A Spokesman of His Times
COSMAN, MAX
A Spokesman of His Times Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. By John Cruickshank. Oxford. 249 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, “Commonweal,” “Arizona Quarterly” IN A WORK on...
...This reality is omnipresent in Camus’ works—whether in early ones like Noces, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, The Plague, Caligula, or in those of his maturity...
...It is a presentation which amply justifies Cruickshank in his conclusion that Camus is both “a spokesman and symptom of his times” and “a novelist and dramatist who is deeply concerned to understand man’s nature and his place in the world...
...If he believes something is unsatisfactory he names it...
...Reviewed by Max Cosman Contributor, “Commonweal,” “Arizona Quarterly” IN A WORK on capital punishment on which he collaborated with Arthur Koestler...
...John Atkins, he might well have built Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt about it...
...Cruickshank is a worker in the best pragmatic English tradition...
...And if John Cruickshank were biographically minded like his fellow Englishman...
...As a result he can see the suitability of “plague” as a symbol for the Occupation but still comment on its lack of pertinence for moral dilemmas that were involved...
...If he thinks Camus is consistent he says so...
...An additional irony, of course, is that our narrator was no less destined, though on a philosophical level, to repeat the experience described...
...Not unexpectedly also, it is a presentation which has a great deal to offer not only to new readers of Camus but to old ones as well...
...Camus says something poignant about his father...
...Cruickshank applies himself in this spirit to the host of themes that exercise Camus—the isolation of the individual, the hostility of nature, the decline of traditional absolutes, the failures of Marxism, the urgencies of absurdity, revolt, evil, atheism, paganism and moderation...
...In due time the amateur penologist returned home horror-stricken, violently sick...
...For when he in due time went forth to the raree show provided for his generation, it did not take long for him also to return horrified, sick at the discovery that behind the phrases the reality still was death...
...The result is as elaborate a lectorial exegesis of Camus’ ideas and their significance for our times as we are likely to get...
...He achieves a lucid, ideational presentation of a man who is torn between a love of life neo-Grecian and Mozartian, and the necessity of living it according to values that, to adapt an outcry of James Joyce’s, must be forged anew in the smithy of his own soul...
...He had just discovered,” Camus goes on, “the reality which lay behind the high-sounding phrases which disguised it...
...Or, when he deals with more human matters like the quarrel between Camus and Sartre, he can accept it as something personal and yet make us understand it as a coming to grips of forces in a land where writer and ideological stand are inseparable...
...The three main sections of Albert Camus—”Revolt as an Attitude to Life,” “Revolt and Politics” and “Revolt and Literature”—analyze and interpret the elements of that stream of intellection which to Cruikshank, as in varying degree to his predecessors, is the raison d’etre for a study of Camus...
...It seems that the worthy gentleman, himself destined to a cruel end (he died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914), went with some others to witness the execution of a man for whom, as the saying had it, “the guillotine was too good...
...The Rebel, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, The Just Assassins, or even in his adaptations from Dostoevski and the like...
...Cruickshank’s introductory chapter is both a prelude on the nature of Camus and an extended account of his progress from slum boy in Algeria to mentor of a generation in France...
...Incidentally, The Road to Wigan Pier was a Left Book Club publication in 1937 and there is every reason to believe that Camus knew of it by 1939...
...But being the university lecturer that he is, he has very properly elected to work in his own sphere...
...But comprehensive as the recital is—and there are details as specific as Camus’ horror of cockroaches or his reading of Gide, Malraux and Montherland among others —inexplicably there is no reference to the relationship that must exist between his oft-referred-to expose of social conditions in the Kabylia district of Algeria and George Orwell’s earlier survey of underprivilege in the north of England...
Vol. 42 • November 1959 • No. 44
