On 10 June 1947, the book The Plague was published in France. Thirty-three-year-old Albert Camus, previously known mainly as a journalist for the rebel newspaper Combat, became famous overnight. Brief moments of elation at his success were followed by 13 years of confronting the price of fame: he felt a prisoner of his name and his work, even of his vocabulary. For him, his fame was his funeral. The world had already written my life story, he reflected, and in so doing had taken away both my future and my right to change. But he did not give in. He stubbornly followed his conviction that in a world without hope, survival must be fought for, and that apparent meaninglessness is not an end, but a beginning. No matter how hard tuberculosis, enemies and personal problems pressed him down, he found the strength to give birth to new periods of laughter and joy.
It was then that he relives, in a slightly different way, moments from his childhood, spent poor but happy in the Algerian seaside town of Algiers. His illiterate, deaf and almost mute mother was unable to introduce him to the world of books, but his primary school teacher, Louis Germain, was able to do so and arranged for him to receive a scholarship to the lycée.
It was there that Camus first realised his otherness: he was poor, the other boys were not. His parents had passed on their family’s cultural heritage to them, but he had to shape himself into a man. In a world completely alien to him, he was completely alone, but without any sense of inferiority or envy. Independent, passionate and courageous, he slowly gained a position among his classmates and developed the strength, indifference and self-sufficiency with which he has since marched through life, using them to protect his vulnerability. Much later, he wrote that he had learned “enough things to be able to give up almost everything”.
But he was only gaining experience when he was young. He never told his friends about living with his overbearing grandmother and elderly uncle, about sharing a room with his mother and brother, about his father who died in the First World War. He was not ashamed of them, he just kept his privacy to himself, then and later. He did not talk about tuberculosis either. He was seventeen when he first contracted it and thirty-six when he first took an antibiotic. By then, his lungs had been thoroughly destroyed and he was an expert in the symptoms of the disease: fainting, exhaustion, gasping for air, choking and coughing up blood.
Albert Camus’ Focus on happiness
The early onset of the disease forced him to face transience and grow up fast. As soon as he recovered in the care of a wealthy uncle, he was already taking life in his stride. At the age of 19 and a student at the University of Algiers, he was all he wanted to be. With his white hat, white dress and white socks, he was having fun with his new friends, future poets, sculptors and architects. They spent their days in pubs and on walks, had fun with the girls at the seaside at weekends and danced on Saturdays. He had to give up his great passion, football, which taught him everything about being a man, but he discovered the Greek philosophers, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gide, Malreaux and Nietzsche, whose picture later hung in his office.
But none of them influenced his decision to give up acting, even if it was only on stage that he “felt the innocence” that pervaded him every Sunday in the football stadium. He chose to write only after reading the booklet The Island by Jean Grenier, his professor and mentor during his last year at the Lycée and then at the University of Algiers. Grenier remained his lifelong friend and was among the first to read all his manuscripts.
Camus thus transformed himself from a street kid playing football in the street in the only trousers and shoes he could find, into a young intellectual who learned to turn burdensome circumstances – poverty, the silence of his own family and illness – into a rewarding experience. Naturally cheerful and gentle, he became stubbornly focused on happiness.
His first marriage did not bring it. Always on the lookout for beautiful girls, he saw Simone Hié, a year younger and beautiful, the daughter of a prominent doctor. They were an interesting couple: she a heroin addict since her menstrual cramps were treated with opium, he a tuberculosis patient. Not yet of age, aged 20, he needed his mother’s permission to marry. He got it together with white socks, a wedding present he had chosen himself.
She and Simone had not been married for three years when she and a friend went on a trip to Eastern Europe. In Prague, she told him that she had sold herself to her doctor for drugs. He travelled on alone, broken and empty. By the time he returned to Algeria, he had recovered enough to get a quick divorce. Although he experienced the divorce as a defeat, like all difficulties later in life, he turned it into a positive experience.
For years afterwards, Simone continued to send books on detoxification, but always without a message. He didn’t want to see her. He never spoke or wrote about her. Seventeen years after the divorce, her mother wrote to him asking what he should do with her. He replied that he did not know and that at that time, “with an intuition that was years ahead of my own, he realised that there was no way out of this situation. That is why I broke off so suddenly, even though it cost me much more than I have ever admitted to anyone.”
