THE STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

On January 4, 1960, Albert Camus lay dead at age forty-six, next to the car that his friend Michel Gallimard had driven into a tree just south of Paris. In the trunk, unharmed, sat the manuscript of his nearly completed last novel, atop its first page the dedication he had scribbled nights before: “To you, who will never be able to read this book.”

That dedication was to Camus’s mother, who had scraped by as a cleaning lady in Algiers after the death of her husband in the opening days of World War I, when Camus himself was a year old. Mrs. Camus was still very much alive, but she would never be able to read the book because, as her son once told a professor who had inquired about his work, “Nobody around me knew how to read. Keep that in mind.”

It is worth keeping in mind. That Camus should today be among the best- known novelists in the French literary tradition was achieved against high odds: African origins, poverty, a short life, tuberculosis, and a fictional output of only five-hundred pages. Millions of students have read The Stranger (1942), the novella that put one critic in mind of “Kafka written by Hemingway.” French journalist Olivier Todd’s authoritative new biography — yen awkwardly translated, and chopped to half the length of its original French edition — shows that Camus was more than a fiction writer. He was perhaps the most influential essayist of his day, widely (if wrongly) viewed as a leading exponent of existentialist philosophy; a stage director, writer, and actor; a decorated hero of the French resistance; and one of the first intellectual renegades of the Cold War. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature — at forty-four, the youngest writer besides Kipling to get it. In death, Camus loomed over the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Thanks to Todd, we now have a very different idea of what he would have been like had he lived through them.

For all our tendency to think of Camus as French, he was rooted in Algeria. Apart from a short vacation, he never set foot in Europe until his late twenties. His passions were local soccer, local politics, and local women. He chose his favorite contemporary writers — Andre Gide, Henry de Montherlant, and Andre Malraux (all of whom he would later befriend) — largely because they had written evocatively about Algeria. When he won a university scholarship, he chose to study Plotinus and St. Augustine, partly out of an interest in metaphysics, but partly, too, because they were fellow Africans.

At twenty, Camus married Simone Hie, a modish morphine addict, only to divorce her when she began trading sex to doctors and pharmacists for drugs. He joined the ragtag Algerian Communist party (without, it seems, having much idea what communism was) and soon got thrown out for deviationism. That was the end of his illusions: By 1939, he would write that “everything leads us to believe that the Soviet Union is now an imperialist power.” Left-wing politics, however, connected him with both the theater and journalism, and Camus wanted to write. He was hired as the assistant to Pascal Pia, a French leftist who ran the Alger Republicain newspaper, and he might have stayed in Algeria had the government not closed it down.

Newly engaged to a piano teacher named Francine Faure, Camus emigrated in 1940 to a France on the verge of war, taking a job Pia had found him with the government-friendly Paris-Soir. He used his spare time to finish The Stranger in May 1940, just as the German tanks rolled in. Despite grumbling, Camus stayed with the paper even when it moved to Clermont-Ferrand, the new capital of Marshal Petain’s Vichy puppet state; even when it began to expel its Jewish employees; even when its editor became high commissioner of propaganda. Camus, by now married again, didn’t leave the paper until he was laid off, at which point he returned with his wife to Algeria to save money on rent.

It would be a long time before Camus made any sacrifices for political principle. When Gallimard, France’s most prestigious publishing house, accepted three major works — The Stranger, the play Caligula, and The Myth of Sisyphus, a collection of linked essays — Camus appeared unbothered that the firm had made a pact with the Germans to appoint a Nazi to edit its flagship magazine. When the novelist Raymond Queneau, one of Gallimard’s readers, wrote to say that a fifteen-page chapter in The Myth of Sisyphus on (the Jewish) Franz Kafka posed “local difficulties,” the author readily cut it.

Camus had been eager to return to France, not to resist but to build a career. He didn’t get the opportunity until his health failed. Camus had first spit blood at the age of seventeen, and a particularly severe tuberculosis would imperil his life for its remaining thirty years. Painful pneumothorax treatments — which involved inflating and collapsing the lungs repeatedly — incapacitated him for weeks, and bouts with Koch’s bacillus would leave him near asphyxiation and subject to panic and claustrophobia. In late 1942, he spent several months at a sanitarium in the Haute-Loire, where he came into contact with Protestant resistants active in the woods there.

By the time he arrived, without his wife, in Paris, The Stranger had become the bestselling novel of the war. What’s more, with The Myth of Sisyphus, it was backed by a remarkable explication of the principles behind it. Even taken together, the books do not form a philosophy. (Those who have judged Camus from the standpoint of academic philosophy have found him severely wanting, like Jean-Jacques Brochier, who in the 1970s wrote Camus: Philosopher for High-School Students.) But the books are not far from philosophy, either. Civilization offers advantages, but it never takes on the central problem of existence: that we are going to die. In noting the absurdity that results — an absurdity that increases as civilization progresses — Camus neither cowers before death nor whines about civilization. “The absurd,” he wrote, “is not in man . . . nor in the world, but in their common presence.” So far, he is in line with existentialism. But Camus differs from the existentialists, and from the surrealists and the “absurdist” playwrights for that matter, because of his claim that the absurd is not an endpoint, but a beginning — the beginning of a plausible moral system for those without God:

We have seen that men will conscientiously go about their work in middle of the stupidest of wars without believing themselves in contradiction. . . . There must be a metaphysical happiness in undergoing the absurdity of the world. Battles, games, unnamable love, absurd revolt — these are homages man offers to his dignity on a field of battle where he is routed in advance.

