April 9, 2012 .

 FACING HISTORY

Why we love Camus.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly-the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to harp on, except that it is almost always the first thing that comes up when people who knew Camus talk about what he was like. When Elizabeth Hawes, whose lovely 2009 book "Camus: A Romance" is essentially the rueful story of her own college-girl crush on his image, asked survivors of the Partisan Review crowd, who met Camus on his one trip to New York, in 1946, what he was like, they said that he reminded them of Bogart. "All I can tell you is that Camus was the most attractive man I have ever met," William Phillips, the journal's editor, said, while the thorny Lionel Abel not only compared him to Bogart but kept telling Hawes that Camus's central trait was his "elegance." (It took the sharper and more Francophile eye of A. J. Liebling to note that the suit Camus wore in New York was at least twenty years out of Parisian style.)
Camus liked this reception enough to write home about it to his French publisher. ''You know, I can get a film contract whenever I want," he wrote, joking a little, but only a little. Looking at the famous portrait of Camus by Cartier- Bresson from the forties- trench coat collar up, hair swept back, and cigarette in mouth; long, appealing lined face and active, warm eyes- you see why people thought of him as a star and not just as a sage; you also see that he knew the effect he was having. It's perfectly reasonable, then, that a new book by Catherine Camus, his surviving daughter, "Albert Camus: Solitude and Solidarity" (Edition Olms), is essentially a photograph album, rather than any sort of philosophical gloss. Looks matter to the mind. Clever people are usually compensating for something, even if the wound that makes them draw the bow of art is no worse than an overlarge schnozzle and sticking-out ears. The ugly man who thinks hard-Socrates or Sartre-is using his mind to make up for his face. (Camus once saw Sartre over-wooing a pretty girl and wondered why he didn't, as Camus would have done, play it cool. ''You've seen my face?" Sartre answered, honestly.) When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.
And then the image of Camus persists-we recall him not just as a fine writer but as an exemplary man, a kind of secular saint, the spirit of his time, as well as the last French writer whom most Americans know something about. French literary critics sometimes treat him with the note of condescension that authors of high- school classics get here, too-a tone that the French writer Michel Onfray, in his newly published life of Camus, "L'Ordre Libertaire," tries to remedy, insisting that Camus was not only a better writer but a more interesting systematic thinker than Sartre.
The skepticism of his native readers isn't just snobbish, though. Read today, Camus is perhaps more memorable as a great journalist-as a diarist and editorialist-than as a novelist and philosopher. He wrote beautifully, even when he thought conventionally, and the sober lucidity of his writing is, in a sense, the true timbre of the thought. Olivier Todd, the author of the standard biography in French, suggests that Camus might have benefitted by knowing more about his anti-totalitarian Anglo-American contemporaries, Popper and Orwell among them. Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end-easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people- doesn't diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and looked at it, elegantly, upside down.
In America, Camus is, first of all, French; in France he remains, most of all, Algerian-a Franco-Algerian, what was later called a pied noir, a black foot, meaning the European colonial class who had gone to Algeria and made a home there. A dense cover of clichés tends to cloud that condition: just as the writer from Mississippi is supposed to be in touch with a swampy mysterious identity, a usable past that no Northern boy could emulate, the "Mediterranean" man is assumed in France to be in touch with a deep littoral history. Camus had that kind of mystique: he was supposed to be somehow at once more "primitive"-he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an even finer football player-and, because of his Mediterranean roots, more classical, in touch with olive groves and Aeschylus. The reality was grimmer and more sordid. His father, a poorly paid cellar man for a wine company, was killed in battle during the First World War, when Camus was one. His mother was a maid, who cleaned houses for the healthy French families. Though he was, as a young man, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, he understood in his marrow that the story of colonialist exploitation had to include the image of his mother on her knees, scrubbing. Not every colonial was a grasping parasite. Camus was a first-rate philosophy student, and the French meritocratic system had purchase even in the distant province. He quickly advanced at the local university, writing a thesis on Plotinus and St. Augustine when he was in his early twenties. After a flirtation with Communism, he left for the mainland in 1940, with the manuscript of a novel in his suitcase and the ambition to be a journalist in his heart. He worked briefly for the newspaper Paris-Soir, and then returned to North Africa, where he finished two books. By 1943, he was back in France, to join the staff of the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat, and publish those books: first the novel "The Stranger" and then a book of philosophical essays, "The Myth of Sisyphus." Part of the paralyzing narcotic of the Occupation was that writing could still go on; it was in the Germans' interest to allow the publication of books that seemed remote enough not to be subversive.
The novel and the essays announced the same theme, though the novel did it on a downdraft and the essays on up- lift: meaning is where you make it and life is absurd. In the novel, Camus meant absurd in the sense of pointless; in the essays in the sense of unjustified by certainty. Life is absurd because Why bother? And life is also absurd because Who knows? "The Stranger" tells the story of an alienated Franco- Algerian, Meursault, who kills an Arab on the beach one day for no good reason. The no-good-reason is key: if it's possible to act for no good reason, maybe there is never any reason to talk about "good" when you act. The of world is absurd, Meursault thinks (and- Camus seconds), because, without divine order, or even much pointed human purpose, it's just one damn thing after another, and you might as well be damned for one thing as the next: in a world bleached dry of significance, the most immoral act might seem as meaningful as the best one. The drained, eye-straining beach where Meursault murders his victim is a place not just without meaning but without real feeling-it became the deadened landscape, and the cityscape, that was populated in the decade by everyone from Giacometti's emaciated walking figures to Bogart's private eyes.
In "Sisyphus," though, Camus offers a way to keep Meursault's absurdity from becoming merely murderous: we are all Sisyphus, he says, condemned to roll our boulder uphill and then watch it roll back down for eternity, or at least until we die. Learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half smile on your face-"One must imagine Sisyphus happy" is his most emphatic aphorism-is the only way to act decently while accepting that acts are always essentially absurd.
It was the editorials that Camus wrote for Combat that sustained his reputation. Editorial writers can seem the most insipid and helpless of the scribbling class: they sum up anonymously the ideas of their time, and truth and insipidity do a great deal of close dancing-the right thing to do is often hard but seldom surprising. Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing. It's a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a down- beat, a tonic note, for the whole of his section. Not "Say this!" but "Sound this way!" is what the great editorialists teach.
What Camus wanted wasn't new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it. Tone was what mattered. He discovered a way of speaking on the page that was unlike either the violent rhetorical clichés of Communism or the ponderous abstractions of the Catholic right. He struck a tone not of Voltaire Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he also sounds sad-he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with dignity, at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public language at a time when history was moving too fast. At the Liberation, he wrote (in Arthur Goldhammer's translation):

