The rebel

The political right and left have been fighting for Albert Camus' legacy, but Europe's most influential literary export remains stubbornly elusive.

By Allen Barra

Nov 1, 2004 | "The cigarette dangles between the lips," wrote Susan Sontag in her 1963 essay on Albert Camus in The New York Review of Books, "whether he wears a trench-coat, a sweater and open shirt, or a business suit. It is in many ways an almost ideal face: boyish, good-looking but not too good-looking, lean, rough, the expression both intense and modest. One wants to know this man."

In the 44 years since Camus was killed in an automobile accident, readers all over the world have gone right on wanting to know him. Nearly all of Camus' major works are still in print. His best known novel, "L'Etranger," a title translated into English as both "The Stranger" and "The Outsider," is available in several translations and has scarcely been out of print since Knopf published it in English in 1946; "The Rebel," his cautionary essay on modern revolution, and his dramatic oeuvre, "Caligula and Three Other Plays," are both available in Vintage editions. The best biography of him, Olivier Todd's "Albert Camus: A Life," published in English in 1997, is currently in reprint from Carroll and Graf. Everyman's Library has just released three of Camus's fictional works -- "The Plague," "The Fall," and his only collection of stories, "Exile and The Kingdom" -- along with his most famous essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," and his argument against capital punishment, "Reflections on The Guillotine," in one volume. And last year, the University of Nebraska Press made a valuable contribution to Camus studies with "Correspondence, 1932-1960," a collection of letters written between Camus and Jean Grenier, the author's philosophy teacher and mentor.

The availability of his work and the constant flow of new books and articles about him almost make Camus seem more contemporary than writers who were born after he died. Every time there is a seismic shift in world politics, a swarm of new readers discovers him; no sooner had the dust settled from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers than commentators groping for a moral barometer were quoting Camus. Before long, both left and right were trying to pull him into their camp. Last year in The Guardian, Marina Warner flagged Camus' novel "The Plague" -- a metaphorical tale of a North African city wakened to consciousness when isolated by a deadly pestilence -- as a beacon for liberals. In Warner's view, "The Plague" is a "study in terrorism" which was "also a fable of redemption." In his book "Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It," released last January, Ronald Aronson argues for Camus as a neo-con avatar.

He has already been a pop icon for several decades. In the first photographs Americans saw of him after World War II, he was wearing a trench coat and was both amused and pleased to find that Americans thought he looked like Humphrey Bogart. (One of his favorite movies was "The Big Sleep.") In the '50s, the author of "The Rebel" looked a little like an older James Dean, the star of "Rebel Without a Cause" -- an image reinforced by his death in a car crash. In the late '60s, posters with one of his most quoted lines, "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer," shared walls in college dorms with Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger. In the '80s, the Cure caused a minor ruckus with the record "Killing An Arab," inspired by an incident in "L'Etranger."

And -- talk about the absurd -- a few weeks ago, while watching an episode of the Madeline cartoon series with my daughter, I was startled to see a nun taking French school children on a literary tour of Paris and stopping at a café frequented by "Monsieur Albert Camus, author of 'L'Etranger.'" A cartoon version of the novel's protagonist, Meursault, is shown behind bars, wondering, "Who am I? What am I? Why am I here?"

Oddly enough, the more popular Camus the writer has become, the hazier the picture of the man has grown. As Todd writes, "Camus's own books do little to bring his personality into focus." His personal papers didn't help. "I've used the 'Carnets' [notebooks]," Todd says in his preface, "but sometimes I feel that Camus wrote them with posterity looking over his shoulder, not the way Gide wrote his succulent 'Journals,' but rather with the discretion of Johnson explaining himself to Boswell."

For many years, it was assumed that Camus' fiction -- particularly his last completed novel, "The Fall," about a judge who judges himself unfit to judge -- was highly autobiographical. It now seems that Camus was merely doing some selective borrowing from his own experiences. "The idea," he wrote in one of the last carnets, "that every writer ... portrays himself in his books is one of the puerilities that Romanticism has bequeathed us. A man's works often describe his longings or temptations, and almost never his own true story."

Next Page: No one who has read "The Myth of Sisyphus" needs to be told that Camus was never really an existentialist

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