(excerpted from a review article by John Hess in the latest Monthly Review) The New York Times Book Review summarized Todd's Albert Camus: A Life as a "biography of the near-proletarian from Algeria who reached the top of the literary pole in Paris, then fell silent when he could not defend the fashionable Stalinism of the 1950s." To which a knowledgeable French reader might reply, quelle neo-connerie! To begin with, Camus never fell silent, expect that he refused to speak out against the French terror in Algeria--a refusal that drew reproaches not only from the left but also from the Christian Democrat Francois Mauriac, the Gaullist Andre Malraux, the conservative Raymond Aron, and Camus's allies in the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Stephen Spender. And it was obtuse for the Times reviewer, Richard Bernstein, to imply that Camus's famous break with his benefactor Jean-Paul Sartre was over Stalinism. Sartre was never a Communist, as Camus had been before the war. Indeed Todd relies on that experience to defend Camus from the charge of prejudice. He relates that the party assigned Camus to agitate for a bill to grant suffrage to a select few Algerian Arabs, but dropped the effort in 1937 in deference to Popular Front unity Camus, Todd says, broke with the party rather than go along. Against that brief outreach to the Other, however, must be weighed the rest of Camus's life and works. For Americans in the 1950s, Camus came on as a dashing figure, a literary genius, an existentialist icon, a champion of our side in the Cold War and a Resistance hero. He rather resembled Humphrey Bogart, and indeed flirted with a movie career; his glamour was magnified by a Nobel Prize and sanctified by his death like James Dean in an automobile crash in 1960. (Of his celebrity tour here, Todd records chiefly that he added an American to his harem.) The two novels he wrote during the Occupation became must reading, as they remain. I recall, however, feeling that I was missing something. Having been to Oran during the war, I wondered as I read Camus, where are the Arabs? They appear to have escaped The Plague entirely; only two figure, barely, in The Stranger--a prostitute who is beaten by the narrator's thuggish pal Raymond, and an Arab youth, perhaps a kin of hers, whom the narrator, Meursault-Camus, seeks out and senselessly murders. I confess I was less struck then by the low status Camus accorded women--the other Other. Meursault treats with callous indifference the woman who loves him, and rebuts a suggestion by the court that his crime might have been impelled by grief and rage over his mother's death. On the contrary, he embraces an imminent release from "this whole absurd life," and the novel ends, "I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate." It is no wonder that the Nazi cultural gauleiter in Paris liked the manuscript and volunteered to help find "all the paper needed" to publish it. A hero's contempt for life and decency and the Other-- what could have been more timely, in occupied Europe, in 1942? Or, alas, today? Camus's contempt for life did not, though, extend to his own, not literally. In The Fall (1956), an autobiographical monologue of self-pity, self-glorification, and disdain for mankind and especially womankind, he said he had refused to join the Resistance because he had a horror of being beaten to death in a cell. "Underground action suited neither my temperament nor my preference for exposed heights," he wrote. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
