The Rebel

Paris-Presse told the news in one stark word so closely identified with Albert Camus in life: ABSURD. In Paris small crowds of his admirers gathered around newsstands, not quite knowing what they were waiting for. One by one the celebrated names of French literature poured out their stunned tributes. Author Camus, 46, France's (1957) Nobel prizewinner, had been killed in a speeding sports car. "A stupid death," cried one Academician bitterly, but somehow nothing could have seemed more in keeping with the vision Camus had had of his time.

He had come out of sun-baked Algeria --a strange and extreme land, he wrote later, that "gives the man it nourishes both his splendor and his misery." The son of a Spanish mother and a French farm laborer who was killed in the first battle of the Marne, Camus worked at everything from selling auto accessories to clerking at a prefecture de police to get his education. By the time he wrote his thesis at the University of Algiers, he had already had tuberculosis, had married and separated, joined the Communist Party and then quit in disgust. Before his death last week, more had been written about him than he had written himself. Above all his contemporaries, he was the authentic voice of France's war generation.

The Despair. It was in 1942, when all humanity "stood at the open door of Hell," that France first heard of him, in his bleak first novel, The Stranger, set in a death cell, and then in a collection of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus explained his doctrine of the absurd. Its first words are: "There is but one truly serious philosophical question, and that is suicide," and its conclusion is that in a world with no God, man's only hope is to keep the absurd alive, and thus suicide is unthinkable. Because Camus articulated despair so eloquently, a generation bred in depression, surrender and occupation chose him its leader in its quest for something to believe in.

The Promise. When France fell to the Nazis, Camus joined the Resistance in North Africa, eventually made his way to Paris. There, while working for his publisher, Gaston Gallimard, he secretly edited the Resistance newspaper Combat. On the day of liberation, Combat appeared with a Page One editorial. "Out of this dread childbirth," Camus had written, "a revolution is being born. The Paris that fights tonight intends to command tomorrow, not for power but for justice, not for politics but morality." For millions, that was the promise of the peace.

But the promise quickly tarnished. Camus' friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, preached his dreary mixture of Marxism and Existentialism; Camus continued to describe the absurd. It was for him a time of "solitary struggle," when all the forces of the old Resistance were falling apart. When Combat seemed in danger of being compromised, Camus quit his job. "He wanted politics with clean hands," explains a former colleague, and many took Camus as symbol of the "betrayed" liberation.

The Question. He paid his own symbolic tribute to the Resistance in his second novel, The Plague, but the book, as Camus noted, was also his most antiChristian. Its theme was man's common struggle to fight evil "without lifting our eyes towards the Heavens where God stays silent." As one character puts it, "Can one become a saint without God?" The question was to be asked in 17 different languages and Camus found himself famous.

France took a fond pride in its rising young star. Hatless, in rumpled trenchcoat, cigarette dangling, he became a familiar figure along the Boulevard St. Germain, and on his arm there always seemed to be a pretty woman. But life still remained a procession of causes. He resigned from UNESCO when Franco's Spain joined the U.N.; he campaigned for German workers killed by Communist police in East Berlin. Alone in his hotel room, standing at a chest-high desk, he wrote. In 1951 his fiercely anti-Marxist The Rebel burst upon Paris.

Horrified by the nihilism that came out of the 19th century and the tyranny of the 20th, Camus declared "the evil geniuses of contemporary Europe" to be Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. Communism was no better than Naziism, for "all executioners are of the same family." He refused religious and political absolutes. Justice, he said, "is both a concept and a warmth oi soul. Let us ensure that we adopt it in its human aspect without transforming it into the terrible abstract passion which has mutilated so many men."

The Heresy. Having examined suicide, in The Rebel he had turned to the problem of murder--the murder committed in the name of future Utopias. "End satisfies the means?" he demanded. "Is this possible? But what will justify the ends?" Sartre raged against him, and their quarrel reverberated through those intent Left Bank circles whose proud boast is that they dispute only about essentials. Sartre's onetime great and good friend, Simone de Beauvoir, cruelly lampooned Camus' life and loves in her novel The Mandarins.

"Every revolutionary," Camus declared, "ends up by being an oppressor or a heretic." Just how far his heresy would take him, he himself did not know. "If one could create a party of those who are not sure they are right," he said, "it would be mine." Yet, at last, the heavy weight of nihilism and Marxism seemed lifted. "It may be necessary to fight a lie in the name of a quarter-truth," said Camus. "That is our situation at present. The quarter-truth that Western Civilizations contain is called liberty. Without liberty it is possible to improve heavy industry, but not to increase justice or truth."

The Visitor. In 1957, for the light he had shed "on the problem posed in our day by the conscience of man," Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature--the youngest man except Kipling ever so honored. With the money, he and his wife bought a Provencal farmhouse near the village of Lourmarin. There, with their 14-year-old twins, they put their marriage together again. Camus' friend Michel Gallimard, the nephew of his publisher, stopped last week with his wife and daughter on his way from Cannes to Paris. The car he was driving was a sleek Facel Vega, and Gallimard asked if Camus would like a ride to Paris.

"It is wonderful to drive fast," said Camus gaily, "when one is not driving oneself." At 2 that afternoon, the car sped through the town of Villeneuve-la-Guyard, about 80 miles southeast of Paris. A few minutes later it lurched out of control, hurtled against one tree and smashed into another. When the police arrived, they found Gallimard fatally injured, his wife and daughter unconscious. In the back of the car, whose speedometer had stuck at 150 km. (94 m.p.h.), was the crushed and lifeless body of Albert Camus.

At week's end, under the cypress trees of the Lourmarin cemetery, the mayor of the village spoke a few words, and in prayerless silence the coffin of Albert Camus was lowered.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.