Albert Camus

...when he later ends up on trial for murder, his lack of feeling about the crime (and about his mother) is used as evidence to convict him...

...women were44 If a right-winger says the earth is round, is one supposed to disagree...

...This might seem a juvenile remark about one of the major intellectuals of our century, but it's no less true for that—and no less apt an explanation of his enormous appeal...

...Sartre was a well-fed, bourgeois-hating bourgeois who until his 198o death never wavered in his view that the USSR and Chairman Mao were the true defenders of human freedom...

...Often he told each girl, in some detail, about the others...

...For the remainder of his days Camus felt the magazines and newspapers were full of enemies, and he devoted the remaining three years of his life to reconciling "my vices and virtues, which finally is the definition of knowing how to live...

...At least I have this in common with Hegel," he wrote, "you haven't read either one of us:' He then went on to say how much his circle had "liked" the Camus of old, but that now, "you are only half-alive among us...

...He caroused with them at all hours, smoking hashish and dancing, bedding them one after the other...

...Combined with his charm and intellect—and the potent mix of a hot passion for life with a glacial indifference to those around him—they allowed Camus his way with women...

...I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice...

...When he discovered his wife was also having an affair —with a doctor who supplied her morphine —Camus 78 February 1998 The American Spectator dumped her...

...In any event, the readiness to die for the truth was a sacrifice Camus himself was willing to make...

...Camus rightly doubted the white French and the ethnic Algerians could co-exist peacefully in the absence of French rule, and as terrorism increased along with the anti-colonial clamor, he increasingly feared for Algeria's poor whites—including his own mother, who had refused to move to France...

...It was perhaps fortunate, then, that Camus was accustomed to going his own route...

...It was to be his last major work...

...Camus's divorce from "acceptable" intellectual society was complete...

...He once asked Sartre why he was working so hard to impress a not very attractive woman, and got the answer: "Look at my face...

...Francine was not entirely stable, and in part because of his affairs she attempted suicide by flinging herself off a balcony...

...The two shared an uneasy friendship, with the older Sartre naturally assuming the role of primus inter pares...

...The American Spectator • February 1998 79 Sartre in turn replied to the reply, with a predictable blend of sarcasm, condescension, and hauteur...

...Think about it...

...He was 47 years old...

...In fact, if the truth seemed to me to be with the right wing, I would go along with it...

...Camus also said he was fed up with hearing from the type of critic who "never placed anything but his armchair in the direction of history...

...Their friendship would eventually unravel over Camus's anti-Communism...

...Todd reports that the Nazis found the book "asocial and apolitical," though one wonders how the censors could have been untroubled by so obviously non-conformist a book...

...He later married Francine Faure, a longtime girlfriend, and they stayed together until his death, though she knew about many of his extracurricular dalliances...

...It is the stuff of literary legend, and as an adolescent you cannot help but conclude: Camus was the epitome of cool...

...Such clear-eyed anti-Communism was then the bugaboo of French intellectuals (as it was in the United States), and the book came under heavy critical fire for being right-wing...

...Sartre gave him space to respond in a future issue, and Camus did not even dignify Sartre by using his friend's name...

...While he was hardly a waver of the pro-colonial "Algeria for the French" banner—indeed he said that he would take to the streets to defend poor Algerians—neither did he believe that France's abandonment would44 Growing up poor had left him with few illusions about human behavior...

...and Francine, whose mental health was deteriorating, had attempted suicide off a balcony some years before...

...MARC CARNEGIE lives in London, where he is correspondent-at-large for The American Spectator...

...The novel solidified his literary reputation, and placed him alongside Sartre as the greatest French intellectual of the time...

...He grew up poor—and as a French boy in colonial Algeria he acquired early on the sense of estrangement from the world around him that would color both his work and his personal relations...

...It is alluring stuff for the sensitive zo-year-old...

...He was drawn to philosophy and literature, as well as the theatre, and would jump back and forth between them throughout his career...

...But because he doesn't feel it, he won't say it—and so is condemned to death...

...The review also noted the book's undoubted literary failings, and called Camusperhaps the very worst slander to a French intellectual—a "pseudophilosopher...

...the state worried about paying for a lifetime of medical benefits...

...80 February 1998 • The American Spectator...

...typically only asked for their identity papers, and the pair slipped safely by...

...It's horrible...

...His political views, like those of so many on the left then and now, were bound up with considerations of style and public taste—which meant changing them would have exacted a personal cost well above the intellectual expenditure needed to see Communism for what it was...

...Camus well understood how difficult a task this was...

