Crumbs from Camus' Table

...Even when he happens to be more explicit, Camus remains quite uncritical...

...Actually, this whole issue of Cahiers du Sud may prove to be the source of many of the ideas that Camus then began to develop in his own activities in Algiers as a promoter of local "little theater" activities...

...It tends, indeed, to suggest that Camus may have been gifted with the kind of violent sexual potency that sexstarved society women and homosexuals sometimes seek among "rough trade" garage mechanics, and that assures success as a pimp to the Maltese in London's Soho underworld and to the Corsicans and North Africans in Paris' tenderloin districts...

...Less comical examples of phony profundity abound throughout these pages: "At Athens, there was a temple consecrated to old age...

...On the subject of ancient Greece, for instance, Camus can, unintentionally, be quite funny: "The grotto of Aglauras on the Acropolis...

...Everything concerned with the theater...

...Earlier this year, though, the French critic Jean Cau had already shocked most readers of the Paris weekly L'Express by somewhat peevishly pointing out how shallow Camus' "philosophy" can be, how cheap his pathos that passes for profundity, how absurd it is that he, rather than many a worthier or more mature writer, should have been awarded a Nobel Prize at such an early age and on such relatively slim merits...

...a prisoner of his own anxieties, he is incapable of communicating these problems to us or of feeling any real interest in the problems of others...

...In the over-sophisticated French literary world, he certainly owed much of his sudden success to his being a kind of barbarian—in fact, to his background as a football-playing, culturally underprivileged "poor white" Algerian-French slum child...

...One has visions of Camus prudishly trying to clothe the Discobolus in a grotto, and thereby deserving Samuel Butler's comment: "Oh God, oh Montreal...

...The company on tour at Bordjbou-Arreridj...

...Presentation...

...More often, though, Camus refers to his own boredom and listlessness, to his anxious feeling that he was missing something essential in life (which seemed to him incoherent or absurd), or in the writings of others (which struck him as pointless...

...Reading Julien Green's Journal, he finds that Green has recorded some of his dreams, and remarks: "I always find this kind of thing boring...

...Or: "Men have not been sufficiently aware, in politics, of how some kinds of equality are enemies of liberty...

...Naked Greek statues are our invention...

...This sometimes leads Camus to be absurdly paradoxical...

...In a biographical appendix we are told that Camus, in 1934, "joins Communist Party" and "works on Arab question...

...Caligula...

...But, he adds, a writer who, like himself, remains isolated or immured in an obscure language or literature and has thus failed to gain the favor of the international reading public, might well write works of real significance and still find no echo...

...But I was in the ranks of the Barbarians...

...The international competition for publication of extracts from these Notebooks among status-seeking literary journals had indeed been extreme...

...Among those whom we neglect, Marianne Moore, Djuna Barnes and Laura Riding surely deserve more attention than the somewhat wistful lipservice that a few critics from time to time pay to their uncompromising talents...

...Even his physical appearance, revealed to us in a photograph displayed on the jacket of this book, stresses his tough and tired appearance: that of a chain-smoking underworld character in a neo-realist movie...

...Minerva's statue, stripped bare of its clothes once a year...

...1 mention this point only because the translator of the Notebooks has neglected not only to refer to this issue of Cahiers du Sud in his otherwise ample footnotes but also failed to refer back to Kyd's original text, Translating the quotation into English from my French version of it...

...Find the productions again...

...Thus we either absurdly overestimate or shockingly neglect our few writers and artists whose minds and works still display any originality...

...Be ail that as it may...

...But nowhere in these Notebooks does Camus observe a similar relationship in his native Algeria between the equalitarian oratory of his own class of "poor white" colons of European extraction and the economic exploitation of politically under-privileged Arab manpower...

...Should we now praise Camus' Notebooks as masterpieces of some new kind of literary Pop Art...

...Yet the Notebooks reveal no awareness of the political and social problems that such preoccupations must necessarily suggest to a sensitive and inquisitive mind...

