The Notebooks of Camus

I read l'Etranger and also La Peste during my military service: as any college graduate of my youth times I had to be a private for six months. I was in my early twenties, enthusiast and eager to read all good stuff.

I found firstly A Farewell to Arms of Hemingway and I discovered my sense of humor: to dream at taking your farewell to arms when you have just entered the military. To be honest I did not appreciate Hemingway much by that time; it would take years to realize the greatness of his novels.

It was Malraux's La Condition Humaine that I greatly appreciated (and I would later appreciate it much more, after having the French version); and it was also Kafka's Der Prozeß; Malraux and Kafka seemed to me the two poles of my universe.

I found then Camus and his books became my companions, as I realized that he was the synthesis of the opposite visions of Malraux and Kafka.

His understanding of the realities of our subconscious, of the mechanics of our impulses, his engagement for human solidarity, his refusal of any intolerance... was he an atheist? In his Notebooks he would say, I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist. Well, he was actually an atheist refusing nihilism and looking for a sense.

I would say that he was looking for something to make sense the day after we establish that all illusions are dead: what remains beyond all illusions, beyond all systems and beliefs? What is the absolute, that remains valid regardless of our beliefs and engagements? His answer was: human solidarity and human tolerance.

I would find another answer after many years: Paul Tillich explaining that what we perceive as the death of God is actually the death of a culture; that we find God only after we become fully aware that anything is lost but God; anything, including the projection of God in our cultural universe.

Let's put it in other way. What is to be done in the Day One after the day our universe died? The answer of Camus: we remain to face it together. The answer of Tillich: after our universe dies what remains is the Universe; what dies is our conception about universe.

Well, there is now a question: what if Tillich is wrong? What if we find nothing after we lost everything? Will it remain solidarity and tolerance? Or only the bet of Pascal, with a very funny YOU LOST stamped on it as answer?

Any of us has her or his own response. Camus says SOLIDARITY; Tillich says HOPE. I believe now rather in the philosophy of Tillich, because it is positive (or because I'm now old); but I will admire the nobility of Camus's approach for ever. And I will be totally on Camus's side in his refusal to take sides.

The English translation of the third volume of Camus's Notebooks was just published and Richard Eder makes the review in today's NY Times. Here it is:
Albert Camus was one of the two pillars of postwar French literature. The other was Jean-Paul Sartre, his comrade in letters if not quite in arms (during the Resistance, Camus dangerously put out a clandestine newspaper, while Sartre stayed safely studying and writing). Then in the early 1950s, they bitterly split.Camus’s pillar stood in Paris, but in a sense it belonged elsewhere: perhaps among the Corinthian columns in North Africa’s Hellenistic ruins. He was a French Algerian, of course, but the point isn’t his provenance but his temperament. He was Mediterranean, a creature of sun and water, fierceness and the senses.

In Paris, with its cool symmetries, he was, to adapt a French saying, uncomfortable in his skin — the constricting ideological precision that Sartre and his fellow intellectuals fitted on him. They treated him as a marvel, and then when he rebelled against their leftist rigor, they condemned him.

This odd unsuitability, both of emotions and the mind, comes to life in the third and last volume of Camus’s Notebooks, appearing in an English translation (by Ryan Bloom) 19 years after they came out in French.

The split took place when Camus took issue with the absolutism of revolutions. Seeking to realize their ideals, he argued, they end up using violence and tyranny. It was an attack on Soviet Communism at a time when Sartre and his followers were becoming its increasingly rigid supporters.

They insisted that overt repression, however repellent, was the only way to fight the insidious structural tyranny of colonialist capitalism. One must choose, painfully. No we mustn’t, Camus rejoined: neither be killers nor victims.

In his Notebooks Camus excoriates the newly achieved revolutionary spirit, nouveau riche, and Pharisees of justice. He names Sartre and his followers, who seem to make the taste for servitude a sort of ingredient of virtue.

He mocks their conformism: cowardly, besides, he implies, citing the story of a child who announced her plan to join the cruelest party. Because: If my party is in power, I’ll have nothing to fear, and if it is the other, I’ll suffer less since the party which will persecute me will be the less cruel one.Camus writes more generally: Excess in love, indeed the only desirable, belongs to saints. Societies, they exude excess only in hatred. This is why one must preach to them an intransigent moderation.

A convenient refusal to take sides, as Sartre and his circle insisted? There was nothing convenient in Camus. He was closer to Milovan Djilas, once a hard-line Communist, then jailed by Tito, and in the end proclaiming his battle-won political credo: the unperfect society.

The most interesting aspect of the Notebooks is not politics but its personal substratum. Beneath Camus’s ideological quarrels is a deeper unhappiness with the critical bent of the Paris intelligentsia. Curious milieu, he writes of La Nouvelle Revue Française, whose function it is to create writers, and where, however, they lose the joy of writing and creating.

It is, in part, the Southerner’s discomfort with the North, with the centralization dating back to the Capet dynasties that drew France’s energies up to Paris. On a trip to Italy Camus writes: Already the Italians on the train, and soon those of the hotel as well, have warmed my heart. People whom I have always liked and who make me feel my exile in the French people’s perpetual bad mood.

There is an exultant feel of liberation — and some of his most beautiful writing — as he evokes Italy’s cities and landscapes, and recites the place names of Greece as if they were incantations. Of Mycenae at sunset:The space is immense, the silence so absolute that the foot regrets having caused a stone to roll. A train chuffs in the distance, on the plain a donkey brays, and the sound rises up to us, the herds’ bells rush down the slopes like a whisper of water.

He writes of his mix of happiness and depression after winning the Nobel Prize —frightened by what happens to me, what I have not asked for — and the angry attacks it provoked from the Paris left. He writes of his wife’s depression and his lovers (many). I don’t seduce, I surrender. Later he varies this to fit Don Juan, who, not surprisingly, fascinates him: I don’t seduce, I adapt.

He travels to his birthplace. Honeysuckle — for me, its scent is tied to Algiers. It floated in the streets that led toward the high gardens where the girls awaited us. Vines, youth. It was a memory that fought against politics. Camus could not put aside the reality of the French settlers. The vicious war between French forces and the F.L.N. — the Algerian nationalists — was his own civil war.

He writes to an Algerian friend, an F.L.N. supporter: You should not ignore the shooting, nor justify that they shoot at the French-Algerians in general, and thus entangled, shoot at my family, who have always been poor and without hatred ... No cause, even if it had remained innocent and just, will ever tear me from my mother, who is the greatest cause that I know in the world.

• The Madness of Sincerity
• Camus et Gallimard

(Le Parnasse des Lettres)