He then immediately “restarted the game, neither happier nor less happy”, but knowing where his strength lay. Throughout his life, he has kept control of his emotions. Dignity for him was indulgence, self-respect and quiet perseverance. No one had full insight into him. Confident and energetic, casual, warm and always smiling, he was popular with both sexes, but equally unapproachable to both. He always kept an insurmountable distance between himself and people, his later friends agreed, including the actress Maria Casarès, nine years his junior, to whom he had been bound for almost 15 years by a “boundless and heaping passion”, as one friend put it.
Throughout his life, he also went back and forth between periods of solitude, during which he regained his inner equilibrium, and socialising, when he partied and worked excessively. In his youth, he wrote, published articles, worked in the theatre, was socio-politically active and participated in the local Communist Party. He was kicked out after 23 months for opposing the withdrawal of support for Muslim nationalism. He believed in the equality of Muslims and was a strong defender of their rights and culture.
At the age of 24, he was already a recognisable public figure with his charisma and natural authority, but loneliness was and remained the central theme of his writings. He experienced it in society, and he experienced it during periods of enforced solitude, when he was forced to withdraw from life because of outbreaks of tuberculosis, as in 1937, when he suddenly travelled to the Alps for convalescence.
He soon returned, to the House at the Top of the World, where he had begun to write The Plague and shared it on the top of the hill with three friends, one of whom was a lover and remained so when he began to court the beautiful but reserved, unpretentious and gentle music and mathematics student Francine Faure. He confided in her and called her “sincere heart”. Her family found a less flattering description for the penniless, tubercular divorced writer. She was not impressed by him, and he was not impressed by giving up other women. Nevertheless, he married her at the age of 27 and later admitted to himself that it might have been better if they had remained friends – he liked her as a sister, not as a woman.
At that time, he was already following the path he had taken two years earlier, when, quite by chance, he became a journalist for the liberal newspaper Alger Républicain. Although he only accepted the job because he had failed the teacher’s exams, he proved to be a dedicated and daring writer. He published some 150 articles before the paper was closed down, although he was also writing his novel, working in the theatre, maintaining a social life and setting up a publishing house. Because his articles made value judgements and called for action, he soon became an instigator, if not a revolutionary, for the authorities.
He detested the war, but was still hurt when France entered it in 1939 and he was turned away on medical grounds. He expressed his rebellion through writing. In January 1940, the authorities had had enough of him and the newspaper. It banned him. Its editor, Pascal Pia, returned to Paris, and Camus began coaching for a living, because all doors were closed to him as a journalist. In the meantime, he wrote extensively, including The Stranger, Caligula and The Myth of Sisyphus, but he constantly doubted himself. “The truth is that I can no longer write”, Francine complained, and in March 1940 he followed his former editor to Paris.
Pascal Pia worked for the daily Paris-Soir and arranged for him to work for it, but was fired at the end of the year for lack of money. At the age of 27, he returned to Algeria, living with his wife in the seaside town of Oran, with her parents, teaching and coaching. He despised Oran, but did not leave in the summer of 1942 because of this. Tuberculosis struck again, and the French authorities were also glad to be rid of him after he had spent the last months helping the rebels flee the country and teaching Jewish children who were no longer allowed to go to school.
The golden days of the Resistance
He and his child, The Stranger, which he wrote under the scorching Algerian sun but which was published in Paris only during the occupation, stayed in the boarding house of Francine’s relatives. In the hills of the Haute-Loire, guests were few and when Francine returned to Algeria to teach, it became lonely. By the end of the war, he had not seen her again. When the Allies invaded North Africa in November, they decided to stay instead, even though he had not intended to.
During his convalescence, he found himself, quite by chance, at the heart of the resistance movement, but it is not clear whether or not he took part in it during those 15 months. He probably did not know that there were 5 000 Jews hiding in the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he occasionally cycled to despite his breathlessness and weakness, but he did know that the resistance fighters were his new acquaintances from nearby Saint-Étienne, where he went twice a week for therapy. He supported them, at least in silence, while he bore his illness stoically in the company of the three dogs he had adopted. “When one learns – and not on paper – how to be alone with one’s suffering, how to overcome the urge to run away… then I have almost nothing more to learn.”
Death was always at his heels. In the future, those close to him “almost lost him several times”, but this time he was still strong enough to write letters, read and occasionally go to Paris. In the spring of 1943, he met Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at the premiere of Sartre’s The Flies. The two men had only known of each other through writing, but this was enough to immediately hit it off.
