Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  The youthful Camus evidently had many attributes of a normal Algerian working-class lout. He liked soccer, girls, beachbumming, movie-going, and idleness. He had decided, one feels, to cherish the image of himself as a citizen of the Belcourt slums, a spiritual mate to the proletariat of whom he wrote, in “Summer in Algiers”:

  They start work very early, and exhaust the range of human experience in ten short years. A workingman of thirty had already played all his cards.… His delights have been swift and merciless. So has his life. And you understand then that he is born in a land where everything is given to be taken away.… So reflection or self-improvement are quite irrelevant.

  The Camus whose gifts for reflection and self-improvement were early recognized and nurtured by a grade-school teacher, the Camus who entered the lycée at the age of ten, who studied philosophy at the University of Algiers from 1932 to 1936, who by the age of twenty-five was a working, travelling, published intellectual and the mastermind of a theatre group—this Camus figures little in the early essays or in the character of Mersault. Mersault, though his consciousness is brushed by philosophical speculation, confesses no ambition for his future and almost never reflects on his past.

  By any standards, Camus’ upbringing had been bleak. His father, an agricultural laborer, was killed in the Battle of the Marne ten months after Albert was born. His mother, a Spaniard, took the infant and his older brother Lucien from the village of Mondovi to the poor district of Algiers, where she became a cleaning woman. Camus was raised in a ménage that included his mother, a partially paralyzed uncle, and a domineering grandmother. These three adults were all illiterate and, in various ways, ill. The grandmother eventually died of cancer of the liver; Camus wrote of her, “She fainted very easily after family discussions. She also suffered from painful vomiting caused by a liver complaint. But she showed not the slightest discretion in the practice of her illness. Far from shutting herself away, she would vomit noisily into the kitchen garbage can.” His mother, he wrote, “could think only with difficulty”; deafness, a speech impediment, and a docile temper combined to enforce a habit of silence. Camus once described his literary career as the attempt to speak for the “silent mother”—the inarticulate and disenfranchised of society. An early sketch portrays a grandmother who persistently asks a child, “Whom do you like best? Your mother or your grandmother?”

  The game was even better when the daughter was present. For the child would always reply: “My grandmother,” with, in his heart, a great surge of love for his ever silent mother.

  Death for a father, silence for a mother: with such a parentage, Camus would never become a fluent or frivolous creator. At the moment of beginning his first novel, what, indeed, was his artistic treasure? A good education, a normal sensuality, a fond ear for working-class dialect, a rapturous sensitivity to nature, a conviction that paganism was being reborn around him in Europeanized North Africa. “For twenty centuries, men have strived to impose decency on the insolence and simplicity of the Greeks, to diminish the flesh and elaborate our dress. Today, reaching back over this history, young men sprinting on the Mediterranean beaches are rediscovering the magnificent motions of the athletes of Delos.” Two events in his early maturity urged him toward energetic use of his capabilities: in 1930 he nearly died of tuberculosis, and in 1934 he joined the Communist Party. Yet always, in the heart of this young man, coexistent with the desire to celebrate and explicate, lay an unshakable lassitude and a blankness. Caligula (a part Camus wrote for himself to act) says, “There’s something deep down in me—an abyss of silence, a pool of stagnant water, rotting weeds.” At the age of forty-five, great in fame and accomplishment, Camus wrote of “the profound indifference that haunts me like a natural infirmity.” Around this natural infirmity, then, the novice artist must shape his strategies—no, not around it; he must point himself into it, for this silence is his message.

  The first sketch, in the Notebooks, for the novel that is to become A Happy Death outlines, with an excessively formal scheme of alternation between past and present tense, what appears to be a story about love and jealousy among students, ending with the hero’s death by disease. “Taste of death and of the sun. Love of life,” reads a note for the ending, encapsulating the tensions—the sun as life-giving yet cruel, the affirmation of life in the moment of death—that Camus wished to dramatize. Violent death does not figure in this first version, though the hero (called simply Patrice) does tell “his story of the man sentenced to death: ‘I can see him, he is inside me. And everything he says pierces my heart. He lives and breathes with me. He is afraid with me.’ ” This premonition of The Stranger, however, remains fallow in the notes; a year and a half later, the novel, still untitled, has become involved with an idea about a gambler and with Camus’ European travels. “Theme of the revolver,” however, emerges in one list of chapters, and a little later a fresh approach to the plot is indicated:

  Novel: the man who realizes that one needs to be rich in order to live, who devotes himself completely to the acquisition of money, who succeeds, lives and dies happy.

