The First Man
By Albert Camus
Translated by David Hapgood
Knopf, 325 pages, $23
For those of us, and we were legion, who cut our eye-teeth on “The Stranger,” who went around muttering, “Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure,” who thought each time we climbed a hill we emulated Sisyphus, who sported raincoats and Gauloises and spouted code-words such as “commitment, nothingness”–Albert Camus was a hero. Everything about him compelled our respectful attention: the lined face, the hooded gaze, the earned ascent from poverty, the work in the French resistance, the Nobel prize in 1957. His essay “The Rebel” was something to quote; his dramatic adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “The Possessed” improved, we were certain, on the original. “La Chute” and “La Peste”–“The Fall” and “The Plague”–were novels to read, reread, read again; we admired both the heady conceptual difficulties of his philosophy and the stripped simplicities of his creative prose.
Then, too, he offered us that emblem of romance: an early and violent death. Camus died in a car crash on Jan. 4, 1960, at the age of 47. He had been driving south from Paris to Lourmarin–a village in Provence where the writer lies buried and which reminded him of his homeland, Algeria, because of “the size of the sky.” In the terms of his own lexicon, the accident seemed “absurd,” a wholly “gratuitous act.” More catastrophic even than Hemingway’s suicide, for Hemingway was in acknowledged decline, Camus’ death in a flaming wreck signaled an end to an era: he had been the intellectuals’ James Dean.
It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that his family feared he also had been in decline and chose to suppress the manuscript he carried with him in the car. According to his daughter, in her brief introduction to “The First Man,” he had antagonized both his allies on the Left (by denouncing totalitarianism and the Gulag) and on the Right (by advocating a multicultural Algiers); he was losing his mano-a-mano with Jean Paul Sartre for control of that intellectual property, existentialism, and “was very much isolated and subject to attack from all sides designed to destroy the man and the artist so that his ideas would have no impact.
“In these circumstances, to have published an unfinished manuscript–144 handwritten pages, often lacking periods and commas, never revised–might well have given ammunition to those who were saying Camus was through as a writer. His friends and my mother decided not to run that risk. My twin brother and I had no say in the decision, for we were only fourteen years old.”
Thirty-five years later, and happily for all of us, that decision has been reversed. Camus was far from “through as a writer”; as these pages demonstrate, he was beginning again. In a first-rate translation by David Hapgood, we may read what he was working on, a kind of reprise of his childhood that–at least in this stage of invention–seems autobiographical in the extreme, an unmediated and lyric account of the world of the pieds noirs.
The prose is hurried and the conception to a degree unclear; it’s hard to know how much of this would have survived the critic’s harsh self-scrutiny and how much by contrast he would have added. We cannot take the geometrical measure of what might have become several volumes and a projected “epic”; what we have is the arc of first youth. Too, the manuscript has been transcribed intact, without editorial emendation; his daughter simply copied out the “144 handwritten pages.” Still, to wish this book unpublished is to insist that Michelangelo should have completed his slaves emerging out of marble or Schubert his “Unfinished Symphony”; “The First Man” is an amplitude, in and of itself more than enough.
In May of 1935, when 22, Camus made the first in a series of entries in a literary diary he maintained until his death. The opening paragraph of the first notebook (translated, in this instance, by Philip Thody) may stand as a signal of the novelist’s later intention:
“What I mean is this: that one can, with no romanticism, feel nostalgic for lost poverty. A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility. In this particular case, the strange feeling which the son has for his mother constitutes his whole sensibility. The latent material memory which he has of his childhood (a glue that has stuck to the soul) explains why this way of feeling shows itself in the most widely differing fields.”
“The First Man,” composed at the end of the writer’s working life, enlarges on this scenario with astonishing fidelity. In appended notes and interlinears Camus declares the same theme:
“I want to write the story of a pair joined by the same blood and every kind of difference. She similar to the best this world has, and he quietly abominable. He thrown into all the follies of our time; she passing through the same history as if it were that of any time. She silent most of the time, with only a few words at her disposal to express herself; he constantly talking and unable to find in thousands of words what she could say with a single one of her silences. . . . Mother and son.