But that was one weekend, and then the solitude of the hills awaited him again. It proved to be very productive: he finished the second draft of The Plague, began work on The Rebellious Man, wrote the first Letter to a German Friend and finished the play Misunderstanding. In the future, he would retreat into solitude whenever he wanted to work. He wrote slowly. He was constantly starting, doubting, starting again. If he wanted to do something well, he had to start several times, he explained. He did not finish the plague until 1947, or seven years after he had recorded his first idea for it in Algeria.
In November 1943, he was well enough to move to Paris. Pascal Pia helped him again. He arranged for him to earn money at the Gallimard publishing house during the day and to write at night. He had too much company now. At the Café Flore he bumped into Simone de Beuavoir and Sartre. He immediately became part of their circle.
Once that winter, he also started writing under the pseudonym Bauchard for the resistance newspaper Combat, edited by Pascal Pia. In March 1944, he took over the editorship of the newspaper, which was secretly circulated among the people, and joined a secret group of writers, which he left after the war because it was leaning towards communism. His editorials were hard-hitting and his life exciting but dangerous. He was once carrying a copy of Combat when he was stopped by the police. He quickly pushed the newspaper to Marie Casarès, with whom he fell in love in the spring of 1944, when she starred in his play Misunderstanding. The police found nothing on him and released him.
Sometimes he had to hide his friends, sometimes they had to hide him. He changed apartments at night for safety, and when German pressure intensified in the summer of 1944, he made a hasty escape by bicycle 45 kilometres from Paris. He did not return until a few days before the liberation of the city. He encouraged his readers to put up barricades and fight: “People who want to live do not wait for freedom to be handed to them. They take it for themselves.” In those dark days, the voice of Camus and his comrades was one of courage and commitment, of heart and hope.
For him as a journalist, those were golden times. He could react immediately to any event and write exactly what he thought, because the newspaper was financially independent. He liked the smell of lead and ink, he liked the jargon and the feeling of belonging to a group. His colleagues liked him. He was a ‘real’ man to them, warm and sincere, if always a little inaccessible. Camus later said that he disliked journalism because, because of deadlines, he could not write again what he had already written and could not express everything he wanted to say, but above all because journalism inevitably makes enemies.
It brought him fame. During the war and after August 1944, when the newspaper went public, there was hardly a Frenchman who did not know about him, and fewer knew that he had put his Caligula on stage in between. He had starstruck for a short time, but soon wrote of the fame that had “struck him at the age of 30”: “Now I know what it is. It’s nothing.” Beuavoir added that he seemed to enjoy success and fame but did not take them seriously.
He was constantly taking part in debates and writing columns, and received thousands of letters every month. Slowly, he began to feel the attention as an invasion of privacy, and he always kept it to himself. To be natural, he said of himself, but with a mask. He never took it off. Even Francine did not know him completely. When she joined him in Paris in October 1944, he and Marie broke off their relationship, but immediately renewed it in January 1948, when they met by chance on the street.
Immediately after the liberation of Paris, he was still living in the studio that was part of André Gide’s large apartment. His home was a social centre where friends came and went. They drank, danced and slept with whoever was on hand. They gave themselves up to a party born of desperation and were ready for new challenges the next day. At the time, this meant expressing their position towards the collaborationists.
In the first months after the liberation, Camus advocated a “quick and hard” purge to give France a chance for a fresh start, although even then he wondered whether such a position was not hard and inhuman. “We know it is, but things are what they are, and that is why it is right not to take them lightly.” In July 1945, his answer was different. He publicly condemned the purges and chose freedom.
By then, the spirit of rebellion was already fading. He was tired. Even though he was part of Sartre’s circle, he never belonged to it. Unlike Sartre and his intellectual friends, he came from a poor background, with a wife and twins, Catherine and Jean, who were born in September 1945, relatives who came to visit and friends from his youth. Outwardly, he was glamorous, charming and attractive, and inwardly he pondered things that his friends did not.
To regain his inner strength, he visited his mother in Algeria and, in March 1946, at the age of 32, visited New York for three months at the expense of the Foreign Office. “Life in Paris wears your nerves out and dries your heart”, he explained to his former mentor Louis Germain. The break from Paris came as ordered, and it was also practical, as he was able to send home a container with 80 kilos of sugar, coffee, powdered eggs, flour, chocolate, soap and baby food.
