About Albert Camus

...To be sure, the absurd world had already been evoked by Kafka with all his metaphysical allegories...

...The message to these young men came in The Plague and, partly, in The Rebel...

...The conflict between blind faith and human hope was present already in Dostoyevsky...

...Hence his taking up arms against the occupier of his country during the war, and his refusal to close his eyes to the Soviet slave-labor camps (which led to his estrangement from the gullible Sartre...

...his plea that France grant freedom to Algeria, and his stirring statement on the Poznan revolt (NL, July 30, 1956...

...after that, Camus lived with his Spanish-born mother...

...in Rumania and Hungarv, he is read secretly, as he was bv his compatriots during the Nazi occupation of France...

...After fighting in the disastrous 1940 campaign, he joined the Resistance and became editor of its most popular clandestine newspaper, Combat...

...Some weigh unfavorably his meager output of novels, plays and essays against the abundant, professional and pugnacious philosophical works of some of his existentialist colleagues, above all Sartre...

...But others have come to believe that even his apparent deficiencies add to his real strength...

...They also feel that his grave, level voice may pass unrecorded in the noisy literary marketplace of today, where only exceptional intensity of persuasion, such as Graham Greene's, or power of emotion, as in Tennessee Williams, can carry a message...

...By now, of course, this "new generation" has been examined from every relevant angle by pedagogues, psychologists and sociologists...

...His intense preoccupation with the main human problems, combined with constant re* examination of his own stand on public issues, has made Camus an outstanding example of integrity among contemporary writers and thinkers...

...Camus believes that: one can: the Christian existentialists oppose him...

...A new man with a new philosophy of life and, above all, with new psychological reflexes has thus been introduced...

...Further...

...not yet 30 years of age and not interested in political power, nevertheless demand a share in what they imagine too be the privileges and the luxury of the ''established...

...Novels and plays have recently voiced, in a peculiarly self-pitying tone, the frustration of certain scholars and artists who...

...But, insofar as it has any ideological implications, it can hardly reach a higher plane without exploring the broad paths opened up by Camus...

...Young Colin Wilson does pay homage to this austere master, both in the title of his book, The Outsider, which is virtually an adaptation of The Stranger, and in the references he makes to the latter...

...But when Camus reported the crime, trial and punishment of his hero, Meursault, the man who had killed someone and gone through life in a state of inborn oblivion, literature made a contribution to the culture of the present generation comparable in its prophetic insight to that which it made for the two previous generations through Stendhal's Julien Sorel and Dostoyev-sky's Raskolnikov, two other such heroes depicted by their authors at the height of their mutual misunderstanding with society...

...Camus's solution of service in humility and lay holiness is, in this relative sense, a return to the Christian virtues...

...Thus, this very respectable but not munificent award seems almost to have been predestined for this very respected but not best-selling author...

...Camus's father, a French agricultural settler, died fighting in World War I when his son was a year old...

...He lacked both fear and courage, passion and property...

...He supports those ideological movements which try to add to the insufficient joy of human life today, and he opposes those which destroy for the sake of destroying or deprive human beings, on whatever pretext, of the limited freedom they already enjoy...

...For Camus, too, the just cause lies in its means and not in its alleged purposes...

...A Western thinker long active along these lines has just won the Nobel Prize...

...They feel that his unadorned truth wears better than ponderous ideologies...

...He wants a revolution which will be "in life's favor, not against it...

...He joined the Communist party in 1934 and resigned a year later...

...No, father," says Rieux in The Plague...

...And I shall refuse till I die to accept this world where children are tortured...

...and that he has aimed primarily at, and achieved, a unique purity of thought which, in In our October 7 issue, Thomas P. Whitney surveyed East European strivings for a new, realistic humanism...

...Though his name stands high on the Soviet Index Expurga-torius, his appeal has proved stronger than the authorities suspected...

...In Poland and Czechoslovakia, he is read openly...

...The world in which I live disgusts me," he said, "but I feel complete solidarity with the men who suffer in it...

...His books, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, were published with enormous success, and his record in the Resistance became widely known...

...Can one be a saint without God...

...both aim at influence rather than success...

...He was egocentric but unambitious, voracious but phlegmatic, aware but blase, amoral but frugal...

