BOOKS The Outsider

By A. ALVAREZ

Ir' the English have little taste for ideas dis- guised as literature—and not much for ideas at all—the French have even less for creative

work without theories to support it. There is almost no public role for the literary intellectual in England unless he is also a novelist, poet or playwright, whereas in France a man's imagina- tive writing often seems to be not much more than a handy way of drawing attention to his ideas. The hero of The Fall remarks, a little sourly: 'It always seemed to me that our fellow- citizens had two passions: ideas and fornica- tion'; and in Paris even fornication has something a little abstract about it, as though it were a brand of physical chess.

Camus seems to fit effortlessly into the French system. His first novel, The Outsider, was bol- stered by The Myth of Sisyphus, his formal defence of the Absurd. The Plague was followed by a new definition of his position in The Rebel; although they were published four years apart, the second volume of his Notebooks* shows that they grew together in counterpoise. The third novel, The Fall, moves on from The Rebel and leads, according to the Notebooks, to yet another vast summa, Creation corrigee ou Le Systeme, which was to have been a 'big novel+ big meditation+unactable play.' Or rather, it would have led there had not the Absurd caught up with Camus again in January 1960, when the car he was being driven in wrapped itself round a. tree.

Despite this, the coherence of his work is not really logical. It is the individual coherence of something organic in which interconnecting veins of life run between every part. The cult of the Absurd gave way to his later rejection of nihilism, not by any clearinteffectual choice, but by a process of natural growth. He did not adopt a new theory, he gave instead reasons for his maturity; he argued it out in a way which was at once historically profound and very personal. Throughout his career he remained an artist who was also an intellectual, rather than an intellec- tual, like Sartre, who used the arts for polemical and theoretical ends. Although he did his univer- sity work in philosophy—his thesis was on Plotinus—he was never a professional, or even a particularly natural philosopher; he was a moralist who managed to make a persuasive system out of his novelist's preoccupation with conduct. The Rebel may be a remarkably probing and sustained intellectual performance for a man of letters, but it is also, for such a difficult, abstruse work, curiously beautiful. The man of letters triumphed over the philosopher, not only in the lucid rhetoric of the close, but in the texture itself of the book. What gives it that sombre, unexpected beauty is something beyond mere style as artifice: it is the quality that forms and controls style: an unwavering sense of justice, a tense humility.

Late in 1950, when his success was complete, his reputation enormous, Camus wrote in the Notebooks: 'Obi, j'ai une patric: la langue frangaise.' This was no exaggeration; the French language seems the only place where he ever felt

* CARNETS. JANVIER 1942—MARS 1951. By Albert Camus. (Gallimard. F15.60.)

himself easily at home. In Metropolitan France he was an outsider from colonial Algeria, his working-class background detached him from Parisian chic, he belonged to no church, was a member of the Communist Party for not much more than a year, his first marriage lasted even less than that time. To all that was added a further double load of alienation: he was tuber- cular and, in effect, an orphan—his father died on the Marne within a year of his birth and his mother farmed him out to a forbidding, harsh grandmother.

There was, in short, a shell around him, a con- tinual loneliness which neither fame nor a second marriage could shift. The detached purity and sustained impersonality of his style was part of that shell. (It was startlingly consistent: the new Notebooks, for example, cover his time in the Resistance without ever mentioning it, even obliquely; in 1946 he ironically excused the in- trusion of personal matters into working notes by saying that his memory is going.) Yet it was through his style itself that he created and tested his life and values. It is a question, above all, of the use to which he put his uncanny gift for sensuous impressions. All the indifference and remoteness and displaced anxiety, the dis- couragement, bitterness, absurdity and nihilism return finally to an assured core of sensuous

calm. It is not sensual, since the women in

his work are felt more powerfully as absences than as presences. It has, instead, something to do with Mediterranean North Africa: with the heat, the salt and the swimming, with the cool winds and settling noises of evening, with the way the light intensifies and fades in a sky so clear, so luminous that there might never have been a cloud.