Now that we have won the means to express ourselves, our responsibility to ourselves and to the country is paramount. ... The task for each of us is to think carefully about what he wants to say and gradually to shape the spirit of his paper; it is to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore to the country its authoritative voice. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will be saved from ruin.

Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity-even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus, and they were not the usual words of French political rhetoric. The enemy was not this side or that one; it was the abstraction of rhetoric itself. He wrote, 'We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction." Sartre, in a signed, man-en-the-scene column for Combat, wrote that the Liberation had been a "time of intoxication and joy." (Actually, Sartre kept off the streets and let Simone de Beauvoir do the writing, while he took the byline.) Intoxication and joy were the last things that Camus thought freedom should bring. His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.

It was in the forties that Camus became intimate with Sartre. Though each had known the other's writing before meeting the writer, they became friends, in Saint-Germain, in 1943, a time when the Cafe de Flore was not an expensive spot but one of the few places with a radiator reliable enough to keep you warm in winter. For the next decade, French intellectual life was dominated by their double act. Although Camus was married, and soon afterward had a mistress, and soon after that had twins (by his wife), an American reader of Todd's biography is startled to realize that after the twins were born Camus's life went on exactly as before-hi's deepest emotional attachment seems to have been to Sartre and his circle.
Indeed, the image of the French philosophers in cafes debating existentialism dates from that moment and those men. (Before that, Frenchmen in cafes debated love.)
Philosophers? They were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history. Their first conversation was about the theatre-Sartre asked Camus, impulsively, to direct the coming production of his play "No Exit"-and not long afterward Sartre was sent, by the Resistance unit he had belatedly joined, to occupy the Comedie-Francaise. (The Resistance actually had a theatre committee.) Camus came into the theatre and found Sartre asleep in an orchestra seat. "At least your armchair is facing in the direction of history," Camus teased him, meaning that the chair looked more committed than the sleeping philosopher.

