The rebel

It's doubtful that Camus wanted his own true story told by anyone else, or that he thought there was a story to tell beyond his novels and essays. He may have been right; he inspired a plethora of biographies and studies, many of them useful but almost none of them satisfying. Herbert Lottman's 1979 biography of him gave us the facts of his life but couldn't capture the spirit of his work. French critics Albert Maquet and Germaine Brée and the Englishman Philip Thody wrote useful studies of his work presented against the sketchy backdrops of history. Irishmen Patrick McCarthy and Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote self-serving books criticizing Camus for not seeing the complex political issues of his time as clearly as they did. Todd's is the first full-length treatment written with an empathy for the cultures, particularly the now-lost world of the impoverished French Algerians that produced Camus, and the book's lack of an ideological agenda is refreshing. Some of Todd's interpretations sound radical in short form, but most won't come as surprises to careful readers of Camus' work.

For instance, no one who has read "The Myth of Sisyphus" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" needs to be told that Camus was never really an existentialist, which won't prevent him from being lumped with that school whenever a journalist is stuck for an easy handle. ("I don't at all feel I am an 'existential'," he wrote in a 1943 letter to Grenier, thus giving credence to those who believe that his philosophical views differed from the existentialists at the outset of his writing career.) Unlike Sartre, Camus never felt alienated by nature and the world, and in his notebooks he listed outdoor life as one of the conditions essential to happiness.

His mistrust of systematic philosophies in general, and Sartre's in particular, was one of the causes of their much-publicized falling out. The immediate cause for the quarrel, exacerbated by personal animosities, was the publication of "The Rebel," which Sartre and other Communist-leaning French intellectuals criticized for its rejection of Marxism.

The promises of Marxism, Camus felt, were ultimately as false as those of Christianity. The latter promised its followers "a beyond," while the former offered "a later," which, Camus felt, amounted to the same thing and was thus equally false. As for the existentialists, he wrote in "The Myth of Sisyphus," "Negation is their God." Camus was a devout agnostic and not a man to exchange a spiritual heaven for a materialistic one.

Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algiers, on Nov. 7, 1913. He never knew his father, who was killed in World War I. His mother was of Spanish descent; André Maurois felt "there was a good bit of the Castilian in Camus," especially the Spanish traits of dignity, nobility and poverty, and defiance in the face of death. Camus' education was hampered by a combination of poverty and a family who, like many of their kind, was not so much anti- as non intellectual. No doubt with some justification, his mother felt that Albert should have to work for a living, like his older brother Lucien who at age 14 was already working as a messenger boy. Camus had the good fortune to be sent to school, where an experienced teacher, Louis Germain, took him under his wing and gave him free lessons. (Many years later, Camus repaid the kindly instructor by portraying him in his unfinished last novel, "The First Man," which neither author nor subject lived to see in print.)

From there, Jean Grenier, a teacher at the local lycée -- a secondary school maintained by the government to prepare students for a university -- took over Camus' education, going so far as to bring him books in the hospital when Camus, after coughing blood in class, was forced to drop out. According to a friend quoted in the introduction to "Correspondence, 1932-1960," Grenier "created Camus and the literature of Camus." That's probably true, but it's an oversimplification; Camus was a student but not a disciple of Grenier, who was a mystic and a classic humanist. Camus, as Jan F. Rigaud, who translated the volume of Camus-Grenier letters, phrases it in his introduction, "did not leave the earthly kingdom. Camus would always rely on man himself and his own free will to be saved."

"He wasn't a boy who was made for all that he tried to do," said Sartre with uncanny insight. "He should have been a little crook from Algeria, a very funny one, who might have managed to write a few books, but mostly remains a crook. Instead of which, you had the impression that civilization had been stuck on top of him and he did what he could with it." That Camus didn't wind up a professional Algerian street rat might have had something to do with his contracting tuberculosis while in his teens. He never completely rid himself of the disease, which probably would have killed him before age 50 if he had not died in the automobile accident. Like other famous consumptives, from the gunfighter Doc Holliday to the country singer Jimmie Rodgers to fellow author Robert Louis Stevenson, he adopted a fatalistic attitude toward life tinged with sardonic humor. He was already intellectually precocious; the disease helped make him emotionally mature.

Next Page: How might Camus the writer have evolved had he survived the automobile wreck?

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