ALBERT CAMUS

Few modern authors have risen to international fame so quickly or from such a slender book as Albert Camus, whose novel The Outsider (as L'Étranger is commercially translated in English - somewhat, I should imagine, to Colin Wilson's literary chagrin) established his reputation as a significant writer virtually overnight, but whose subsequent career was to prove both disappointing and short-lived. Of all modern French authors, Camus was arguably the most dilettante, the one who least wanted to dedicate himself exclusively to writing. But as though to compensate both himself and the public for this (a shortcoming in the eyes of all true professionals!), he was one of the least spontaneous, impulsive, or technically slapdash writers, a man who worked with a craftsman-like respect for stylistic details, who considered himself the heir to a long tradition of belles lettres and had no ambitions to outdo anybody in technical innovation or thematic radicalism. Indeed, so much was this the case, that he may justifiably be regarded as one of the most conservative of modern French writers.

Of humble origins, Camus had a proletarian respect for hard work, as also for the work-a-day world. To live in an 'ivory tower' of literary creativity, like Proust or Gide, was not for him. He needed regular contact with the common man, needed to feel a part of the everyday world of fixed routine for a fixed salary. He was temperamentally a realist rather than a romantic, and he wanted to create a realistic literature, without romantic pretensions. That he did so in addition to being a journalist, an editor, a printer, a member of the Resistance and one or two other things besides ... is undoubtedly one of the reasons why his literary work wasn't all that prolific. Another reason lies in his technical fastidiousness. Then, too, we must not forget the fact that he succumbed to an early death as the result of a car accident. But taking the first two reasons into account, we have an explanation, at least in part, for the slender nature of most of his publications - the longest not exceeding 250 pages. I alluded to the slenderness of his first novel at the beginning of this biographical sketch, but his last published novel was even more slender - a mere 100 or so pages in length. Clearly, no major novel can be produced by a man whose works barely exceed a hundred pages! Camus, for all his technical fastidiousness, was only to write one novel that came anywhere near being a major one - namely The Plague.

Of course, slenderness of volume isn't by itself an obstacle to literary merit. On the contrary, it can even be a contributory factor, albeit one dependent on the type of work being produced and the epoch in which it was written. A bourgeois/proletarian novelist is entitled to reduce the length of a novel to something appropriate to an age of spiritual expansion and material contraction. But if he does so on bourgeois terms, with a conservative thematic and technical bias, then he is simply producing a short bourgeois novel, and such a novel is unlikely to be a major one! Camus, for all his merits, wasn't a major novelist. Neither, for that matter, was he a major essayist, short-story writer, or philosopher, though the latter arguably ranks higher than his fiction. If he approximates to being a major anything, it was arguably as a playwright, though even here he was far from prolific, and one of his best-known plays was simply an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed. Even as a dramatist, he would have to take second-place to his compatriot and exact contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Granted, then, that we are not dealing with a major novelist, the question remains to be asked - what kind of a writer was Camus? I have already said that he was both technically and thematically conservative, which doesn't signify praise, and must add that he was ideologically conservative as well, even reactionary on a number of counts, not least of all political. If he became a communist during the 1940s, he most certainly developed into an enemy of communism in the following decade, producing, with The Rebel, one of the most reactionary philosophical works of his time, which led to a quarrel with Sartre who, while not a card-carrying communist, was moving towards the Extreme Left. Like Arthur Koestler, Camus seems to have lost his faith in Soviet Communism owing to the brutality and oppression it entailed, not only in the Soviet Union but, following World War II, in such Soviet-controlled countries as Poland and Hungary. The freedom of the individual was a major theme of The Rebel, and Camus seems to have felt that no cause, no matter how well-intentioned, justifies the coercion and oppression of the individual, thereby taking what many would regard as an a-historical line of thought which denied the claims of historical necessity and regarded evolutionary progress towards some heavenly future as an illusion.

If Camus' reactionary political position left something to be desired from a Marxist standpoint, his religious stance could hardly have appealed to Catholics. For he lacked any sense of the transcendent and was more in favour of a neo-pagan, Mediterranean-style hedonism compounded of sun, sea, sand, women, and sky ... than of any Christian or post-Christian asceticism. In this respect he took after his friend and mentor André Gide, whose autobiographical novel The Fruits of the Earth extols the pleasures to be derived from a sensuous appreciation of nature. The chief difference between the two men, however, is that whereas Gide was a sophisticated northern Frenchman endeavouring to free himself from the shackles of bourgeois convention, Camus was a natural-born pagan, simple and humble enough to find the natural-world-order sufficient unto his needs. Gide wrote his neo-pagan work while convalescing from a serious illness and probably wouldn't have done so, had he not come close to death at the time. Camus, however, although himself tubercular and of generally poor health, needed no such prompting to voice his affirmation of Mediterranean sea and sun. Like D.H. Lawrence (who, coincidentally, was also tubercular), his neo-paganism was natural and genuine, not the product of bourgeois decadence or artificial posturing. He could never have lost faith in Christianity, as Gide was to do, because he could never really have acquired such a faith in the first place. His love of elemental life was natural and spontaneous, requiring no creed or philosophy to sustain and/or refute it. He was born a pagan and he died a pagan, though a long way from his beloved Algerian coastline, which he wrote about with such tenderness in Lyrical Essays, in many ways his best body of work. He disliked the cold wet climate of Paris, disliked, too, the urban sprawl itself. His heart never left Algeria, and one can well believe that he would have been content to die there, as Mersault was to do in A Happy Death, cradled in the lap of the Chenoua, a returnee from bitter exile. As a type, Camus more resembles the Mediterranean-loving Lawrence Durrell than either the primitive-inspired D.H. Lawrence or the nature-worshipping John Cowper Powys. A simple, sensuous sun hedonism, devoid of religious solemnity or metaphysical moralizing.

Camus was handsome as writers go and not unattractive to women. His private life was on the whole satisfactory, even happy, and he had no qualms about being a family man, unlike Sartre. But he wasn't a romantic, despite his success with women, and he never lost the moral toughness peculiar to his realistic and in many ways tragic temperament. Had the age into which he was born been less tragic or his personal background less humble or his physical health less poor, things might have been different. But Camus retained a matter-of-fact attitude towards women characteristic, in a way, of D.H. Lawrence - devoid of that romantic glamorization which usually characterizes the relationships of the better off. He liked them and used them, but he didn't worship them. That would have demanded a nobler and more old-fashioned temperament than his!