Camus' Clippings
Bree, Germaine
Camus' Clippings Notebooks: Volume I, 1935-1942, by Albert Camus. Translated from the French, with a preface and notes by Philip Thody. Alfred A. Knopf. 224 pp. $5. Reviewed by Germaine Bree At...
...Those readers who might wish to find, in these first notebooks, either intimate details concerning Camus' personal life or penetrating political disquisitions will be sorely disappointed...
...For, fragmentary though the notations are, they do afford a glimpse of the complexity, depth, and immediacy of the interests and concerns which, over a period of seven years, transformed the obscure young man from the working-class slums of Algiers into one of the outstanding figures of the Forties and Fifties: his determination to become a writer...
...In 1942, in jotting down notes, all dealing with war, Camus made some brief entries concerning Alexander the Great...
...In 1942, with the publication of The Stranger, he emerged as one of France's most promising young writers...
...Camus' stature, both as an influential figure during the two crucial decades between 1940 and 1960 and as a writer, has not ceased to grow, particularly perhaps in the United States...
...Naturally, rapid notes can be quite telegraphic in style and therefore somewhat ambiguous...
...The translation reads: "Alexander with . . . joins the Persians...
...his political opinions and commitments are reflected in the series of articles he wrote for the local paper, Alger republicain, and in his activity as director of an amateur theater-group combining students and workers...
...His first three notebooks, covering the period between May, 1935, and February, 1942, are the years during which he worked on his first brilliant works...
...Speaking of his poverty-stricken childhood, of the years lived in misery (which Mr...
...Reviewed by Germaine Bree At the age of twenty-one, Albert Camus started to keep notebooks, jotting down, at irregular intervals, disconnected remarks, ideas, observations, notes on his reading, plans for his work...
...I shall cite only two examples of dubious translation, one from the opening pages, the other from the last ones...
...Thody translates as "years lived without money"), Camus notes that the world of poverty is shut in upon itself, a sort of island in society, and remarks how easy it is to live there like a kind of Robinson Crusoe, as though one were totally alone...
...But it is not the translator's task to rewrite the text...
...The entry reads: "The Susa nuptials: 10,000 soldiers, eighty generals, and Alexander wed Persians...
...And in those years his occupations were many: He earned his living, completed a university thesis in philosophy, ran his Theatre de I'Equipe, adapting plays in which he also acted, started on his career as journalist, and published his first works...
...His first notebooks are really, as an English critic put it, only "clippings" from his workshop...
...He had occasionally allowed people to consult them and, although rather reluctantly, had had them typed up for publication in the interest of accuracy...
...his moments of doubt...
...Moreover, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, then of World War II, political events soon caught up with him...
...Camus did not cultivate a "confessional" type of writing...
...One of them recalls the Susa nuptials, when Alexander married the daughter of Darius, and his army, in a mass marriage, wed Persian girls...
...At his death there were eight such notebooks...
...But for the serious student the book has one grave disadvantage— the translation...
...The first three of these notebooks, published last year in France in a single volume, have now appeared in English in the translation of Philip Thody...
...There is no question at all that the translation of the Notebooks unfortunately needs revision...
...Readers who are already somewhat familiar with Camus' work and his life will find the Notebooks of great interest...
...his passionate sense of life...
...Anyone interested in something more than a general impression will be well advised to go to the French text...
...Easy to read and smooth, sometimes quite accurate, it also contains a most regrettable number of errors, misprints, interpolations, omissions, quite questionable so-called "interpretations...
...Thody, who has written a critical essay on Camus' work, has supplied a brief, well documented introduction besides a quite complete biographical sketch to set the notebooks in perspective...
...his refusal to become resigned to the seemingly inevitable routines of living of the white-collar clerk...
...There is, too, a kind of fascination in seeing, however fleetingly, his work take shape: never, as has too often been assumed, as a kind of demonstration of an intellectual theory...
...It is quite cheap to go there and play at being Robinson Crusoe," is the misleading English version...
Vol. 27 • August 1963 • No. 8
