Albert Camus: The Life of Dialogue

Howe, Irving

By comparison with the work of men like Koestler, Silone and Orwell, Albert Camus' writing has always seemed to me somewhat grandiose and porous. He lacked Koestler's capacity for sustained...

...Perhaps so...
...He called for an end to the terrorization of civilians by both sides, he proposed an autonomous Algerian community linked to France, he spoke for a restoration of civil freedom and order...
...Real virtues, and in our time among the greatest a writer could have...
...with the fact that it was the moral response which was the essential one, the moral response which now became a kind of politics...
...He was not the kind of intellect ual who would sacrifice, in behalf of fidelista rhetoric, his fidelity to the idea of liberty...
...Time and again, one comes across passages that are entirely unoriginal— they could have appeared in DISSENT often enough—passages so simple and unambiguous and good that one is tempted to cut them out and mail them to Professor C. Wright Mills: The first thing to define totalitarian society, whether of the Right or of the Left, is the single party, and the single party has no reason to destroy itself...
...In defense of the values by which he tried to live, he could be properly intransigeant...
...But this was our dilemma: the one we felt to be an essential part of our experience...
...It alone allows one to denounce torture, disgraceful torture, as contemptible in Algiers as in Budapest...
...he was not the kind of intellectual who could be swerved by production statistics, the rapture of mass meetings, and the lure of rising power...
...It alone allows one to denounce, hence to correct, injustice and crime...
...What Camus, clearly sensing the depth and range of that dilemma, tried meanwhile to do was to keep alive the possibility of a renewed radicalism, with or without the socialist label and vocabulary, for the decades to come...
...Camus drove himself to return to journalism whenever he could no longer bear his detachment as an artist, whenever, that is, he suffered too much from the "bad faith" of silence...
...There is a disconcerting sameness of tone in these articles, a fondness for the glittering epigram and oratorical lilt which seem to belie Camus' claim to be writing from the very edge of despair...
...And again: Yes, the great event of the twentieth century was the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movement, the progressive retreat of socialism based on freedom before the attacks of Caesarian and military socialism...
...And this Camus did superbly: The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel at one with the men who suffer in it...
...But they were virtues that also brought with them two significant weaknesses: a temptation to reduce humanism to a mere literary device and an incapacity to embody his moral sentiments as political ideas...
...it seems to me that there is [an] ambition that ought to belong to all writers: to bear witness and shout aloud, every time it is possible, insofar as our talent allows, for those who are enslaved as we are...
...And here, trying to imagine once again the situations in which Camus had written these overwrought pieces, I had to acknowledge that the force of my objections was not very great...
...As far as he could —that phrase bulks large at the moment, since these past few decades the dilemma of the democratic left, which Camus shared, has been its inability to move from abstract position to a concrete program and then from a concrete program to an active politics...
...Utterly familiar...
...He spoke on this subject, as on all others, with that good faith, that commitment to human freedom, which is the essential requirement for modern politics...
...But if one goes beyond ready-made "positions" and tries to think about the realities of the Algerian tragedy, then one may be a little more respectful of Camus' opinion, even if still supposing him to be mistaken...
...To the political life of our time Camus contributed two simple ideas...
...And recalling these occasions— the Resistance, the post-war struggle in France, the Algerian war, the Hungarian revolution—one is struck (as if it were some sort of discovery...
...The scores of similar passages in Camus' writing testify to the fact that, as far as he could, he helped preserve the idea of freedom in a dark age, and equally important, preserve the idea of human possibility...
...He lacked Koestler's capacity for sustained argument, Silone's mixture of humor and humaneness, Orwell's gritty concern for facts...
...This is why the only society capable of evolution and liberalization, the only one that deserves both our critical and our active support is the society that involves a plurality of parties as part of its structure...
...To be sure, Camus never succumbed to the casuistry of the later Koestler or the occasional anti-intellectualism of Orwell...
...Camus, for example, took a position on Algeria that some of us might at first glance reject: he did not favor unconditional Algerian independence, though he did speak out for Algerian self-determination...
...That the essential is sometimes not the sufficient, is something else again...
...but except for The Stranger, his one first-rate novel and his deepest exploration of the problem of nihilism, Camus' work had a disturbing quality: all too often he seemed to be making a speech...
