BOOKS
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And yet he was filled with hope when he took possession of his new
house in Lourmarin-a remodeled silk farm still faintly informed with the
odors of wax and mold and set in a country wonderfully evocative of his
native land. He would keep a place in Paris; and his endless love affairs and
preoccupation with the theatre would tempt him to move about rather more
than he should; but the first draft of
Le Premier Homme
was bourgeoning and,
towards the end of November, he gave himself eight months to finish it,
although he would have to make one brief trip
to
Paris in early January.
On November 22 he wrote to his young Danish lover, whom Todd dis–
creetly calls "Mi": "I have never had such dense material to work with and
this afternoon I had the fleeting impression that my characters were taking
on this density and that for the first time in the twenty years that I've been
searching and working I was finally breaking through to the truth of art. It's
like a delightful bolt to the heart, but a fleeting one, and then back to blind
work and constant doubt." His letters at this point are filled with this sort of
thing: it's a terrible grind, he keeps saying, but he is proud and glad to be on
his way. In short, he was sleepwalking again, as when years before he had
written
Les
Noces
or
The Stranger
or
The Fall
with no very clear idea ofwhere
he was going but moved by an ins tinct for life and a sheer love of it. And
despite the arrival of Francine and their twins he kept at it, "at full throttle,"
he says in a curious little note he jotted in his journal. "Sown by the wind,
harvested by the wind, and a creator nevertheless---such is man through the
ages, and proud to be alive, however briefly"-until the morning ofJanuary
3, when he drove off towards Paris in Michel Gallimard's car.
According to Lottman, who covers the circumstances of this painful
business more thoroughly than Todd, perhaps because the latter was
exhausted by then, the uncompleted first draft of
The First Man
ran to one
hundred forty-five closely written manuscript pages, some eighty-thousand
words. Lottman could not foresee that Camus' daughter Catherine would
publish this text one day. Nor could
I.
But now that it is possible to read
these pages, it is clear that this was the right thing to do. The manuscript
is still rough-hewn and awkward in places but remarkably compelling,
especially the chapters on Camus' poverty-stricken childhood in Belcourt,
a slummy quarter of Algiers which-when I first saw it during World War
II-reminded me of the East Side of New York or the Third Ward of
Newark, New Jersey. Or perhaps the analogy came home to me later, when
I learned more about this man, his mother and their circumstances. You
don't have to be a literary artist to walk in your sleep. In any event, when
I was asked to review yet another biography of Catherine's father about fif–
teen years ago, before those chapters were available, it seemed natural to call
my piece "Brother Camus".
H.
J.
KAPLAN
