Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  Camus noted that public executions were stopped in France in 1939 after photographs of one were published. He challenged the logic of moving the operation out of public view because, after all, one alleged purpose of the punishment was the deterrence of crime. Camus suggested that if deterrence were indeed the intended purpose, executions should be performed in broad daylight at the Place de la Concorde, and televised. But he pointed out that the statistics did not, in fact, support a deterrent effect. He cited data from Great Britain that the majority of condemned men there had witnessed at least one execution. Furthermore, in countries that had abolished the death penalty, there was no increase in murder and no correlation with overall criminality.

  So why continue an ineffective policy? Camus asked. Because at its core, he answered, “let us recognize it for what it is essentially: a revenge. A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge. It is a quasi-arithmetical reply made by society to whoever breaks its primordial law … whoever has killed must die.” But Camus urged, “This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature … It is intended to correct it.” And a law’s justification, Camus pointed out, “is in the good it does or fails to do to the society.” The lack of effectiveness of capital punishment proved to Camus that its “upholders cannot reasonably defend it” and that it was “a lazy disorder that my reason condemned.”

  Condemned, Camus thought, because it was also doing great harm. He made his case on two main points: judicial error and its irreversibility, and that it constituted state-sponsored murder that fostered a climate for yet more murder. The former argument rested on the fallibility of the justice system and the probabilities and certainty of putting innocent citizens to death. Once someone was executed, Camus noted, there was no possibility of correcting an injustice.

  Even more compelling an argument to Camus was the idea that capital punishment was administrative murder—a murder “no less repulsive than the crime” and furthermore, “this new murder, far from making amends for the harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one.” Whereas one might have seen capital punishment as the state protecting individuals, Camus pointed out that in recent history and current events, the number of people killed by the state had assumed “astronomical proportions” that far exceeded private crimes. Moreover, the death penalty was being applied for political crimes, not solely murder. He urged that society must now defend herself more so against the state. Camus asserted that such “bloodthirsty laws” made for “bloodthirsty customs” and the climate for mass murder. Camus then reminded his readers of the executions during the Occupation and elsewhere, and of their consequences: “Without the death penalty Rajk’s corpse would not poison Hungary; Germany, with less guilt on her conscience, would be more favorably looked upon by Europe; the Russian Revolution would not be agonizing in shame, and Algerian blood would weigh less heavily on our consciences. Without the death penalty, Europe would not be infected by the corpses accumulated for the last twenty years in its tired soil.”

  With the contagion spreading into Hungary, Algeria, and elsewhere, Camus declared that “we must call a spectacular halt and proclaim … that the individual is above the State” in order to progress toward a “society based on reason” and away from the anarchy created by the excessive powers of the state.

  Camus urged that eliminating capital punishment would be a crucial step in that direction and indeed, that “in the unified Europe of the future the solemn abolition of the death penalty ought to be the first article of the European Code we all hope for … There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.”

  The problems of the Algerian conflict were much broader than the death penalty—too broad for Camus to budge the warring factions. Therefore, he maintained his commitment to acting personally as appeals continued to stream in on behalf of Algerians and Hungarians. Of special concern to Camus was the prosecution of writers for political activities. In late June 1957, an urgent plea arrived concerning a very prominent case in Hungary, an appeal in which Agnes Ullmann played a part.

  HUNGARIAN JUSTICE

  Throughout the winter of 1956–57, Kádár filled his prisons with thousands who had participated in the revolution and were deemed a threat to his regime. By the end of January, 148 people had been tried in secret by summary courts, with 29 receiving the death penalty, 14 of whom were promptly executed.

  In order to further discredit the revolution, it was decided to hold a public trial open to Western journalists so that the world could see that the rebels were, as the judge in charge put it, “intellectuals, students, and ne’er-do-wells” who had acted “merely out of a spirit of adventure or because of lack of information.” Eleven freedom fighters facing various charges were tried together, including two organizers of the December 4 women’s demonstration, writer Gyula Obersovszky and playwright József Gáli, medical intern Ilona Tóth, an Army lieutenant, and seven others.

  The cases were loosely connected at best. Ilona Tóth, known as Ica to her friends, was a twenty-five-year-old intern in internal medicine at Sándor Péterfy Hospital when the revolution began. As a first-year medical student, she had taken a general chemistry course from Agnes Ullmann. Tóth shared her political concerns with Ullmann at the time, even daring to broach the then-taboo subject of the Rajk trial. Tóth was fully committed to the ideals of the revolution. She joined the Volunteer Rescue Service, which attended to the wounded fighters. After the second Soviet invasion, as the hospital filled, a nearby annex was used for the walking wounded. Tóth volunteered to be the interim leader of the annex, which became a hideout for insurgents whom Tóth helped to protect by listing them as patients.