...Finishing Resistance, Rebellion, and Death I felt that whatever its limitations it was the work of a man with whom one could live: that is, live the life worth having, the life of dialogue...
...As a man reflecting upon the life of our time, Camus could be, in his very bewilderment, an enormously sympathetic figure...
...He kept urging that the traditional ideologies had become bulwarks of misconception and pretexts for a refusal to communicate...
...but in part it raises the more serious problem of the extent to which the moral pronouncement can satisfy a political need...
...To some extent, these weaknesses reflect the dilemma of the post-Resistance intellectuals in France who refused to surrender themselves to any total ideology yet felt a need for some principle by which to guide their public life...
...Camus or 01lenhauer, the klein biirgerlich leader of the German Social Democracy...
...For that matter, which leader of the socialist movement in the recent years would have had the humane imagination to compose a pamphlet as profoundly stirring and politically significant as Camus' attack on capital punishment...
...And then Camus understood the primacy of the idea of liberty in this age...
...THESE VIEWS were reinforced when I started to read Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, a collection of Camus' journalism beginning with war-time statements in behalf of the Resistance, reaching a point of climax in the mag nificent essay denouncing capital punishment, and ending with some recent declarations on the place of the artist in modern society...
...Camus really preferred the truth to everything else, even to his own security as an intellectual...
...Since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from the world and a solitude has begun for each and every man...
...Perhaps he was wrong in fail ing to see that by now it was too late for such proposals: there was no longer any choice but to allow independence to countries like Algeria even if one knew that the leadership of the FLN contained authoritarians and worse, and even if one suspected that an FLN-controlled Algeria would mean the substitution of a new-style dictatorship for old-style colonialism...
...So far as I know, Camus did not call himself a socialist, though he expressed a strong kinship with the traditions of socialism...
...but it goes to the heart of things...
...When it came to specific proposals, he shared the troubles of everyone else, and shared them with a modesty that bears recommending both to some of his contemporaries in the intellectual world of Paris and to many of the "politicals" who clung to the socialist word even as they were incompetent to perform a socialist deed...
...In doing this Camus was closer to us, more a true friend and comrade, than the vast bulk of party politicians in Europe who, from sheer inertia or petty advantage, clung to the name of socialism...
...The hopes nurtured by the Resistance having been so sadly dissipated, they began to fall back upon large and unprovisioned sentiments of fraternity, sentiments without which little else can be worth while but which in themselves seldom lead to concrete realizations in life or art...
...he urged people to talk to each other, those who really cared about socialism and freedom...
...Norman Thomas, Asoka Mehta, perhaps two or three others .. . THE INADEQUACY of Camus' journalism in regard to concrete politics demonstrates the power of its moral judgment— for without the latter one would not even think to notice the former...
...But in the age of the total state, when this consensus was broken by terror, the first task of radical intellectuals who still believed in human freedom was to articulate the assumptions — assumptions often violated, yet operative as both checks upon evil and inducements to good— which had in the past been at the foundation of the human order...
...he was impatient with dialectics, ideologies and positions...
...The traditional competition between socialists and liberals, as even at times between socialists and conservatives, had rested on a tacit assumption of some shared values as to the needs and nature of man...
...but to whom does one feel closer: Camus or Guy Mollet, the chauvinist leader of the French Socialist party...
...but he was also ready to bend before the waywardness of impulse, the needs of personal feeling, the claims of the body...
...Perhaps that is one reason Camus' reflections tend to go soft and his fiction seems thin-blooded...
...For his journalism makes clear that Camus was not really a "political man," even to the limited extent that Silone is...
...His mind was not really fecund, like Sartre's, but then he never became infatuated, again like Sartre, with his own dilemmas and agilities...
...it is surely not to deny that Camus deserved much of the praise that has been rendered him...
...That he was not entirely right in saying all this I have tried to indicate, but anyone familiar with the congealing of traditional leftist opinion in France knows he was primarily right...
...In part my objection is simply to the tradition of French journalism, which seems permanently infatuated with operatic grandeur...
...To note these reservations is to do that, and no more...

Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2


 
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