Difficult choices for France's most reluctant existentialist

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 2, 1998 | by Roger Kaplan

Camus was not a great political thinker or a brilliant writer, but he

had a passion for justice and freedom -- and a horror of extreme

solutions, which led him to oppose independence for his homeland.

Born in 1913, Albert Camus was

orphaned by the century's original

catastrophe when his father

was killed during the early weeks of

World War I. He and his brother received

stipends that enabled them to

stay in school beyond the primary

grades, and Camus was admitted to a

competitive lycee in Algiers, where

he majored in philosophy. There he

joined the Communist Party and supported

civil rights for the "indigenes,"

who represented nine-tenths of the

Algerian population.

But Camus could not equate civil

rights with independence. He sought,

against political passions that rose

throughout his adult life, a confederal

solution that would have guaranteed

the rights of each community within

France's North African colony. As a

result, Algerians still view one of their

best-known writers with suspicion.

The matter of Camus' opposition to

Algerian independence, as Olivier

Todd shows in Albert Camus: A Life

(Knopf, 434 pp), was far more complicated

than Algerian nationalists

were willing to admit. Indeed, one of

the book's virtues shows that nothing

in the life of this man was simple.

The idea of Camus as the James

Dean of French existentialism grew

out of his saturnine and reserved personality.

He was married twice and

was involved for years with one of the

most talented actresses of his generation,

Maria Casares, and he had a fair

number of passions on the side. With

his handsome looks and athletic build

(despite, or because of, his chronic

lung problems), he was too good for the

image-makers to pass up.

Thought to be a representative of

the existentialist generation, Camus

rejected the label as well as the philosophy

because it was at odds with his

need for absolute moral standards.

There was, of course, a sense in which

Camus was more of an existentialist

than Jean-Paul Sartre himself, as evidenced

by Camus' devotion to the

ideas of liberty and personal responsibility.

Sartre gave up on such notions

when he became, in his own way, a

Marxist and a communist fellow-traveler.

Camus' existentialist reputation

was due mainly to The Stranger, published

in 1941. It has become, over the

years, the all-time best-seller of the

Gallimard publishing firm. With its

famous first line -- "Mother died

today" -- his first novel was one of the

purest expressions of sincerity and

authenticity, virtues the existentialists

held in high esteem but rarely practiced.

Camus described it as a novel

about what happens to a man who

refuses to play the game -- refuses,

that is, to pretend to be something he

is not. Camus was the Parisian "literary

intellectual" par excellence; yet he

remained, in a certain way, the boy

from the distant province.

Camus was killed in a car accident

in 1960, 19 years after publication of

The Stranger. The manuscript he was

working on -- published two years ago

as The First Man -- was radically new

for him, even if it was unmistakably in

his style. It would be his warmest and

most passionate work. Many of his

writings, including The Stranger, use

Algeria as background, but they are

not specifically about Algeria, as is

The First Man.

Camus' writing remains fresh and

exciting today and, as Todd points out,

it is likely to retain its appeal for

generations -- in large part because it

reflects so intensely the modern difficulty

of reconciling one's "positions"

with one's personal situation. This is a

problem that has outlasted a long period

of totalitarian temptations, one that

led people to view morality as a matter

of expediency. Nearly a decade

into "post-Sovietism," we find that

moral expediency still is very much a

"lifestyle" and taking an ethical stance

"a judgment call."

Roger Kaplan, who lived in Paris at the

height of the Cold War, witnessed an

episode during which Camus prevented

an intoxicated but righteously outraged

Arthur Koestler from demolishing with

his fists a no-less-intoxicated Jean-Paul

Sartre.