Les Neiges d'Antan

...But after Kate Millet et al, I read as part of a sisterhood, and what was exposed in this first book of Camus' is very sad The women he depicts, besides the dead mother, are beautiful, unintelligent creatures who move with a natural grace, have a certain kind of guile and are not to be seriously talked with because they are either stupid or alien...

...Fifteen years ago all the young artists I knew were a little in love with death-it was quite fashionable to be so despondent about the meaning of life that you put your head in the oven from time to time, envied Keats and Byion, and felt it a little crass for anyone to survive 30 I don't remember with any fondness that romantic indulgence, a kind of masturbation of the intellect m whose honor so much genuine affection was ignored or squashed I guess I just don't believe in philosopher kings anymore...

...Mersault's first mistress, Marthe, he calls "image", while she apparently finds that charming, it speaks of his inability to see her as real, as something other than a reflection of his wish He leaves her, of course, without ever having known her...

...The real grief and terror lies in the fact that human beings cannot really experience themselves as part of the cosmos, a star among billions in the dark night, instead they have toothaches, petty ambitions for their children, sneaking desires to satisfy perverse and ordinary appetites...

...How romantic to glorify fever, sickness and the rotting of cell matter...

...Fifteen years ago I would surely have found that murder splendid, a great act of retaliation against the bourgeois mentality of my own environment Kill a cripple who's just told you how much he wants to live and you've really moved m with Nietzsche, beyond good and evil onto a new plateau where life is amoral, like nature itself, and each man is entitled to try to soar above the others...

...This brief summary of the plot cannot begin to convey the ridiculous (in the ordinary, not the existential sense) ordeal of reading this short pretentious novel Yet as I write I have to stop and question the influence of age on criticism I am now creeping into the middle years and find myself tormented by a very different set of questions, uncertainties, than those that hovered over my late adolescence When I first read Camus I felt my life had been forever changed, that now I knew, really knew what meaninglessness was, what humanity could be, how isolation burdened the human condition I read The Myth of Sysiphus I too believed that the only possible dignity left to man lay in consciously recognizing the illusions that structured existence I thought Camus had made me wise and maybe he had...

...It is also now a new time for women, and I read differently than I did 15 years ago Then I totally accepted the fact that to enter the exalted rooms of high art I must identify with male characters, see the world from a man's view, an eager trespasser hoping not to be discovered in my disguise So I never thought at all about Hemingway's women, Fitzgerald's, Gide's, Proust's, etc I just assumed that if women were badly treated, so much the worse for them...

...Mersault wants to be a stone, to die a stone, and indeed he feels himself turning to rock at the exact moment of his death He welcomes this experience as a resolution to his human torments, his isolation I might once, in my own insufferable adolescence, have thought Mersault's death beautiful Today I am angry with him How stupid to deny that death is anything more than waste...

...The three girls whom he lives with m "the house above the world," m a kind of early hippy commune arrangement, remain muses for his inspiration, beautiful women like the figures on Greek friezes, each gesturing m some eternal woman-like way They are signposts along his metaphysical journey, not fellow travelers...

...Literature has always romanticized the consumptive It has long been the best way to die a little blood, a delirious fever in which true revelations come, and finally, peace The real blood and vomit of a real person on real sheets can never be a triumph of human spirit That is the crankiness of my middle age...

...These themes germinate m A Happy Death, an occasional sentence, a superb description give promise of the future But in the later pages a downpour of romanticism, religiosity, pomposity, and self-consciousness flood this early book, making it virtually unreadable...

...All this is not to deny the profundity and beauty of Camus' later work, or to ignore the occasionally perfect phrase or image even in this early novel Camus' sense of distance and space between people, his obsession with light and the way he outlines objects and gestures has a quality that we reexperience in the films of Bergman and Fellim, the paintings of de Chirico and Magritte...

...This, however, is not just a description of Mersault, it is an accurate picture of adolescence-of that terrible time before food is real food and sex is real sex and one abandons the search for meaning, replacing it with the various pleasures and pains of actually doing and being I suspect that 15 years ago I would have identified with Mersault and his preoccupations, his inability to find life connections would have echoed my own in a more holy and pure way...