His work as a journalist during the war got him in trouble with the FBI at customs, but after that everything went as it should. In Paris he was a celebrity, in New York few people knew him, and even fewer as a journalist than as a writer. Yet his lecture at Columbia University was attended by 1200 people instead of the usual 300. He was given a grand reception on the roof of the Astoria Hotel in Times Square, taken on sightseeing tours, to dinners, pubs, jazz clubs and private parties.
He went to the theatre and opera with a 19-year-old American student, Patricia Blake. In Paris, his one-night adventures and brief romances were an open secret, while the Americans were only just discovering his charms. The affair with Blake, which he discovered while lecturing at the Institut Français, was a torrid affair that ended in the same way as his other more intense relationships: from a passionate beginning, it became an intimate friendship. Later, his intimate friends included several of his former lovers, but now he sometimes had to ask Blake to leave him alone. The tuberculosis had recurred, not in its worst form, but badly enough to make him cough up blood and exhausted.
After three months in New York, he could only conclude that he knew nothing about it. “Does one move here among madmen or among the sanest people in the world; is life really as simple as all America says it is, or is it as empty as it seems… Are New Yorkers liberals or conformists, modest or dead souls; is it admirable or trivial that a garbage collector wears matching gloves at his work?”
What the Americans have learned about him is that he does not say much, “only when he has something to say”, that he is incredibly attractive, a little inaccessible and rather overbearing, but in a native, not aggressive way. Despite his Parisian manners and wit, he retained something of his provinciality, which, among other things, suited Francine Knopf, who, with her husband Albert, founded the Knopf publishing house in 1915. In charge of European authors, she met Camus at the Ritz Hotel in Paris shortly after the war and did what her husband told her to do: she became his American publisher.
For the next 15 years, she racked her brains on how to get him to allow her to publish his CV on the cover of books, and how to keep readers interested in him when he so rarely published anything. But he was so much more profitable then. In the first week after the publication of The Plague in America in 1948, the book sold 3,000 copies, which was spectacular even for the successful Knopf publishing house, even though it had invested heavily in promotion. Camus asked Francine if she now had enough money to buy a motorbike.
The face of hate
On his return to Paris in June 1946, all he could think was that he was more beautiful than ever. Life was returning to normal. The metro reopened in May, the theatres were packed and in August, for the first time since 1937, Parisians went on holiday in large numbers. Camus’s family also spent a month at the seaside, where he spent some time polishing his The Plague, although even after it was finished he was not sure whether it was worth publishing or not.
He was constantly distracted by his two children. He joked that one had the plague and the other had cholera. He was a father who was worried about them in the cold winter and the lack of food, but was also annoyed by their crying, which disturbed him at work. He and Francine moved first to a borrowed house in the suburbs of Paris and then back to Saint-Germain, only this time to a bigger flat.
He still lectured a lot, corresponded, encouraged other writers, flirted with women and drove his old Citroën DS, but now he blamed Paris for Americanising itself. It was the time of the Cold War. In the autumn, he wrote to a friend that everyone was afraid, silent and in hiding. In November, he began to publish his views again in Combat. He advocated peace and opposed totalitarianism, revolutionary violence, the death penalty and any form of legitimate murder. He called for dialogue, moderate politics and mediation, warned against “the end justifies the means” thinking and reflected on the new meaning of revolution and the new global world. “Today we know that there are no more islands and that borders are meaningless.”
Sartre’s followers immediately attacked him. In one article, they described him as naive, unrealistic, a poor judge of Marxism and a silent saint. Camus dismissed the accusations by saying that it was not Marxism that had taught him about freedom, but scarcity, “but most of you don’t even know what the word even means”. He does not want to change man or the world, he stressed, but values without which the world would not be worth living in and man would not be worthy of respect.
It was then that Sartre, an ardent defender of communism, and Camus, who was accused of moralising, first came into conflict, finally breaking up five years later. At this time, Camus’s publications were almost entirely concerned with ideology, war and resistance. Everything was connected with events in Europe, Franco in Spain, the guerrillas in Greece, the Soviets in Prague and Berlin, and even Tito, except that he no longer published his views in Combat.
