Albert Camus: A Life - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Jean-Philippe Mathy

Olivier Todd. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York: Knopf, 1997. 434pp. $30.00 (cloth).

Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life is a biography for the 1990s, devoted as much to the private foibles of the man as to the achievements of the gifted writer and the trials of the public intellectual. In the preface, Todd underscores what makes his own version of Camus' life original, and long overdue: he has relied on previously unexamined material, from eyewitness accounts to unpublished letters. The man who wrote that "there is no true creation without secrecy" was indeed quite protective of his privacy. The avowed purpose of this new biography is to reveal some of the best-kept secrets of a tormented life, beset by illness and self-doubt. According to Todd, the death of Camus' wife, Francine, in 1979, made those revelations possible, since "decency imposed a certain reserve" while she was still alive.

Undoubtedly, Camus' numerous love affairs and Mediterranean machismo will fare no better with most readers than did Sartre's callous mistreatment of Simone de Beauvoir, once it became publicly known. In Todd's narrative, the writer's infidelities played a major part in Francine's decline into suicidal depression in 1954. Where Herbert Lottman, who wrote the first authoritative biography of Camus twenty years ago, charitably glossed over the whole episode, content with remarking that Camus "was not then or ever prepared to give up the way of life which could have been the primary cause or one of the principal causes of the trouble" (527), Todd is far blunter, and much more explicit: "All she [Francine] did was cry, sleep, and talk obsessively about Maria Casares, her husband's lover" (318).

Camus felt lasting guilt for his wife's ordeal, writing to Arthur Koestler's wife, Mamaine: "I have no gift for love, nor for suffering, and I wander around without knowing what I am here for" (319). Francine Camus could only agree. When her husband showed her the manuscript of The Fall, a thinly disguised autobiographical narrative replete with self-deprecating irony, she told him: "You're always pleading the causes of all sorts of people, but do you ever hear the screams of people who are trying to reach you?" (342).

The conflict between the private man and his public persona, between the exile and the prophet, is at the core of Todd's biography, providing a useful key to the inner torments of the artist. Camus's life was indeed a study in contrasts, if not contradictions. A proclaimed son of the sunny Mediterranean, a lover of surf, desert, and beaches, he spent most his adult life as a modern-day Rubempre, in cold, gray, rainy Paris, a city he both admired and resented. Orphaned at an early age (his father died during World War I), hungry for friendships and attention, more at ease with the little people of Algiers he knew as a child or the revolutionary workers he later befriended than with the rich and the powerful, he found himself overnight the darling of the literary Tout-Paris before becoming the favorite whipping boy of the left-wing intelligentsia.

Hailed by many as one of the most brilliant representatives of existentialist atheism, a label he rejected, Camus relentlessly searched for an absolute, as did some of his most memorable fictional creations, repeatedly yearning, in the midst of his struggles, for the "asceticism, silence and inspiration" of the monastic life (158). As a result, he fared better with Catholic humanists than with his former companions in the secular Left. Having heard the novelist speak to Dominican priests soon after the war, Julien Green noted in his Journal that "Camus spoke in a way that I found very moving, about what Catholics are expected to do in France in 1946. He was moving in spite of himself, without any effort at eloquence, it's his honesty that does it" (230).

Todd's book, rich in revelations about Camus' private life, is less original on the public icon, whose works and times have been widely documented. However, readers unfamiliar with intellectual and political France from the thirties to the sixties will be introduced to the major events of the tumultuous decades that spanned the writer's life: the effects of the 1936 Popular Front victory on Algerian society, the early rumblings of the anti-colonial struggle just before the war, Camus' involvement in the theater and the Resistance press, and the bitter disputes of the Cold War.

As Camus reached the apex of international celebrity and was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature, his star had already faded in his own country, at least among his peers. In 1952, Camus published L'Homme revolte (The Rebel), in which he denounced Stalinism, the post-Hegelian religion of history, and the whole tradition of Cesarean socialism in the name of a rebellious, idealistic brand of libertarianism. Sartre's Les Temps Modernes published a scathing review of the book. Camus responded in kind, declaring that he was tired of receiving lessons from critics who "never placed anything but their armchairs in the direction of history." Sartre made clear what he thought of his former friend: he was a second-rate philosopher. "I don't dare advise you," he replied to Camus, "to go back to Being and Nothingness, since reading it would be needlessly difficult for you" (309).