Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR CAMUS I was surprised to see that Ghita Ionescu's appraisal of Albert Camus (NL, November 18) o-mitted his latest and, I believe, greatest work, The Fall. Yet, The Fall reveals ideas...
...This is the cause and the meaning of his bizarre occupation of "judge-penitent...
...Philadelphia Walter Storey KUDOS The best of luck and good fortune in the coining year...
...Jean-Baptiste's progress from the illusion of purity and innocence to crime and incipient insanity is a. direct one...
...Yet, The Fall reveals ideas and seems to announce u. message—after all, its hero, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, is new John the Baptist who raises his clamor in the desert of our big cities—which transcend the main themes of Camus's earlier work...
...It is also Mumford who has said that every honest man ought to recognize in himself tendencies which, if unchecked, would lead to crime or insanity...
...Rieux in The Plague...
...Washington, D. C, Robert F. Kennedy 'Chief Counsel, Senate Government Operations Committee...
...Jean-Baptiste, modern man, Camus seems to say, has not reached the maturity of insight that integrity consists not in purity, but in the constant effort of self-restraint and the pursuit of virtue through an acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil...
...He is a most pathetic figure...
...This leads me to the fact that millions of American workers who find it difficult to get work at half this man's age arouse no effective social conscience...
...It may be premature unless we realize the abysmal depth of his self-contempt, which leads him to the fringes of insanity...
...It is true that in retrospect the hero of The Fall pours all the irony and scorn of which he is capable upon his "full life...
...Indeed, the fever which plagues Jean-Baptiste during his final conversation suggests to us the pathological character of his desperate desire for punishment—his hope of being arrested by the police—on the one hand, and his equally distorted will to domination—his wish "to be the Pope"—on the other hand...
...Our contempt for Jean-Baptiste would be presumptuous unless we recognized that the early, happy Jean-Baptiste stands indeed for modern man—and that most of us share some of the underlying assumptions of his existence...
...No contrast is more striking or instructive than that between Meursault, the hero of The Stranger whom Ionescu discusses in some detail, and Jean-Baptiste Clamence...
...Also, the application of label like "existentialism" becomes quite meaningless and futile in the case of The Fall and should not be used any more with reference to Camus...
...Yet, self-respect cannot arise without the consciousness of merit, and the merit of acquired virtue is the thing modern man is least keen about, since it destroys illusions about "natural," "innate" innocence...
...In this film, a man of 70 complains that he cannot find employment because of his age...
...Jean-Baptiste's considerable self-love is exclusively based on the conviction of his natural goodness...
...Yet, one evil touched on briefly in the current film Gervaise, adapted from an Emile Zola novel and brilliantly directed by Rene Clement, is extremely serious today...
...Responsibility and self-respect rest upon the possibility of and the right to a judgment of integrity...
...Jean-Baptiste is trapped in a conception of "goodness" as the absence or ignorance of temptation rather than successful resistance te it...
...If works like The Stranger or The Plague were an authentic voice of the decade of the Forties as distinguished from the works of Malraux or Hemingway in the Twenties and Thirties, The Fall may well be counted among the few truly great inquiries of our century into the human condition...
...While Meursault perhaps expresses the meaninglessness of life felt by particular generation in a particular part of the world, Clamence reflects the innocent optimism which is more characteristic of a larger part of modernity...
...While inadequate pensions are- a partial solution for employees over 65, we have done little to end the economic stigma and sanctions imposed on those in the middle years, or even those much younger...
...Chicago Gerald Stourzh AGING WORKER Many Americans seem to think that all major social reforms have been obtained...
...As Lewis Mum-ford, who perhaps of all contemporary American thinkers coimes closest to Caimus's ideas, says, "To recover the very habit of restraint, to subject every act to measure is the communal response we must make to the challenge of both physical and moral disintegration...
...When circumstances ("but there are always circumstances," he adds) shatter his image of himself, there sets in the corroding process of self-contempt, alleviated by the desperate expedient of universalizing corruption and, finally, setting himself up as judge, corrupt among the corrupt, yet purchasing the right to condemn by the repulsive bribe of self-condemnation...
...I always find your magazine of great interest and sincerely believe you perform a great service for this country...
...Yet, the hero of The Fall never ceases to repeat what a full life he has lived in the past, how important and respected a part of society he was...
...Yet, it may be premature and presumptuous for us to join Jean-Baptiste, as some critics have done, in ridiculing his earlier life...
...Jean-Baptiste, modern man, first denies the existence of evil and then universalizes it...
...In his stress on the reality of virtue and self-respect, not as a gift given by nature to newborn human beings, yet within the reach of human endeavor, Caanus has now come closer to the heritage of Greece than ever before, and he has taken his stand against those elements of our civilization, diverse and numerous, which have tended to obscure or destroy it...
...In an interview recorded in the New York Times Book Review, Camus has called self-respect the central value of those religious traditions which he honors...
...It is due to the impact of two quite diverse traditions upon our civilization: On the one hand, there is that powerful element of the Christian tradition which enjoins us to became like children, lest the Kingdom of God escape us, which stresses grace from above instead of individual merit, and humility rather than self-respect...
...On the other hand, there is that typically modern conception of man, born in the philosophy of the 17th century, which made the self-preservation of the individual the sole and sufficient standard for individual conduct, soon followed by the Romantic dogma of the supreme right to self-expression...
...Apparently this growing section of our population has no "right to work...
...One of these assumptions of modernity is the belief in the innate goodness or innocence of inan...
...Modern man's lack of self-respect is the central theme of The Fall...
...Les juges integres is the painting which Camus's hero hides in his room, while he desperately denies the possibility of judges of integrity...
...Since self-preservation per se is the ultimate, often unconscious standard, we are bound to fail if confronted with Jean-Baptiste's predicament: to risk our own life for another one unknown to us...
...Meursault is indeed pervaded by the feeling of futility and absurdity, and so, though at a higher level of awareness, is Dr...
...It is an indictment of modern man in general, not only as he lives at mid-century but as he has progressed toward his present state through at least two centuries...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 3
