Camus in his own words: Discipline, doubt, and the limits of intimacy

The Complete Notebooks

by Albert Camus | Translated by Ryan Bloom

Published by University of Chicago   704 pages  $45  By Dwight Garner

 

The first volume of Albert Camus’s notebooks appeared in 1963, three years after his death in a car accident at the age of 46. The book, with entries from 1935 to 1942, received two especially notable English-language reviews, from two strikingly different writers.

 

The first was by A J Liebling, the journalist and gourmand, in The New Yorker. Liebling had struck up a friendship with Camus when the French Algerian writer visited America in 1946. Liebling, a Francophile and press critic, especially admired Camus’s work during World War II as the editor of the Resistance journal Combat.

 

 

Liebling called Camus’s notebooks “intensely enjoyable” and “a book to which one can return, at almost any page, with assurance of pleasure.”

 

The second review was by Susan Sontag, in The New York Review of Books. Sontag opened with this provocation: “Great writers are either husbands or lovers.” Because of his tranquillity and air of reasonableness, Sontag suggested, Camus was “the ideal husband of contemporary letters.” (She could not have known that, according to his later biographers, he was serially unfaithful to his wives, the actress Simone Hié and the pianist Francine Faure.)

 

The rest of Sontag’s review was a takedown of Camus both as a novelist and as a philosopher. “Was Camus a thinker of importance?” she writes. “The answer is no.” She heaped more contumely on the notebooks themselves, calling them sketchy and impersonal and “not great.”

 

Several more volumes of Camus’s notebooks would appear over the years, and they’re collected in full for the first time in The Complete Notebooks. Picking up the book, I had Liebling’s and Sontag’s warring voices in my mind. Putting it down, after completing its nearly 700 pages, I was surprised to find myself, a committed Liebling fanatic, on the Sontag side of the divide.

 

Camus’s notebooks, which run from 1935 to 1959 contain almost nothing about his friends or his family, his experiences during wartime or much about his personal life. He was an intensely private man who found gossip and confession repellent.

 

Indeed, when he received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming at 44 one of the youngest authors to have done so, he wrote in a notebook, “Frightened by what’s happening to me, what I didn’t ask for.” He reported having panic attacks. A few days later he wrote, “Never talk about your work” and “Those who truly have something to say never speak of it.”

 

What these journals do contain are philosophical notes for the novels published during his lifetime —  The Stranger, The Plague and The Fall — books that are sui generis explorations not just of the absurdity of existence but of isolation, guilt, redemption, and resilience.

 

Camus’s notebooks also contain gleanings from his intense reading, of everyone from Milton and Goethe to Faulkner and Rosa Luxemburg, quotations that comprise a personal commonplace book. He was always seeking the core of things. He lived in his mind more than most men did. He whipped himself onward. “Withdraw completely and run your own race” is a typical dictum.

 

These notebooks, in this translation by Ryan Bloom, are dense and inward-facing and not, one thinks, meant for public consumption. They are not quite for the casual reader.

 

This casual reader was glad to make their acquaintance anyway, even if searching for the more lucid and interesting bits is like panning for gold. Some of the better known entries here, accounts of Camus’s travels in the United States in 1946 and in Latin America in 1949, have also been published in earlier.

 

There is other material here to admire. Camus comments occasionally on his critics, writing in 1942: “Three years to create a book, five lines to ridicule it — and with inaccurate quotations.” He later writes: “Malice is the only industry in France that doesn’t suffer underemployment.” About politics, he decides: “I prefer committed people to committed literature.”

 

The sensualist in him is occasionally allowed to peek out. He goes with friends to a whorehouse; he admires women in the street “with their breasts free.” Some of the comments are outraged and funny. “I always wonder why I attract socialites,” he wrote in 1949. “All those hats!”

 

Camus’s Mediterranean spirit comes through, especially in his love for swimming and for the sun. He liked travel, but not ostentatious luxury. “Fear is what makes travel valuable,” he writes in an early entry — it should be an “ascetic experience.” He mostly disdained fancy restaurants as well, praising the city of Oran, Algeria, as a place where “you can still find extraordinary cafes that have grime-varnished counters sprinkled with fly parts, a leg, a wing, and where you’re served in chipped glasses.”

 

Camus’s notebooks are something like those countertops. But if these notebooks are messy and a bit chaotic, honest sustenance does appear. “There are days the world lies,” a 24-year-old Camus writes one spring evening, and “days it tells the truth.”

 

---

The reviewer has been a book critic for The Times since 2008.

©The New York Times News Service