In Paris he was welcomed and feted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who were both having a good war, if not exactly an honorable one. Sartre had contributed to the collaborationist journal Comoedia, and de Beauvoir, after being fired from her university post for seducing a student, had taken a job with Vichy-government radio.

It was not until late 1943 or early 1944, a hundred-some days before the Allied armies landed in France, that Camus himself entered into active resistance, as editor of Combat, a clandestine newspaper. Although he was nearly taken in a surprise roundup while carrying proofs of the paper, surveillance seems to have been limited and the danger to Camus slight. Otherwise he had the time of his life. The wealthy Gallimards not only took him into their social set, they took him on as an editor (a job he would hold for the rest of his life, publishing Jean-Francois Revel and, posthumously, Simone Well). Most important, Camus wrote and directed a new play, The Misunderstanding. Although the play was a flop, he launched a life-long affair with its star, the Spanish expatriate Maria Casares, while Francine waited incommunicado across the Mediterranean in Algeria.

Herbert Lottman’s excellent 1978 biography of the writer had to reckon with the still-living Francine Camus. Todd’s does not, and his most stunning revelation is the extent of Camus’s womanizing. It was Camus’s central preoccupation, greater than politics or writing, and he would drop either of these to pursue new “talent.” Francine’s sister Christiane Faure described Camus as looking “like a little monkey,” but others compared him to Humphrey Bogart — a comparison that made him purr with pride — and the evidence is that women found him formidably attractive. Once he had developed a sexual relationship with a woman and had her in a position of abject dependence, Camus would renegotiate his responsibilities, explaining that monogamy was impossible for him. Romance turned him into a compulsive liar. Even by today’s decadent standards, Camus was goatish, predatory, and dishonorable.

Around the time he was mulling aloud to friends about a divorce, Francine was admitted to an asylum, where she spent her waking minutes mumbling about Maria Casares. Camus seems to have viewed her behavior as some kind of purely physiological fluke. “I found that her depressed mood had deepened into clinical depression, complicated by signs of anguish and obsession,” he wrote a friend. “I am very worried and I blame myself . . .” — For abandoning her? No — “. . . for not having taken the first symptoms more seriously.” When Francine attempted suicide, the course of treatment was several weeks of electroshock. Camus, meanwhile, saw a series of doctors himself, settling on one who prescribed for him “freedom and self-fulfillment.”

In 1956, Camus acquired a second mistress, the actress Catherine Sellers. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1957, Francine was able to ban Sellers and Casares from the celebration party. But by then Camus had taken a third on board, the mysteriously named Danish fashion model “Mi.” He spent the last days of his life writing letters to his three active mistresses, explaining to each how empty the lack of her made him feel.

In the years after the war, Camus finished his only full-length novel, The Plague. He was awarded one of the four-thousand rosettes the government gave out to honor those in the resistance, and used his kudos to good effect. With publication rights granted only to papers with noncollaborationist war records, Camus found himself one of the most powerful journalists in the country. He developed a taste for public polemic that would set him against practically all his friends.

The feud with Sartre that defined Camus’s last decade began at the apartment of avant-garde novelist Boris Vian. Camus stormed out after attacking philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty for defending the Soviet Union’s Bukharin show trials. Sartre defended Merleau-Ponty, and it’s easy to see how he would break with Camus over communism. With one foot still in Algeria and a resistance rosette of his own, Camus felt no need to adopt an apologetic leftism in atonement for France’s wartime collaboration.

Camus established himself as a critic of totalitarianism and hardened his rivalry with Sartre in his extended essay, The Rebel (1951), which began with a distinction between revolt and revolution. Revolt he described as a visceral reaction of refusal (a “no”); revolution was a mental state, a conscious construction of a new world out of man’s creative powers (a “yes”). This required a rigorous look, from a neutral stance, at existing institutions, and the upshot was what Todd correctly calls “a radically original questioning of revolution in general and the French and Russian revolutions in particular.” When Sartre commissioned a hostile review of The Rebel, Camus wrote that he was tired of taking lessons from one “who never placed anything but his armchair in the direction of history.” Sartre responded by attacking Camus for generalizing about Marx without having read him (a fair criticism, although an authority on Marx, the political philosopher Raymond Aron, would declare the two “equally incompetent” on the subject).

