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...
...Unfettered tyranny...
...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 My the de Sisyphe, of the inviolable secret which is enclosed in every man's heart simply because he is "condemned to die...
...and the violence of the Hitlerian negation was in itself logical...
...the only thing that made sense was that part of man which remained outside of history, alien and impervious to the whirlwind of events...
...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...
...And when we found ourselves face to face with Hitler's terror, in what values could we take comfort, what values could we oppose to negation...
...his books were brilliant...
...It was not an idea compatible with normal life, let alone with literature—or so it seemed to me...
...To know the value of hospitality one must have been alone and homeless...
...That is man's transcendence...
...That is man's transcendence in respect to history...
...that is, to challenge directly the actual situation of contemporary man in the name of the exigence of a conscience whose rigor was not attenuated by pragmatic considerations...
...The facts showed that men deserved what was happening to them...
...By that time I had read L'Etranger, Le Mythe de Sisyphe and Caligula...
...But when he arrived at the question of the connection between man and history today...
...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...
...This secret, like the "eternal jewel" of Macbeth can never be compromised or violated without sacrilege...
...1 felt that no one else could be so possessed by it, yet I yearned for someone to share it with...
...266 He had published a volume of prose poems entitled Noces, they told me...
...Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in...
...Nothing except the obstinate negation in which we were forced to close ourselves from the very beginning...
...at twenty, Hitler...
...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...
...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 said good-bye to Camus and his wife, knowing that we had exchanged the gift of friendship...
...I SAW HIM AGAIN in New York in 1946 on the pier where I had gone to meet his ship...
...But solitary and shut off as I was, I was the guest of those young people...
...These were the foundations of our education...
...If, indeed, such a part existed...
...It was no longer a matter of literature, but of directly confronting the world...
...The truth was the living presence...
...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...
...it is present in each of us...
...With these words, it seems to me, the dialogue of Albert Camus with his contemporaries, truncated as it is by death, is nonetheless complete...
...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...
...In their midst I found the France I loved and the pure clear warmth of French friendship...
...and you seek to form a judgment which takes account of the secret source from which they sprang and which is now stilled...
...I attended the rehearsals of Hamlet, went to the beach with them, took walks with them, talking about what was happening in the world...
...The first is that the poison which impregnated Hitlerism has not been 269 eliminated...
...With this, one might say, he returned to the raison d'être of writing...
...Another thing we have learned is that we cannot accept any optimistic conception of existence, any happy ending whatsoever...
...and it makes communication impossible...
...and nothing can replace it...
...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...
...The world of culture was beautiful, but it was not real...
...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 selftormenting tormentor speak, resisting all forms of complacency and moral self-satisfaction...
...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 contemporary tyranny did not seem to me to have much in common with Caligula's...
...This agreement sealed our friendship...
...he was famous...
...All other beauty does, we agreed...
...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...
...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...
...This was the real and the only valid meaning of engagement...
...But living by nihilism is living on bad faith, as a bourgeois lives on his income...
...in remaining true to one's self even when condemned by the gods to repeat over and over the same vain task...
...But what had happened came from the very root of man and society...
...We opposed terror because it forces us to choose between murdering and being murdered...
...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...
...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...
...Such a choice carried within itself the threat of the cancerous negation that Camus called nihilism...
...But it was unbearable and we fought it...
...The story of a man is always incomplete...
...He wrote, "I was persecuted by a ridiculous apprehension: one cannot die without having confessed all one's own lies...
...The simplest act of life is an act of affirmation...
...This is why we reject any ideology that claims control over all of human life...
...We spoke little even then, but we praised the sea, which does not have to be understood, which is inexhaustible and which never palls...
...Albert Camus had known how to give form to this feeling and to remain true to it...
...But there was no one...
...In my eyes he seemed to me like a man coming 267 straight from the battlefield bearing its marks, pride and sorrow...
...Because of this, his presence added to everybody's world, making it more real and less insensate...
...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...
...Next came the Second World War, the defeat, and Hitler in our homes and cities...
...And one cannot discover the man through the writer, or the writer through the man...
...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...
...Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency and "historical tasks" spreads it...
...In this lay the value of L'Etranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe for me...
...it is the acceptance of one's own and others' lives as the starting point of all thinking...
...This thought I considered my exclusive privilege...
...But the picture of the man is not made up of the sum of your memories...
...this absolute assassination of the truth gave me vertigo...
...Translated by MIRIAM CHIAROMONTE 270...
...He had mastered it and carried it to extreme and lucid conclusions...
...Hitler had just occupied Greece, and the swastika waved over the Acropolis...
...Everything is fragmentary, everything is incomplete, everything is the prey of mortality even when destiny seems to have granted bout 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...
...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...
...He is an actual or potential assassin...
...ALBERT CAMUS appeared in my life in April, 1941, in Algiers, where I had come as a refugee from France...
...that is the truth which no social imperative can erase...
...He had won his position on the stage of the world...
...And that value is eternal...
...I have kept notes of his talk, and am sure I can reconstruct it without betraying his meaning...
...Nothing...
...Immortality is an illusion for thought and art, as for man...
...But if we believe that optimism is silly, we also know that pessimism about the action of man among his fellows is cowardly...
...In those black years the young man from Algeria had fought and conquered...
...With an almost monstrous richness of ideas and vigor of reasoning Sartre had said something similar...
...It seems to me today that in this speech, which was a sort of autobiography, there were all the themes of Camus' later work, from La Peste to Les Justes to L'Homme Revoltd...
...But to me he had conquered in a more important sense...
...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...
...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 1. I remember being totally obsessed by a single thought: we had arrived at humanity's zero hour and history was senseless...
...He had faced the question which I considered crucial and which had so absorbed me during the days that I first met him...
...He had become, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, the symbol of a defeated France, which because of them had imposed itself victoriously in its chosen domain—intelligence...
...One had to go through the experience of nihilism and fight it...
...Now that Hitler has gone, we know a certain number of things...
...IN 1946 CAMUS was invited to speak to the students of Columbia University in New York...
...From Oran I continued my journey to Casablanca from where I had been told I could embark for New York...
...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...
...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...
...As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929...
...nor the figure of the writer of the sum of his works...
...The gist of the speech was as follows: We were born at the beginning of the First World War...
...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...
...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...
...I suffered continual nausea and solitude in the face of these events...
...and he had indicated precisely where, according to him, this absolute lay: in the conscience, even if mute and stilled...
...We had recognized in each other the mark of fate—which was, I believe, the ancient meaning of the encounter between stranger and host...
...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...
...Their way of life had so little value...
...In none...
...They are nothing but relics mutely surviving time's erosion and history's disasters, like monuments of stone...
...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...
...Then came the Ethiopian War, the Civil War in Spain, and Munich...
...But it is in this very fragility— that 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...
...I was being chased from Europe...
...The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge...
...the man who, in questioning the world, questioned himself, and by this testified to his own vocation...
...Literary space, that trompe l'oeil that had been invented in the nineteenth 268 century to defend the individual artist's right to be indifferent, was broken...
...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...
...otherwise, be there one hidden untruth in a life, death would render it definitive...
...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 Pétain...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