...A sound, a movement are reported like ancient calligraphy at the foot of a huge monument, saying something to an unlistening eternity Yet when Mersault becomes aware of himself postuiing on the wide screen, as in his fevered and endlessly boring trip through Eastern Europe, I felt impatient, irritated with the adolescent assumption that all our gradiose imaginings are of extreme interest to others Mersault's self-dramatics even trivialize the murder that provided the funds for his trip Making off with a million dollars in a broken-handled suitcase is hardly a search for happiness (money buys time, time to sniff out your happiness) It is simple greed-understandable, human, but not very grand at all, not very abstract, intellectual, or existential...

...Mersault's wife, whom he really does not care for, was chosen because her body movements were similar to his and she was "fortunately" not intelligent No wonder he was filled with existential despair and loneliness He could talk with a doctor, respond to a fisherman, but never a woman-a woeful comment on our shared humanity but not, after all, philosophy Had the young Camus just liked women better, accepted them as people, he would have suffered considerably less existential torment...

...Les Neiges d'Antan A Happy Death By Albert Camus Knopf 224 pp $5 95 Reviewed by Anne Roiphe Author, "Up the Sandbox' and the forthcoming "Long Division" A Happy Death was Camus' first novel, written at the age of 23 He chose not to publish it, and used some of the material, even the name of his hero, in his later, far superior work, The Stranger Clearly the early talent is breathtaking The first 25 pages are magnificent, touching on all the themes that Camus eventually honed to a brilliant clarity of 20th-century truths...

...Mersault (spelled "Meursault" in The Stranger) moves in an isolated cold world in which the hot Algerian sun warms nothing-each human soul remains frozen, distant, doomed to making empty gestures against the perfect blue sky There is no good and evil, no Christian morality, only eternity, a search for self, for the meaning of things, an intense burning for life, and beyond those imposing ideas, a longing for mother, for a tenderness inexplicably denied...

...Each adolescent fears that he alone is unlovable, untouchable, and evil in his secret heart, and that loneliness and early death are his sad lot These things are true of Mersault, but love is not so impossible for all of us Somehow the touch is made, the protective walls are broken, and most of us he next to someone we love (at least for a time), hurt and are hurt m return, have babies, wrap arms around one another and share ourselves...

...Mersault, whose mother has died after a 10-year illness, holds a clerical job that daily obliterates his soul and keeps him m poverty His girlfriend introduces him to a cripple, a legless man who had once been her lover Committing the perfect crime, Mersault kills him, takes all his money and starts a search for happiness He immediately falls ill with pleuiisy and, after building a beautiful sanctuary by the sea that becomes his prison, his salvation, he dies, content...

...A Happy Death becomes ridiculous-though happiness is not to be found hanging like a whole pear on a tree, it is still around, like a breeze or a wind, moving through one's life at this moment or that But the young Camus works in Wagnerian tones Grimness is everything, no time to brush your teeth, pick at a blackhead, thumb your nose m the mirror Mersault, we are led to believe, died of a metaphysical plague Out of what are not such extraordinary thoughts in the average intelligent 15-year-old, Camus has constructed a philosophical novel-it put me in the mood for a good Marx Brothers movie...

...But in this book the young hero is so obsessed with his desire to find Life, to be aware of death, that he winds abstractions endlessly within his brain His passions burn him out without his ever having been grounded m any of the available human realities He is unable to make himself specific, have a specific life or death...

...Fifteen years ago I talked a lot about hypocrisy and existential choice-how much I understood of what I said I'm not quite certain Today I'm more practical because moral choice has become real to me, not a literary experience at all My country has turned rotten and kills each day I am a little corrupted myself, ideals no longer atract my attention It is enough not to inflict pain on anyone It is enough to find a little love-to give it when possible I have perhaps turned into the bourgeoise I so despised in 1957 My taste m art has changed I no longer want to talk or read about the abstract human condition-I want to experience it...