  After the fighting ended, Tóth wanted to preserve the achievements of the revolution, so she helped with the distribution of underground leaflets that were printed in a secret shop in the basement of the hospital. The operation was extremely vulnerable to informants, and the hospital was raided by the police in mid-November. Many involved were arrested, but not Tóth. She and her remaining compatriots were determined to ferret out any informants. Two days after the raid, they became convinced that a stockroom clerk had been a member of the AVH. Fearing that the clerk would inform on them, Tóth and two of her associates decided that the clerk had to be killed quickly.

  That same day, Obersovszky and Gáli arrived at the hospital to start their underground newspaper, Élünk, in the basement. They met with Tóth in her office while the clerk was being questioned in another room, but did not learn his fate until later. Gáli was told at first that the AVH man had been given a sleeping pill and would later be let go.

  Tóth was arrested on November 19 in a raid on the print shop. It was two weeks before the police learned, from Tóth herself, of her involvement in the killing of the clerk. In the meantime, Gáli and Obersovszky had continued printing and distributing their newspaper, and were arrested after the women’s march. They would be charged with publishing an illegal journal.

  The sight of the pale, thin, blond Tóth on the stand created a great stir. Observers and the press had a hard time believing that she was a murderer, as did Ullmann, and all suspected that she had been coerced into her detailed confession. But her two accomplices also admitted their involvement. Tóth tearfully asked for understanding and mercy. She explained that she was exhausted from her nonstop work, and completely disheartened from the betrayal of the revolution by the Soviets. She testified that she acted out of her conviction: “I thought I had to do everything for the revolution.”

  Obersovszky was defiant. He told the courtroom, “I want to be a free man, but I do not want mercy or a compromise. I did not fight against the system or the idea, but only against those who besmirched it and discredited it.”

  On April 8, the judge handed down the sentences: one year for Gáli, thre
e years for Obersovszky, and death for Tóth and her two accomplices. All of the convicted appealed the sentences. Gáli’s and Obersovszky’s lawyers wanted a complete acquittal, while the prosecutor sought a more severe sentence.

  On June 20, the Council of the People’s Court confirmed the death sentences for Tóth and her accomplices but overruled the sentences on the writers and instead imposed the death penalty on each.

  The intellectual community, or at least that segment of it that was not yet in prison, was horrified by the extreme sentences imposed on Gáli and Obersovszky. By law, the punishments were to be carried out quickly. So their colleagues had to act quickly if the writers’ lives were to be spared. It was hoped that an international appeal might put pressure on the government to reduce the sentences. Letters were drafted by former members of the now-defunct Revolutionary Intellectual Committee to be forwarded to prominent writers and artists around the world via their embassies in Budapest. Ullmann happened to live across the street from, and rode the same bus as, the French consul nearly every day, so she volunteered to deliver the letter. The consul immediately agreed to forward the appeal.

  Camus responded immediately, as did Bertrand Russell, Louis Aragon, and Pablo Picasso. On June 25, the prosecutor announced that the sentences were suspended pending reexamination of their cases. On July 4, the court reduced Gáli’s and Obersovszky’s sentences to fifteen years and life imprisonment, respectively.

  THE BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY

  The sparing of Gáli’s and Obersovszky’s lives demonstrated that appeals from the international community could affect events in Hungary, but it brought little solace to Camus. After all, the men still faced very long prison terms, and more than fifteen other Hungarian writers were also in Kádár’s jails. Some of those awaiting trial were very prominent figures, including novelist Tibor Déry (who was arrested in April 1957), playwright Gyula Háy, and journalist Tibor Tardos. Another twenty or so writers, while still free, had pledged to remain silent as a protest against the regime.

  But it was not so much pessimism over the plight of his professional brothers in Hungary that afflicted Camus as it was the heavy burden of his commitments. “Seldom in any country has a writer held so responsible a position as that now occupied in France by Albert Camus,” the New York Times said. Those responsibilities weighed not only on Camus’s conscience but also on his time, and pulled him away from his craft. Camus explained to one correspondent, “The balance between creation … and this grip of responsibilities is our only problem.” That problem was aggravated by the incessant criticism and second-guessing that went on in the press.

  Throughout the summer of 1957, Camus grew increasingly frustrated, and almost despondent, over his lack of progress in his writing. He’d had the plan for a new novel for several years. But he felt incapable of creative work, as if he were just “waiting for inspiration’s wing to rustle by me and shake me up.”

  He retreated to the medieval town of Cordes-sur-Ciel for a vacation and diverted himself with reading the greats Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Emerson. The latter’s 1850 essay entitled “Goethe, or the Writer” reminded Camus of the lessons and challenges facing any writer aspiring to have an influence in his own troubled time:

  Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the fainthearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men or hours. The world is young, the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavenly and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honour every truth by use.

  Despite a restful stay, Camus was still struggling. He shared his frustration with his former teacher Jean Grenier:

  I am resigned to failing at everything after this summer … discouraged to the point that I don’t even dare put myself in front of a blank sheet of paper. Wouldn’t it be better for me to drop everything, to give up this sterile effort which has for years prevented me from being totally happy and free anywhere, which takes me away from others, rather guiltily, and in a large part away from myself?… These are the kind of thoughts I have been nurturing and that you will undoubtedly recognize.