The wisecrack bugged Sartre more than he first let on, as such jokes will among writers. Sartre-bashing has become a favorite sport for Anglo-American intellectuals-in the past decades, Clive James and the late Tony Judt have both kicked him around-and so it's worth recalling why Camus valued Sartre's good opinion more than anyone else's. Sartre's appeal was, in no small part, generational and charismatic. If you had asked people whose lives Sartre changed why they admired him so keenly, they would have said that it was because in his book "Being and Nothingness," and in the famous 1945 speech "Existentialism Is a Humanism," he had reconciled Marxism and existentialism. To some, this may seem like not much of an accomplishment-they may feel rather as a parent feels when a child has, over breakfast, reconciled Lucky Charms and Froot Loops in one bowl-but at the time it seemed life-giving. Sartre had found a role for both humanism and history- "humanism" meaning the Enlightenment belief that individual acts had resonance and meaning, "history" meaning the Marxist belief that, in the impersonal working out of the dialectic, they actually didn't. Sartre said that you couldn't know how history would work out, but you could act as if you did: "If I ask myself “Will the social ideal, as such, ever become a reality?” I cannot tell I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing." And again: "Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is." (There are moments when Sartre sounds like Tony Robbins-only you can make you what you want to be! - which may also have been, secretly, part of his appeal.) People aren't born free and everywhere are in chains; they're just born. What better way to choose freedom than by unlocking the next guy's chains, too?
Sartre's move toward Marxism, and toward the French Communist Party, oddly mimicked that of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal's seventeenth-century "wager" in favor of Christianity: the faith might be true, so why not embrace it, since you lose nothing by the embrace, and get at least the chance of all the goodies the faith promises? In Sartre's case, if the "social ideal" never arrived, at least you had tried, and if it did you might get a place in the pantheon of proletariat heroes. This reasoning may seem a little shabby and self-interested, but to those within Pascal's tradition it seemed brave and audacious. (Camus called Pascal "the greatest of all, yesterday and today.") Faith in the Party, which Sartre never joined but to which he gave his purposefully blind allegiance, so closely mirrored faith in the Church that it borrowed some of the Church's residual aura of moral purpose. It wasn't that Sartre didn't notice the Soviet camps. He did. He just thought that you could look past them, as a good Catholic doesn't pretend not to see the Hell on earth that the Church often has made but still thinks you can see the Heaven beyond that it points to.
Camus moved toward a break with Sartre, and Sartre's magazine, Les Temps Modernes, in 1951, after the publication of his "L'Homme Revolte," called in English, a little misleadingly, "The Rebel." The fault line between the two men was simple, if the fault-finding was complex. Sartre was a straight-out fellow-traveler with the P.C.F., the Parti Communiste Francais, and Camus was not. Sartre was outraged on behalf of the Party by such episodes as the "affair of the carrier pigeons," in which the Party Secretary was found with pigeons in his car and was accused by the police of using them, like a good revolutionary, to coordinate illegal demonstrations. (It turned out that, like a good Frenchman, he was merely planning a squab casserole.) In "The Rebel," Camus writes (in Philip Mairet's translation):

He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.  

In English, this can come across as merely sonorous. In France in 1951, the real meaning was barbed and apparent: only a moral idiot would give his allegiance to the Communist Party in the name of the coming revolution. Camus spotted "the catch in Sartre's account of fellow-travelling as a leap of faith. The only practical way to unlock the next guy's chains, on Sartre's premise, is to kill the guy next to that guy first, since he's the one chaining him up; kill all the jailers and everyone will be free. This sounds great, Camus saw, until you've killed all the jailers and all you have is other jailers. There is no difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp. We should be neither executioners nor victims; it is madness to sacrifice human lives today in the pursuit of a utopian future.
This position was rightly praised for its truth and oddly praised for its courage. After all, opposition to both Fascism and Stalinism was exactly the position of every democratic government in North America and Western Europe. It was Harry Truman's position and it was Clement Atlee's position; it was Winston Churchill's position and Pierre Mendes-France's. It was the doctrine of the liberal version of the Cold War: the true inheritors of "totalitarianism" were the Communists, and had to be resisted.
Well, it was courageous, we say, because, though common people and politicians were wiser, intellectuals in France believed the opposite. This is not false, but there is a subtler point at play. It is in the nature of intellectual life-and part of its value-to gravitate toward the extreme alternative position, since that is usually the one most in need of articulation. Harvard and Yale pay some of their professors to tell the students that everything they believe is a bourgeois illusion, as the Koch brothers pay their foundation staff to say that all bourgeois illusions are real, and the fact that neither is entirely true does not alter the need to pay people to say it. The ideas we pay for, as Ayn Rand grasped when she looked at her royalty statements, are those which define the outer edge. We want big minds to voice extreme ideas, since our smaller minds already voice the saner ones.

