📖 Albert Camus 📖
7 Things You Didn't Know
Author, "A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning"
Posted: 11/07/2013
Today, Albert Camus would have been 100 years young. The voice of the Nobel Prize winning author of The Stranger and The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel
remains as vital today as it was during his own lifetime. Raised in a
working class neighborhood of Algiers by an illiterate grandmother who
slapped more often than she spoke, and a partly mute mother who worked
as a cleaning woman, Camus confronted the absurd at an early age. Not
only did it pursue him through his youth - a serious soccer player, he
began to cough blood one day and found he had tuberculosis - but it also
struck France in 1940, when the nation collapsed in the face of the
German onslaught, transforming it into the collaborationist regime of
Vichy. After returning to France from Algeria in 1942, Camus joined the
Resistance and eventually became the editor of the great clandestine
newspaper, Combat.
From the liberation of France to the end of his life, Camus continued
to resist. Whether it was France's brutal treatment of the Arab and
Berber inhabitants of Algeria or the glaring social and economic
inequities in both Algeria and France, the institution of capital
punishment or the use of the atomic bomb, the practice of torture and
terrorism by both the French Army and Algerian nationalists during the
bloody war of independence, Camus resisted the ways in which we turn
fellow men and women into abstractions and we justify inexcusable means
by citing impossible ends. On his centenary, we could do worse than
recall his words on the duty of the writer: The nobility of our métier,
he declared, "will forever be rooted in two engagements difficult to
keep: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance against
oppression."
1) Camus was not an existentialist.
Smoking a
Gauloise cigarette over an espresso in a Parisian café does not an
existentialist make. Nor does an intense, but brief friendship with the
poster child for existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Camus always, and
rightly, reminded interviewers he wasn't part of that fashionable
postwar movement, largely because it refused to move. Rather than
offering an answer to its bleak diagnosis of the human condition,
existentialists instead embraced it--a response unacceptable to the
author of The Rebel and The Plague.
2) Camus was not French.
Strictly speaking, he was a
pied-noir, the moniker given to the mostly European colonists who
settled in Algeria during the 19th and 20th centuries and, with their
offspring, became French citizens. While Camus' father was from Bordeaux
(Camus however always believed he was from Alsace-Lorraine), his mother
was from Spain and Camus' roots dug deep into Algeria. A half-century
after Camus' death, Algerian writers and intellectuals are beginning to
agree: for the novelist (and member of the Academie française) Assia
Djebar, Camus is both a native son of Algeria and one of its great
martyrs.
3) Camus was not a philosopher.
Though he took a
philosophy degree from the University of Algiers--his thesis was on the
thinker he liked to call "the other North African," namely Saint
Augustine--he disliked the term "philosopher" as much as he did
"existentialist." His two "philosophical essays," "The Myth of Sisyphus"
and "The Rebel", were precisely that, essays: in other words,
provisional efforts to make sense of the human condition. As with so
much else in his life and work, the essays seek to pose questions, not
provide answers.
4) Camus was not a pessimist.
Sure, he liked to
remind us that there was no reason to hope. How could one in a universe
of "tender indifference" to our repeated demands for meaning? But this
was never a reason for despair. Think of the scene from "Annie Hall,"
where Woody Allen puts the moves on a young woman who, while staring at a
Jackson Pollock canvas, replies with an apocalyptic vision of the
world. Like Allen, Camus would have asked if she was busy tomorrow night
and, upon hearing she planned to commit suicide then, would pause only a
moment before asking if she was busy tonight.
5) Camus was not anti-American.
Which is not to see
he was pro-American. He was, in a way, a bit like a first-time visitor
to the Himalayas: their sublimity fills one with awe as well as dread.
During his one brief visit to New York City right after the war, Camus
was overwhelmed by the contrasts: the poverty of the Bowery and
privilege of the East Side. At the end of his public lecture at Columbia
University, it was announced that the evening's receipts, earmarked for
a charity, had been stolen. The audience spontaneously made up the
difference: an act of generosity that deeply impressed Camus. Yet, he
was also impressed by "the army of starlets who recline on the lawns
with their long legs crossed" he saw at Vassar. "What they do for young
people here is worth remembering." Clearly, Camus didn't think the
"starlets" themselves would bother to remember.
6) Camus was not always a novelist.
Like the writer
with whose style he has often been compared, Ernest Hemingway, Camus
began his writing career as a journalist. As a reporter for an
independent newspaper, "L'Alger Républicain," he wrote in 1939 a series
of searing accounts of the condition of the Berber tribes, whose
miserable lot was largely the result of France's indifference. He
continued his muckraking until the eve of WWII, when the authorities
were relieved to have an excuse to shut down the paper. His journalism,
like the rest of his writing, was marked by the conviction that whenever
we "replace a political problem with a human problem, we take a step
forward."
7) Camus was not George Orwell's twin who, separated at birth, was raised in French Algeria.
Orwell was taller and wore tweed. The rumor is, however,
understandable. Both men smoked relentlessly, both men were tubercular,
both men died too young and both men acted on their political
convictions: Orwell during the Spanish Civil War, Camus during World War
II. (Camus had also wanted to join the republicans in France, but his
tuberculosis prevented him from doing so.) Both men remained on the
Left, despite the very best efforts of the French and British Lefts,
mesmerized by communism, to disown them. Both men, with their moral
lucidity and personal courage, were essential witnesses not just to
their age, but remain so for our own age as well.
Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history at the University of Houston, is the author of
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“Charm is a way of getting the answer yes
without asking a clear question.”
Albert Camus
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