He left it in 1947. In the flood of new newspapers, Combat was losing readers and leaning more and more to the right in its desire to survive. Although Camus was still considered one of the opinion leaders in Paris, he felt completely isolated in Sartre’s intellectual circle, which was characterised by an aggressive over-politicisation. Others drew strength from their constant ideological disputes and criticisms, but he did not have the will to do so. He saw himself as an artist, not an intellectual.
He was interested in freedom and justice. In this spirit, he set up a network to help European intellectuals threatened by totalitarian regimes, published newspapers, gathered material for his new novel, The Rebellious Man, reflected on the artist’s responsibility to the times in which he lived, publicly opposed Spain’s admission to the newly-formed United Nations, and devoted himself to the theatre. Since he renewed his relationship with Mario Casarès and combined the private and the professional, the theatre has fulfilled him all the more, although he has always found relaxation and joy in the softness of art when he was overwhelmed by the aggressiveness of Parisian life.
He was already a star by then. On 3 June 1947, he resigned as editor of Combat, and on 10 June The Plague was published, winning the Critics’ Prize two weeks later. Previously, the French had known him mainly as a journalist and editor, because The Stranger had been published in a very small edition due to the paper shortage between the wars; now they bought The Plague as if it were a pawn, even though the books were still a luxury for them.
Financially, it was more stable, but it was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the endless expectations of the public. He hired a secretary, Suzanne Labiche, but even she could not give him peace and a normal life. People were looking for him in the street and even the nanny he had hired for his child turned out to be a tabloid journalist.
The intrusiveness of people disturbed his inner peace, and living in a small flat with his mother-in-law, who always had something to say about him, was not very good for his work. By the end of 1948, he had stopped even bothering to write at home. He locked himself in the office of the Gallimard publishing house, switched off the telephone and worked.
He increasingly despised Parisian life, but every time he visited Algeria, he realised that it had changed too. He basked in the glow of fame and grew increasingly lonely, although he was cheered up a little by a tour of South America in 1949, during which he tried to find a job in France for a Brazilian couple he had met there.
But he needed a doctor above all. Tuberculosis struck again. His secretary wrote off at the end of 1949 that he was suffering, unreachable and working a maximum of two hours a day. He was convinced that he would not survive. “After being so convinced for so long that I was cured, this setback should have brought me down. And it did. But because it’s just one in a continuous series of setbacks, it actually makes me laugh. In the end, I am liberated. Even madness is liberating,” he wrote in Cabris, where he went for a year-long convalescence at the age of 36. But he was not unhappy: while loneliness and fear of the future weighed on him, his illness also gave him a break from Parisian life, his family and his marriage to Francine.
His two children never saw him ill. He always withdrew when he was ill. He bore it upright, but alone, one friend recalled. The inner strength, indifference and self-sufficiency he had acquired in his youth were only strengthened by the disease. In 1952, he needed all three.
He spent seven years writing his novel The Rebellious Man and poured most of himself into it. It was a summary of all the insights he had gained during and after the Resistance, but it was also completely at odds with everything people believed at the time. Before it was published, he expected attacks from the left, perhaps some from the right. He waited patiently for the “catastrophe that was slowly approaching” and for the days after the publication of The Rebellious Man when he would no longer have a friend to lend a hand.
The book was discussed on both the left and the right before it was read in October 1951. Camus did not react to the first wave of criticism, and he intended to distance himself from it in the future, even though it boosted sales to such an extent that he wondered whether people would even read the book. At the time, he had no idea that the brutal public reckoning would not come until the following year.
In Les Temps Modernes, his views were first attacked by Sartre’s pupil Francis Jeanson, and then by Sartre, only he did not attack the content, but Camus the man. In the months of public reckoning, Sartre had turned into a bully, from whom malice erupted with uncontrolled force. From then on, they no longer spoke, not even about each other.
The circulation of the newspapers skyrocketed and the gap that had always existed between Camus and the Parisian intellectual community deepened into an unbridgeable abyss. Camus was left alone. “This proves that these people have never been my friends and I have always insulted them by what I believed”, Francine wrote, when no one publicly took his side.
For more than a year he stared into the eyes of hatred and became thoroughly acquainted with it, but at the end of the bilious controversy he remained adamant that he would write The Rebellious Man again if he had to. In order to regain his inner peace, he made an extended visit to Algeria in December 1952, but this made Paris even more alien to him than before. The feeling of being trapped and persecuted deepened. He thought about work, but could not work.
