Perilous Task Research Articles

Camus by Germaine Brée (review)

96 MODERN DRAMA May CAMUS, by Gennaine Bree, New Brunswick, N. J., Rutgers University Press, 1958, 275 pp. Price $5.00. The recent death of Albert Camus, in an automobile crash near Sens, gives an unforeseen and solemn relief to this warmly sympathetic book by Germaine Bree, whose foreword begins: "It is a perilous task to undertake to write a critical study of a living writer. . .." As compensation for the peril of her task, however, Miss Bree had the privilege of being aided in it by Camus himself, who put at her disposition a great deal of unpublished material, notably the personal notebooks he had kept since 1935 and the unfinished manuscript of his first attempted novel, La Mort Heureuse, which throws a curious new light on l'Etranger. She has further enriched her study by recalling certain neglected writings such as l'Envers et l'Endroit as well as numerous contributions to periodicals , and the works of other authors ranging from Aeschylus to William Faulkner that Camus adapted for the stage of his day. However since her approach to his work is above all "literary," the main part of her criticism deals with his major novels, stories and plays. The first six chapters constitute what is probably the most serious and comprehensive biography of Camus to have appeared so far. "We can reach," affirms Miss Bree, "no really penetrating understanding of the significance and value of his work if we take it out of the historical context of our time." This is obvious for the exceptional material circumstances out of which came, for example, LettJ'es Ii un ami allemand; less obvious but far more important for those intellectual circumstances that oriented Camus' reflections in the pre-war world of 1930-39, and which Miss Bn§e clarifies for us admirably. However the most interesting attempt of this biographical study is not the most historical: what it seeks particularly to expose are the essential images or intuitions, the forms of sensibility that underlie the problems Camus poses in his works and his way of posing them. Most often these are simple images drawn not from books but from his childhood and youth in North Africa: images of poverty and light, of pain and need and hopeless waiting, of the desert and the sea and the "invincible summer" of his native land. It is with these that one can begin speaking of what distinguishes him from his French-born contemporaries. Against the background of a society without religion, without ethics, without any consolation for what it must do and endure, man's task seemed perhaps to define itself more Simply for him than in the intensely historical and ideologically-tom civilization of the continent: to surmount the facile nihilism that is equally the lesson of life on a purely sensual and discontinuous plane, and of logical reflexion pushed to its extreme consequences; to affirm against the absurd and triumphant unity of nature and the superhuman purity of rational abstraction his own ambiguous being, and from it to draw the values that endow his life with coherence and meaning. "We must first save man," wrote Camus, "if we \",ish to save the idea of man." For, as Miss Bn§e takes care to point out, Camus is not, professionally speaking, a philosopher, nor is he interested above all in ideas or logical demonstrations; he is rather as she defines him, "a man who seeks to elucidate his experience through an effort of his intelligence." And it is not by chance that the experiences he most frequently presents in his works are "those moments of nakedness, when all rationalization and all protective ideas and beliefs disappear." A voyage, which throws one out of his carefully arranged pattern of living; a crime which suddenly reopens the whole question of life and death; a natural catastrophe on a personal or social level, which can not be eluded but must somehow be dealt with; an' accident , however trivial, which sets off such a prolonged and intense crisis of self- 1960 BOOK REvmws 97 knowledge as that which overtakes the narrator of La Chute-~>ne by one Miss Bree analyzes these "parables," as she likes to...