The Rains of Empire: Camus in New York David Reid (bio) For Claire D. Tremaine Nous remontons le port de New York. Spectacle formidable malgrĂ© ou Ă cause de la brume. Lâordre, la puissance, la force Ă©conomique est lĂ . Le coeur tremble devant tant dâadmirable inhumanitĂ©. 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: âCar ce qui fait le prix du voyage, câest la peur.â 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 HiĂ© broke up. âLe 2 septembre 1939, en effet, je nâĂ©tais pas allĂ© en GrĂšce, comme je le devais,â he writes in âRetour Ă Tipasa.â âLa guerre en revanche Ă©tait venue jusquâĂ nous, puis elle avait recouvert la GrĂšce elle-mĂȘmeâ (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: âFatiguĂ©. Ma grippe revient. Et câest les jambes flageolantes que je reçois le premier coup de New Yorkâ (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, âParadoxalement, alors que le jeune homme sans grandes ressources avait librement parcouru lâEurope, lâĂ©crivain en pleine notoriĂ©tĂ©, aprĂšs 1948, fuira les voyages qui peuplent gĂ©nĂ©ralement lâexistence des se pairsâ (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 âexperiencing nature,â 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 Djemilaâor in other Mediterranean places where he experienced a shock of recognition. A monastery in Fiesole, for example: âDans le vie de ces franciscains, enfermĂ©s entre des colonnes et des fleurs et celle des jeunes gens de la plage Padovani Ă Alger qui passent toute lâannĂ©e au soleil, je sentais une rĂ©sonance commune,â he writes in âLe dĂ©sertâ (Essais, 84). By comparison, the evocations of European [End Page 609] cities in âLe Minotaure ou la halte dâOranâ are emptily rhetoricalâmere gesturing, like âParis est souvent un dĂ©sert pour le coeur, mais Ă certaines heures, du haut du PĂšre-Lachaise, souffle un vent de rĂ©volution qui remplit soudain ce dĂ©sert de drapeaux et de grandeurs vaincues. Ainsi de quelques villes espagnoles, de Florence ou de Prague,â 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 âLa mort...