On 7 November, 1913, Albert Camus was born in a small coastal town in the north-easternmost corner of Algeria. Forty-six years later, he died on a road near Villeblevin, 120km from Paris, returning from a holiday with his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard.
V S Pritchett, the New Statesman’s longest-serving literary editor (1926-65), wrote the following obituary, after hearing of the Nobel laureate’s death.
A Conscience with a Style
The violent death of Albert Camus in a motor accident is a double shock. He was one of those writers one seems to know as a person. He was young – only 46 – and one expected much of his maturity. It was at this point, by a malicious irony, that the absurd and the meaningless struck at him. It is as if he had become l’Étranger. He was pre-eminently a European conscience; what is rarer – a conscience with a style. He was the best prose writer of his generation.
In France, where writers live in factions and are required to “pronounce”, the reputation of Camus got into difficulties after his disengagement from politics. Like Orwell and Koestler, he washed his hands of Communism. He was reproached for silence about the Algerian atrocities, for example; but he had, in fact, drawn up his own liberal policy for Algeria some years ago. He had said what he wanted to say. He was accused of withdrawing from the siècle de la peur into a Utopia of “beautiful souls”; one heard of him being written off as a mere moralising and “consenting” man of letters. To the Anglo-Saxon reader all this talk was meaningless: we saw a brilliant, compassionate and independent man. If it is not absurd to say it of a Mediterranean, he had not only a touch of the sun, but a touch of the Protestant. His sane and unyielding sense of the unique value of the individual human being, stands out as the one lasting gain after the ideological battles of the Thirties and Forties in France.
Many critics have shown us that Camus was an unworldly politician. Having denounced totalitarianism, he came to believe in revolt for limited ends. (He was, for example, a passionate opponent of capital punishment.) He hated nihilism and its inevitable product: the man-god. The son of a very poor Algerian colonist, he said of himself that he had the feelings of the common people and the mind of an intellectual. It is true that La Peste was written with some literary sophistication, in the manner of Defoe; but few books in our time can have conveyed the sense of the whole, feeling life of all the ordinary people in a great city, living under stress. In the famous quarrel with Sartre, it is obvious that the philosopher and artist never made contact; one was talking about an abstraction called “the people”, the other was talking about men and women, the victims of wars and programmes. Camus accepted that we must die; but all the moral force of civilisation rose in him to reject the idea that we should regard ourselves as expendable for the benefit of some theory of history.
Camus was (he said) a pessimist about human destiny, but an optimist in regard to man himself. Sisyphus would never succeed in rolling the boulder to the summit, but the continually renewed effort to do so was the secret of his nobility. At heart, Camus was a lonely man. He was a wonderer. He had a more powerful sense of place – Amsterdam in La Chute, Oran in La Peste, the beach in Algiers, the dusty villages of the Algerian steppe in his last volume of stories – than any French writer I have ever read. He appeared to have valued every grain of dust, ever change of sound, the very cooling or warming of the earth.
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