Books: The Individual

NOTEBOOKS 1935-1942 by Albert Camus. 224 pages. Knopf. $5.

Albert Camus was briefly a Communist; later he was considered to be a disciple of Jean Paul Sartre’s despairing existentialism. In fact, Camus was an individual who all his life pursued his own hard and lonely path to the truth. He recoiled both from Communism’s dictation of how man should behave and from the nihilistic insistence that it did not matter how man behaved. He clung to a faith in the individual man, seeking a formula through which a man could live happily within his tragic limitations without surrendering either to collectivism or to despair.

All of Camus’ life was devoted to this quest, and it was still not ended when he died in a car crash at 46. In these notebooks (the first of three volumes to be published), Camus recorded his early speculating, tentative theories and spontaneous observations. Like notes found scattered along a trail, they not only indicate his destination but also why he chose it. This volume covers his youth in his native Algeria, summer’s sojourn in Europe, and the first somber years in occupied Paris.

Back to the Body. Like many another young intellectual, Camus was fascinated by the all-or-nothing philosophy of Nietzsche, the notion that “since God is dead,” life is devoid of meaning. Camus agreed that God is dead, but he rejected the corollary. He too much loved the passing moment, the play of sunlight, the delights of the body, to surrender them to philosophical principle. In fact, he loved life with a fervor that is even more apparent in his notebooks than in his formal writings. “Every year the young girls come into flower on the beaches,” he wrote with characteristic sweetness about Oran. “They have only one season. The following year, they are replaced by other flower-like faces, which, the previous season, still belonged to little girls. For the man who looks at them, they are yearly waves whose weight and splendor break into foam over the yellow beach.”

Sartre argued that life is basically absurd, because man knows he must die. No one had a sharper sense of death than Camus, who suffered intermittently from tuberculosis, and he loathed nothing more: “Impossible to exaggerate the ridiculous quality of an event that is normally accompanied by sweating and gurgling. It could not be too far demoted from the sacred status normally attributed to it.” But instead of driving him to despair, Camus’ awareness of death made him love the life he had even more intensely. He had occasional longings for the permanent and eternal: “Beauty is unbearable . . offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch over the whole of time.” But he always came back to earth. “The body, a true path to culture, teaches us where our limits lie,” he wrote with finality.

The Right to Contempt. When Camus dropped out of the Communist Party after a couple of years’ membership in his early 20s, it was because he was repelled by all forms of absolutism. There was already stirring in him the great attack he would mount in The Rebel on Marxism, Communism, Hegelianism and all systems where the ends justify the means, where present-day cruelties are excused as part of an infinite plan. And he never could share the Marxist view that poverty was the ultimate evil, even though he was poor himself. He felt that a true love of life depended on giving up material goods. In the first entry in his notebooks, he wrote: “For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it really is: an infinite grace.”

For all his sense of the limits of life, Camus never advocated an Epicurean withdrawal. He believed that all of life should be savored, the bitter with the sweet. These early notebooks tell nothing of Camus’ heroic service in the Resistance; they say surprisingly little about the war. But Camus does make clear in them his reasons for joining the Resistance: “There is nothing less excusable than war and the appeal to national hatreds. But once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible. It is both impossible and immoral to judge an event from outside. One keeps the right to hold this absurd misfortune in contempt only by remaining inside it.”