Unresolved Enigma
KING, RICHARD
Unresolved Enigma Albert Camus By Herbert Lottman Doubleday. 731 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Richard King Associate Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College; author, "The Party...
...Indeed, if he can be said to have moved to the Right in the 1950s, the Algerian conflict, not anti-Communism per se, was responsible...
...The depiction of the ambiguous existence the French led under Nazi occupation is particularly fine, and demonstrates that there were fewer clear-cut heroes or villains in this period than one might think...
...Camus had fallen prey to some vague "nervous" disorder...
...His politics tended toward a vague sort of non-Marxist socialism and anarchism...
...Herbert Lottman's massive biography begins slowly—the sections on the writer's years in Algeria are heavy going —then picks up momentum once Camus arrives in France in the early '40s...
...To follow this course, however, is to miss precisely what made Camus such a sympathetic intellectual figure: He was admired because he attempted to forge an anti-me-taphysic and an ethic in a world where terror had become the norm...
...author, "The Party of Eros" Almost 20 years after he died in a car crash, Albert Camus remains an enigma...
...Susan Sontag has observed that his writings are about "the pathos of moral positions...
...It could be argued that Camus was hardly an original thinker, so his philosophy does not merit deep examination...
...For in his long rejoinder to Camus' attack on him and Francis Jeanson (who wrote a hostile review of The Rebel in Les Temps Modernes in 1952), Sartre charged that Camus was less an "atheist" than an "anti-theist," that his revolt was more religious than political...
...Yet a larger appreciation than we are given of The Fall—his finest work —is essential to any understanding of Camus toward the close of his life...
...An eloquent proponent of human solidarity, he was proud and formal and revealed little of himself to others...
...It is regrettable that this biography does not bring him to life in all his complexity...
...For instance, a central theme in Camus' writing is the problem of evil and the rejection of a God who allows innocents to suffer...
...Her husband, it is darkly suggested, bore "some responsibility for this and was unwilling to help the condition by changing his behavior...
...In the end, he chose his "mother," loyalty to place over the principle of pluralism...
...But Camus felt that whatever the social system, people inhabited a world full of misery, and this he refused to accept...
...The hero, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, observes that his own confessions of bad faith are ways of achieving a kind of inverted superiority, that by proclaiming how low he has fallen, he can regain the high moral ground...
...But with the onset of the Algerian War in 1954, he was confronted by a crisis: He was in favor of political, social and economic equality for non-European Algerians and backed de Gaulle's plan for a referendum, yet he could not support Algerian independence or accept the notion that the French pied noirs would have to leave after independence...
...and his struggle to reconcile the abstract principles of justice and freedom with a love of his birthplace—where his people were colonizers—was a moving one...
...Not all the inconsistencies surrounding Camus were personal or social or political...
...One can't help wondering how much his concern with the ineluctability of suffering was intensified by a life-long struggle with tuberculosis...
...Condemning terrorism and repression on both sides, he called for a truce and received no response from the French or the FLN...
...His ambivalence, his political and moral doubts, were representative of his era...
...Finally, Lottman forgoes any deep discussion or analysis of Camus' fiction...
...The novel was written in the mid-1950s, when he was politically isolated and having difficulty writing...
...She is a shadowy figure in this book, always returning to or from Algeria, or being sent away to the country with the twins while her husband stayed in Paris...
...Since Lottman does not establish the intellectual context of his subject's evolving political thought, the unsuspecting reader might think Camus was alone in battling Stalinists and fellow-travelers...
...His work seemed dedicated to discovering what it meant to be a "good" man, but at his death he felt at an artistic deadend and knew that many former admirers had come to doubt his status as moral exemplar...
...For instance, his prose style, which irritated friends-turned-enemies such as Jean-Paul Sartre, was spare, classical and austere—remarkably uncolloquial for someone with proletarian roots...
...A lifelong opponent of French injustices in Algeria, he never wavered in his belief that Algeria should stay a part of France...
...From a working class background, he was something of a dandy...
...If, as Sartre claimed, Camus insisted on carrying a pulpit around with him, this book saw Camus turn his moralizing against a figure who bore a definite resemblance to himself...
...In the 1940s he captured the imagination of metropolitan France, yet he never felt entirely at home there...
...In The Fall, he explored his situation...
...Lottman constantly drops hints about Camus' womanizing and alludes in several places to his long-term liason with actress Maria Casares...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien has argued in his study of Camus that the tortured moral casuistry of Clamence is related to Camus' doubts about his stand on the Algerian conflict...
...Lottman, despite his tracking of Camus' every move, is surprisingly reticent about certain areas of the writer's personal life as well...
...Like many non-Communist intellectuals, Camus pursued a "third way" immediately after World War II, somewhere between the Cold War camps...
...Albert Camus was a complicated man, far more interesting than the plaster saint he was once taken to be...
...Apart from a few perfunctory remarks on the "absurd," though, Lottman gives us no sense of this deep concern with the religious question...
...It is difficult to know from the scant information that is provided...
...Once a member of the Communist Party in his native Algeria, he became a firm anti-Stalinist after World War II...
...Camus simply never felt comfortable in the "free world" camp and refused to sign petitions drawn up by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, because he objected to its silence on injustices in the West...
...What was the illness...
...Then, near the end, we are told that Mrs...
...But there were many others, including Karl Popper and George Orwell in England, Raymond Aron (to whose Gaullist politics Camus objected) and Arthur Koestler in France, lgnazio Siloneand NieoloChiaromontein Italy, and of course, Hannah Arendt...
...The author is equally unilluminating in the area of philosophy...
...Most glaring is the neglect of Camus' relationship with his wife, Francine...
...Unfortunately, Lottman's account of Camus in the postwar years is shapeless and unrevealing, so that it never explains or resolves the crucial contradictions of his life...
...It just as surely reflects his sense of personal and artistic failure...
...he was always willing to speak up for unpopular and quixotic causes and for individuals scorned by more hardnosed radicals...
...Although he held no specific religious creed or political ideology, he was a dogmatic moralist in search of a morality...
...What, precisely, might Camus have done...
...Increasingly trapped in his public image, he even consulted a psychiatrist for feelings of claustrophobia and choking...
...Moreover, ignoring his religious aspect renders the objections of Sartre and others to Camus' philosophy of revolt nearly incomprehensible...
Vol. 62 • June 1979 • No. 13
