Of Things Past

The First Man
by Albert Camus
translated by David Hapgood. Knopf. 325 pp. $23.00

On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was sitting in a restaurant in Paris. A waiter rushed up to announce that the writer had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. Incredulous, visibly more shaken than pleased, Camus could do little more than mutter that the prize should have gone to André Malraux instead.

Camus had reason to be stunned: at forty-four, he was too young for the prize. But he was hardly undeserving. A prolific writer, he had been in the public eye for over twenty years—not only as an essayist, novelist, critic, and political thinker, but also as a journalist, actor, playwright, publisher, and political activist.

After World War II, during which he served in the French Resistance, Camus had become one of the towering luminaries of French intellectual life, associated not only with the Left in politics but with the existentialist movement in art and philosophy. But then, disenchanted with systems and parties, he had begun to cultivate the sort of contemplative, introspective humanism which his former comrades were quick to label “bourgeois.” As an erstwhile Communist sympathizer who had the courage to voice his disillusionment with Soviet totalitarianism, he was attacked by French leftists—preeminent among them Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom Camus conducted a notorious public feud—eager to defend the Soviet system against any and all criticism. But he was also assailed by the Right for his willingness to make concessions to Arab nationalists in his native Algeria. To complicate matters further, although he did indeed sympathize with the Algerian Arabs and defended them vigorously, he conspicuously stopped short of endorsing the terrorist tactics of the National Liberation Front (FLN), and was adamant about the legitimacy of French claims in North Africa. Ultimately, his fellow Algerian Frenchmen were as distrustful as his Arab friends of the fanciful hopes he entertained for a French-Arab federation. In the end, in this as in everything, Camus was an outsider.

The Nobel Prize brought many good things to Camus, but it came at a particularly difficult moment in his life. Although he had published The Fall a year earlier, in 1956, he had entered a slow, dry, tentative phase—a fact that stirred no end of anxiety in a man who had always written with a great deal of agility and flair and who, faced now with disquieting doubts, could not help being mindful that the Nobel Prize was usually conferred at the end of a long literary career.

Would he write again? And would anything he wrote ever supersede his earlier work? Would people ever stop comparing everything he wrote to The Stranger (1942), a work of his late twenties? Many factors conspired to suggest that he was, if not finished, at least quite consumed. His marriage was not satisfying, the political situation in Algeria, where his brother and mother continued to live, was becoming ever more volatile, and Paris, though full of rewards for a man seeking the luster of an intellectual dolce vita, had never slaked his thirst for intimacy and/or good fellowship. His own Notebooks bear testimony to what must have been a tortured period in his life:

October 17. Nobel. Strange feeling of depression and melancholy. At 20, poor and naked, I found real glory. . . .

* * *

October 19. . . . I must overcome this kind of terror and incomprehensible panic in which the unexpected news has thrown me . . . This month, three fits of breathlessness exacerbated by claustrophobic panic. Disorientation.

* * *

December 29. New panic attack. . . .

Night of 29/30. Endless anxieties.

January 1. Redoubled anxiety.

Only later in 1958, when he began work on an autobiographical novel, provisionally entitled Adam and later The First Man, did Camus seem to find his bearings again. By then something had changed. It was not just that he was now writing about his own life. Like Stendhal, like Proust, Camus had long littered his work with attempts at autobiographical writing; many of his essays are musings in this vein. What was special now was that an author who had made a name for himself as a controversial and above all an intellectual writer was attempting to capture his own life in a manner that could only be called retrograde.

Indeed, in her introduction to the English translation of The First Man, the unfinished draft of which was found in a briefcase next to the wreckage of the car accident that took Camus’s life in 1960, Catherine Camus, the author’s daughter, explains that one of the reasons the family withheld publishing it was that her father had too many enemies eager to pounce on so highly personal, so sentimental, and hence so vulnerable a book. This was not an ideological novel; nor was it another roman à thèse, where intellectual notions masquerade as characters in a thinly veiled plot tangled with ethical-philosophical questions. Unlike The Stranger, The Plague (1947), or The Fall, all novels of ideas—indeed, top-heavy with ideas—The First Man soars on gossamer wings. Its lightness, its overall lack of brooding pessimism, its blend of serene yet stark presentation of character, mark a significant new register in Camus. This sudden efflorescence of a new, less ironic, almost soulfully lyrical voice might well have left the book defenseless against those who, in Catherine Camus’s words, “were saying Camus was through as a writer.” Thus it lay buried for 34 years.