For most European writers, all this would be the setting for one of those Durrell-like Never- Never lands where all the girls are beautiful, eager and inventive, and hangovers never happen. Camus, who was born there, was always aware of the dirt and poverty and discomfort of North Africa, the unspeakable suburbs, the dust and cold of the uplands. But underneath that he knew what else it could give: an assured ease and sense of well-being, which is the one unchanging moral positive in his work.

'The secret of Europe,' he wrote'in The Rebel, 'is that it no longer loves life.' Camus was cer- tain of himself at least on that score. But of not much else. The rest of his work was an attempt to show what remains when you love only life, how you must conduct yourself without the sup- port of any of the other comforting abstractions: God, politics, nihilism, family, history, even love. He was involved with morals without morality, with the politics of loneliness.

In his famous quarrel with Sartre, Camus seems to have been made the scapegoat for the whole of the bourgeois left wing's resentment of utopian liberal humanism. This was less than just. One of his greatest strengths as a thinker was that he demonstrated from the inside just how hopeless the liberal humanist position has become. It is not simply that modern industrial states are too vast and highly organised for the creed to be effective, or even meaningful. It is rather that they are organised in such a way that they exert on all beliefs an intolerable pressure which forces them into totalitarianism. Both the nineteenth century's nihilism and its revolutionary utopianism produced their separate brands of totalitarianism—of the right and of the left, Hitler's and Stalin's. Against them, liberal humanism was too vaguely loving hopelessly enlightened and full of optimistic intentions to be a viable alternative.

What Camus set in its place was not a philosophy but a personal stance that assumed nothing, expected nothing and was critical of everything. His early concept of the Absurd was, I suppose, a secularised sense of tragedy, an analysis of the way a meaningless death gratuitously calls in question a life without meaning, or a life amounting, at best, to no more than that death. 'Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I know quite well why... • From the dark horizon of my future,' says Meur- sault the Outsider, 'a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing towards me, all my life long. from the years that were to come.'

Camus's experience in the Resistance changed his attitude but not his assumptions. Accepted nihilism becomes nihilism criticised, absolved by the possibilities of action. The Rebel is a critique of romantic absolutism in all its forms and also of whatever seems malicious, willed and slightly paranoid in the cult of the Absurd. All that re- mains is the individual freedom to say no, and some kind of self-knowing courage which cane an be expressed in action and the senses. There is also a mild nostalgia for what he calls 'the delicate equilibrium between humanity and nature, man's consent to the world, which gives ancient thought its distinction and its refulgence.' If this is humanism, it is humanism in total isolation, assuming no community with anyone else.

Freedom, moreover, was not natural or in- stinctive; it was something to be acquired the hard way and learned, as it' were, end on. 'There is only one liberty,' he wrote in the Note- books, 'to come to terms with death. After which, everything is possible.' This idea that you should work from the end of your life back to the present, that you must consent to your death before you can properly, knowingly, live now, is perhaps inevitable in a man who, like Camus, had been tubercular. But it is also typical of his work. His heroes are men with no child- hood; they have only, at best, an adult 'past they can reach back to, a handful of sharp yet casual sense impressions. This means that each begins with a life that is more or less in control, more or less formed, understood and accounted for. It makes them impervious to romanticism.

Yet by cutting the roots to his childhood, a writer not only cuts off much confusion and mess and darkness, he also runs the risk of cutting himself off from the sources of real feeling. Camus avoided this by giving himself with extraordinary generosity to the present. He did so without drama or self-pity, without precon- ceptions, regrets or illusions. with great intelli- gence and modesty, and by creating a style which was lucid, unfailingly objective, yet humane, tentative and lonely. He was courageous without making claims; he had, above all, no conceit. Simply by recognising the present •impossibility of systematised morality he emerged as the one genuine imaginative moralist of our time. In the Notebooks for February 1951, he wrote a final footnote on The Rebel which seems to apply to all his work : 'I have wanted to speak the truth without ceasing to be generous. That is my justification.'