Outsider
Peter Levi
The reputation of Camus suffered for many years in France from the childish `I am lefter than thou' rivalry of Sartre and his associates. Camus was derided as a moralist and sneered at as a saint. In England and America his reputation has suffered almost equally because of his Nobel Prize; it has been covered with an academic glaze like a thick coat of Victorian varnish. As a writer of wonderful directness and salty brilliance, as a member of the 1945 resistance, and an intelligent, un- systematic philosopher on the side of liber- ty, equality and fraternity, he was a sitting target I suppose. Even now, and even in this latest study, which is critical in the carping sense of the word, often silly and usually patronising, Camus is not clearly recognis- ed for his technical and human greatness as a writer. That is possibly because he was a premature anti-fellow-traveller, and loyal to the Algeria of his childhood.
Patrick McCarthy has too little sense of language and literature to be a sympathetic guide to Camus, and yet his book is packed with interesting paragraphs, many of which will be news to most English readers. It is one of those books in which one may be irritated several times a page, but in the end one has accepted most of the conclusion before one reaches it. 'Camus's life was almost the opposite of what it seemed to his contemporaries: a long, losing battle against wars and terrorists, tuberculosis and fame. French Algeria, which had offered him instincts, passions and happiness, however tangled with poverty and pre- judice, almost destroyed him along with itself'.
If Camus had not died in his forties in a road accident, he would now be under 70, a new and different kind of Malraux perhaps, for the France of M. Mitterrand. Most of what preoccupied him in his writings looks reasonable enough today. He hated the death penalty, he was horrified and frightened by state violence and by ter- rorism; he was close to being a pacifist. His early work was so lyrical that when by chance I bought his Noces at an airport bookstall, I thought at first it might be by some different Camus. After those misgiv- ings I recognised in it the youth of an equal- ly vulnerable, almost equally lyrical, but sadder, older writer, the Camus of the Carnets.
Patrick McCarthy is too dismissive of the sense of the mediterranean and the 'bar- baric' feelings of young Algerian Camus, and makes too much of his passions for swimming and football, as if those were eccentricities like having a parrot on one's shoulder. As for the barbarism, young Camus wrote a university thesis on Plotinus, he produced the Prometheus of Aeschylus in his local theatre, and only the necessary medical test kept him from a post as a university teacher. Later in life, Camus was blamed for a speech during the crisis leading to Algerian independence, in which he said his mother ran the risk of being murdered. He loved justice but preferred his mother. Was that so stupid or so wicked?
Imagine Camus as an Ulster protestant, but left wing and a reformist in Ulster politics. The analogy is not exact of course, but Sartre's position over Algeria was equivalently to support the Provos, while Camus, having demanded reform for 20 years and having done what he could to promote a truce that both sides rejected, still disapproved of terrorism, and spoke in the end of throwing what weight he had as an Ulster writer into arguing against Ulster leaving the United Kingdom. The fait accompli of Algerian independence surely ought not to destroy our sympathy with the loyalty that Camus felt to his own roots, or even with the future he had once dreamed for French Algeria. Camus was a provincial writer with the sharpened sense and the moral intelligence a youth in the provinces can give. There have been not dissimilar writers of roughly the same generation from Alexandria and from Southern Greece and from the North of England.
But there is no real English equivalent to Camus; the closest is George Orwell, but Camus comes in age about half way be- tween Orwell and Philip Larkin, and he
shares with Larkin a deadly ability to con- vey a certain blankness, an emptiness and an absence of consolation. Camus is a more philosophic writer than Orwell, partly no doubt because Bab-el-Owed grammar school, let alone a French provincial univer- sity, put more emphasis on the subject than Eton. One would certainly be lucky at any English school to find a teacher like Jean. Grenier of Bab-el-Oued. Camus, in Ills lifetime, was often accused by trendier writers of flirting with religion, or of smuS- gling in an implicit God. The accusation is quite untrue. If ever a writer deserved to be honoured for what he made of his atheism, that writer is Camus.
He had, or came to have, an admirable distaste for politics. If that is a conservative attitude, then he became to that extent con- servative. He wrote with feeling that `Politics is not a religion. If it becomes oTle, then it becomes an inquisition'. In spite 0' his continual involvement in public life, which was not as unfruitful for his contem- poraries as Patrick McCarthy seems to fee), Camus made his greatest contribution mfiction and in the theatre. Both his philosophy and his radicalism are best en- countered in his stories, and for those who relish a writer's writer, maybe in the Carnets as well. All the same, it is possible to feel nostalgia for the Paris of the libera- tion and for the rhetoric of the Your!! Camus, going up straight and pure 104 smoke from the maquis.
We have a new translation of The Oaf' sider, by Joseph Laredo, much better than any earlier ones I have read. It catches perfectly the flatness and the sparkle of Camus. It moves faster than the styles we are used to nowadays in English, let alone, in French. The sky was 'full of red strealo, or you amid see 'the motionless surface nr the sea, and, further along, a massive Pro- montory drowsing in the clear water'. For some inscrutable reason the name of the ex- cellent translator is not on the cover of the book or in the publisher's publicity note that came with it. Joseph Laredo is worth watching; he has made a masterpiece read like a masterpiece. What a difference It would have made if Patrick McCarthy wrote as well, but he speaks of Augustine age', and 'pastis-filled toasts and 'Arab antisemitism' which sounds a suicidal note he does not intend.
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