Chapter 1 literally presages its author’s birth, evoking in austere prose his family’s arrival in the Algerian countryside and the protracted labor in a hut. Then the father, Henri Cormery, goes off to fight for France and is fatally wounded at the battle of the Marne. In Chapter 2, a traveler, “forty years later” and at his mother’s behest, goes to visit the soldier’s marked grave; there’s a suggestion here and elsewhere of disaffection, as if the adult fails to credit all such ritual observance. But the bulk of the novel deals with childhood–the sights and smells of a working-class suburb of Algiers, of swimming and hunting and fighting and candy and soccer, of young Jacques’ devotion to his deaf mother and illiterate grandmother, of his acknowledged debt to a teacher who helps him win a scholarship to the Lycee. As its title suggests, “The First Man” is Edenic, prelapsarian, and the grown man recollects that childhood not so much in tranquility as with longing compounded by loss:
“Now, for Jacques began a time of ecstasy that he would always guard with remorse in his heart: the two men two meters apart but staying abreast, the dog in front, himself always kept at the rear, his uncle whose eyes are suddenly wild and cunning, always checking to make sure he kept his distance, and the interminable walking in silence, through bushes from which a bird they passed up would sometimes fly with a piercing cry, going down small ravines full of scents where they would follow the bottom ground, going back up toward the sky, radiant and warmer and warmer, the rising heat rapidly drying soil that was still damp when they set out.”
There’s a paean to the delights of reading, startlingly similar to the one contained in Jean Paul Sartre’s own autobiography, “The Words.” Young Jacques can identify books with his eyes closed; in the near-mute presence of his mother, he falls under the spell of language:
“And each of these odors, even before he had begun reading, would transport Jacques to another world full of promises . . . that was beginning even now to obscure the room where he was, to blot out the neighborhood itself and its noises, the city, and the whole world, which would completely vanish as soon as he began reading with a wild exalted intensity that would cast the child into an ecstasy so total that even repeated commands could not extract him, `Jacques, for the third time, set the table.’ “
The text betrays the haste of its composition throughout, or rather the aspect of a vision before revision. In the first chapter, for instance, there’s a sleeping child next to the mother, at another stage that elder brother seems safely stowed in Algiers. Jacques’ uncle is variously named Uncle Emile, Etienne or Ernest; in a sustained description of a
cooperage, “a sort of bench with a rather large slot cut in it into which the barrelhead was slid and then shaped by hand with a tool that resembled a chopping knife, but with the sharp side facing the man who held it by its two handles” the author reminds himself to “look up the name of the tool.”
Still, the overwhelming impression is of how well Camus wrote, how natural and unforced was his eloquence. Here, chosen nearly at random, are samples of how he could describe a scene both at speed and epigramatically:
“The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories and names are preserved in measured spaces, the other where the wind of the sand erases all trace of men on the open ranges.”
“But to tell the truth, there was no one they hated, which would greatly hinder them when they were adults, in the world where they had to live then.”
“Although he had lived till then in poverty, it was in this office that Jacques discovered ordinariness, and he wept for the light he had lost.”
And Camus manages, time after time, to yoke the personal and impersonal, to make of this particular child a representative figure and to conjoin the short and long view. Though history is violent, though Jacques’ hunt for his father would seem foredoomed to fail, much else has been retrieved:
” As if the history of men, that history that kept on treading across one of its oldest territories while leaving so few marks on it, was evaporating under the constant sun with the memory of those who made it, reduced to paroxysms of violence and murder, to blazes of hatred, to torrents of blood, quickly swollen and quickly dried up, like the seasonal streams of the country. Now the night was rising from the land itself and began to engulf everything, the dead and the living, under the marvelous and ever-present sky. No, he would never know his father, who would continue to sleep over there, his face forever lost in the ashes.”
We are fortunate indeed that this phoenix-text has been reclaimed.
