganization of his life. The death of his father contributed to his demoralization; but the chief factor in it was his inability to adjust to the conditions of existence of the modern city. Malcolm was a victim of the handicaps of race, but also of the burdens of the urban life of the past two decades.

THE CITY IS THE FRONTIER by CHARLES ABRAMS (Harper, $6.50) is the best survey we have of contemporary urban problems. The chairman of the department of urban planning at Columbia University writes with the authority of decades of experience. He has a clear and sophisticated understanding of the difficulties the United States now faces. And he writes convincingly. The result is a thorough analysis of the decline of the central city and the spread of suburbia, of the situation in housing, and of the racial upheaval of the past two decades. Abrams’ exposition of the effects of urban renewal is judicious and avoids exaggeration.

The conclusion is familiar but bears repetition. The city is in a state of crisis which subjects a large part of its population to intolerable strains. And few will object to the blueprint sketched for the future: better design, more open spaces, the salvage of the central business1 district, the preservation of the sense of neighborhood, and improvement of youth’s environment.

The rub comes in the vagueness about the means of attaining these desirable goals. The affluence of our times tempts Professor Abrams, as it does all of us, to think of federal funds as a cure-all; and certainly increased expenditures will help. But there is a long way between the appropriation by Congress and the desirable execution of a program. The experience of the past fifteen years has shown that it takes more than agreement upon objectives and spending to cope with these problems. Political considerations, bureaucratic ineffectiveness, and deficiencies in planning may frustrate the best of aspirations. Much of the quality of American life in the future will depend upon our ability to bridge the gap between good intentions and their implementation.