ON ALBERT CAMUS
Chiaromonte, Nicola
A man is dead: you think of his living face, of his gestures, his actions, and of moments you shared, trying to recapture an image that is dissolved forever. A writer is dead: you reflect upon...
...I try to recall details, as if through them I could relive those days and learn something more about the young writer with whom I actually spoke little, since he felt no more like talking than I. I remember being totally obsessed by a single thought: we had arrived at humanity's zero hour and history was senseless...
...And when we found ourselves face to face with Hitler's terror, what values could we oppose to negation, in what values could we take comfort...
...From Oran I continued my journey to Casablanca from where I had been told I could embark for New York...
...nor the figure of the writer of the sum of his works...
...Camus held firm, at the risk of exposing himself, defenseless, to the criticism of the dialecticians, and of seeming to pass brusquely from logic to emotive affirmation...
...One had to go through the experience of nihilism and fight it...
...However, I did have something in common with this twenty-eight-year-old writer— love of the sea, joy of the sea, ecstatic admiration of the sea...
...All other beauty does, we agreed...
...He had won his position on the stage of the world...
...He had published a volume of prose poems entitled Noces, they told me...
...The simplest act of life is an act of affirmation...
...The story of a man is always incomplete...
...He had succeeded in saying in his fevered way and in an argument as taut as a bow why, despite the fury and horror of history, man is an absolute...
...By that time I had read L'Etranger, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, and Caligula...
...It was no longer a matter of literature, but of directly confronting the world...
...And that value is eternal...
...I said good-bye to Camus and his wife, knowing that we had exchanged the gift of friendship...
...and you seek to form a judgment which takes account of the secret source from which they sprang and which is now stilled...
...But in it there remained, discreetly in shadow, the other Camus, the one that I can call neither truer nor artistically superior, for he is simply "the other," jealously hidden in his secret being—the anguished, dark, misanthropic Camus whose yearning for human communication was perhaps even greater than that of the author of La Peste...
...But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among his fellows is cowardly...
...I SAW HIM AGAIN in New York in 1946 on the pier where I had gone to meet his ship...
...But living by nihilism is living on bad faith, as a bourgeois lives on his income...
...IN 1946 CAMUS was invited to speak to the students of Columbia University in New York...
...I was being chased from Europe...
...at twenty, Hitler...
...Literary space, that trompe l'oeil that had been invented in the nineteenth century to defend the individual artist's right to be indifferent, was broken...
...In the language of Camus this signifies that if the world is absurd, the artist must live immersed in the absurd, must carry the burden of it, and must seek to prove it for the others...
...He had become, together with JeanPaul Sartre, the symbol of a defeated France, which because of them had imposed itself victoriously in its chosen domain—intelligence...
...It seems to me today that in this speech, which was a sort of autobiography, there were all the themes of Camus's later work, from La Peste to Les Justes to L'Homme Revolte...
...Their way of life had so little value...
...He is an actual or potential assassin...
...Another thing we have learned is that we cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever...
...But the picture of the man is not made up of the sum of your memories...
...The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge...
...They also put on plays, and in That period were preparing a production of Hamlet in which Camus, in addition to directing, played the leading role opposite the Ophelia of his wife, Francine...
...and nothing can replace it...
...Albert Camus had known how to give form to this feeling and to remain true to it...
...He had mastered it and carried it to extreme and lucid conclusions...
...this absolute assassination of the truth gave me vertigo...
...Camus told me then that he was writing a tragedy about Caligula, and I tried to understand what could attract a modern writer to such a subject...
...it is sufficient to think of what could have been different—almost everything—to know that his story can never contain the meaning of a human life, but only what that existence was permitted to be and to give...
...We spoke little even then, but we praised the sea, which does not have to be understood, which is inexhaustible and which never palls...
...I attended the rehearsals of Hamlet, went to the beach with them, took walks with them, talking about what was happening in the world...
...But what had happened came from the very root of man and society...
...But there was no one...
...In my eyes he seemed to be like a man coming straight from the battlefield bearing its marks, pride and sorrow...
...That is man's transcendence in respect to history...
...Desperate transcendence and truth, because they are challenged in the very heart of man, who knows that he is mortal and eternally guilty, with no recourse against destiny...
...I carried away with me the impression of a man who could be almost tenderly warm one moment and coolly reserved the next, and yet was constantly longing for friendship...
...This was the real and the only valid meaning of engagement...
...Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things...
...the only thing that made sense was that part of man which remained outside of history, alien and impervious to the whirlwind of events...
...it is the acceptance of one's own and others' lives as the starting point of all thinking...
...He wrote, "I was persecuted by a ridiculous apprehension: one cannot die without having confessed all one's own lies...
...We opposed terror because it forces us to choose between murdering and being murdered...
...The truth was the living presence...
...That is man's transcendence...
...Immortality is an illusion for thought and art, as for man...
...And because of this, not of his fame, the young writer from Algeria has "grown" in my eyes, worthy not only of friendship but admiration...
...They are nothing but relics mutely surviving time's erosion and history's disasters, like monuments of stone...
...At the core of this friendship was something very precious, something unspoken and impersonal that made itself felt in the way they received me and in our way of being together...
...To know the value of hospitality one must have been alone and homeless...
...With this, one might say, he returned to the raison d'être of writing...
...Next came the Second World War, the defeat, and Hitler in our homes and cities...
...As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929...
...Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in...
