Albert Camus

Elements of a Life

Robert D. Zaretsky

• Editorial: Cornell University Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801462375
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Biographies

"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 of 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 more complicated and critical."—Robert Zaretsky

On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was dining in a small restaurant on Paris's Left Bank when a waiter approached him with news: the radio had just announced that Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus insisted that a mistake had been made and that others were far more deserving of the honor than he. Yet Camus was already recognized around the world as the voice of a generation—a status he had achieved with dizzying speed. He published his first novel, The Stranger, in 1942 and emerged from the war as the spokesperson for the Resistance and, although he consistently rejected the label, for existentialism. Subsequent works of fiction (including the novels The Plague and The Fall ), philosophy (notably, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel ), drama, and social criticism secured his literary and intellectual reputation. And then on January 4, 1960, three years after accepting the Nobel Prize, he was killed in a car accident.

In a book distinguished by clarity and passion, Robert Zaretsky considers why Albert Camus mattered in his own lifetime and continues to matter today, focusing on key moments that shaped Camus's development as a writer, a public intellectual, and a man. 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 in 1945 to sign a petition to commute the death sentence of collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach; his famous quarrel with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 over the nature of communism; and his silence about the war in Algeria in 1956. Both engaged and engaging, Albert Camus: Elements of a Life is a searching companion to a profoundly moral and lucid writer whose works provide a guide for those perplexed by the absurdity of the human condition and the world's resistance to meaning.

FROM COUNTY MAYO TO KABYLIA

Yes, there is beauty and there are the humiliated.
Whatever the difficulties the enterprise may present, I would
like never to be unfaithful either to one or the other.

Rarely had turn-of-the-century Ireland seemed so familiar as it did in interwar Algeria. The comic masterpiece by the early twentieth-century Irish playwright John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, had traveled to the edge of the Eastern world in 1939. An amateur theatrical group, the Théâtre de l’Equipe, was performing the play in the jewel of the French colonial crown, Algiers. But in unexpected ways, Synge’s and the audience’s worlds were similar. Both were impoverished margins of empires: French Algeria and British Ireland. Both were home to indigenous peoples, Irish Catholics and Arab Muslims, respectively, who were increasingly dissatisfied with foreign rule. Both were blasted by famine—resulting, in part, from imperial misrule—that forced great waves of immigrants to foreign shores. Both harbored ruling classes, the Anglo-Irish gentry and pied noir settlers, who were as much exiles in their adopted lands as they were in the mother countries. And both communities nurtured circles of artists who fought to express the experience of the colonized through the medium of the colonizer’s language.

Albert Camus, the actor playing the role of Christy Mahon appreciated these parallels. In fact, Camus and Christy were kindred spirits. Like Camus’s father, Lucien Camus, who had died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914, a year after the birth of his son, Old Mahon, Christy’s father, had also been killed—or so his son thought. Christy had bashed him on the skull with a shovel, to discover days later that he had only knocked him unconscious. Both Camus and Christy had tongues that soared in flight, sweeping along women in their wake. (One can only imagine the reaction of one of the members of the amateur cast, Francine Faure, who would soon become Camus’s second wife—and the victim of his serial infidelities—when Pegeen tells Christy that “any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence or talk at all.”) Both men even shared the same heritage: Christy’s background (or so he proclaimed) was in equal parts French and Spanish; the family of Camus’s father hailed from Bordeaux (and not from Alsace, as Camus had always believed), and his mother’s family came from Majorca.

And both men were still unformed. At the play’s high point, when Christy learns Pegeen loves him, he wonders: “Is it me?” During the same period, though for different reasons, Camus also asked: “Is it me?” As he wrote in his journal: “I am uncertain of the future but have achieved total liberty toward my past and toward myself. Here lies my poverty, and my sole wealth. It is as if I were beginning the game all over again, neither happier nor unhappier than before. But aware now of where my strength lies, scornful of my own vanities, and filled with that lucid fervor which impels me forward toward my fate.”1

