Books: Intellectual Sensualist

LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS by Albert Camus. 365 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

Albert Camus died eight years ago, at 46, in an auto crash—a pointless death that served to emphasize the pointless absurdities of life, which he so painfully tried to comprehend.

Camus was often misunderstood. He was labeled an existentialist, but in interviews he protested that his The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) was “directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.” He was criticized for contributing to the literature of despair, but his novels (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall) as well as his essays and plays sought to surmount despair. He was called an atheist, but Camus was a deeply religious man without a god.

He was noted as the intellectual Parisian humanist. He strove with a stoiclucidity to reaffirm man’s nobility in a warring age that seemed to defy that nobility. Actually, he was also a sensualist, a “Black Romantic” who found ecstatic revelations on the sun-soaked shores of his native Algeria. This poetic sensualism flavors Lyrical and Critical Essays, now collected and published for the first time in English.

Cloth of Time. In a 1958 preface to The Wrong Side and the Right Side—essays first published when he was a 23-year-old journalist—Camus remarked: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

These essays reflect Camus’ search for the ideas about love, life, death and despair that distinguish his later work. Like Goethe, who on his deathbed cried out for light, Camus also desperately searched for light. For him, it was a twofold love, intellectual and physical—the blinding flash of passionate insight into man, and the life-giving caress of the Mediterranean sky.

The simple images that Camus rediscovers in the essays are the sun and sea of the North African shore, his remembrances of family, and his feeling for the physical life of the Mediterranean people. They illustrate the philosophical turn of mind that alienated him from his Algerian countrymen, whose basic attitude toward living left no room for abstract speculation. An old woman buys her own tomb and grows to love it. This teaches Camus the value of the present moment: “Let me cut this minute from the cloth of time. Others leave a flower between pages, enclosing in them a walk where love has touched them with its wing. I walk too, but am caressed by a god. Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time.”

In the next two groups of essays, Nuptials (1938) and Summer (1954), Camus’ ideas about how to combat life’s absurdities deepen as he faces the dark despondency he finds in Europe. Like a fallen angel, he keeps looking homeward for the revitalizing sensual graces of Algeria. And in these journeys are intimations of the ideas in his future writings. In the heavy stone city of Oran, he finds a refreshing boredom in the ordinary down-to-earth commercialism that appears as the setting for his later novel, The Plague. Among the flowers and ruins at Tipasa, Camus discovers that ” ‘I see’ equals I believe,’ ” and this supports his idea about living intensely for the present moment.

Among the tanned youthful bodies on the beach at Algiers, he accepts the natural renewal that argues against myths and fickle gods: “One can find a certain moderation as well as a constant excess in the strained and violent faces of these people, in this summer sky emptied of tenderness, beneath which all truths can be told and on which no deceitful divinity has traced the signs of hope or redemption. Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.” However, Camus’ quest for a lucid, objective ethic for man never allowed him more than a temporary relief in the stones, flesh and stars of touchable truths.

Quivering Wings. In the fierce wind at Djémila, he finds the natural renewal that defies the despair leading to suicide: “The violent bath of sun and wind drained me of all strength. I scarcely felt the quivering of wings inside me, life’s complaint, the wea’ rebellion of the mind. Soon, scattered to the four corners of the earth, self-forgetful and self-forgotten, I am the wind and within it, the columns and the archway, the flagstones warm to the touch, the pale mountains around the deserted city. And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.” Yet, despite this lyrical sensualism, it was Camus’ beiief in an intellectual revolt (after facing “the absurd”) that most renewed and sustained his bat tle against the “quivering wings” of a suicidal death.

Rounding out this volume are Camus’ critical essays, including those on Sartre, Ignazio Silone, Melville, Gide and Faulkner, and three interviews that he gave over the years. In one of these interviews, he was asked what compliment most annoyed him. He replied: “Honesty, conscience, humanity—you know, all the modern mouthwasnes.” Yet, these qualities best describe the man who struggled so ardently to understand what it was to be simply a man.