...Encounter and its sister-publications in German, Telugu, Malayalam and what-have-you proudly won the day some months ago when they offered the best of this mediocre prose to their respectful readers, as if mere crumbs from so notoriously rich a table were the true caviar of contemporary writing...

...Camus seems, moreover, to have attached enough importance to his most commonplace or least coherent thoughts to note them and preserve them as veritable memorabilia...

...Among the overrated, on the other hand, Albert Camus already belongs, along with Ernest Hemingway, in the category of those about whom he himself, in these very Notebooks, has said: "A writer's death makes us exaggerate the importance of his work...

...Many of the more explicit passages turn out to be first drafts of individual paragraphs in The Stranger or The Plague...

...Translated with slavish gallicisms into colorless and humorless English, these incoherent diaries are now presented to us by their editor and publisher in a spirit of awed reverence which precluded any cutting of the numerous passages in which even the author's widow and his best informed French commentators had failed to detect any meaning...

...Gertrude Stein wrote that kind of thing more consistently...

...which he had read in a forgotten article that I published some 30 years ago in a special issue which Cahiers du Sud, a Marseilles periodical devoted entirely to Elizabethan drama...

...Special number of Rivages on the theater...

...Obviously, our publishing industry and a majority of our critics often conspire to foist on us as works of genius the by-products and the waste of the literary activities of those who already enjoy a great reputation, however undeserved...

...On the contrary, as one reads his monotonously incoherent or confused jottings, one is constantly shocked by the dazed quality of the author's preoccupation with his personal problems...

...In one passage Camus quotes my own French translation of a passage from one of the major scenes of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy...

...Probable that all statues were similarly clothed...

...And I thought of the entry of the Barbarians into the Eternal City...

...Here Camus has probably hit the nail on the head...

...And the American publication of Notebooks 1935-1942 can only add grist to the mills of the few lucid critics who have failed to be completely blinded by the hysterical acclaim and publicity against which Cau was protesting...

...For these unfortunate Notebooks frequently contain no more than the undistinguished and confused ruminations of a much overrated thinker...

...Somewhere in his splendid but shockingly neglected Diario, the Portuguese poet Miguel Torga remarks, after reading a particularly absurd passage of André Gide's Journal, that a famous man writing in a major language will be praised even for his nonsense...

...Children were taken to visit it...

...If one tries to read these Notebooks at all attentively, one must inevitably feel the same kind of frustration...

...We may still have to wait many a year before being offered an American translation of as important a spiritual and intellectual autobiography as Torga's Diario, or before the magnificent autobiographical writings of Cesare Pavese achieve the same kind of popularity as the following pearls from the pen of Albert Camus: "Mersault...

...In Greece, there were free men because there were slaves...

...This does not, however, prevent Camus from likewise recording one of his own dreams: "I dreamed that we entered Rome as triumphant conquerors...

...Little can be said in favor of these Notebooks, except perhaps that some parts of them may now serve as source material to the authors of doctoral dissertations on the genesis of a few fragments of Camus' more important writings...

...One might well protest against such violation and desecration of the literary remains of the dead, were it not stated in the introduction to this book that, although these diaries "were not originally intended for publication," Camus himself had "had a typewritten copy made of the first seven notebooks, and corrected it with the obvious intention of eventually allowing these to be published...

...All too often, he shows himself to be a pretentious and confused middle-brow, a kind of dreary caricature of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet...

...Reviewed by EDOUARD RODITI Author, "Dialogues on Art" We seem more and more to be living in an age dominated by the flim-flam-flummery of fads, fashions and fan cults, and deprived of any objective critical standards...

...The Mirabel garden in Salzburg...

...Commentary on Miquel's plan...

...But our failure to appreciate their significance as the "spiritual and intellectual autobiography" which we are told they constitute does not necessarily mean that we are similarly numbed or likewise missing the point of our reading or of our own more direct experiences of life...

...Nowhere, for instance, have I seen anyone in recent years suggest that Salinger may owe his monologue technique of fictional narrative to the garrulous old Doctor in Nightwood...