...But when hearrived at 214 NICOLA CHIAROMONTE the question of the connection between man and history today, between man and the choices which impose themselves today, Sartre seemed to have lost the thread of his reasoning, to have turned backward to realism, to categorical obligations imposed on man from the outside, and worse, to notions of the politically opportune...
...I met him soon after my arrival, for in Algeria he was famous: the leader of a group of young journalists, aspiring writers, students, friends of the Arabs, enemies of the local bourgeoisie and Petain...
...In their midst I found the France I loved and the pure clear warmth of French friendship...
...But it is in this very fragility—which equates the humblest existence with the one that we falsely call "great" and is simply one that had the luck to express itself—that there lies the meaning and value of human life...
...But it was unbearable and we fought it...
...and the violence of the Hitlerian negation was in itself logical...
...It was not an idea compatible with normal life, let alone with literature—or so it seemed to me...
...that is the truth which no social imperative can erase...
...Such a choice carried within itself the threat of the cancerous negation that Camus called nihilism...
...This is why we reject any ideology that claims control over all of human life...
...The gist of the speech was as follows: We were born at the beginning of the First World War...
...But to me he had conquered in a more important sense...
...For if the problem of man is reduced to any kind of "historical task," he is nothing but the raw material of history, and one can do anything one pleases with him...
...They lived together, passed the days on the seashore or hillside, and the evening playing records and dancing, hoping for the victory of England and giving vent to their disgust with what had happened to France and to Europe...
...He had faced the question which I considered crucial and which had so absorbed me during the days when I first met him...
...And one cannot discover the man through the writer, or the writer through the man...
...I did not read it, because in those days I was not in the mood for prose poems, but chiefly because the company of him and his friends was enough...
...ON ALBERT CAMUS 215 The world of culture was beautiful, but it was not real...
...that is, to challenge directly the actual situation and contemporary man in the name of the exigency of a conscience whose rigor was not attenuated by pragmatic considerations...
...In this lay the value of L'Etranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe for me...
...Hitler 213 had just occupied Greece, and the swastika waived over the Acropolis...
...his books were brilliant...
...Putting the world in question means putting one's self in question and abandoning the artist's traditional right to remain separate from his work—a pure creator...
...In none...
...it is present in each of us...
...I suffered continual nausea and solitude in the face of these events...
...This thought I considered my exclusive privilege...
...But contemporary tyranny did not seem to me to have much in common with Caligula's...
...Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" spreads it...
...With an almost monstrous richness of ideas and vigor of reasoning Sartre had said something similar...
...If, indeed, such a part existed...
...the man who, in questioning the world, questioned himself, and by this testified to his own vocation...
...This agreement sealed our friendship...
...In those black years the young man from Algeria had fought and conquered...
...The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been eliminated...
...in remaining true to one's self even when condemned by the gods to repeat over and over the same vain task...
...otherwise, be there one hidden untruth in a life, death would render it definitive...
...I have kept notes of his talk, and am sure I can reconstruct it without betraying his meaning...
...But solitary and shut off as I was, I was the guest of those young people...
...This is the Camus of the last pages of L'Etranger, and especially the Camus of La Chute in which we hear his deepest being, the self-tormenting tormentor speak, resisting all forms of complacency and moral self-satisfaction...
...There was no doubt about this, and it was confirmed day after day not so much by the behavior of the criminals but by that of the average man...
...Nothing except the obstinate negation in which we were forced to close ourselves from the very beginning...
...I felt that no one else could be so possessed by it, yet I yearned for someone to share it with...
...ALBERT CAMUS appeared in my life in April 1941, in Algiers, where I had come as a refugee from France...
...I discovered this one day when I was his guest at Oran and we went by bicycle beyond Mers-el-Kebir to a deserted beach...
...Camus (and, in his very different way, Sartre) by the simple act of raising the question of the value of existence, asserted the will to participate actively, in the first person, in the world...
...Absurd, such transcendence and truth—but absurd as they were, they were reborn every time that Sisyphus descended "with heavy, but equal, steps, toward the torment whose end he would never approach...
...Unfettered tyranny...
...We had recognized in each other the mark of fate—which was, I believe, the ancient meaning of the encounter between stranger and host...
...and he had indicated precisely where, according to him, this absolute lay: in the conscience, even if mute and stilled...
...Everything is fragmentary, everything is incomplete, everything is the prey of mortality even when destiny seems to have granted both man and writer the gift of living to the limit of his forces, and of giving everything humanly possible, as in the case of Tolstoy...
...Because of this, his presence added to everybody's world, making it more real and less insensate...
...he was famous...
...It is certain that what induced him to remain firm was not an ideological system, but the sentiment, so vehemently expressed in L'Etranger and in some pages of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, of the inviolable secret which is enclosed in every man's heart simply because he is "condemned to die...
...These were the foundations of our education...
...The facts showed that men deserved what was happening to them...
...and it makes communication impossible...
...This secret, like the "eternal jewel" of Macbeth, can never be compromised or violated without sacrilege...
...With these words, it seems to me, the dialogue of Albert Camus with his contemporaries, truncated as it is by death, is nonetheless complete...
...Translated by MIRIAM CHIAROMONTE 216 NICOLA CHIAROMONTE...
...A writer is dead: you reflect upon his work, upon each book, upon the thread that ran through them all, upon their vital movement toward a deeper meaning...
...Nothing...
...Then came the Ethiopian War, the Civil War in Spain, and Munich...
...they remained, exposed to the violence that had driven me out...
...If the problem had been the bankruptcy of a political ideology, or a system of government, it would have been simple enough...
Vol. 21 • April 1974 • No. 2