“There are people whose religion is based on always forgiving offences but never forgetting them. I don’t have what it takes to forgive an insult, but I always forget it”, he reflected in October 1953, after finding relaxation and joy in the theatre again. Among intellectuals, he always felt that he had broken one of the rules of their clan, and the theatre environment restored his sense of belonging and connection.
World famous and alone
In June 1953, he and Maria Casarès spent pleasant days at the Angers Theatre Festival and took a few more days to enjoy themselves as a couple. Francine knew about his affairs but never expected him to fall in love. She did. In the autumn, Francine began to withdraw into herself more and more, she was growing tired. She had a nervous breakdown. At Christmas she tried to commit suicide. A few months later, she tried again and broke her pelvis jumping. While she was being treated in Oran, Algeria, and in Paris, her mother looked after her daughter Catherine and her sister looked after her son Jean.
Camus, not yet fully recovered from his war with Sartre, was reeling under the weight of guilt. He blamed himself for not taking the first symptoms seriously. He could not deny, either, that Francine was suffering because of his affair with Maria. He was bound to Francine by a “deep friendship” and a “sense of responsibility”. She was totally dependent on him. She and Maria were bound together by a “boundless and heated” passion. She was independent and autonomous.
When Francine was recovering with her sister, he was at sea with the children. At the end of their holiday together, he returned to an empty Paris. He walked a lot, watched a few football matches, got a job and wrote letters to friends. He divided them into groups. He showed a different part of himself to each one, but not all of himself to any one.
It felt like hell. Ever since the post-war debate on the purges, and especially after the conflict with Sartre, he had the feeling that the public was judging him. It had labelled him a moralist and expected him to act accordingly in private. “All I want is for people to let me live the way I want to live”, he wrote to Mamaine, his former lover and now friend. With his fame, this was almost impossible, and he was also constrained by his home environment, “a universe that for a year destroyed me cell by cell”.
He couldn’t leave Francine, and he couldn’t leave Marie. Finally, both Francine and her family accepted her. For the sake of peace in the house, Marie did not collaborate with Camus again after 1953, and she did not publish her autobiography until after Francine’s death. She wrote only as much about Camus as she had to in order to shed light on almost 15 years of her life, during which she had known a great deal of pain, albeit without nervous breakdowns or suicide attempts.
Camus, who wanted to live a moral life but was unable to do so, painted his portrait in the anti-hero The Fall, although he publicly denied that the book was autobiographical. Similarly, in November 1954, Simone de Beuavoir claimed that one of the characters in her book Mandarins had nothing in common with Camus, even though she had almost painted him on a piece of paper. Camus was not offended that she had once again taken him to task; rather, he was disgusted by the whole thing. He remained silent. He had distanced himself from the “Paris Comedy” before. When asked why he did not answer her, he replied only: “Because you do not discuss things with a seamstress.”
As if the confrontation with Sartre and Francine’s nervous breakdown were not enough, war broke out in Algeria on 1 November 1954, after the country had been in turmoil for a long time. Camus was expected to speak out for or against an independent Algeria. He remained silent. When he did speak out, he defended the federal system.
In January 1956, he travelled to Algiers to present a peace initiative, the only way to stop the killing and establish dialogue. “There are no innocents left in Algeria, except the dying”, is one of the sentences of his 50-page speech. He stood pale and worried in front of the crowd. He was fully aware of the violence that surrounded him and was reminded of it by death threats. He left the hall surrounded by bodyguards assigned to him by his brother Lucien, and boarded the plane surrounded by his friends. Only later did he learn that they were armed. “They all want to kill you”, they explained to him.
Camus’ assessment of the situation was correct, but it did not reflect the situation on the streets. The Paris circle, which had advocated an independent Algeria, distanced itself even further from him, and he did not speak or write again on the Algerian question until the spring of 1958, when he again presented his plan for an Algerian-French federation. He knew that no one would be happy with it, but he could not give the public what it wanted: a definition for one side or the other.
With the publication of his essays Actuelles III, he again said what no one wanted to hear, and again he kicked Sartre on the head. He made new enemies. “He suffered to the point of being wounded”, one of his friends described how he felt. But no matter how much the violent intellectuals of Paris urged him to speak out, he did not comply. He kept his stoicism and they isolated him.
