IRVING HOWE
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placing it at the heart of our need, perhaps our desperation. "We
had arrived," wrote Nicola Chiaromonte, "at humanity's zero hour
and history was senseless; the only thing that made sense was that
part of man which remained outside of history, alien and impervious
to the whirlwind of events.
If,
indeed, such a part existed." That
"if" was transformed by desire into an "as if," becoming the bur–
den of Camus's rebel.
In
America existentialism led to no literary groups or schools,
but it forced writers back to an apprehension of some essential,
naked man: a mere idea of man, if you wish, but an idea rich in
salvage. I can't remember anyone I knew declaring himself an exis–
tentialist except William Barrett, a recent addition to the
Partisan
cir–
cle; yet in some unsystematic way the writings of Sartre and Camus
left a strong mark. Of the two, Sartre had the more powerful mind,
but politically and "personally" (though I never met him) I felt
closer to Camus. Sartre seemed an unresting machine for the manu–
facture of theories, while Camus, in his veiled bewilderments and
unveiled vanities, struck one as more humane. You might learn from
Sartre, but you could talk with Camus. And in Camus there were
two saving presences: the individual person, a stranger stammering
with doubt, and the physical world, shore, ocean, sun. There was
also a disturbing softness in Camus, a weakness for noble rhetoric .
Still, I thought of him as a comrade, as I could not think ofSartre.
It
was Camus who said: "The great event of the twentieth century was
the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary move–
ments .... Since that moment a certain hope has disappeared from
the world and a solitude has begun for each and every man ." That
was how I felt in those years, though I would not have put it quite so
grandly, with quite so much assurance about the "solitude" of "each
and every man ." But then, I told myself, Camus was French.
Ideology crumbled, personality bloomed. Perhaps there was a
relation between the two? The New York writers, unmoored and
glad to be, began to take pleasure in constructing elaborate public
selves. The
Partisan
group had done its best work during the late
thirties and early forties; now its scattered numbers, tasting the
sweets of individuality, were beginning to do their best individual
work. In the search for centrality, they yearned to embrace (even
crush) the spirit of the age.
Do I delude myself in thinking there was something peculiarly
