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never-failing contradictory intelligence, plus the exuberance of one who
has been visited by the animal faith, with which Horatio's education is
concluded, that there are weapons "that do not weigh one down" and
that the lover of life has also on his side "the force that is in the heart
of matter, that, as if stubbornly, makes things exist rather than be mere
dreams or wishes."
Harold Rosenberg
CAMUS AS DRAMAliST
CALIGULA AND THREE OTHER PLAYS.
By
Albert Comus. Alfred A.
Knopf. $5.00.
So honest a man as Camus is obviously at a disadvantage in
so dishonest an institution as the theater. His sincerity has become a
legend, but it has prevented him from becoming a successful dramatist.
The Nobel Committee commended his "clear-sighted earnestness," and
Harold Clurman called him "a moment in the conscience of mankind."
Obviously, this is not a man who can easily lend himself to the subter–
fuges of the stage, who can say of his playwriting, as Henry James did;
"Oh, how it must not be too good and how very bad it must be!" I can
not think of a better application of the term "defect of his virtue";
Camus's strenuous virtue is the key to his plays and to his defective sense
of the theater. Explicitly forswearing "psychology, ingenious plot-devices,
and spicy situations," he requires that we take him in the full intensity
of his earnestness or not at all.
Simple in plot, direct in argument, oratorically eloquent, his dramas
are like few other modern plays. They remind us of Gide and of the early
Sartre (in
No Exit
and
The Flies),
before Sartre mastered the deceptions
of politics and of the stage. But even these comparisons are inadequate
because Camus differs significantly from his many French contemporaries
who have put ancient myths on the modern stage. The others have turned
conventional myths-at least their antiquity has made them seem con–
ventional-into instruments of iconoclasm. Obviously stimulated by
French neo-classical drama, Cocteau, Giraudoux, and Sartre became the
debunking inside-dopesters of ancient mythology; they made Oedipus
into a young man on the make, Electra into a rather addled termagant,
Zeus into a tyrant. They overturned or exposed the classical stories. But
what Camus does is to begin with a sufficiently cynical legend-the his–
tory of Caligula or the murder of the prodigal son (the basis of Robert
Penn Warren's "Ballad of Billie Potts")-and to dramatize it as forth-