  The italicization of “happy” signals an arrival; a month later (September of 1937), the title “La Mort Heureuse” appears. That fall, the character of “an invalid—both legs amputated” begins to talk in the notes, and before the end of the year he has his curious name, Zagreus. To this new character adheres the old “theme of the revolver,” elaborated in a remarkable earlier notation about a man who plays with a loaded revolver before going to sleep: “And, as he woke up, his mouth filled with an already bitter saliva, he licked the barrel, poking his tongue into it, and with a death rattle of infinite happiness said again and again in wonder and astonishment: ‘My joy is priceless.’ ”

  The stage is at last prepared, then, for the central action of A Happy Death. Patrice Mersault, a poor young man, makes the acquaintance, through a mistress, of a legless invalid, Roland Zagreus, who shows him one day a safe full of money, a loaded revolver, and an undated suicide note. Some days later (in a chapter Camus transposed to the beginning of the novel), Mersault visits Zagreus, takes up the revolver, kills the cripple with it, leaves the suicide note on a table, and departs with the money. Walking away from this perfect crime, he sneezes, and the remainder of the novel traces his wandering, through a variety of countries and romantic entanglements, toward his own death, of pleurisy, chills, fever, and weak heart—a somewhat poetic syndrome. Assembled rather than conceived, the story has too many duplicating parts—too many women, too many deaths, too many meditative approaches to the lyrical riddle of “happiness.” Simple problems of clarity exist. Has Zagreus deliberately invited Mersault to murder him? Why, when Mersault holds the gun to his head, doesn’t Zagreus gesture or speak? “When he felt the barrel against his right temple, he did not turn away. But Patrice, watching him, saw his eyes fill with tears.” These tears are given meaning not by the context but by an entry in the notebooks: “The man who doesn’t want this easy way out, and who wants to chew over and taste all his fear. He dies without a word, his eyes full of tears.” The murder is so abruptly rendered as to seem merely sensational. Nor do its consequences easily flow: after the murder and the theft, Mersault does not live like a rich man; he travels thriftily in Europe and loafs among friends. None of his pleasures are beyond the financial reach of Camus himself at this impoverished stage of his life. Mersault never becomes the proposed hero “who devotes himself completely to the acquisition of money”; money never becomes an embodied theme.

  Since A Happy Death arrives now with an excellent critical afterword by Jean Sarocchi, and since Camus suppressed the work, why belabor its weaknesses? Only to marvel at how its materials and concerns reëmerge in The Stranger, transformed by their new position within a unified action. For instance, chapter two of A Happy Death describes for several pages the passage of a Sunday in Algiers as witnessed by Mersault from a window in his room. These pages rank with the youthful essays for poetic power, and, indeed, “B
etween Yes and No” shows Camus’ mother thus sitting and gazing at the street for hours. But the resonance remains private: the Sunday is no particular Sunday; it illustrates Mersault’s boredom within a somewhat formless flashback. In The Stranger, however, where the passage recurs almost word for word, the Sunday is the Sunday two days after Meursault has buried his mother, and the very day after he has taken a beach pickup, Marie, to a Fernandel movie and begun an affair with her; in this context, the reused description reflects sinisterly upon him and ominously upon life: “It occurred to me that somehow I’d got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I’d be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed.” Another instance: the “tough” characters in A Happy Death—the customers in Céleste’s restaurant and the barrelmaker Cardona, who lives downstairs—provide only background; they exist in the book because Camus, a convinced egalitarian, has invited them in. Whereas, in The Stranger, old Salamano and the pimp Raymond Sintès, besides being more vivid, actively lead Meursault into the nexus of violence that dooms him. Further, they testify at his trial, during which Raymond’s friendship is cited in proof of Meursault’s criminality. All the events of The Stranger, indeed, are relevant at the trial; the plot’s turns are cast in iron.

  No amount of trimming and rearranging can counterfeit the effect of a single concept alertly pursued. How splendidly, at the center of The Stranger, event, symbol, and statement fuse! Camus’ obsession with that harsh wonder the sun—with the “Nada whose birth is possible only at the sight of landscapes crushed by the sun”—creates a furnace in which existential absurdity engenders sensation and action:

  The whole world seemed to have come to a standstill on this little strip of sand between the sunlight and the sea.… And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.… But the heat was so great that it was just as bad staying where I was, under that flood of blinding light falling from the sky. To stay, or to make a move—it came to much the same.… The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace.

  These four additional shots, fired in dazed indifference, are what condemn him to death. The inner blankness of the Camusian hero, a puzzling sullen driftingness in Mersault, Meursault proclaims as a splendid defiance. “It makes no difference, I am not interested”—such phrases, repeated in the face of society’s hatred, reconfirmed in the moment of extinction, become the litany of a new kind of holiness. Before his execution, Meursault opens his heart to the “benign indifference” of the universe. Its indifference and his are akin. “To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.” All that is needed to complete his happiness is the howl of execration from the mob around the guillotine. Caligula, under the swords of his assassins, “laughing and choking,” cries out, “I’m still alive!” Of himself, Camus wrote, in a youthful essay, “And yet, at the very moment that the world was crumbling, he was alive.” A few sentences further: “Every time it seems to me that I’ve grasped the deep meaning of the world, it is its simplicity that always overwhelms me. My mother, that evening, and its strange indifference.” Indifference, life, simplicity, the sun, death: the concepts link up, make a circle. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” an essay affirms. Love, despair, silence, mother, nature. A sentence deleted from A Happy Death reads, “The sun is the real mirror of the world.” Blank, indifferent, merciless, the sun is in each of us, the sun is life. Instead, then, of a soul seeking reunion with God, we contain a stark reflection of “the blind, black god”—another phrase deleted from A Happy Death. We serve this god by pretending no more than we feel, though we feel nothing, and by accepting death in a pantheistic ecstasy that Camus called “happiness.” Some of Camus’ most interesting ethical precepts, as set down in The Myth of Sisyphus—written directly after The Stranger—are deliberate inversions of Christian suppositions: each man has “his irreparable innocence,” “what counts is not the best living but the most living,” and the heart the creator needs is “the closed heart.”

