The enduring morality of Albert Camus

Now, come back to the 90’s, and meet your New Man in the black market of Russia. When the Wall was breached, when the Soviet empire collapsed under the weight of its own lies, communism exposed itself as the ebony joke of the century. Today the New Man is reaching out to the Big Mac. This was not the last act expected of him by the traveller from the Finland station. And it was not a sight visualised by the cafe romantic. The `violence’ of his idea remains, true; but it achieves only the freedom of the terrorist. So it is perfectly okay if you burn the philosophy of Sartre — Todd’s “utopian anarchist” — in a seminar room.

The flame illuminates the survivor: Albert Camus, the eternal stranger, the frontier man tanned by the Mediterranean sun, the one who defied God. The writer once mocked by the leftists as a master of abstract morality today stands vindicated, totally unscarred by history. Todd’s Albert Camus: A Life (Chatto & Windus/Rupa; 435 pp; — 13.95) brings out the personal grammar of the enduring morality of this century’s most read French writer. Despite Todd’s early warning to this writer (“Please don’t read the English translation, read the original in the French. The American publishers have cut it by half!”) , the book is the dramatic progression of a life lived in denials and doubts, in love and loathing. In “lucidity”, to be short.

A pure Mediterranean lucidity perhaps. For, “he felt strangely like a Greek in a Christian universe and questioned how one could have a religious temperament without belief. He was attracted to communism as a religion without God”. So the freedom from God was only a beginning. As Todd writes, “it was easier to base a ready-made social morality on communism than to create a whole new, personal morality. To the question of how to live without God, who does not exist, Camus had three answers: live, act, and write.”

Living for a while was a passage through poverty, so poignantly captured in The First Man, the posthumously published incomplete novel, actually a first draft recovered from the wreckage of the sports car in which Camus met his death on January 4, 1960. An encounter with his mother who had a clouded memory: “Poor people’s memory … has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are grey and featureless. Of course, there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labour, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.”

But Camus’ memory was of the Algerian heart. Everything — his initial fascination with communism, his famous disillusion, his lonely, politically incorrect stance during the Algerian war — is based on a moral system formed and matured in Algeria. Such a man with a specific, rooted heritage was doomed to be The Stranger in a Paris of wordy romance. For the existentialist-cum-permanent rebel, Camus’ “stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, was a dubious weapon against the massive, deformed events of our time. But on the other hand, by his unrelenting refusals, he reaffirmed the existence of moral facts against our era’s Machiavellians, and the golden calf of realism”. This passage from the obituary of Camus by Sartre was a rather “heartless” extension of the leftist argument which had portrayed Camus’ anguish as confused sophistry. That was not unsolicited admission that life is absurd. For Camus, the absurdity was lucidly identifiable, and it was something to be lived. And he lived that in silence and solitude, as the leftist intellectuals, rudely provoked by The Rebel, the finest repudiation of communism, went on to isolate him. The labour camps frightened him. Sartre too found these camps just as “unacceptable as you do. But I find equally unacceptable the use that the so-called bourgeois press makes of them every day.” Camus’s tomorrow exiled the violence of ideology, and it dreamed of an idyllic Mediterranean beach of abundant humanism. Sartre’s tomorrow too sought the idyll, but the route was revolution. As Todd writes, “Camus and Sartre both wanted a new, more humane social order, but Sartre remained a violent revolutionary in theory, while Camus was a man in revolt who rejected revolutionary excess, whether Jacobin or Communist in origin.”It was this disagreement with revolution that prompted Camus to declare that “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” He was talking about Algeria, the liberation of which meant an end to terrorism, not the French retreat. “The cause of the Arab people of Algeria has never been worse served than by terrorism against civilians, now practiced systematically by Arab movements. Terrorism delays, perhaps irremediably, the solution of justice that will eventually come”. Justice has not yet come to Algeria, and the one who delays it is the Islamic terrorist. Algeria today echoes the moral anguish of the poor Albert from Mondovi. Between Algiers and Moscow, history still continues to sway to the heartbeats of a moralist. It is an understatement when Todd writes, “Camus refused politics without morality.”

The last cry of The Stranger: “I felt ready to live it all over again. As if that great anger had purged me of evil and emptied me of hope, facing the night loaded with signs and stars. For the first time I exposed myself to the tender indifference of the world, feeling that it was so similar to me, like a brother in fact. I felt that I had been happy, and that I still was.” The world is living it all over again, as an eternal homage to the intimate stranger.