° ° °

In 1907, the opening of Synge’s comedy in Dublin sparked a riot. Rather than the play’s depiction of rural poverty, popular violence, or rough justice, the audience, according to some observers, had been shocked by an allusion to local women in their undergarments. While there were no riots at the Salle Pierre Bordes in 1939, poverty, violence, and justice were very much on the minds of the actors and audience that night. This was particularly true for Camus, the leader of the Théâtre de l’Equipe, the theatrical troupe responsible for the production. As he had already told one of his high school teachers, “I have such a strong desire to see reduced all the misfortune and bitterness which poisons humankind.”2 Camus echoed this sentiment in his journal: “I must bear witness,” he insisted. “When I see things clearly, I have only one thing to say. It is in this life of poverty, among these vain or humble people, that I have most certainly touched what I feel is the true meaning of life.”3

Between 1936 and 1939 both the Théâtre de l’Equipe and its predecessor, the Théâtre du Travail, were known as la bande à Camus. Veteran of a school production of Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers, Camus must have enjoyed the tag.4 If it was a coincidence that he played the role of d’Artagnan, it was a happy one. Like the Gascon (and his compatriot, Cyrano de Bergerac), Camus was a young man from a region famed for its lyricism and courage. And as youthful and untried as d’Artagnan, Camus quickly imposed himself on the others as leader. Dumas’s observation that it was “as if d’Artagnan had commanded others his entire life” applied equally to Camus.

No less important, d’Artagnan leads his fellow musketeers in their celebrated refrain: one for all and all for one. Since become a cliché, it nevertheless expressed more than simple romantic verve when exclaimed by friends united in a common enterprise. That refrain also underscores a dilemma at the heart of communitarian thought: How to reconcile individual initiative and group cohesion? Both theater groups insisted on equal participation between the actors and audience, just as they insisted on full parity among themselves. Yet, despite these official claims, Camus was clearly first among equals. He had founded both groups, influenced the choice of plays, directed the productions, and wrote his own works or adapted those of others. Yet this caused little dissension or resentment. One for all, all for one: these theatrical ventures sprang from Camus’s conviction that theater must project the “collective realization of one man’s thought.”5

They also sprang from the idealism then sweeping through the French Left. As fascism threw its shadow across the continent during the 1930s, movements on the Left began to stir. In France, the formation of the Popular Front in 1934—the fragile alliance of Socialists, Communists, and Radicals—was spurred by a common fear of fascism at home. Though the Popular Front’s time in power was short-lived, the idealism it nurtured was at the heart of Camus’s theatrical work. It was a time when André Malraux’s early novel, L’âge du mépris (Days of Contempt), portraying a working-class community’s resistance to Nazism, was galvanizing French youth. The novel overwhelmed Camus. In fact, the young man was impressed enough to write to Malraux, asking for permission to adapt the story for the Théâtre du Travail. The older man, in turn, was impressed enough by the unknown writer’s gumption that he sent a one-word reply: “Play.” Camus was as overjoyed by the dramatic command as he was by the familiar tu form in which it was cast.

° ° °

“André Malraux” was perhaps André Malraux’s greatest dramatic creation: few figures in modern France were more gifted at representing themselves on the stage of history—or more driven to do so. By the time Camus entered university, he sympathized with this desire. When among friends, Camus reveled in playacting, miming scenes, declaiming speeches, mixing comedy and tragedy. (A bit like a North African Damon Runyon, he especially relished the patois and accents he heard in the streets and cafés of Algiers.) But as with his hero Malraux, the young pied noir often blurred the line between theater and reality, stage and street. Even when alone, he tended to see his life in theatrical terms. Commentators have, in fact, suggested that Camus turned himself into a character and director in his letters and writings: acting for Camus was “a fundamental form of existence.”6 How else to conceive a man who, in his journal, expressed the desire to be “the perfect actor”?

At first glance, this is a common human trait: we all try to make sense of ourselves by staging our lives. Many of us are old hands at such cognitive two-steps, when we stand outside ourselves, assuming the roles of director and commentator. For Camus, this habit became more frequent as he grew more famous. “I’m at my best at funerals. Really, I shine,” he wrote with muted sarcasm in the early 1950s. “I walk slowly through iron-festooned suburbs, down wide lanes bordered by cement trees leading to holes dug in the cold ground. There, under a dimly red sky, I look on as stout fellows lower my friend six feet under. A clay-covered hand passes me a flower: I never miss when I toss it into the grave. I show the proper piety and emotions, my head tilted just right. To everyone’s admiration, I find the right words. But I take no credit: I am waiting.”7

