Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Albert Camus (Review of Albert Camus: A Life by Olivier Todd)

I would wager that, of all post-war French writers, the best known in Britain, the most widely read and the most cherished is Albert Camus. I use the word “cherished” advisedly because Camus is one of those writers who, as our reading matures, introduces us to the world of literature. Or, to put it another way, Camus is one of those writers who produced one of those books that marks a reader’s life indelibly. I refer of course to L’Etranger. It is like Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22, like Lucky Jim or Brideshead Revisited (and a handful of others) — one remembers vividly the actual reading of the book itself, the sense of unfolding revelation afforded, however modest, of doors being opened, the power of one writer’s imagination impinging irrevocably on your own.

In Camus’s case a reading of L’Etranger was invariably followed by The Myth of Sisyphus, then The Plague, The Fall and so on — the urge to consume the entire oeuvre was a vital part of this writer’s allure. And yet one knew very little about Camus himself, other than he was Algerian, liked soccer, had won the Nobel Prize and died young (he was forty-six) in a car crash.

Which was why the publication of Olivier Todd’s superb biography of the man was so welcome: clear-eyed, compendious, with full access to the Camus’s archive, it fulfilled every expectation and its publication in France last year was a cultural event. It is rare and gratifying to have an English “version” (more of that later) so swiftly.

Camus was born in 1913. Ten months after his birth his father was dead, a conscripted soldier, an early victim of the Battle of the Marne, a tragedy that condemned the surviving members of his family — a wife and two sons — to a life of near abject poverty. Camus, like James Joyce, never forgot the genuine privations of his early life and, also like Joyce, he saw his intellect as a source of escape. He was bright, ambitious and, one senses, remarkably sure of his destiny. As a young man in 1930s Algeria he joined the Communist party (and was expelled), plunged himself into the world of theatre — acting, producing, directing — married and divorced (his first wife was a morphine addict) but all the while nurtured dreams of becoming a writer.

Camus was also tubercular, gravely so, and his life from the age of seventeen was dogged with bouts of ill-health and the enervating pre-antibiotics treatments of his lesioned lungs. In Algeria, in the years before the start of the Second World War, the young Camus established a formidable reputation as a campaigning journalist, a left-wing intellectual with a fully developed social conscience and, it has to be noted, a compulsive womanizer. It was only the outbreak of war that took him to Paris (he was too unwell to be called up) where he began writing L’Etranger in 1940.

The novel was published in 1942, followed shortly after by the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus, remarkably, was only twenty-eight years old. By the time of the liberation of France he was already acclaimed in intellectual circles and his trenchant journalism in the resistance newspaper Combat added to his renown.

Indeed, Camus often thought that fame came too early to him: in the late 1940s he was an internationally bestselling author, his name (to his constant irritation) was for ever linked with Sartre as a founder of Existentialism and his life subsequently became that of the classic Left-Bank intello moving in all the right socio-cultural circles. He worked for his publishers, Gallimard, he travelled, he had many love affairs, he hobnobbed in the fashionable cafes and brasseries but he always remained, it is clear from Todd’s account, something of an outsider. This may simply have been a matter of temperament, or it may have been the ever-present proximity of death (the severity of Camus’s tuberculosis is one of the book’s key illuminations), or it may have been the fact that he was a pied-noir, an Algerian, never feeling truly at home in France.

In the event, he quarrelled bitterly with Sartre and after the start of the Algerian war in 1955 found himself even more isolated by his refusal both to support the FLN freedom fighters and to condemn France’s colonial oppression. Ironically, it was at this stage, in 1957 aged forty-four, that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and his elevation to the pantheon was assured.

And then he was killed, on 4 January 1960, in a car crash, being driven back to Paris from his new home in Provence and the legend, and the disputes about his greatness, or lack of it, began.

Todd’s biography is both remarkably thorough and candid, and will prove indispensable to all those interested in Camus’s life. However this English translation falls short on several counts. First it has been severely abridged: “some material not of sufficient interest to the British and American general reader has been omitted,” so runs the translator Benjamin Ivry’s introduction. This is disingenuous — only the economics of publishing could explain such significant cutting. Much has gone: notwithstanding the natural brevity of English, Todd’s 767 pages of French text somehow become 420 English ones. Furthermore, in Todd’s concluding chapter in the French edition he makes a profound and highly important comparison between Camus and George Orwell as exemplary figures of the heterodox left. This is mysteriously omitted in the English edition — but surely this would be “of sufficient interest” to the anglophone general reader? Further comparisons between the two texts throw up other anomalies. For example: a chapter entitled “Un regard myope” becomes in English “Algerian Grief.” The harmless adjective “foutu” (“done for” in my dictionary) is a coarse “fucked-up” in the English text (Ivry tends to inflame the mildest profanities). “Je n’ai plus un sou” is rendered as “I don’t have a dime” (what could be wrong with “I don’t have a sou”?). Certain infelicities of style draw attention to themselves: “His palling around deepened into friendships, as Albert became more choosy.” The French is: “Des copains deviennent des amis. Albert cloisonne.” Todd’s own style is punchy and terse and written in the present tense — which one would have thought would have favoured the English version, but here all present tenses have routinely been made past.

Still, despite these nagging worries and a sense of disquiet at being served up something indubitably boiled down, this biography remains completely fascinating for the portrait of Camus that emerges and, incidentally, for its depiction of the snake-pit of post-war French intellectual and political life. The debate over Camus’s status still rages across the Channel (interestingly, it is far more secure here) but Todd, I think, establishes the nature of Camus’s appeal and importance with great insight and skill. Its essence is contained in Camus’s own modestly couched ambition: “What interests me is knowing how we should behave, and more precisely, knowing how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason.” These are, in the end, interests we all possess, and answers we all seek. This is what provides the universal element in Camus’s work and this is what will make it endure.

1997