Camus: Normal Virtues in Abnormal Times

By Stefan Kanfer

On Jan. 4, 1960, on a road southeast of Paris, a car lurched out of control and crashed into a tree. The driver and two of his passengers were injured; the fourth was killed instantly. When news of the tragedy emerged, the only appropriate word was one that the dead man had made famous: absurd.

For more than two decades, Albert Camus had been the lyricist of the absurd, a condition, he wrote, "born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world." To fill that silence, he wrote essays and fiction that have become part of the century's testament. His climb from obscurity was rapid: the poor North African upbringing was obscured by the Parisian celebrity.

Book followed book, honor followed prize until, at 44, he was awarded the Nobel.

Even those who had never read Camus became familiar with the chain-smoking figure in a trench coat, fatefully evocative of Bogart and Yves Montand. Much was made of his celebrated statement that in a purposeless world the only vital question was one of suicide. His novels The Stranger and The Fall describe souls out of touch with a moral landscape; The Plague watches townspeople succumb to a literal and spiritual disease. It is small wonder that at his death Camus seemed the spokesman of despairing existentialism, a cinematic figure as doom-ridden as any of his characters.

The portrait endures like a retinal image after the lights are turned off, at once romantic and classical: the artist as stoic.

It lacks only one component--truth. As two newly reissued volumes show, Camus was not a mourner of the human condition but its celebrant. The two-volume Notebooks (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $3.95 each) follow the writer from 1935 to 1951 and neatly cleave the legend from the man. In the process they show why his formal works are as pertinent as the day they were written, a world ago.

The very first entry has an astonishingly religious tone for an unbeliever: "For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it really is: an infinite grace."

In the mid-'30s, he writes a note that might have been minted for the Me Decade: "The Cult of the Self presupposes either optimism or a dilettante's attitude toward life. Both nonsense. Do not select a life, but make the one you have stretch out."

An observation that antedates Woody Allen by a generation: "Not only is there no solution but there aren't even any problems."

Of course there were problems-philosophical, psychological and physical. Camus, afflicted by tuberculosis, struggled merely to survive. "Illness is a convent," he writes, "which has its rule, its austerity, its silences, and its inspirations."

Soon afterward, that convent was invaded by the chaos of Nazi occupation. The hero of the French underground says little of his hazardous wartime activities. After the fall of France, he takes time for a note of Proustian sensuality: "Every year, the young girls come into flower on the beaches. They have only one season. The following year, they are replaced by other flower-like faces which, the previous season, still belonged to little girls. For the man who looks at them, they are yearly waves whose weight and splendor break into foam over the yellow sand." The minutes stolen for reflection concern the values of action vs. creation: "I ought not to have written; if the world were clear, art would not exist."

But the postwar epoch was not clear and the artist continued to compose. His underground newspaper was called Combat. That might have served as the subtitle for all of Camus's work. He tried the Communist Party and found it guilty of hypocrisy. He refused to endorse extremist positions on either side of the Algerian struggle for independence. "I must condemn a terrorism which strikes blindly in the streets ..." he declared, "and which one day might strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice." The famous phrase caused Camus to be mocked for 20 years by leftist intellectuals who uncritically backed the Algerian revolutionaries. He broke with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre when the philosopher tried to suppress news of Stalin's gulag.

Given this pugilistic stance, this unwillingness to cut his conscience to fit the reigning Paris fashions, it is not surprising that Camus became a figure of global controversy. It was a difficult role to assume; he struggled with it until his death, aware that any political or artistic statement would be distorted. "One never says a quarter of what one knows," he confessed. "Otherwise all would collapse. How little one says, and they are already screaming." Even posthumously the man was not safe. In the '60s the New York Times listed him as one of seven heroes of the New Left, a pantheon figure alongside Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon. The assumption was clear: had Camus lived he would have joined the students on the barricades. But if the dead can be enlisted in any battalion, the facts cannot. To be commemorated properly, Camus ought to be seen not as a statue but as a man, as flawed as his fellows. His loyalty to France, for example, could blind his foresight. "America," he declared in 1952, "is the land of the atomic bomb." When an American critic, Lionel Abel, countered, "You'll have one here, too, as soon as France can afford it," Camus confidently replied, "Never."

He found "nothing less excusable than war and the appeal to national hatreds." But he added: "Once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible."

His essays are often contradictory or downright muddy: "Man, at bottom, is not entirely guilty, since he did not begin history; nor entirely innocent, since he continues it." Nor, despite lifelong claims and yearnings, was Camus a true philosopher, with an organized system of thought. But he is frequently something more valuable: a reliable witness. Observes Critic Wilfrid Sheed: "Like Thomas Aquinas, who 'saw' something just before his death that made all his writings seem like straw," men like Albert Camus "seem to have 'seen something' which makes a good deal, anyway, seem like straw . . . What they had seen was terrorism, and it made even literature seem comparatively trivial."

It is this quality that gives Camus a solar power in times of cant and moral squalor. Unlike his fellow anti-colonialists, Camus was never willing to issue a license to kill. Of rebel atrocities he writes, "The truth, alas, is that part of French opinion vaguely holds that the Arabs have in a way earned the right to slaughter and mutilate, while another part is willing to justify in a way all excesses. To justify himself, each relies on the other's crime. But that is a casuistry of blood, and it strikes me that an intellectual cannot become involved in it, unless he takes up arms himself.. ."

On the matter of vicarious violence, he speaks of the 1956 Hungarian uprising in terms that have a chilling contemporary application: "I am not one of those who long for people to take up arms again in an uprising doomed to be crushed under the eyes of an international society that will spare neither applause nor virtuous tears before returning to their slippers like football enthusiasts on Saturday evening after a big game. There are already too many dead in the stadium."

Camus's literary works have never gone out of print, but his message has often been muted or ignored. Until now. In America he is a part of the curriculum on almost every campus; even in France, where he was almost pathologically rejected by Sartre's followers, he is being rehabilitated. Says Historian Christian Jambet, 29, whose analysis of revolution, L'Ange, has become a modern classic:

"Camus was saying that those who demand liberty and who then kill are no longer worthy of being loved. It is a message that is important to us today." Agrees New Philosopher Jean-Marie Benoist, 36:

"You have several Camus. You have the Camus who was a guru for the left in the '50s, and you have the philosopher. As to the Camus who was the leftist, he at least had the lucidity to be aware of the Soviet concentration camps. The Camus who is the most near us now is the Camus who said he will denounce tyranny and fascism not only when it is on the extreme right but also when it is on the extreme left . . .

Camus is coming back into relevance because of his ethical point of view. The current views on human rights are very much in debt to Camus's approach."

This revival has its haunting implications. In his truest and most tragic self-analysis, Camus notes, "My whole work is ironic." True because he always places fact alongside theory to dramatize the distance between humane ideals and human failure. Tragic because he also confesses, "The sole effort of my life [was] to live the life of a normal man." A generation after his death, Albert Camus's Notebooks continually show that the "normal" virtues of courage, of decency, of uncompromising accuracy are, in fact, as vulnerable as great writers -- and as rare as great writing. -- Stefan Kanfer

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