BOOKS
303
0, sharper than a serpent's tooth! Todd tells us in a footnote that Frank
later had second thoughts about this ferocious remark, but my own instinct
is that-apart from the tone--it came rather close to Camus' own view of
his career at that stage--too close, in any event, for comfort. The final chap–
ter of Todd's book is the story of how Camus found his house in Lourmarin,
in the Vaucluze, not far from his great friend the poet Rene Char, and set to
work on his new book. Not exactly the first,
pace
Bernard Frank, but surely
the one that would confirm his vocation and illuminate all the rest.
A professional literary artist, in Camus' view, is among other things a
writer who recognizes no greater urgency and does not go whoring after
strange gods as most of us do, for whatever reason; one whose work springs
from what he called-in answer to a question about what the critics had
failed to see in hin1-"the dark side, the part that is blind and instinctive in
me." A revealing remark, one he had made before, in fact repeated in one
form or another throughout his life-and utterly self-evident to the man
who created
The Stranger,
the tortured narrator of
The Fall,
the
Mediterranean sun-worshipper on ilie beaches around Algiers. He remained
a passionate reader all his life, and cri tics will duly discover traces of Kafka in
Meursault, of Dostoyevsky in Jean-Baptiste Clarnence, of Gide in
Les
Noces,
etc., but the fact remains that the works of Camus which "come off" best
and most successfully-in terms of public acceptance, and in my view as
well-were not iliose he wrote most laboriously, as a card-carrying French
intellectual formed in the public schools of the Third Republic, but rather
those he wrote at white heat, without the scholarly outlines and impedi–
menta he used in
The Myth
if
Sisyphus
and
The Rebel-the
philosophical
essays which were intended to work out and define his positions in the pecu–
liar atmosphere of occupied and postwar France, where the authentic
forts- en-themes-Sartre
&
de Beauvoir
&
Co.-were setting the tone and for–
mulating the questions in terms of German phenomenology, Marxism, and
Stalinism. These glib and talented contemporaries now appear, on the
whole, as an unmitigated if short-lived disaster for French culture, but no
one who lived through that period can forget the enormous power they
wielded, not only in Paris but throughout the western world. Nor can he
fail to appreciate--as Todd does quite brilliantly as he traces the evolution
of Camus' views on Communism and then on the Algerian question-the
extraordinary courage, earnestness, and insight he brought to these issues;
insisting all the while that he had neither the baggage nor the temperament
of a philosopher or a political scientist and that his heart-if only the times
were not so out of joint-was elsewhere.
Meaning where, exactly? I have already suggested that it was in a certain
literary ambition; not just a literary career but the highest, the most over–
weening ambition. He had this
chutzpah
and it helped to give him that lofty