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The First Man is about growing up in extreme poverty, about the necessity of inventing oneself out of nothing, about gratitude, loyalty, beauty, and love. As it opens, the parents of Jacques Cormery (Albert Camus), impoverished French migrants, are riding in a carriage in the rain, hastening to reach a shelter where the wife will give birth. The year is 1913, and though the town of Solferino in Algeria is not Bethlehem, Jacques Cormery’s initials suggest beguiling parallels with the Nativity.

A year later, Jacques’s father, whom the boy never meets, has gone back to France to fight in the war and dies there of a wound brought on by a shell splinter, leaving the family to fend for itself in penury. Everyone moves to Belcourt, one of the poorer neighborhoods of Algiers, where Jacques will grow up in the company of his mother, a charwoman; his grandmother, an embittered, stern matriarch; and his kindly uncle Etienne, who builds kegs for a living. The boy learns to play with others his age in the smothering heat on the sidewalks of Algiers, using his wits and fists, but finally catches the attention of a well-intentioned schoolteacher who coaches him for a high-school scholarship. Jacques is, in fact, entranced by learning. But, at the edge of adolescence—where the manuscript ends—he is also very much of the earth, and of the beaches, and in that quandary we leave him.

At times, without meaning to, The First Man lapses into what sounds like first-person autobiography. Signs of this are the passages in which individuals are suddenly referred to not by their fictional but by their real names. Not least of these is Jacques’s mother, who sometimes appears here not as the widow Cormery but as the Veuve Camus, a name which—as Camus remarks in his Notebooks—she used into her old age even though she had lived with her husband for the briefest period and could hardly remember him. “What year was he born?” inquires Jacques in The First Man. “I don’t know. I was four years older.” “And you, what year were you born?” “I don’t know. Look in the family book . . . it was a long time ago.”

This scene held a haunting appeal for Camus; it appears not only in The First Man but in his Notebooks and in “Between Yes and No,” a ten-page version of his autobiography written when he was only twenty-two years old. Both versions mention the dead father, the shell splinter turned into family heirloom, the abusive and authoritarian grandmother, the dark and dirty stairway with its grimy banister, and above all Jacques’s mother, a listless and distracted woman, half-deaf and also somewhat vacant, who spends hours staring at nothing and everyone, absent, silent, and submissive, forever holding a handkerchief which she rolls into a ball between arthritic fingers. The family itself is afflicted with congenital muteness. In a note appended to The First Man, Camus reminds himself that, to convey his mother’s speech, he must limit his vocabulary to 400 words only. Uncle Etienne, the most colorful character in the book, is totally deaf, a handsome debonair who speaks only in yelps and yaps and “scraps of sentences.”

Still, everything in the house is also filled with an almost ferocious animal love. The grandmother, a severe, almost cruel disciplinarian, lands her grandson his first job by lying to his future employer—and, of course, punishes the young Jacques whenever he lies to her. It is she who manages household affairs; and her weak-willed daughter always defers to her. The grandmother is stubborn, irate, thrifty, a tremendously vivid personality, even if not the one who, finally, haunts the pages of this book.

That person is, again, Jacques’s mother, who never understands much of anything, including her own “misfortune,” who has “difficulty thinking,” whose memory is entenbré, clouded, who cannot pray, and who, much later, in one of the novel’s flash-forward scenes, unable to grasp the extent to which the situation of French Algerians has deteriorated, will turn down her grown son’s invitation to come live with him in France. (“Oh no,” she says, “it’s too cold over there. I’m too old now. I want to stay home.”) It is to this woman in Belcourt that the adult Jacques, a writer, returns each time from Paris, rushing up the stairs, four treads at a time, his body still remembering the exact height of each riser, his mind devoid of words. For words, which have become his trade, are superfluous in this household and are no substitute for love. “He is her son, she is his mother,” wrote a younger Camus in “Between Yes and No.” Proust had done no better, trying to speak of his love for his grandmother. “She was my grandmother, and I was her grandson.”

