The Self Revealed

...Four months of solitary and ascetic life," Camus remarks at one point...

...For we have but one way of creating God, which is to become him...

...They also define a personal myth, a myth that is always eroded by self-doubt...

...I do not accept that they are right...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde," and a forthcoming history of the modern French novel This is the second volume of Camus' notebooks to be published in English...

...Yet even after 1945, when such considerations ceased to be important, the proportion of references to either personal or public events remains surprisingly slight...

...the ideas are never absent, and to readers used to the AngloSaxon tradition of fiction they may often seem over-obtrusive, but stylistic precision, the evocatively accurate use of words to present a view of life, remains the most important element in Camus' success as a novelist...

...Why am I an artist and not a philosopher...

...Their importance is therefore secondary...

...for example, it is only after the German occupation is over that Camus records any significant facts about resistance and collaboration, and then, one is led to assume, only because these observations are useful to literary work he is pursuing...

...They cover the period during which Camus' other major works-The Plague and The Rebel, and his plays, The Misunderstanding and Les Justeswere planned and written and during which he was most active in the Resistance as editor of Combat, and terminated his association with Sartre and Communism...

...It is clear that for Camus these notebooks were important primarily as adjuncts to the process of writing, in which he laid by fragments of raw material that might be useful (the proportion of quotations from other authors is considerable) and noted down the thoughts that came to him, often tangentially, while he was planning and writing his major works...

...It has more interest than its predecessor, which covered the years between 1935-42, partly because it deals with a more important stage in its author's life and partly because it is less a mere workbook, more a reflective journal...

...they rarely record what happened to the author, the day-to-day events which formed the pattern enclosing his mental life...

...it defines styles of life...

...The will, the mind profit from it...

...Interesting-and revealing to the scholar-as the Notebooks of Camus may be, they do not stand among his major works in the same way as, for example, the Journals do among Gide's later writings...

...That is the whole history of Christianity...

...But the heart...

...They are not diaries...

...While the Notebooks make little reference to actual experiences, they do display a great deal of interest in the self that experiences, and from reading them a kind of outline portrait of Camus does emerge, a sketch drawn with severe, ascetic strokes...

...True courage is passive...

...he asks...

...Hence "It is up to us to create God...

...In the Notebooks, it is the ideas that dominate, still unsubordinated to the discipline of a closely worked verbal pattern...

...One is therefore tempted to see the Notebooks as the emanations of a roving intelligence rather than of a personality, and to assume that they are likely to be of more use to the critic seeking the mental sources of the author's work than to the biographer...

...If this world has no meaning, they are right...

...it is indifference to death...

...Reticence, to an almost agonizing degree, is indeed the personal characteristic that most emerges...

...Of his own activity in the Resistance, of his career as editor of Combat, there are hardly even hints...

...Here, I think, we have the clue to an essential difference between the Notebooks and the other writings of Camus...

...Because I think according to words and not according to ideas...

...At the time, of course, there were prudential reasons for not making notations that might compromise the author or his friends in case the notebooks fell into the hands of the Gestapo...

...This, however, is not entirely true...

...They resemble the Journals in their self-consciousness, but they lack that impulse to outrage his own reticence which turned Gide's daily records into the major task of his later life...

...the only chastity is linked to a personal progress...

...if we could imagine ourselves deprived of the novels and plays to which we can relate them, they would give an incomplete impression of Camus' powers as a writer, whereas Gide's Journals, in any circumstances, would stand on their own as a major work of literary creation and a remarkable feat of imaginative self-analysis...

...But to link these Notebooks to a series of events is to risk misrepresenting their character, for their reticences are as significant as their statements...

...These Notebooks begin in the year The Stranger, completed earlier, was first published...

...To a great extent, in his fiction, this is true...

...almost everything has been rendered into abstract form, and one is always aware of a veil of ratiocination over the author's feelings...

...Such phrases mark out a personal ethic...

...They do not even say much about the great historical movements and changes which dominated this period...

...Let us go back to classicism, out of modesty...

...Observation of the physical world, and the direct recording of emotions, which fill the workbooks of so many writers, are rare indeed...

...And it is the picture of a style of life-aiming deliberately at the moderation to which Camus gave his own value in The Rebel-that emerges...

...And when, in the latter third of the volume, the manner becomes less laconically aphoristic, the result is not a greater intimacy, but merely a more fumbling tentativeness, a greater inclination to concentrate on quotations from others, on facts useful for work in hand (a whole series of notations, for example, on Russian 19th century terrorists which Camus found useful in connection with Les Justes), and to avoid such troublingly paradoxical passages as those in which Camus dealt with the problems of men without religion: "There is no objection to the totalitarian attitude other than the religious or moral objection...

...The morality of the twentieth century is positive," Camus observes...

...He is not the creator...