BOOKS
Crying in the Wilderness
By JAIN HAMILTON
OH, sun, beaches, and the islands in the path of the trade winds, youth whose memory drives one to despair.' Camus puts the words into the mouth of his tormented and tormenting Jean- Baptiste Clamence, that explorer of hell whose fearful monologue is the whole substance of The Fall, but the lyrical cry of longing for a vanished Intensity of physical existence is unmistakably his own. Time and again throughout his work the note is heard. That on the one hand, and, on the other, the terrible awareness of suffering, separation, cruelty, guilt and madness. 'Do you know,' says Jean-Baptiste, 'what has become of one of the houses in this city that lodged Des- cartes? A lunatic asylum. Yes, it's general delirium, and persecution.'
Regarded from this side of the Channel at any rate, where the classical concept of measure has been far more effectively realised in the creation of a reasonable polity than either Camus or his French critics seem to know, he is one of the very few writers of today who can scale the intellectual heights and plumb the emotional depths without succumbing finally to either vertigo or despair. Mr. Philip Thody's close study* of his writing composes a sympathetic portrait of an artist for whom man the individual creature is still the measure, of an intellectual who realises how much more difficult it is merely to sustain ordinary human life in decency and respect than to proclaim utopias of one sort or another, whether in the future or in the sky.
In the cast of much of his thought as in the central rigour and hardness of much of his writing, Camus is very much a southerner; be- tween his eyes and the object there is not much mistiness interposed (although, of course, he well understands that northern romanticism which has been reaping grim fruits in the excesses of this century); and he knows that for man to be at home in this world and to stay at home in it he must keep nervously alive his sense of balance and tension and resolutely turn away from the temptation of extremes. As a liberal humanist (a dirty phrase not only among French in- tellectuals) he pushes against the twin currents always ready to sweep off the poor benighted and exhausted intellectual into the witlessness of mere religiosity or the heartlessness of totali- tarian politics. He feels for his fellow human creatures in the here and now, and yet as a writer he stands alone—and that is, as it should be, for has not an artist to make his own dis- coveries and prove their reality upon his own pulse? His concept of revolt has been circum- scribed by his acceptance of limits, without which, whatever the direction of the protest, chaos must come again; and his explorations of
• ALBERT CAMUS : A STUDY OF HIS WORK. (Hamish Hamilton,18s.)
l'absurde have not always led him into absurdity. Clearly some of our own aspirant novelist- philosophers—judging from recent variations in fiction and otherwise upon the theme of the human condition—might have benefited from a more diligent study of Camus's actual work be- fore setting up in business for themselves in the preposterous, pragmatical pig of a world on this side of the Channel. Mr. Thody puts it with ad- mirable simplicity when he says that by revolt Camus meant a movement 'to protect the indi- vidual against the absurd and the irrational, and to preserve something which he found infinitely valuable, human life as it naturally is.' As for literature, he has come to regard it not so much as a means of protesting against life, but of pro- ceeding towards a deeper understanding of it. (Hence his preference for Tolstoy over Dostoiev- sky, a choice in which some of our own in- tellectuals can no doubt smell out sentimentality.) This study carefully and painstakingly dis- tinguishes Camus's position from that of the other mandarins with whom he was once grouped, but it would have benefited from a more expansive treatment—at any rate in the eyes of the British reader who cannot but look with awe if not out- right bemusement at the terms on which literary and philosophical arguments are conducted in France and which are often held up to us by some of our more feverish Francophiles as an example of the superior state of affairs on the other side of the water. The great break with the chief mandarin Jean-Paul Sartre came with Camus's publication of The Rebel, in which, turning quite away from the nihilism implicit in earlier works, he spoke in favour of limits and values which the intellectual Left did not appreciate (it was even alleged by Communists that he had been paid by America to write as he did) but which showed that he could live through 'nihilism, con- tradiction, violence and the yearning for destruc- tion' without having his humanism irremediably damaged. All this, as Mr. Thody says, may be puzzling to those in Britain who are sustained more or less by a traditional morality with or without supernatural sanction. Karamazov's 'If God does not exist, then everything is permitted' has never quite struck the convincing note here. Mr. Thody illustrates Camus's attitude as ex- pressed in The Rebel with the anecdote about the Englishman and the nihilist. "My liberty is absolute," claimed the nihilist. "There is no value at all to prevent me from punching you on the nose if I wish to do so." "Oh yes there is," re- plied the Englishman. "Your liberty ends where my nose begins."' The smoky arguments with Sartre and Breton and others were obscure enough to be sure, but a fuller account of them here would have illustrated more strikingly just how abjectly so much of French thought lies down before the abstract monsters that have been bidding fair to devour us all, clever and silly alike.
However, it is not Camus the polemicist who interests us most keenly in our empirical island, but rather the imaginative writer who has lived through defeat and despair, traversed the deserts of abstraction and retained natural humility enough to preserve him from absolutist siren- songs. The Fall is not only an imaginative tour de force but also a powerful answer to those who had thought that Camus's creative force was spent. And if The Rebel had led some to see a growing Christian influence on him, and even a coming conversion, how that suspicion must have been reinforced by the profound religious feeling permeating every page of The Fall, that mar- vellously ambiguous, multifariously suggestive and disturbing work whose boldness of execution justifies the epigraph from Lermontov :
Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances. . . . A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait but not of .an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our generation in their fullest expression.
Whatever the book meant to the author, there is no doubt that it played most tellingly upon the unease lurking in the hearts of most of its readers. But Mr. Thody points out in a shrewd analysis that those who saw Camus falling back from the horrors he delineates into the protect- ing arms of Holy Mother Church may have been rejoicing prematurely; and it is certainly true that many critics, this reviewer among them, failed to take sufficient note of the irony which also informs The Fall. If, like Marlowe, he makes his puppet cry, 'Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it,' he uses him not only to concentrate man's unworthiness and degradation, but also to stand for those who, having insisted too much upon the innocence of the creation, now 'want to crush us with the feeling of our own guilt.' How well we know those Ancient Mariners! And so Mr. Thody offers-us an interpretation by which The Fall is seen to satirise the belief in universal human wickedness, and to attack it as a weapon, like the Marxist-Hegelian theory of history, for enslaving men. Thus, by this reckoning, Camus still stands firm on his humanism.
The interpretation is persuasive but, as Mr. Thody admits, not wholly satisfying. Would it not be simpler to allow both interpretations equal validity, for surely such contradictions are the very hallmark of the age? And is it not precisely such an ambiguity which makes Camus a writer of importance to us?
Previous page
