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PARTISAN REVIEW
customary in highbrow circles in France). Furthermore, the novel on which
Camus was at work when he died,
Le Premier Homme,
has now been published,
and this is an indispensable key to the writer he felt he had not yet become.
In
any event, thirty-five years after Camus died senselessly in a car crash,
it was time to sort
things
out, and this is what Todd has so painstakingly and
admirably accomplished, and more.
So much, alas, cannot be said for the English-language edition, published
late last year by Knopf. This is an abridgement (by half) of Todd's book,
woodenly written, albeit relieved here and there by involuntary humor, as
when the translator attributes to Hubert Beuve-Mery, commenting on a
statement Camus was reported to have made during a press conference in
Sweden: "I was totally sure that Camus would say some fucking fool thing."
The last three words of this sentence are meant to render the word
connerie,
meaning a foolishness, nothing more; an unwontedly strong word for the
austere Beuve-Mery, to be sure, but putting the F-word in the mouth of the
founder and director of
Le Monde
is
cocasse,
as the French say, as
if
a weary
old Pope, instead of sending out his blessing
urbi et orbi
in Rome, were to
proffer an obscenity and tell the people to get lost. A tiny detail, agreed, but
my point is that presenting Todd's book in a sort of
Reader's Digest
conden–
sation was a poor idea to begin with and the resulting miscarriage which
Knopf now passes off as Todd's work is compounded by Ivry's lack of feel
for it, or for nuance and texture in either language. The reader is advised to
stick to the original; and
if
he hasn't enough French for it let him read
Lottman, or, say,
War and Peace,
a book which haunted Camus as exemplifY–
ing the literary
Art
he was finally going to master as he withdrew from the
madding crowd in Paris and the
dvilisation de
/'
agenda,
as his friend Bloch–
Michel called it, and settled down to work in the magnificent house he had
acquired in Provence with the proceeds of the Nobel Prize, awarded in 1957.
The Nobel, gratifYing as it was, filled
him
with a dismay almost akin to
the breathlessness which afflicted him from time to time, inducing panic.
The prestige of the prize and the financial freedom which came with it only
increased the burden he carried. He was only forty-six, and catching sight of
him
in Paris around that time I had the impression that he looked stooped
and rather haggard. Thin-skinned though he was, he could shrug off the
malicious reactions of his political enemies, even of those which came from
his former friends and comrades on the Left. But I suspect that Bernard
Frank, with his subtle perspicacity and malicious humor, rather got to
him
when he suggested that the emperor simply had no clothes. "The critics are
always expecting this man to come up with something," Frank wrote in
La
Nif, "but it's hopeless....He graduates his effects. You couldn't hear his
silence a few years ago, but it's become so noisy now that people are bound,
finally, to get the point:
he's never written anything. "