...Years later Camus explained The Stranger as the tale of a man who won't "play the game," a man "who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth...

...for after his exile by the mainstream left over his anti-Communism, he estranged himself still further by his position on Algerian independence...

...Does the mythic Camus, whose icy reflections stirred up such interest and debate some fifty years ago, have anything to say to us today...

...This translation of Todd's 1996 French original is clunky at its best moments...

...I don't believe I have any taste for heroism or saintliness," he once said...

...The Nazi censors saw no reason to ban The Stranger, and its publication—along with The Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical essay arguing that the question of suicide was the first question a man must answer for himself—brought Camus to the attention of Paris's tightly knit literary society...

...There are few experiences more powerful, when one is still in the questing years of youth, than opening one of his taut and resonant little books, and encountering for the first time those classically balanced yet thoroughly modern aphorisms: "Judging whether life is or is not worth living is to answer philosophy's fundamental question...

...But in Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus finally spoke up...

...The couple was often apart for long periods of time, most notably when Camus lived in Paris under the German occupation...

...When a friend said he was considering joining the party, Camus told him, "Whatever happens, I would defend you against the firing squad, but you'd be obliged to approve if I was shot...

...His brilliant novella The Fall, whichappeared the year he won the Nobel, was in part an effort to purge the guilt he felt about his wife's condition...

...The disease also seems to have given him an unusually strong lust for life, and especially its sensual pleasures...

...For his part Camus found his friend's companion, Simone de Beauvoir, extremely unattractive both physically and personally...

...Their friendship was well and truly finished, and after that Sartre told friends that he had never thought much of Camus intellectually, calling him "a kind of schoolteacher, worthless in philosophy, but radiating a moral hubris...

...Like many handsome men whose success with women came effortlessly, Camus could not understand how hard the less fortunate had to labor in their amorous affairs...

...It is difficult for the American reader to know how good a job Olivier Todd has done in retelling the life of Albert Camus...

...Camus had certainly been thinking about it, and in 1951 published The Rebel, an uneven hodgepodge of literature, history, and philosophy that attempted a critique of Communism by way of examining man's impulse toward non-conformity...

...Camus was searched, but he had already slipped the proof to the woman...

...77 be an unqualified good, which was an article of faith for Sartre and the left...

...He was the paterfamilias of Parisian literary life, had been to the finest schools, and acted the dandy in his role as France's greatest living philosopher...

...At 17 Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an affliction which closed off his most likely career as a teacher...

...Still, something of Camus' charm and bravery shine through the mucky prose...

...I must live and create, live until I weep from living...

...In the end, Camus argued with some prescience, individuals had more effect on (and more responsibility for) the fate of society than did the historical and economic factors venerated by Marx and the Communists...

...This doubtless made him particularly conscious of the split between the preoccupations of daily life and the bigger picture—a theme that he would return to again and again in his work...

...T hough it is inaccurate to suggest Camus was a man of the right, in many ways he and Sartre typified the often uncrossable political divide...

...But for the efforts of teachers who recognized his talent, and recommended him for scholarships, he would never have been pushed (or able to afford) to continue his education...

...Camus never overcame his guilt about this episode...

...Albert Camus: A Life Olivier Todd translated by Benjamin Ivry Knopf / 435 pages / $30 REVIEWED BY Marc Carnegie A lbert Camus was cool...

...The man could save himself, if only he would tell the jury that he feels great remorse...

...along with a mistress, he was once stopped by a German patrol when he had a proof of Combat under his coat...

...He was temperamentally unsuited to collectivism, whether in the form of a literary circle or a political system...

...As Todd points out, this was to become one of the most famous utterances of his life —and though it was an expression of compassion and common sense in the irrational face of violence, the remark sat none too well either with Algerians or the avatars of "social progress...

...His womanizing had gone on unabated...

...What interests me is being a man...

...He was a man of relatively simple tastes—he liked books and sex, perhaps not in that order—and growing up poor had left him with few illusions about human behavior...

...and he belongs likewise in the courageous ranks of Orwell, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, writers who did not flinch from turning their gaze to, and laboring against, totalitarian evil...

...In addition to his epic womanizing, the constant struggle against TB, and the effort he put into writing, Camus was also a key figure in the French Resistance, eventually becoming editor in chief of the important underground newspaper, Combat...

...He addressed his reply "Dear Editor," and went on to declare, "One doesn't decide the truth of an idea according to whether it is left- or right-wing, and even less by what the left or right wing decides to make of it...

...Knowing that his doubts about independence would make him more unpopular still, Camus kept quiet...