The First Man is dedicated “To you who will never be able to read this book.” Would she never read it because she would not live long enough to see it completed, or because she did not know how to read, or even understand when she was being read to, and was therefore condemned to be forever alienated from the most significant part of her son’s life—which would also mean that she would never be able to read the dedication itself, or know of it, or thank him for it, or even be moved by it? In fact, it is doubtful that Camus’s mother did understand much when they came to tell her in 1960 that once again someone dear to her had perished in a violent accident in France. As the biographer Herbert Lottman writes, “Reporters arrived at Camus’s mother’s apartment late on January 4, but when they realized that she knew nothing, they stammered that they were looking for someone else.” Friends finally announced the news to her. She survived Albert only a little over nine months, dying in her Belcourt apartment in September 1960.

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The dedication is not the only moment in The First Man marked by dislocation and profound irony. The adult Jacques/Albert finally goes to visit his father’s tombstone in France:

He read two dates: “1885-1914,” and automatically did the arithmetic: twenty-nine years. Suddenly he was struck by an idea that shook his entire body. He was forty years old. The man buried under that slab, who had been his father, was younger than he.

This sudden capsizing of one’s entire being is not an uncommon event in Camus’s work in general, or in existentialist literature as a whole. What saves the moment here is Camus’s refusal to draw a large, overarching moral from this mystifying puzzle, or even to resolve it philosophically. His sense of helpless confusion is what has stirred him to set out on this journey in search of his father. Although it is also a search after such grand concepts as identity, truth, heritage, and the “tangled hidden roots that attached him to this magnificent and frightening land,” here the philosopher has freed the novelist to do as he pleases, which happens to be the one thing he does best: simply to remember.

And that is where the beauty of The First Man lies. It is a beauty found in Camus’s superlatively lyrical collections of essays—Nuptials, Summer, The Wrong Side and the Right Side—works which, like his Notebooks, are seldom read but rival anything he is famous for. In these essays, too, the boy who was born in poverty speaks of his love for North Africa, its cities, its ruins, its people, its odors, its sea. But in The First Man, the prose is less sinewy than in earlier renderings of the same material, more supple, and more elegiac, as though drawing inspiration directly from Proust as it recalls

the odor of burned grass, of manure, of algae, the strong smell of fermenting grapes and of grape liquor; the smell of varnished rulers, and pen cases; the delicious taste of the strap of his satchel that he would chew on at length while laboring over his lessons; the sharp bitter smell of purple ink . . . the soft feel of the smooth glossy pages in certain books, which also gave off the good smell of print and glue, and finally, on rainy days, the smell of wet wool that emanated from the school coats at the end of the classroom.

This is not to say that The First Man is altogether purged of the sort of intellectual—and at times clunkily symbolic—content of the philosophical novel, or that, in subsequent drafts, Camus might not have yielded to the impulse to write “big” themes. There is, for example, that opening scene, almost embarrassingly kitschy, of the man and his pregnant wife in the carriage, and then there are those initials: Jacques Cormery. The title itself, The First Man, smacks of Camus’s compulsive inability to leave ideas alone—or to avoid announcing them with resounding gongs. Although Camus is writing about his own life, he is also writing about a “country” whose history, he claims, is as unremembered as it is unrecorded—the country of the poor, whose uncompleted narratives blend in the dust and are buried in the sand storm. For “poor people’s memory,” he writes,

is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are gray and featureless. Of course, there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labor, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past [Proust, again!] is not just for the rich.

One hears, in these lines, the distant rattling of anti-bourgeois propaganda. But if one listens carefully, one also hears the salute of one comprehensive master of memory to another. Remembrance of things past, these words say, is for everyone.