In the herdlike intellectual climate of Paris, opinion was virtually unanimous, even among Camus’s Gallimard colleagues, that Sartre had got the better of the argument. Camus started avoiding his Left Bank haunts and increasingly viewed the French intellectual world as corrupt. When Sartre attended a “peace” meeting in Prague just months after the anti-Semitic purges of Stalin’s “Doctor’s Plot,” Camus remarked that French leftists’ only work “is to carefully distinguish between good and bad concentration-camp jailers and good and bad anti-Semites.”

By the 1950s, Camus appeared worn out by tuberculosis, women, and politics. In 1956, he published his excellent novella The Fall, a dark monologue set in an Amsterdam barroom and loosely patterned on Camus’s state of mind after Francine’s suicide attempts. As Camus put it, the narrator Clamance shows the debilitating weakness of “a modern heart, that is: he cannot stand to be judged.” Todd shows us that Clamance is more autobiographical than we had hitherto expected, and properly praises The Fall as Camus’s best work of fiction.

At the time, readers missed how radical a departure The Fall was from Camus’s previous work. But thanks to the 1995 publication of The First Man, the unfinished novel left in the car at his death, we can see that Camus was at a turning point in his career as a novelist. Since he was a dogged reviser, it’s hard to say how good The First Man would have been. But it certainly shows him writing in his strongest idiom and seemed to promise a way around the fiction-writing impasse Camus had reached — indicating that more could have been expected from the writer had he lived into his fifties.

But Camus’s energies were so wrapped up in ephemeral matters that little else he wrote in the 1950s will last. His stance on France’s guerrilla war in Algeria disappointed almost everybody. Camus never held the mainstream leftist intellectual position that France ought to give up the colony and let the ethnically French pieds-noirs like his relatives fend for themselves.

But he was silent on the matter for long periods, largely for fear that his family would be targeted. At his Nobel speech, he answered a fanatical Algerian who asked why he hadn’t taken a stand: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.”

Camus urged broader democratic rights for Arabs and toured the country hoping to establish a “truce party.” He thought about Algeria as both a blue- collar native and Cold Warrior. Particularly after the Suez crisis of 1956, he feared that a Cairo-directed “Arab empire” would serve as a cat’s paw for Soviet expansion. When, toward the end of his life, compromise became impossible, Camus was slowly coming around to the hard right-wing position: The Algerian terrorists should be fought in an all-out colonial war.

Camus’s isolation and unpopularity among the French intellectual establishment persisted long after his death. “Civilization had been stuck on top of him,” Sartre said, “and he did what he could with it, which is nothing. ” When Herbert Lottman published the first full-length biography of him in 1978, it was viewed in intellectual circles as a work of resuscitation, even if Camus remained popular among rank-and-file readers and certain Cold War dissidents. What most infuriated Camus about Sartre and other leftists is that they used such popularity against him, taking the positive reviews he received in “bourgeois” publications like Le Monde as proof that Camus has been co-opted by the right.

Camus thought the accusation said more about the French left than about himself. “One doesn’t decide the truth of an idea according to whether it is left- or right-wing, and even less by what the left or right wing decides to make of it,” he wrote. “In fact, if the truth seemed to me to be with the right wing, I would go along with it.”

Had Camus lived, he would have done just that. By the time of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, his positions were drawing him more and more into agreement with the Catholic Right (he protested the Soviet intervention with Roger Martin du Gard, Francois Mauriac, and T. S. Eliot) and the philosophical Right (he protested the imprisonment of the writer Tibor Dry with Eliot, Ignazio Silone, and Karl Jaspers). “If the words ‘left wing’ no longer have much meaning,” he wrote, “it’s because leftist intellectuals in particular have chosen to be the gravediggers of freedom.”

As it happened, it was Raymond Aron who lived to carry forward the Cold War rivalry with Sartre and to gather the laurels when world events exposed the latter as a power-worshipping apologist for killers. Whether Camus would have had, like Aron, the intellectual firepower to continue to confront Sartre is not clear.

What is clear is that the end of the Cold War has destabilized a lot of literary reputations. In France, certain conservative writers have come back into vogue in the 1990s. Alain Finkielkraut’s book on the Catholic nationalist Charles Peguy comes to mind, as does Antoine Compagnon’s recent biography of the wholly forgotten liberal anti-Dreyfusard Ferdinand Brunetire.

One would think that those whose views were vindicated in the conflict would see their reputations rise, but the calculus is more complicated than that. Consider George Orwell: Does anyone believe Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm will be read at all once they cannot be read as ideological romans a clef? Something similar is happening to Camus. His reputation cannot stand on a fictional output of one novel, two novellas, and a handful of stories. His journalism rarely rose above the run of the mill, and his plays are bad. His brilliant essays will continue to attract readers, particularly The Rebel. But his image is destined to fade along with the ideologies to which he was an antidote. People will remember Camus as a hero of the Cold War — a brave critic of mid-century malaise and violence and intellectual corruption. In short, a writer who is owed part of the credit for the fact that we no longer need him.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.