Camus, a Romance Book

I love Camus. No author has had a greater influence on my life. And his book L'Estranger or The Stranger has no equal in books that influenced me. I read it in college and consider it one of the greatest reading experiences of my life.

So I was looking forward to this biography. Apparently, Elizabeth Hawes also loves Camus. So the subtitle of the book--A Romance--refers to her love for him. Keep in mind, she never met him, but, like me, she just loves him. Great. But to be perfectly blunt, I don't really give a shit. I wanted to read about Camus, not her. Her constant references to herself rarely helped. She even ended the book with herself, an unpardonable sin.

Here are a few takeaways about Camus:

His name rarely shows up in the familiar roundup of artists who suffered from tuberculosis, such as Keats, Shelley, the Brontes, the Brownings, Chopin, Chekhov, Mansfield, Stevenson. He probably would have had an early death anyway.

There was the unpleasant feud between Sartre and Camus. I am totally on Camus's side. Sartre was just a flat out dick. As my mother would have called him: "a peckerhead." Sidenote: I had a great mother.

I never realized Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Mandarins with characters modeled on Camus and Sartre. When Camus was asked why he didn't respond to her put down of him, he responded, "Because you don't discuss things with a sewer."

Camus was an Algerian. A big issue in his life is why he didn't take a firmer position on the war with Algeria. I'm okay with that and always have been. I understand and love diplomacy, negotiations, moderation. He believed there should be no negotiations with terrorists, and he believed in reconciliation. He probably missed out on the idea of preparing Algeria for independence long before this, just like with Vietnam.

Camus "could not support oppression in Algeria nor one that would abandon the Arab people to even greater misery and tear the French settlers from their age-old roots." He tried to be the voice of reason. He could not join any of the extreme camps but there was no middle group, so he basically withdrew. As he said, "the true cause of our madness lies in the ways and workings of our political and intellectual society, I have decided to no longer participate in the unending polemics."

His friend the Muslim writer Mouloud Ferraoun who worked throughout the war for Franco-Muslim solidarity in Algeria, was assassinated by the OAS, along with five other liberal educators in Algiers on February 1962. The OAS was a right-wing French dissident paramilitary organization.

Although Camus was stoic, an Algerian friend said he had been "hurt to the point of injury" by the attacks on his character. There are hints of "persecution and betrayal" in his letters.

It was this controversial remark that got him in trouble: "If a terrorist throws a bomb into the Belcourt market where my mother shops and it kills her, . . . in order to defend justice I would at the same time have to defend terrorism." He was even ridiculed for his attitude toward his mother.

Camus thought about refusing the Nobel Prize. He felt Malraux deserved it. He would face a new round of polemics and ridicule, especially about his mother comment and the sense that he did not deserve the Nobel.

Susan Sontag attributed Camus's appeal to his "moral beauty." His ethics and his desire to be ethical, what he called his "noble feelings in search of noble acts," is still what often draws people to him until today.

Perhaps his best friend, Roger Quillot, committed suicide with sleeping pills. His wife also took pills but survived. Camus spent a lifetime denying suicide. Quillot explained his decision: "Will people understand if I say that our mutual choice of a voluntary death is an act of both liberty and the love of life in the fullest?" I don't know if anyone understands that, but I definitely do.

Camus's favorite writers were Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche.

Camus referred to dying in a car crash "une mort imbecile." How absurd is his dying in a car crash. He had train tickets but was persuaded at the last moment to drive with Michel Gallimard. Camus hated speed and cars. He was a passenger. It was a straight road. The car zigzagged off into a tree and into another one. Camus's neck was broken and he died instantly. Gallimard died later. The accident has never been fully explained.