From Alexandria

On October 16, 1957, Albert Camus was sitting in a restaurant in Paris. A waiter rushed up to announce that the writer had just been awarded the Nobel Prize. Incredulous, more shaken than pleased, Camus could only mutter that the prize should have gone to Andre Malraux instead.

Camus had every reason to be stunned by the news: he was too young for the prize. But he was not undeserving. As the two-volume set of his complete works in the prestigious Pléiade edition makes perfectly clear, he was a prolific writer who had already been in the public eye for over twenty years—not only as an essayist, novelist, critic and political thinker, but also as a journalist, actor, and playwright.

After World War II, during which he served in the French Resistance, Camus had become one of the luminaries of French intellectual life, associated not only with the Left in politics but with the Existentialist movement in art and philosophy. But then, disenchanted with systems and parties, he had begun to cultivate the sort of contemplative, introspective humanism which his former comrades were quick to label “bourgeois.” An erstwhile French leftist, Camus conducted a notorious public feud with Jean-Paul Sartre. But he was also assailed by the Right for his willingness to make concessions to Arab nationalists in his native Algeria. To complicate matters further, although he did sympathize with the Algerian Arabs and defended them vigorously, he conspicuously stopped short of endorsing the terrorist tactics of the National Liberation Front (FLN), and was adamant about the legitimacy of French claims in North Africa.

Camus, whose anti-totalitarianism had drawn him into the French Resistance, could no longer decide whose side to take in the looming Franco-Algerian conflict. Ultimately, his fellow Algerian Frenchmen were as distrustful as were his Arab friends of the fanciful hopes he entertained for a French-Arab federation. Everyone may have sensed he was right, but it always seemed easier to toe existing party lines. In the end, and as always, Camus remained the outsider.

If Camus felt a stranger among men and attained international fame because of his ability to speak the disenchanted, disaffected, solipsistic universe of the outsider, his inability to adhere to any set ideology alienated him even further, both in Europe and in his native Algeria. This is hardly surprising for someone who was neither really French, nor really African. Camus, after all, was pied-noir. History, as he foresaw so clearly, would eventually displace his kind and make them strangers, this time, however, not strangers in occupied Algeria, but on their own ancestral French soil. Such blind, arbitrary irony never escaped Camus’s eye. The eager and impassioned boy/man/author from one of the poorer neighborhoods of Algiers, who was born “à mi-distance de la misère et du soleil” ¹ and grew up “dans la mer” but “found all the luxuries gray when he lost the sea” ² and moved to France, no longer felt at home in France, or in Algeria, or anywhere else in the world. He frequently traveled to and from his native country, but he felt unhinged on either side of the sea. “La Méditerranée séparait en moi deux univers” (181). Each Albert is staring at the other Albert on the opposite shore.

The Nobel Prize brought many good things for Camus but, with all of its attendant glory, it came at a particularly difficult moment in his life. Although he had published La chute a year earlier in 1956, Camus had also entered a slow, dry, tentative phase as a writer—a fact that stirred no end of anxiety in a man who had always written with a great deal of agility and flair and who, faced with disquieting doubts now, could not have ignored the unintended irony behind the award. The Nobel Prize, as he and everyone else knew, is usually conferred at the end of a long literary career—not, as in his case, at such a young age. Would he write again? And would anything he wrote ever supersede his earlier work...