ALBERT CAMUS

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His father was killed in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne in World War I, and Camus was raised by a grandmother and his devoted but illiterate mother, who worked as a charwoman. The Camus family lived in a small flat without electricity in a run-down area of Mondovi. Camus’s slightly better situated uncle helped him and the family as much as he could.

One of the heroes in Camus’s life was a teacher from grade school, Louis Germain. He recognized Camus’s keen intelligence and helped him win a scholarship to one of the best high schools in the area. There Camus was exposed to the writings of Plato, Pascal, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche.

As a teenager, Camus enjoyed sports such as boxing and soccer. Indeed, in a letter he once remarked, “It was on the playing fields that I learned my only lessons in ethics.” Camus also savored the intensely beautiful sun and sea of his beloved Algeria, where he spent many hours splashing in the surf. However, his intensely physical life was curtailed when he contracted tuberculosis at seventeen. Camus was hospitalized for months, and from then on struggled with his health and never had the same vigor again. He became depressed over his weakened physical condition, and on and off, that depression would accompany him through the rest of his days.

In 1933, Camus commenced study at the University of Algeria. Unlike his more privileged fellow students, Camus always had to divide his time between study and work. Some of the jobs that he held were automobile accessories salesman, meteorologist, clerk, and journalist. In 1934, Camus married for the first time. His wife was a heroin addict. As a young husband, he struggled unsuccessfully to help her conquer the addiction. Their painful relationship came to a close within a couple of years, though it was not until 1940 that they would become officially divorced.

Camus joined the Communist Party in 1935 and helped with the party’s theater productions. A stellar student at the university, Camus wrote a brilliant master’s thesis on Plotinus and Augustine. However, without any further academic prospects, Camus took a job writing for a leftist newspaper in 1939. The paper was forced to shut down a year later, and Camus departed from Algeria for Paris, where he found work for the large-circulation Paris-Soir. However, he quit the paper after a few months and began his lapidary The Stranger, which along with The Myth of Sisyphus was published by the prestigious Gallimard Press in 1942. These two books immediately established his reputation.

During the war, Camus became editor of the influential Resistance newspaper Combat. Along with his trenchant editorials, he continued to write novels and plays. At this time, he began stormy friendships with Jean-Paul Sartre, André Gide, and Simone de Beauvoir. He also became a reader for Gallimard, a job that he would keep for many years to come.

Camus had married Francine Faure in 1940, and in 1945, he became the father of twins. That same year his play Caligula became a big hit. After the war, Camus continued on for a year as editor of Combat, and famous as he now was, he did a lecture tour of America in 1946. In June 1947, Camus published The Plague. The period after the war was both intellectually vibrant and tumultuous. While Sartre and many of Camus’s Left Bank friends were still communists, Camus saw in this movement the same potential for tyranny that he witnessed with the Nazis. His unwillingness to bow to Marxist ideologies, along with his stance against the use of terrorism by the Algerians in their war for independence with France, culminated in a public break with Sartre.

Camus was the veteran of many political frays, and they took their psychological toll on him. Worse yet, in the fifties he fell in love with Maria Casares, and his domestic situation deteriorated to the point where his wife attempted suicide. The theme of his constant womanizing and his wife’s despair are incorporated in his 1957 masterwork The Fall. That same year, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Never one to forget his friends, Camus dedicated the prize to Germain, the primary school teacher who helped set Camus on his path.

In the late fifties Camus, who had directed many plays, was planning to take on the directorship of a major theater company. He was also working on an autobiographical novel (The First Man) about his youth in Algeria. But fate had other plans. Camus, who once remarked that he could not think of a more meaningless death than perishing in a car crash, died in a highway accident on January 4, 1960. He had the manuscript of his novel with him in the car, which was driven by Michel Gallimard, a relative of his publisher.

Camus’s voice was shaped by both his sensuous love of nature and the poverty of his early years. As the reader will glean from our selections from The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus tries to affirm life while rejecting both the heaven of religion and the utopian hereafter of the communists. Jacob may have wrestled with God, but Camus tried to wrangle an authentic sense of meaning from a cold and indifferent universe. It is this terrible combination of the human hunger for meaning and the indifference of the universe that casts the formula for Camus’s important and related concepts of the absurd and revolt, which may be best expressed together in his famous quip, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Profoundly affected by writers as diverse as Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Malraux, Camus was an exquisite stylist. His novels outshine his philosophical tracts. I strongly recommend reading the bookends of his authorship, namely, The Stranger and The Fall.