In this sense, Sartre's admirers are not wrong when they protest what seems to them the naive moralizing of his Anglo-American critics. Those admirers, who remain plentiful in Paris, insist that Sartre was, above all, open-minded, that he reproached himself for his own errors, constantly revised his mistakes, broke with the Soviets not all that long after siding with them-that his open-ended, lifelong "recherche" was never meant to be concluded, and that you shouldn't score it like a foot- ball match, Right Views 3, Wrong Views 6.  To accuse such a thinker of hypocrisy seems unfair, but perhaps he can be accused of too much habitual happiness. For all their self-advertised agonies, the lives Sartre and Camus led after the war mostly sound like a lot of fun. Their biographies are popular because they dramatize the agonizing preoccupations of modern man and also because they present an appealing circle of Left Bank cafes and late-night boites and long vacations. A life like that implicitly assumes that the society it inhabits will go on functioning no matter what you say about it, that the cafes and libraries and secondhand bookstores will continue to function despite the criticism. A professor at the College de France who maintains that there should be no professors at the College de France does not really believe this, or else he would not be one.
This wasn't a luxury that thinkers in Moscow, much less Phnom Penh, ever had. Sartre's great sin was not his ideology, which did indeed change all the time. It was his insularity. The apostle of ideas as action didn't think that ideas would actually alter life; he expected that life would go on more or less as it had in spite of them, while always giving him another chance to make them better. Nice work, if you can get it.
Camus wanted a better Republic. What he got was the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle is often given credit for the myth of the Resistance, which is no more of a myth than the American myth of emancipation; i.e., it really did happen, you just have to leave a lot of other stuff out to make what happened sound like it was mostly good. But he also created another myth: that of the failure of the Fourth Republic, in order to prove the necessity of his Fifth. In fact, the Fourth Republic, far more parliamentary than the Presidential-monarchical Fifth, was no more than normally corrupt and inefficient, and did a terrific job of moving France from paralysis to prosperity from 1945 to 1958. It foundered exactly on the insoluble problems of decolonization, about which it could be no wiser than its constituent parts.
Along the way, it solved philosophical problems. It may be hard to reconcile history and humanism, but it isn't hard to make laws that force capitalism to give workers more rights and comforts and security than they had before, while still respecting the liberty of each man to run a small shop and curse the government. It's so easy that every wealthy Western country has done it, and was doing it, even as its masterminds were arguing about whether it would ever be imaginable. These things are easier to do than they are to think about-a Sartrean point that Sartre never quite got around to seeing.
Sartre responded to "The Rebel" with truly papal exquisitism. Rather than let the condemnation of the heretic come from the seat of Peter, it would come from lower down, which would both imply a certain papal ambiguity and allow the possibility of reproach and an eventual welcome home. The task of condemning Camus was handed to a staff writer for Les Temps Modernes named Francis Jeanson, who went after Camus full tilt, praising his prose style (praising a writer's smooth prose is usually a way of implying that he's not too bright about the big ideas) and accusing him of being both a philosophical naïf and an unwitting tool of the French right. Camus, replying, ignored Jeanson completely, and directed his words exclusively to Sartre, as the "Director of the Publication." Sartre, replying in turn, tried to play the innocent: Jeanson wrote that, not me; by writing to me, you dehumanize Jeanson. In this way, Sartre both protected and belittled Jeanson, implying that he was in need of papal protection, and accused Camus of indifference to the little people Sartre was at that moment belittling. It was a neat job. (Jeanson, as it happens, was a genuinely interesting character, more Catholic than the Pope, and even more heretical than the heretic, and has recently received a good biography by Marie-Pierre Ulloa. While Sartre was far too comfortable and cunning to be any kind of example of Sartrean man, and Camus far too touched by inner rectitude to be an instance of Camusean man, Jeanson was both. A partisan of the Algerian rebels, he ended up, poor guy, in hiding for almost a decade, far from Saint-Germain-the only man in the circle who thought they meant it.)
Each man knew where the other was vulnerable. Calling Sartre "Monsieur le Directeur," that is, a kind of literary bureaucrat, was Camus's dig at his friend's position; Sartre countered by condescending to Camus's philosophical pretensions. "And sup-pose you didn't reason very well? And suppose your thinking was muddled and banal?" he suggested. Infuriated, Camus chose to remind Sartre of the nap at the Comedie-Francaise, saying that, as a militant who had "never walked away from the combats of the time," he was tired of being given lessons by those who had "never placed more than their armchairs in the direction of history." Like the word "upstart," which makes Groucho declare war in "Duck Soup," "armchair" was the fatal insult. The two men never spoke again.