...Camus's followers are young intellectuals or humanists throughout the world, but mostly in Europe—including Eastern Europe, a significant aspect of his influence about which I will have more to say...

...This leads Camus also to oppose inhuman revolutions and states based on any infringement of human rights and dignity...

...Finally, he is a symbol of the Resistance, of the fighting intellectual who luis dedicated himself to the task of achieving independence and dignity...

...In Anglo-Saxon countries, existentialism tends to assume unexpected colors of social inferiority complexes and great concern with money...

...Both are discreet and distinguished...

...It was, Camus contended, man himself who was being changed, for better or for worse...

...Compelled by tuberculosis to give up his university studies, he spent two of his formative years in forced meditation upon the human condition...

...Finally, his plea for fulfilment through "human brotherhood" and "lay holiness" gives him a raison d'etre with which more severe forms of existentialism would not provide them...

...I have another idea of love...

...Politics must submit to these essential truths...

...Also, if less enthralled than their elders by the idea of uncompromising freedom of the individual, they do find in his doctrine of the "rebel" many of the negative reasons for which they themselves resist political or any other kind of mass-conditioning...

...The more despair one feels about the absurdity and injustice of the world as it was shaped and as it is accepted by Christians, the greater the love for men...

...Published in 1942, The Stranger is not only one of the earliest but still one of the deepest incursions into the Weltanschauung of the mysterious youth which, since the end of the Second World War, has baffled parents and educators everywhere...

...Here we present an overall approach to Camus and his work by Ghita lonescu, a Ril-manian-born intellectual who now writes in London and New York...

...Camus believes in the unity of the spirit of revolt: Man must in his life be in a situation of revolt...

...This is the only concrete problem which I know of today...

...Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, four years to the day before the Bolshevik Revolution, which was to attract as well as repel him and thus forced him to define his own creed and take his own stand...

...But Camus brought in the man who was to live in the absurd world...

...He must demand and fight for justice to be given to him, not as an individual, but as a man among other men, on this earth, the land of men...

...But his was the era in which the European spirit was rising against religion, leading to the Nietzschean quest for superman, which in turn led to totalitarianism...

...that he deliberately limited himself to morality as against metaphysics, politics or art for art's sake...

...Camus's influence is spreading rapidly among the young intellectuals of Eastern Europe...

...Camus's exact stature among today's writers and thinkers still eludes us...

...After the Liberation, Camus's reputation was born...

...I say "partly" because I find Camus more at ease in novels than in treatises, where a sort of heavy German philosophical style tends to obscure the lucidity of his ideas...

...He offers the young Eastern European intellectual the post- and not simply the anti-Marxist solution...

...It spoke of reconciliation with the godless world through love of men and through dedication to this love...

...Unlike his direct predecessors, the young men of the Thirties whose thirst for life, adventure and revolution had been celebrated by Hemingway and Malraux, the "stranger" exuded boredom and indifference toward a world which seemed to him irremediably absurd...

...This helped mold his thinking as a young Frenchman faced with the daily problems of the decline of colonialism and with the manifold aspects of human rights...

...This can hardly be described as a philosophy of life and might better be placed in the standard-of-living category of contemporary problems...

...Perhaps his most widely discussed pronouncements have been that in 1952 on the incompatibility between human ethics and Communism, uttered during his polemic with his existentialist Pollux, Jean-Paul Sartre, then still an ardent fellow-traveler...

...This also partly explains why the relative youth of the latest recipient did not occasion more comment...

...He was born in Algeria, where he spent most of his life up to the outbreak of World War II...

...For him, a true artist and intellectual must reject the "society of slaves...

...If Camus's influence continues to grow in Western Europe and the United States, it will surely broaden horizons and shake the sterile selfishness of those disgruntled young intellectuals now generally known as "the angry young men...

...These young people find in his work a lucid interpretation of what they now know to be the maladjustment of their own generation in this world where they feel themselves to be "strangers...

...Like them, he strives toward a truth which combines social justice with political freedom and denounces the use of Pavlov's conditioned reflexes as a means of ruling men...

...the opinion of those who can be called his followers, is the rarest virtue nowadays...

...It would lean first of all on the immediate realities, those of the crafts or those of the villages where one can find the true human being, the living soul of things and of men...