Yet Camus mined this tendency in remarkable ways. His notebooks bristle with reflections, often contradictory, on authenticity and acting. On the one hand, he urged himself to be “deep through insincerity” and admired Eugène Delacroix’s remark that the “illusions I create with my painting are the most real thing in me. The rest is shifting sand.” Soon after he turned thirty, Camus declared that at this age a “man ought to have control over himself . . . be what he is . . . settle in to being natural, but with a mask.”8

On the other hand, Camus blurred the line between sincerity and insincerity, mask and self. In a particularly complex passage he sketched in 1937 for A Happy Death, the character Patrice insists that “if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. . . . I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most exciting and serious there is.” He adds after a pause: “And I want to be this perfect actor.”9

Is the mask our natural self? Or instead, is there a natural self still intact behind the mask? Camus’s thoughts reflect the concerns expressed two centuries before by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So similar to the Swiss thinker in other respects, Camus here turns Rousseau on his head. In his Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau famously damns theater: it is a surrogate for existence, a simulacrum of community, a sink of iniquity and falsehood. Acting, for Rousseau, was becoming the “fundamental form of existence” in the modern age—and this was precisely the problem. “When we do not live in ourselves but in others, it is their judgments which guide everything.” The problem with theater, Rousseau declared, was that it gets in the way of life, coming between man and his world, between man and his own self. Theater is thus little more than modern life writ small. Instead of cultivating the virtues of citizenship and family, tragedians stage these virtues, replacing reality with appearance and lived experience with vicarious experience.

At first glance, Camus takes this “problem” and turns it into a solution: since we are condemned to act, let us act well and let us act together. While Rousseau believed it was only in solitude that he could regain his own self, Camus, though he had an aptitude for solitude, was convinced it was only in the company of others that he could find or shape his self. “Seek contacts. All contacts,” he exhorted himself in 1936. “If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love?”10

But Camus also wished that he could be the perfect actor. Did he mean so perfect that he would become his role? Or so perfect that his real self, standing to one side, could only admire the performance? It may well be that, for Camus, the “actor is the man who incarnates unreality and hence he is the only true man.”11 Not that Camus ever associated truth with unreality: he was too rooted in the world’s profane truths and beauties to ever believe that. But if by “unreality” we understand only “art” or “artifice,” we get closer to the truth.

Camus does not say if he had ever read Rousseau’s critique of theater. If he had, however, he would have sided not with Rousseau but with Rousseau’s friend become nemesis, Denis Diderot. In his Confessions, Rousseau recounts a visit he made to the philosophe at the prison of Vincennes. On entering Diderot’s cell, Rousseau threw himself into his friend’s arms “with my face pressed against his, speechless except for the tears and sobs that spoke on my behalf, for I was choked with tenderness and joy.” When they finally disengaged, Diderot triumphantly turned to another visitor: “Observe, Monsieur, how my friends love me!” Rather than wring his hands over issues of sincerity, Diderot applauded the theatrics of goodness, either at the Comédie Française or in a prison cell. It was good to stage the good.

Camus, like Diderot, believed in the moral potential of theater. This conviction helps explain the weakness of his theatrical pieces, which are often mired in a kind of ethical didacticism. But this conviction also reveals Camus’s great desire to connect with others: to enter into a dialogue not just with his fellow actors but also with his audience. As Camus often repeated (but did not always practice in his own theatrical pieces), on “stage as in reality, the monologue precedes death.”12 Far from corrupting and enslaving us, Camus believed, theater could make us better and freer.

Becoming better and freer, however, depended on the audience. In its manifesto, the Théâtre du Travail declared it was “sometimes advantageous to art to descend from its ivory tower.” To this end, the group decided, gate proceeds would go to a fund for unemployed workers in Algiers. Yet benighted crowds hungry for culture were not necessarily waiting at the tower’s front door. Camus and his friends, determined to bring art to the people, discovered that the people were, by and large, much less determined to come to the art. While hundreds turned out for the performance, few of them were European or Arab workers. Instead, the spectators reflected the social character of Camus’s gang: young, European, and bourgeois. And yet the play’s impact on this small slice of the French Algerian community was immediate and important. As one spectator later recalled, they “saw unfold on stage our own struggle against the degrading mindset of fascism.”13

This spirit of...