Prospect Magazine – Albert Camus

Saturday, December 20th, 2003

Paul Barker discusses Albert Camus‘s life:

Camus’s first and best-known novel, L’Étranger, written in his twenties, is a short moral tale, in the tradition of Voltairean contes, about a meaningless (‘absurd’) murder. Its flat short sentences have a permanent appeal to adolescent angst.

L’Étranger is one of the few novels I’ve read in French. “Its flat short sentences” didn’t appeal so much to my adolescence as to my limited French comprehension.

I wouldn’t expect these conditions to spawn a famous writer:

Camus was himself an outsider. Like the philosopher Jacques Derrida, he was Algerian-born. But Derrida was middle-class Jewish; Camus’s background was humbler: the white working class of Algiers. His father was a wine company foreman, killed on the Marne in 1914, eight months after his son’s birth. His mother, Spanish by origin, was illiterate and partly deaf. With her husband dead, she worked as a cleaner. Camus took his baths in a zinc tub, in a home without books.
[...]
For the settlers, in a province which was then administratively part of metropolitan France, Algeria was a Mediterranean California. Camus’s early writings are suffused with the charms of sun, sea and sand. The Algerians — meaning the settlers — were, he wrote in his early twenties, “a race without a past, without tradition and yet not without poetry.” The poetry largely consisted in “the cult of an admiration of the body.” Algiers was then a colonists’ city, with only 50,000 Arabs out of 220,000 inhabitants. Camus wrote dreamily about “the flowers and sports stadiums, the cool-legged girls.” When he began to write seriously he worried about keeping a “fragile” balance between work and sun-worship.

It’s hard to imagine Algeria as a Mediterranean California these days.

In 1957, Camus was offered and accepted the Nobel prize. He retained the frugality of his youth, never travelling first class on trains. For the Stockholm ceremony, he borrowed a dinner jacket; Francine borrowed a mink stole. At a question and answer session with students, he was asked about Algeria. He saiid, “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” From the left, Le Monde was delighted to give prominence to the quote.
[...]
Camus spent some of his Nobel money on a farmhouse in Provence, where he began a new novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man). In 1959, after Christmas in the farmhouse with his family, he wrote fond letters to his current mistresses — two actresses and a Balmain model — saying he’d soon be back. On 3rd January 1960, he accepted a lift in his publisher Michel Gallimard’s high-performance Facel Vega. The next day, after lunch, the car hit a roadside tree on the N5. Camus was killed instantly. In his briefcase were 144 pages of his draft novel, which was eventually published as he’d left it. It is about growing up as a poor white in Algeria.

I guess it’s ironic that an obsessively frugal, consumptive, existentialist writer died in flashy car crash.

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