...Camus asserted that in fact it was Marx's philosophy that had led directly to Stalin's death camps...

...In 1960, with an unfinished novel in his briefcase, he and two friends struck a tree with their car...

...It was obviously dangerous work...

...The narrator of The Stranger, a haunting novel that remains his best known work, feels little emotion after his mother dies...

...Moreover, as an Algerian he had often felt himself outside the French mainstream...

...Even though his disease left him thin and often haggard, Camus had the tough good looks of a matinee idol...

...But while that cool suffices to generate interest during one's youth — especially in France, where writers hold an exalted place in the popular imagination—in the long run there is only one question worth asking about any writer: Is he still worth reading...

...After the war Camus published The Plague, an allegorical novel widely thought to be a condemnation of the Nazis but later understood to be an attack on all totalitarian regimes, that of the Soviets included...

...Sartre surely would...

...The remark was both a discreet dig at Sartre and a more obvious reminder that he had placed his life on the line during the resistance...

...beginning to think is beginning to be undermined...

...Even Sartre thought the book a masterpiece...

...Not that Camus was inclined to overestimate his achievement...

...though when Francine read it she told him, "You're always pleading the causes of all sorts of people, but do you ever hear the screams of people who are trying to reach you...

...There was no systemic flaw in Communism, merely a poor application of principles...

...This period marked the beginning of his literary success...

...He was born in Algeria in 1913, the son of an illiterate charwoman and a father who died at the Battle of the Mame, when Camus was eight months old...

...Like most lotharios, however, Camus couldn't bear the thought that women might be unfaithful to him...

...At the party to celebrate his Nobel Prize she requested that specific mistresses not be invited...

...Perhaps one of the most important contributions that Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life makes to our understanding of the writer is just how much the disease affected him...

...Camus was an improbable literary star...

...Though Camus married his first wife, a morphine addict, at age zo, he was constantly chasing pretty young girls— extremely beautiful girls, in fact—and succeeding...

...Every mistress whose photograph is reproduced here is staggeringly, jaw-droppingly gorgeous...

...It is hard to imagine Todd, who has done diligent research and clearly has an affinity for his subject, feeling anything but chagrin over this poorly edited volume...

...Camus responded by telling friends: well, if a right-winger says the earth is round, was one supposed to disagree...

...and at half the length it is often clumsy, sometimes nearly unintelligible...

...Camus resisted the Communists with the same intensity as he had the fascists, befriending the anti-Communist writer Arthur Koestler (while, typically, carrying on a torrid affair with his wife) and sparing no opportunity to decry whathad happened in the Soviet Union...

...His celebrated journal, Les Temps Modernes, carried a withering review of The Rebel (by a committed Sartrean acolyte) outlining the now familiar argument that "Stalin was the one who created Stalinism...

...It's true that Sartre may have been on to something about him—indeed it has become the standard take on Camus that his philosophizing never rises above a morose self-absorption which, for all its "cool" and undergraduate appeal, perhaps has little to say to today's readers...

...and that Camus, the philosopher of the absurd, perished in a car accident after having all his life declared that an automobile crash was the most absurd way to die...

...Whether through redaction or laziness, there are an unfortunate number of sentences along the lines of: "Paulhan had told Sartre that Camus was like Kafka written by Hemingway...

...But as the Stalinist horror became widely known—this happened more slowly in France than elsewhere—he distanced himself from the party, and was a committed pacifist well before the end of the war...

...He had joined the Communist Party in his youth...

...He told a French reporter there, "I have always condemned terrorism, and I must condemn a terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike my mother and my family...

...But for the rest of his life he is riddled with shame, and spends each evening in a bar, confessing his tale...

...that the hero of his greatest novel is really an anti-hero, guillotined as a result of total ambivalence about his mother's death...

...In it a highly esteemed citizen fails to save—fails even to try to save—a woman who jumps into the Seine as he is walking home one evening...

...that he was probably the most influential journalist of the French Resistance...

...that, but for Kipling, he was the youngest ever to win the Nobel Prize for literature...

...Todd makes it clear that, though not the type to brood over his illness, Camus nevertheless was always acutely aware of his ownmortality...

...But he is in the league of Kafka as a portrayer of the individual isolated from society...

...The supremely detached Camus, meanwhile, had never cared for Parisian literary life...

...He merely hears the splash, and keeps going...

...Camus died instantly...

...He always referred to her as The Beaver, and to those speculating on bedding her he'd reply: "Imagine what she'd say on the pillow afterwards...

...Then one discovers that he also looked like a movie star, and possessed the women to match...