Wounded by the exchange, Camus was silenced by the Algerian war. Sartre saw the world's crisis on a North-South, not an East-West, axis. The Soviet domination of Europe, and the fellow-travelling acquiescence of the French Communist Party in that domination-indeed, its explicit desire to extend it to Western Europe-might have been, perhaps should have been, Sartre's central subject. But his preoccupation was instead the wars of colonial empire that dominated French foreign policy throughout the fifties, first the war in Indochina and then the one in Algeria, with Suez in between. To see the central political story of the fifties as the attempt by the Western democracies to hold on to their liberty is rational; but to see it as the attempt by the fading European empires to hold on to their overseas possessions is not false, either, and recedes for us in memory only because it failed so completely that we don't even remember that they tried.
Though impeccably anti-colonial, Camus refused to take part in the sentimental embrace of the National Liberation Front, the F.L.N. that became de rigueur in left-wing circles in those years. Struggling to explain why he could not abandon the idea of a French Algeria-or, at a minimum, of some decent compromise that would insure majority rule while protecting the rights of the "settler" minority-he ended with the weak-sounding formula that he could not abandon his mother, which made it seem merely a question of blood. Lacking a better way of putting it, he chose silence, and this most indispensable of editorialists spent the last five years of his life, until his death, in a car crash, in 1960, with his own tongue under house arrest, vowing not to speak about the Algerian problem.
Camus felt as deeply for the seeming oppressor as for the oppressed. He grasped that the great majority of the settlers in any country, and in Algeria in particular, were as much victims of the circumstance as the locals, and made the same claims on decency and empathy. They were for the most part not rootless colonists who had come for the main buck-and those who were would be replaced by a local boss class. Colonialism is wrong, but the human claims of the colonists are just as real as those of the colonized. No human being is more indigenous to a place than any other. This remains an unfashionable, even taboo, position; one feels it still, for instance, in the condescension that American leftists offer white South Africans. (Athol Fugard's plays are a good antidote for his simplification, while Mandela's moral greatness was to see, and say, that the Boers were as much South Africans as the Xhosa.) Camus wasn't wrong. What he meant by his mother was his mother: not blood loyalty or genetic roots but the particular experience of a woman who had labored all her life as a domestic servant and was no more guilty of or complicit in colonial crimes than everyone else who lives on earth is complicit in dispossessing someone. It wasn't that he wouldn't abandon his roots for a cause; it was that he wouldn't abandon his mother for an idea.
Camus called the tendency to dehumanize those who stood in the way of history the problem of "abstraction." He meant that we can always look past the humanity of the kulaks or the pieds noirs or whoever is the necessary victim of the day. Read too much Marx, and you'll look right past your own mom. What's a few hundred thousand peasants in the face of history? Camus thought that all systems of ideal government were wrong, and all atrocities equally atrocious. To be a liberal in that sense, with a style that conferred eloquence on compromise, was the accomplishment. When Sartre's circle praised Camus's style and then objected to it, they were on to something. The threat he posed to totalitarian thought came from his ability to attach these common-sense principles to a set of magisterial arguments and timeless aphorisms. There is no better book to read for moral salt and sweetness than his notebooks from the fifties, which are filled with chiselled epigrams: "Progress-minded intellectuals. They are the tricoteuses of the dialectic. As each head falls, they reknit the sleeve of reasoning torn apart by the facts." Or simply: "Justice in the big things only. For the rest, just mercy."
Liberalism is optimistic in English- speaking countries, and therefore always a little fatuous. Telling Sisyphus that he'll get that stone up there someday is an empty hope. He won't. Camus imagined Sisyphus committed to his daily act; he doesn't encourage him to hope for a better stone and a shorter hill. The counsel given is essentially the same-short-term commitment to the best available course of action-but, by accepting that the boulder is always going to roll back down, Camus put a tragic mask on common sense, and a heroic face on the daily boulder's daily grind. It may have been the handsomest thing he ever did .•

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 9, 2012