Strangeness of the Stranger

By Stefan Kanfer

ALBERT CAMUS by Herbert R. Lottman; Doubleday 753 pages; $16.95

The French have two words for it: homme engage, a man involved in the ideas and actions of his time. Some definitions are more detailed, but only one is shorter: Camus. The name is enough to evoke the romantic figure of a revolutionary philosopher, fighter in the French underground, disillusioned radical and Nobel laureate, outfitted in trenchcoat, hands cupped around the eternal cigarette: Bogart as existentialist.

Since Albert Camus's death in a 1960 car crash, these images have totally obscured the writer. Journalist Herbert R. Lottman's voluminous work attempts to sweep away rumor and legend in the hope that a man will emerge. But Camus is much too elusive for mere biography. After 753 pages, the subject seems as melodramatic in death as he was in life.

From his earliest days in Algeria, young Albert was transfigured by irony. When he was eleven months old, his father was killed in the Battle of the Marne. The intellectual, curious boy was raised by an illiterate mother and grandmother. In adolescence he developed the physique of an athlete and the lungs of an invalid. By the age of 17 he was coughing blood, and soon afterward retired from the soccer field. Other arenas soon presented themselves. Not quite 21, Camus married Simone Hie, a beautiful young woman and a drug addict. Within a year the couple were estranged, and Camus began his lifelong exploration of "the tender and reserved friendship of women." He became an actor-director in a workers' theater, a profession that taught him the value of public postures, and he joined the Communist Party, with which he would have his bitterest wrangles.

By 1939, the young writer had started a new life. He planned to marry again: Francine Faure, whose father had also died at the Marne. When Francine's sister observed that Albert's ears stuck out of his head in simian fashion, Francine replied defensively, "The monkey is the animal closest to man." Three years later, the monkey was famous. Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus's first novel, The Stranger, characterized the Absurd Man who lives outside of sentiment or tradition: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure..."

Jean-Paul Sartre hailed it as a new classic, and he was soon joined by a choir of enthusiasts. As Lottman notes, "Fame traveled by train in those times." It took some months for the author's reputation to reach beyond the precincts of Paris. By then, the Nazi-occupied city had other matters to contend with. Camus joined the Free French, writing for the underground newspaper Combat.

The liberation of Paris in 1944 marked the freeing of talent and energy. Camus was awarded for wartime courage, oversaw the production of his flawed drama Caligula and began intensive work on The Plague, an allegory of moral infection and individual salvation. By the age of 35 he was a candidate for the Nobel; when he was 40 Camus found that his work, along with George Orwell's and Arthur Koestler's, was one of the rallying points for Europe's non-Communist left. His loathing for totalitarianism brought him into sharp conflict with Sartre, then in lockstep with the Stalinist party line. Much was made of Camus's ambiguous feelings about Algeria: the anti-imperialist could neither condone terrorism nor endorse France's colonial policies.

More and more he withdrew from public life, seeking the obscurity of the old days. He suffered from a crippling writer's block, and complained of sterility and decay. Even the Nobel, awarded in 1957, was perceived as both an honor and an invasion of privacy. "I'm castrated!" he complained to a friend. The cry, like many of his statements, was pure theater. Yet as Lottman shows, Camus produced no more major work. He retreated to the sanctity of his home, to Francine and their twins, and was at work on a new novel, The First Man, when he was suddenly killed. He was eulogized every where; even Sartre wrote a lyric tribute.

But the reputation swiftly diminished, and Camus's tone of stoicism and forbearance was swallowed in the crowd noises of the '60s. Only now has the canon been appraised as a coherent statement about the possibilities of secular salvation. One sentence in The Fall, Camus's last published novel, sums up a life and a work: "Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."

In a strenuous effort to help readers make their own last judgment about Camus, Lottman seems to have talked to everyone who ever shared an espresso or a bed with the author. But the book offers an utter catholicity of research and taste.

The name of some forgotten dog competes with book critiques. Analysis of a philosophical essay mixes with scuttlebutt of a gossip column: a horoscope predicted a bad end; a Vassar campus newspaper considered the writer's visit to New York "one of the cultural events of the season."

At the violent conclusion, as at the start, Lottman's Camus is the projection of a cinematographer, made up of thou sands of irrelevant and vital images that constitute a film--but which are, after all, only flickering suggestions of the truth.

Even after this lengthy examination, readers must still be advised to go else where on the shelf for the real Camus:

you've seen the movie, now read the books.

Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

Camus himself would turn pale, would be irritable, even belligerent, when he drank too much. Simone de Beauvoir was somewhere in the middle. She was obviously interested in Camus, while he confided to a friend that he stayed away from her because he feared she would talk too much in bed. Her caustic treatment of Camus in her memoirs has been ascribed to spite, just as Sartre was patently jealous of the younger man who could attract women even without the exploitation of his intellect and reputation. In fact, Beauvoir wasn't as caustic as all that in her memoirs; one finds tenderness there as well. A legend that circulated at the time had Camus saying to a respectable woman of letters: 'We have, dear friend, spent a marvelous evening evoking high-minded subjects, but, you see, if a wench walked by right now I'd drop you and follow her.'

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