Dedicated Camus
Friedman, Melvin J.
Dedicated Camus Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus (translated from the French by Justin O'Brien). Knopf. 272 pp. $4. Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman This carefully selected and...
...Camus has sober comments to make on a wide variety of issues...
...Despite the political bias of most of the essays, Camus is intent on defining the position of the creative writer and reinforcing his own position in the arts...
...But he has a clear commitment: ". . . the artist can neither turn away from his time nor lose himself in it...
...As Justin O'Brien points out in his skillful introduction to Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, this journalistic side is as essential to Camus' art as his fiction, playwriting, and literary criticism...
...Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, with its provocative title, offers us a code of artistic, moral, and political behavior...
...He insists on a middle ground—consistent with his voice of moderation throughout the volume—in which the artist scrupulously avoids the ivory tower and yet resists the temptation of "galloping around the political arena...
...The Algerian reports have a curious interest because of Camus' involved yet detached position...
...The subtle distinctions, the verbal tricks, and the clever considerations with which people still try to cloak the truth do not interest us...
...This essay was widely quoted at the time of the Caryl Chessman case a year ago and will always have particular relevance to any enforcement of the "death penalty...
...He dislikes Existentialism (one suspects the Sartrean variety) but respects it because "it represents a great adventure of the mind...
...He inevitably asks for moderation...
...He asks that we not be impatient with nihilism because it is "what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account...
...He can reject but always with a nuance of acceptance...
...We can easily accept the suggestions of a writer who, even in translation, expressed himself so gracefully and was so firmly committed...
...This latest Camus volume to appear in English has all the authorial fiat one can hope for, since the contents were carefully selected by the writer from among his Actuelles before his untimely death...
...We are now confronted with a Camus who can speak of himself as "the already-old journalist I am...
...In the Gallic spirit of "vive la difference," Camus suggests the central paradox of our time: "Then our differences ought to help us instead of dividing us...
...Equipped with the responsible role of the "litterateur," Camus can pass convincing judgment on the evils of the Nazi temperament, on the need for a "civilian truce" in Algeria, on the martyrdom of the Hungarian re-sistants and the Spanish government in exile...
...His solution would involve a happy coaimingling of Arabs and French—insisting on their differences as well as their natural ties...
...The Spanish Civil War, the Hungarian uprising, and the Algerian crisis are treated as successive stages in the same historical moment: "The slaughtered people are our people...
...It dates from the same period and develops parallel to his creative writing...
...Reviewed by Melvin J. Friedman This carefully selected and edited volume contains essays and public lectures dating from 1943 and carrying through some fifteen years of Camus' creative existence...
...it is an aspect prepared for by the philosophizing and moralizing of The Fall, The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus but without the same literary bias...
...He is at his most persuasive when he argues against capital punishment in "Reflections on the Guillotine" (which previously appeared in English translation in Evergreen Review...
...The Camus who emerges from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death is the spokesman for minority groups, the enemy of capital punishment, the friend of the exile...
...He cannot dismiss his concern for his native Algeria but manages nonetheless to judge impartially...
...What Spain was for us twenty years ago Hungary will be today...
...It gives us quite another side of the author of The Stranger, The Plague, and Exile and the Kingdom...
...As for me, here as in every domain, I believe only in differences and not in uniformity...
...The urgency and stylistic clarity of his philosophical tales and his plays are also found in the editorials Camus wrote for the underground newspaper, Combat...
Vol. 25 • May 1961 • No. 5