  But A Happy Death, with its half-hearted autobiography, too numerous romances, static scenery-painting, and ingenuous melodrama, could not focus this anti-theology. The images that could, however, already lay in Camus’ notebook. One of the entries for January of 1936 lists six story ideas; two are “Death of the mother” and “The story of the condemned man.” These two preoccupations figure marginally in much of Camus’ youthful production; with The Stranger, for the first time he invents them, in the freedom of fantasy. By proposing a young man who could not shed tears at his mother’s funeral and went to the movies instead of mourning, and by rendering her pauper’s funeral and his daily life in the full dry light of their absurd inconsequence, Camus placed his hidden theme of blankness where no reader could avoid being challenged by it. Though of course derived from observation (impressions of a funeral occur in the notebooks, and his grandmother’s death had already provided matter for an essay), the central circumstance is imagined; Camus’ mother, in fact, outlived him. His essays show how deeply he loved her. But by killing her in his mind, he unlocked an essential self, Meursault the essential orphan, in all his “simplicity” and estrangement, this cool monster who is Everyman, with his casual, androgynous voice that would blow down all our castles of Christian decency and conventional delusion. And by making this hero’s condemnation to death literal and legal, instead of an attenuated wasting by disease, Camus immensely heightens the pressure. He is forced, observe, by these inventions to conjure up two blank-walled interiors—the old people’s home and the jail—that crystallize Nada better than the open landscapes he so loved to describe. And the necessary characters of the warden and the chaplain, with their tragicomic eloquence, lead his book into a dimension undeveloped in A Happy Death—the dimension of the political. Society acquires spokesmen, and in debate Meursault turns singular, heroic, revolutionary. The fussed-over irrelevancies of A Happy Death fall away. The new novel pours smooth and hot from start to finish.

  Fiction must hold in healthily tense combination the mimetic and pedagogic impulses. Perhaps because kind teachers had guided his rise from poverty, Camus respected pedagogy, wished always to make things formal and clear, liked stories to have morals. He sometimes reminds us of a schoolteacher standing before us insisting that though there is no headmaster and no grading system and scarcely any blackboard, we must stay at our desks, learning virtue and happiness with the diligence of saints. We must, in short, love our mother—“The earth! … that great temple deserted by the gods”—even though she is silent. After The Stranger and The Plague, Camus’ fiction shows more intellectual will than vital, involuntary substance. The Fall and the short stories of Exile and the Kingdom seem relatively stiff and diagrammatic. The poet stoops in his prophet’s robes. A Happy Death shows the other extremity of this curve—the beginning, when artistry and philosophy struggled with an abundance of live impressions; the prophet had not yet been robed, the young man stood naked.

  EUROPE

  Two Points on a Descending Curve

  MOUCHETTE, by Georges Bernanos, translated by J. C. Whitehouse. 127 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966.

  TWO VIEWS, by Uwe Johnson, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. 183 pp. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.

  Time passes in America and Asia; in Europe, history occurs. We have this impression, perhaps, because Europe had a Middle Ages, a fusion of faith and action, politics and culture, symbol and reality, after which all things seem to disintegrate and decline. In Georges Bernanos’ great sacerdotal novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, an old curé tells the hero, “Min
d you, it’s not that I’m taken in by the usual fairy-tale Middle Ages: people in the thirteenth century didn’t pretend to be plaster saints.… But we were founding an empire, my boy, an empire that would have made the Caesars’ effort look like so much mud.” Further on, a soldier indicts the Church for abandoning the Middle Ages: “It was you who first pandered to the lawmakers of the Renaissance, whilst they made short work of Christian rights, and patiently constructed … the Pagan State: the state which knows no law but that of its own well-being—the merciless countries full of greed and pride.” Medieval nostalgia, bumptiously expressed in English by Chesterton, is not confined to Roman Catholics but pervades secular Europe with a sense of loss, of a historical fall and a progressive demoralization. Modern man is man demoralized. “I’ll define you a Christian people by the opposite,” the curé says. “The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old.” First went supernatural faith, then faith in kings, then faith in reason, then faith in nature, then faith in science, and, most lately, faith in the subconscious. The texture of prose and the art of narration have changed to fit the case; indeed, since Don Quixote fiction has to some extent thrived on disillusion. But in this century the minimal presupposition of human significance, the power of one human to touch another’s heart, seems too much to be assumed. Love is, a current epigram* has it, “the friction of two epiderms,” and, if Freud is to be believed, we spend our emotional lives vainly seeking, amid a crowd of phantoms, to placate our parent’s ghosts. Such solipsism renders obsolete the interconnectedness of action that comprises “plot” and the trust in communication that gives a narration voice and pulse. Formless tales blankly told may be the end result; two recently published novels illustrate the trend.