The Rains of Empire: Camus in New York

Abstract

The Rains of Empire: Camus in New York David Reid (bio) For Claire D. Tremaine Nous remontons le port de New York. Spectacle formidable malgré ou à cause de la brume. L’ordre, la puissance, la force économique est là. Le coeur tremble devant tant d’admirable inhumanité. Journaux de voyage 1 I Albert Camus was not an eager or fortunate traveler. The beginning of a journey generally found him anxious, often physically sick. Aged twenty-one, on a voyage by freighter to the Tunisian border in 1935, he began spitting up blood almost within sight of Algiers. Forced to disembark at the first port of call, he returned home by bus. Later that year, a visit to the Balearic Islands, his first outside North Africa, found him nervously observant: “Car ce qui fait le prix du voyage, c’est la peur.” 2 In 1936 a modest Wanderjahr of slightly more than two months took him as far as Prague, where he was miserably homesick. Italy was an ecstatic discovery, but in the middle of the journey his marriage to [End Page 608] Simone Hié broke up. “Le 2 septembre 1939, en effet, je n’étais pas allé en Grèce, comme je le devais,” he writes in “Retour à Tipasa.” “La guerre en revanche était venue jusqu’à nous, puis elle avait recouvert la Grèce elle-même” (Essais, 870). The world figure, flying into Athens in 1955, stayed in Greece for all of two weeks. Arriving in the U.S., by freighter ship, in March 1946: “Fatigué. Ma grippe revient. Et c’est les jambes flageolantes que je reçois le premier coup de New York” (Journaux de voyage, 29). On a lecture tour in South America, in 1949, the second and last time he ventures beyond Europe and North Africa, his dormant tuberculosis flared up. When he was young and unknown, Camus blamed poverty for cramping his journeys. When he was older and affluent, he was a martyr to celebrity, always dreading its exposures and demands. His editor Roger Quilliot writes in the introduction to the travel journals, “Paradoxalement, alors que le jeune homme sans grandes ressources avait librement parcouru l’Europe, l’écrivain en pleine notoriété, après 1948, fuira les voyages qui peuplent généralement l’existence des se pairs” (13). In the ten years or so separating the South American trip and his death in 1960, Camus accepted few invitations to lecture abroad, and turned down a very lucrative offer to go to Japan. To oblige his publisher, and no doubt because it seemed the necessary, proper thing to do, he nerved himself to go to Stockholm to collect the Nobel Prize in 1957. 3 Of course Camus never pretended to be a great voyager, a Malraux or a Cendrars, but the worldly tone of the earlier essays tends to disguise the limits of his prewar travels. This is not to say his impressions were shallow or false; he had what Henry James calls an “experiencing nature,” and his sense of place was always vivid; but in the descriptive prose as in the fiction it was almost always surer and livelier on native grounds: Algiers, Oran, the ruins at Tipasa and Djemila—or in other Mediterranean places where he experienced a shock of recognition. A monastery in Fiesole, for example: “Dans le vie de ces franciscains, enfermés entre des colonnes et des fleurs et celle des jeunes gens de la plage Padovani à Alger qui passent toute l’année au soleil, je sentais une résonance commune,” he writes in “Le désert” (Essais, 84). By comparison, the evocations of European [End Page 609] cities in “Le Minotaure ou la halte d’Oran” are emptily rhetorical—mere gesturing, like “Paris est souvent un désert pour le coeur, mais à certaines heures, du haut du Père-Lachaise, souffle un vent de révolution qui remplit soudain ce désert de drapeaux et de grandeurs vaincues. Ainsi de quelques villes espagnoles, de Florence ou de Prague,” and so on (Essais, 813). There is a kind of visionary dreariness that distinguishes his description of Prague, and his journey from Prague to Vienna, in “La mort...