Soul in Despair

THE FALL (147 pp.)--Albert Camus--Knopf ($3.00).

In Adam's fall We sinned all.

--New England Primer

Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a middle-aged Parisian lawyer who would rather do good than make good. He specializes in hardship cases, preferably widows and orphans. He never charges the poor a fee. He even likes to go out of his way to lead a blind man across the street.

Yet Jean-Baptiste is damned. What is so wrong with him, anyway? Readers may have to brace themselves for the answer given by French Novelist Albert Camus (The Plague). It is not fashionable, like the Oedipus complex or alcoholism or a nagging mistress. Jean-Baptiste is under Adam's curse, original sin. Such a theme would be no novelty from Franc,ois Mauriac or Graham Greene, but it is surprising when it comes from an existentially-minded French intellectual. As a novelist, Camus dissipates his shock effect by telling his story in a long-winded flashback. As a thinker, he remains as provocative, and to many of his French fellow intellectuals as annoying, as an alarm clock going off in the middle of the night.

The Absence of Grace. When The Fall begins, Jean-Baptiste has long since abandoned Paris and the law for a stool in a sleazy Amsterdam bar. There he hangs like a gin-soaked albatross around the neck of a long-suffering listener, perhaps meant to be the reader himself. To this shadowy confidant, Jean-Baptiste bares his soul--or, rather, picks the scabs off it. The trouble with doing good, he reveals, is the monumental vanity of it. The moment comes when a man realizes that "he can't love without self-love."

Jean-Baptiste decides he would rather be wrong than self-righteous. He dabbles in sensuality ("A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers"). But this leads to remorse, especially when one girl whom he desires jumps into the river and he does nothing to save her life. Diabolical and cowardly in his own eyes, Jean-Baptiste becomes publicly penitent. But, "You see, it is not enough to accuse yourself in order to clear yourself."

Is suicide the answer? People "will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action." Is God the answer? He is "out of style." Is there a second chance? No, Adam used up man's only chance. In Camus' existentially-locked universe of absurdity and guilt without divine grace, no one ever releases the sinner from his cell. As The Fall ends, Jean-Baptiste apostrophizes the girl he allowed to drown: " 'O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!' A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose that we should be taken literally? We'd have to go through with it. Brr . . .! The water's so cold! But let's not worry! It's too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately!" Jean-Baptiste is content to be damned so long as the whole human race is damned with him.

Tending Towards God. Author Camus is a fascinating case study of a modern thinker caught in a dilemma that is not confined to France or to French intellectuals. He stubbornly clings to the conviction that man is the measure of all things--the sentimental tradition of the Enlightenment. But he is far too intelligent and sensitive to accept the Enlightenment's shallow optimism and Utopian illusions about the human condition. On the other hand, he cannot move in the opposite direction towards religion. He is frozen midway. He accepts the Christian insight into the nature of evil, but rejects the rest of Christian theology. Every line of his book argues the need for religion, but he cannot accept God, even though his notion of original sin seems to postulate the existence of God.

That is the harrowing dilemma that Camus sketched in essay form in The Myth of Sisyphus (TIME, Oct. 3, 1955) --the vision of a man in despair who can believe in damnation but not salvation. Yet in this novel there are clues of something else to come. The hero's name, Jean-Baptiste, is intriguing as a wordplay on John the Baptist, the herald of Christ's coming. The Fall is too obviously the novel of a man in mid-quest to be Camus' last word. Perhaps both book and author are best described by the late French Jesuit Pierre Rousselot, who once wrote: "The human soul has not found itself; it is looking for itself; and this kind of absence of itself from itself is the essential sign signifying the state of being on the way, tending towards God."

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