I. The Arithmetic of a Grave
The stone carries two dates and nothing that accounts for them. 1885. 1914.
It stands in the military plot of the Saint-Michel cemetery at Saint-Brieuc, on the Breton coast, and the man beneath it had passed his working life at the other end of the French empire, racking and shipping barrels of wine for an Algiers merchant in the plains behind Bône. Shell fragments struck him in the head on the Marne in September of 1914. He was moved by hospital train across a country he had never seen until that autumn, to a school in Saint-Brieuc requisitioned as an auxiliary ward, and he died there on the eleventh of October. The dates on the stone are accurate and very slightly deceptive. Born in late November, dead in early October, Lucien Auguste Camus did not reach twenty-nine. He was twenty-eight.
His younger son came to look at the stone in 1947. The boy had not been a year old when the father was called up, and in the household that raised him there survived almost nothing of the dead man: no letters worth keeping, a military citation, a shard of the shell that killed him, sent back to the widow as though a splinter of metal were a form of news. In the novel Camus began twelve years after the visit to Brittany, the journey is an errand performed for the mother, who had never seen the grave and never spoke of the man buried in it, and the son who performs it finds the visit meaningless until he reads the dates and understands that he is older than his own father. That is the scene everyone knows. It belongs to fiction. The verifiable core is thinner and, for a biographer, more useful: in 1947 Albert Camus, then in his thirty-fourth year, traveled north, partly because his old teacher Jean Grenier had settled in Saint-Brieuc, and stood in front of a grave. What he thought there he did not record at the time. Twelve years later he gave the thought to a character named Jacques Cormery, rounded the father’s age up to twenty-nine and the son’s up to forty, and let the arithmetic do its work. Cormery, incidentally, was the maiden name of Camus’s paternal grandmother. He built his fiction out of the family’s real vocabulary and then adjusted the numbers.
This is the difficulty the whole of his life presents. Camus is among the most quoted writers of the twentieth century and among the least reliably quoted. He has been made into a secular saint of moral clarity, an emblem of decency under occupation, a brand of stoic consolation sold on refrigerator magnets; he has also been tried in absentia as a colonial novelist who could imagine the inner life of a settler clerk in fastidious detail and could not be bothered to give an Arab victim a name. Both portraits are assembled from real materials. Neither survives contact with the documents, which are abundant, contradictory, and often embarrassing to whoever has arrived looking for a verdict.
The argument of this book is that the familiar shorthand—Camus, philosopher of the absurd—describes a single early move in a much longer effort, and that the effort, not the slogan, is what makes him worth this much attention. He spent roughly twenty-five productive years asking a question that his century had made urgent and that no metaphysics could answer for him: how human beings might live, and refuse to kill, once the guarantees have been withdrawn. Not how to endure meaninglessness. How to keep from becoming an executioner while still resisting. The answer he assembled—lucidity, revolt, solidarity, measure, limits—was drawn from a poor childhood, a diseased body, a decade of theater, four years of clandestine journalism, and a habit of mistrusting anyone who spoke confidently about History with a capital letter. It was also tested, repeatedly, against the thing he could least afford to see clearly: the colonial order into which he had been born poor, and the war that ended it. In that test his moral language proved both admirable and insufficient, and the insufficiency was not incidental. It grew from the same soil as the admiration.
We know a great deal about him. Three volumes of notebooks. Eight hundred and sixty-five letters to and from the actor María Casares. Editorials by the hundred, signed and unsigned. School records, medical exclusions, publishing ledgers, prefectural files, the minutes of a Communist cell in Belcourt. We know almost nothing about certain central things: what his mother thought, in her small vocabulary and her partial deafness, about the son who made her silence famous; what passed between two men in a car on the fourth of January 1960. The gaps are not invitations. In what follows, when the record stops, the sentence stops.
II. Mondovi, 1913
He was born on the seventh of November 1913, in the village of Mondovi in the department of Constantine, about a dozen miles inland from the port of Bône. The village had been laid out by the French in the 1840s on the model of every other colonial settlement in the Bône plain: a grid, a church, a square, a name imported from a Napoleonic battle. The family had arrived a few weeks earlier. Lucien Camus had been sent from Algiers by the wine merchant Jules Ricôme to take charge of a ...