  The fact remains that I’m in a strange mood … Even a letter seems difficult to write and please forgive my silence this summer.

  Despite his creative crisis, Camus did not forsake his commitment to Algeria. Having articulated his unconditional opposition to state-administrated killing, he felt compelled to intervene in death-penalty cases, but only if the accused had not participated in terrorist acts of the kind that would endanger Camus’s family. In late September, he was contacted by a lawyer about a dozen men who had been condemned, most of whom had not actually killed anyone. After reviewing the cases, Camus agreed to intervene. Noting the youth and large families of some of the convicted, he appealed on their behalf to President René Coty to commute their sentences:

  As a French-Algerian with my entire family in Algiers—conscious of all the dangers that terrorism courts for my family as well as for all the inhabitants of Algeria—the present drama afflicts me every day so strongly that, as a writer and a journalist, I have renounced all public acts, which, despite the best intentions in the world, on the contrary, risk to aggravate the situation. This reserve, authorizes me, perhaps, Mr. President, to ask you to use your right to pardon as many as possible of the condemned whose youth and numerous families deserve your pity. I am convinced, moreover, after long reflection, that your indulgence will, in the end, help preserve the future we all want for Algeria.

  Camus’s hope to regain his creative powers and his concerns about restricting his involvement in Algerian matters to private channels would soon be dashed in one stroke—with a stunning message from Stockholm.

  THE CONSCIENCE OF A GENERATION

  The Swedish Academy declared that Camus was receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times.” The secretary of the Academy noted “a genuine moral pathos” in Camus’s writing “which impels him to attack boldly and in his own markedly personal way the great fundamental problems of life.”

  For Camus, the news of the Prize brought a mixture of pleasure and panic—“a strange feeling of overwhelming pressure and melancholy,” he recorded in his notebook. He thought immediately of his mother, and of André Malraux.

  He was the youngest writer to receive the honor in fifty years, since Rudyard Kipling. He had, in fact, been nominated several times previously. The successful nomination was submitted by Sylvère Monod, a distant cousin of Jacques’s and a professor at the University of Caen.

  In a press reception at Gallimard the next day, Camus explained, “I thought that the Nobel Prize should crown an already completed life’s work or at least one more advanced than mine. I wish to say that if I had taken part in the voting, I should have chosen André Malraux, for whom I have much admiration and friendship, and who was one of the masters of my youth.”

  Malraux, almost fifty-six at the time, and one of the acknowledged luminaries of French literature, congratulated Camus, telling him, “Your reply honors both of us.” Malraux never would receive the Prize.

  Camus’s humility and modesty spared him neither the sniping and spite from critics of both his political stands and his literature nor much second-guessing of the Academy. It was to be expected; Camus anticipated the attacks the moment he learned he had won. Perhaps the most outrageous comments came from Lucien Rebatet, a supporter of Nazi Fascism and writer for the collaborationist newspaper Je Suis Partout up until the time of the liberation. Rebatet had been sentenced to death in the purge trials after the war. Camu
s was one of three Resistance writers who, despite finding Rebatet’s actions and views despicable, signed a petition for clemency in 1945 as a consequence of his already-resolute opposition to the death penalty. Rebatet was spared and freed in a general amnesty in 1950. Now, ignoring Camus’s intervention, though it may well have saved his life, Rebatet claimed that Camus would have liked to have commanded the firing squad. The unrepentant and ungrateful Fascist also played literary critic: “This prize which falls most often to septuagenarians is not at all premature in this case, because since his allegorical La Peste [The Plague], Camus has been diagnosed with an arteriosclerosis of style.”

  But, of course, Camus’s loyal friends were elated. Monod sent a note immediately upon hearing the news:

  My dear Camus,

  My emotion and my joy are profound. There were many times when I felt like thanking you for your friendship, for what you are, for what you managed to express with such purity and strength, and that I had likewise experienced. I wish that this dazzling honor would also appear to you, in some small part, as a token of friendship and of personal, intimate recognition. I would not dare coming to see you right now, but I embrace you fraternally.

  Jacques Monod

  Former Combat companions got together for a round of drinks with the new laureate. Camus told Jacqueline Bernard, Roger Grenier, and other former staff that he had prepared part of his speech for Stockholm: “Remember that shit thou art and into shit thou shalt return.”

  Camus was deeply touched and grateful for the support of those whom he considered to be his relatively few constant and sincere friends.

  Public congratulations were printed in many newspapers. Two previous French laureates in literature, Roger Martin du Gard and François Mauriac, offered their thoughts. Martin Du Gard was generous and effusive. Mauriac, who had sometimes been critical of Camus, acknowledged, “This young man is one of the most listened-to masters of the young generation … In a way he is its conscience.”