The rebel

Many other factors conspired to shape Camus' outlook on life and existence: his intense love for his quiet, unlettered mother; his classic French education; his instinctive love for the Greek philosophers and poets (rather than the German philosophers who exerted such an influence on his French contemporaries) with whom he felt a Mediterranean kinship. None of these would prove so strong an influence as the sun and sea of his native Algeria, from which Camus derived the vision of the invincible summer he carried with him all his life. Far from Catholic France, surrounded by Muslims, the sea, and the desert, Camus grew up a 20th century pagan imbued with Christian-like piety. "It's true that I don't believe in God," he once said, "but that doesn't mean I'm an atheist, and I would argue with Benjamin Constant, who thought a lack of religion was vulgar and even hackneyed."

Or, as he told reporters in Stockholm at the Nobel Prize ceremony, "I have Christian concerns, but my nature is pagan." Surely a better combination than the other way around.

Despite his popular image as a professional pessimist, Camus was in fact possessed of an almost unnatural optimism. Sartre once derisively referred to it as "Metaphysical Quixotism," though Camus' optimism in the face of what he perceived to be the world's indifference probably accounts in large part to his continuing popularity. Camus always speaks to individuals, never to groups; despite the best efforts of those attempting to pigeonhole his philosophical and political beliefs, Camus, like George Orwell, remains relevant without being fashionable. In the words of Olivier Todd, he "used his novels and journalism to attack the obvious fortress of totalitarianism, communism, as well as bastions of Fascism, like Franco's regime. He was more or less alone in his struggle ..."

As a result, Camus was "treated like a traitor by the Communists because given the political climate in France, he was correct too early." It wasn't just France where Camus was correct too early: It was in the '80s that Susan Sontag (who once accused Camus of being "not that emotionally tough, not tough in the way Sartre is") angered old leftists by calling communism "fascism, with a human face" -- a statement that pretty much sums up what Camus had been saying since the end of World War II.

It was Sontag, in 1963, who offered what many thought at the time was the definitive judgment on Camus the writer. Claiming to judge "by the highest standards of contemporary art," she wrote that "his work, solely as a literary accomplishment, is not major enough to bear the weight of admiration that readers want to give it." Camus' cardinal virtue, she felt, was moral beauty, but "unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable." Perhaps not so perishable, it turns out, as Sartre's moral toughness. Whatever "the standards of art" (and whose standards would those be, Sontag's?), many seem willing to judge Camus on his own terms, not as a philosopher or even a novelist, but as he put it, "an artist who creates myths." Nearly half a century after most of his major works were published, he remains the most influential Continental writer in the U.S.; in France, says Todd, "Camus leads the pack ... with Jean Paul Sartre lagging far behind."

It's intriguing to think how Camus the writer might have evolved had he survived the automobile wreck. Would he have become an increasingly irrelevant embarrassment, as, to a large extent, Sartre has, to a generation that no longer puts faith in Marxism? Would he, as "The First Man" suggests, have become more of a pure novelist and receded from the increasingly turbulent 1960s political scene? Would the moralist of "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Rebel" be transformed into a neo-Christian mystic, a C.S. Lewis for old radicals?

Whatever development his thoughts might have taken, it's doubtful he would have strayed far from the path he initially laid out in "The Myth of Sisyphus": "A man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them." Camus could not deny what he felt were his truths even when political expediency would have served him well. For instance, he refused to endorse the Algerian Revolution, which earned him more enmity, perhaps, from leftist intellectuals than his rejection of Marxism. Sontag's comment on his emotional toughness was a criticism of his agonizing inability to take a stand on the Algerian question: "Moral and political judgment," wrote Sontag, "do not always so happily coincide." Indeed they do not, as so many French, English and American intellectuals discovered when the Algerian nationalist group they endorsed proved to be as brutal and despotic as any fascist engine.

Which is why anyone who tries to reduce Camus' work to fuel for political punditry is ultimately doomed to failure. Moral and political judgment being so often incompatible, we need reminders that the moral judgment is the less perishable.

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