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PARTISAN REVIEW
air
his enemies made such sport of, like a Brooklyn boy with an awful accent
who wants to be Shakespeare,
at least,
and he preserved and nurtured it
throughout all the years of journalism and the risks he took in the
Resistance and as an editorialist at
Combat,
together with a stubborn sense
of what was moral and what was not, and a growing helplessness as his coun–
try and his mother's, Algeria, was submerged in terror and by an idea of
justice that he lacked the intellectual tools to refute. For all his indefatigable
reading, he seems to have been unacquainted with the Scottish-English the–
oreticians of the civil society or wi th Hayek, say, or Popper in our time. He
had been brought up in the left-wingJacobinism of the French Left and the
Federalist tradition remained foreign to him. For Algeria,
in
any event, the
problem which concerned him most intimately, history had become a trap
and it was too late-witness Raymond Aron, who was one of the first to
urge the French simply to pack up and get out. So Camus' involvement in
public affairs was like the threat of death which hung over him all his life,
from the day he was diagnosed as tubercular as an adolescent- a sort of solu–
tion, on one hand, and a cons tant torment on the other, a relief from what
he saw as his destined but oh-so-difficult lifework, and the prospect, the
galling frustration, of defeat. Camus' deepest desire was to write novels, or at
least One Great Novel. It was as simple as that. Not to tell the world how to
face the fact that we are adrift in a world without God and without mean–
ing, as he tried to do in
The Myth
if
Sisyphus;
or to write a guide for the
perplexed in the face of the ideologists-from Sartre to Foucault-who
despised their bourgeois families and called for the destruction of the civi–
lization and inherited moral order to which he (much like an American of
immigrant or "hardhat" background) had acceded with such difficulty. His
answer to the sentence that hovered over him and to the distractions imposed
upon him by his circumstances was to write-at long last-the Book which
would encompass his time and establish-at long last-who he was.
Hardly a novel ambition, one might say-and of course one would be
right, but it had a special poignancy in Camus' case because he was so con–
stantly haunted by the idea that in the absence of this achievement his
entire life, all the books and plays he had wri tten, for which he had
received the plaudi ts not only of the public but of his peers, would be, in
fact
was,
nothing but a fraud-or a
Misunderstanding,
to quote the title of
the play which he had been carrying about with him for years and finally
produced elaborately with a stellar cast in one of the premier theaters of
Paris, only to see it hissed off the stage. For once, at least, there was no mis–
understanding; the mistaken identity which leads to the death of the play's
hero is badly contrived and
obviously
fails to work-as if Camus were too
entranced by his inner problem to see what is so clear to the public, the
actors, and everyone else.