Once he was all alone in Paris, the situation worsened. In 1957, he was the first North African writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He heard the news at lunch with Patricia Blake. Panic-stricken, he gasped for air. Instead of being honoured, he immediately put himself on the defensive. He knew that his already numerous enemies would multiply, because the prize was inevitably linked to politics and the war in Algeria. The first attacks were ‘so low that they pierce my heart … I want to leave the country again. But where to?”
At first he didn’t even want to go to the ceremony, but then he went with Francine and added fuel to the fire by talking about the equality of Algerians and French. He ended by saying that he had always condemned terrorism. He must also condemn the one who is rampaging through the streets of Algeria and may one day strike his mother and his family. ‘I believe in justice, but I will protect my mother first’ was the sentence that threw his enemies out of their chairs.
He can now count among them his former friends. The poet Jean Sénec, whom Camus had helped to succeed, ridiculed all his views, including those of his mother. In his early years, Camus may indeed have been ashamed of her, but when he became aware of her helpless ignorance, he respected her all the more. He began to appreciate her gentle endurance and to love her fiercely.
“His” Combat also turned against him. Others have either slammed him or distanced themselves from him because of politics, principles, impatience or fear. No one has forgiven him for being a Nobel Prize winner and the most famous Algerian in the world, but he remains silent. He wondered: why write when everything is already forgotten? In this case, he preferred to remain silent and prepare for the inevitable.
The war in Algeria has pierced his heart and the last five years have worn him down. Anxiety attacks and claustrophobia set in, and he dared not even set foot on the metro. Suffocated, he battled suicidal thoughts. He felt completely helpless. Once again, his lungs failed him. He wondered whether he might be suffering from an overwhelming sense of responsibility, a perpetual “I must”.
As a cure, he prescribed a return to himself and to happiness as often as possible. “Do not deny what is true, even when the truth is contrary to what is desired.” And: “Accept the necessity of enemies. May you like the fact that they exist.” He also helped himself with tranquillisers. Three months later, he was breathing a little easier again. Then he felt “only a dull and continuous anxiety”. Later, he realised that those months had simply sailed past him.
So he couldn’t enjoy the prize at all, even though he was inundated with mail from readers all over the world and had to hire another secretary. Money had never meant much to him, but now the Nobel Prize came in handy to buy a house in Lourmarin, after having rented one in Provence. He wanted to leave Paris. While the sales of his books were growing around the world, he was an outcast.
He did not recover until mid-August 1959. He was writing again, the book The First Man, and full of new enthusiasm. In the middle of the work, he announced to young Mia, with whom he had fallen in love less than three years earlier, “Absence, painful frustration. But my heart is alive, my heart is alive at last.”
He devoted much of his time and attention to women. They touched him most of all, but they were not the only thing he noticed. He loved stones and would have been a sculptor if he had not been a writer, or perhaps a doctor. He liked Mozart and Edith Piaf, John Wayne and Marlon Brando. When he could no longer swim and play football, he took up table tennis and fishing. Simple hotel rooms and tasty oysters suited him. He never gave up smoking for more than two weeks. He practised yoga for short periods and once went to dance classes, as long as they were not relaxation exercises. He never locked his car, although he loved his cars as much as Greek mythology. He named one Desdemona and the other Penolope.
He has experienced many things in his life, but his greatest wish has never been fulfilled: for his mother to be able to read his works. Illiterate, deaf and almost mute with a vocabulary of 400 words, she was isolated from the outside world. She could not read the newspapers or listen to the radio, she had no expectations or noticeable wishes because she “dared not wish”. Camus always recalled with anger and sadness the joy she had felt during her only romance, which her mother and brother had immediately destroyed. From then on, she quietly persevered in life and loved her son dearly, but she did not want to live in Provence. There “are no Algerians there”, she explained to him.
The 46-year-old Camus and his family spent Christmas 1959 in Provence. On the third of January 1960, he escorted Francine, 15-year-old Catherine and Jean onto the train. He also had a return ticket, but at the persuasion of Michel Gallimard, he returned to Paris by car. On 4 January 1960, he began to wobble on the road. He was swept into a tree and then into another. Camus was dead in the passenger seat with a broken neck, and Gallimard, the driver, died a few days later. Camus’s mother said goodbye nine months after her son. She was buried in Algiers, he in Lourmarin. He did not hear the news that he had got his theatre, which he wanted so badly.
