RESISTANCE, REBELLION, and DEATH, by Albert Camus. Knopf
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BOOKS Albert Camus: The Life of Dialogue RESISTANCE, REBELLION, AND DEATH, by Albert Camus. Knopf. 272 pp. $4.00. By comparison with the work of the waywardness of impulse, the needs men like Koestler, Silone and Orwell, of personal feeling, the claims of the Albert Camus' writing has always body. Real virtues, and in our time seemed to me somewhat grandiose and among the greatest a writer could have. porous. He lacked Koestler's capacity But they were virtues that also brought for sustained argument, Silone's mix- with them two significant weaknesses: ture of humor and humaneness, Or- a temptation to reduce humanism to a well's gritty concern for facts. To be mere literary device and an incapacity sure, Camus never succumbed to the to embody his moral sentiments as po- casuistry of the later Koestler or the litical ideas. occasional anti-intellectualism of Or- To some extent, these weaknesses re- well; but except for The Stranger, his flect the dilemma of the post-Resist- one first-rate novel and his deepest ex- ance intellectuals in France who re- ploration of the problem of nihilism, fused to surrender themselves to any Camus' work had a disturbing quality: total ideology yet felt a need for some all too often he seemed to be making principle by which to guide their pub- a speech. lic life. The hopes nurtured by the To note these reservations is to do Resistance having been so sadly dis- that, and no more; it is surely not to sipated, they began to fall back upon deny that Camus deserved much of the large and unprovisioned sentiments of praise that has been rendered him. As fraternity, sentiments without which a man reflecting upon the life of our little else can be worth while but time, Camus could be, in his very be- which in themselves seldom lead to wilderment, an enormously sympa- concrete realizations in life or art. Per- thetic figure. His mind was not really haps that is one reason Camus' reflec- fecund, like Sartre's, but then he never tions tend to go soft and his fiction became infatuated, again like Sartre, seems thin-blooded. with his own dilemmas and agilities. Camus really preferred the truth to THESE VIEWS were reinforced when I everything else, even to his own secur- started to read Resistance, Rebellion, ity as an intellectual. In defense of and Death, a collection of Camus' the values by which he tried to live, journalism beginning with war-time he could be properly intransigeant; but statements in behalf of the Resistance, he was also ready to bend before reaching a point of climax in the mag- 210 nificent essay denouncing capital pun- assumptions — assumptions often vio- ishment, and ending with some recent lated, yet operative as both checks declarations on the place of the artist upon evil and inducements to good— in modern society. There is a discon- which had in the past been at the certing sameness of tone in these arti- foundation of the human order. And cles, a fondness for the glittering epi- this Camus did superbly: gram and oratorical lilt which seem to The world I live in is loathsome belie Camus' claim to be writing from to me, but I feel at one with the the very edge of despair. In part my men who suffer in it ... it seems objection is simply to the tradition of to me that there is [an] ambition French journalism, which seems per- that ought to belong to all writers: manently infatuated with operatic to bear witness and shout aloud, every time it is possible, insofar as grandeur; but in part it raises the more our talent allows, for those who serious problem of the extent to which are enslaved as we are. the moral pronouncement can satisfy a political need. And again: And here, trying to imagine once Yes, the great event of the twen- again the situations in which Camus tieth century was the forsaking of had written these overwrought pieces, the values of freedom by the revo- lutionary movement, the progres- I had to acknowledge that the force sive retreat of socialism based on of my objections was not very great. freedom before the attacks of Cae- For his journalism makes clear that sarian and military socialism. Since Camus was not really a "political that moment a certain hope has man," even to the limited extent that disappeared from the world and a solitude has begun for each and Silone is; Camus drove himself to re- every man. turn to journalism whenever he could no longer bear his detachment as an The scores of similar passages in artist, whenever, that is, he suffered Camus' writing testify to the fact that, too much from the "bad faith" of si- as far as he could, he helped preserve lence. And recalling these occasions— the idea of freedom in a dark age, and the Resistance, the post-war struggle equally important, preserve the idea in France, the Algerian war, the Hun- of human possibility. As far as he could garian revolution—one is struck (as if —that phrase bulks large at the mo- it were some sort of discovery!) with ment, since these past few decades the the fact that it was the moral response dilemma of the democratic left, which which was the essential one, the moral Camus shared, has been its inability to response which now became a kind of move from abstract position to a con- politics. crete program and then from a con- The traditional competition between crete program to an active politics. But socialists and liberals, as even at times this was our dilemma: the one we felt between socialists and conservatives, to be an essential part of our expe- had rested on a tacit assumption of rience. What Camus, clearly sensing some shared values as to the needs and the depth and range of that dilemma, nature of man. But in the age of the tried meanwhile to do was to keep total state, when this consensus was alive the possibility of a renewed broken by terror, the first task of radi- radicalism, with or without the social- cal intellectuals who still believed in ist label and vocabulary, for the dec- human freedom was to articulate the ades to come. 211 In doing this Camus was closer to ing to see that by now it was too late us, more a true friend and comrade, for such proposals: there was no than the vast bulk of party politicians longer any choice but to allow inde- in Europe who, from sheer inertia or pendence to countries like Algeria petty advantage, clung to the name of even if one knew that the leadership socialism. So far as I know, Camus did of the FLN contained authoritarians not call himself a socialist, though he and worse, and even if one suspected expressed a strong kinship with the that an FLN-controlled Algeria would traditions of socialism; but to whom mean the substitution of a new-style does one feel closer: Camus or Guy dictatorship for old-style colonialism. Mollet, the chauvinist leader of the Perhaps so. But if one goes beyond French Socialist party? Camus or 01- ready-made "positions" and tries to lenhauer, the klein biirgerlich leader think about the realities of the Alger- of the German Social Democracy? For ian tragedy, then one may be a little that matter, which leader of the social- more respectful of Camus' opinion, ist movement in the recent years would even if still supposing him to be mis- have had the humane imagination to taken. He spoke on this subject, as on compose a pamphlet as profoundly all others, with that good faith, that stirring and politically significant as commitment to human freedom, which Camus' attack on capital punishment? is the essential requirement for modern Norman Thomas, Asoka Mehta, per- politics. That the essential is some- haps two or three others .. times not the sufficient, is something else again. THE INADEQUACY of Camus' journalism To the political life of our time in regard to concrete politics demon- Camus contributed two simple ideas. strates the power of its moral judg- He kept urging that the traditional ment—for without the latter one would ideologies had become bulwarks of not even think to notice the former. misconception and pretexts for a re- When it came to specific proposals, he fusal to communicate; he urged peo- shared the troubles of everyone else, ple to talk to each other, those who and shared them with a modesty that really cared about socialism and free- bears recommending both to some of dom; he was impatient with dialectics, his contemporaries in the intellectual ideologies and positions. That he was world of Paris and to many of the not entirely right in saying all this I "politicals" who clung to the socialist have tried to indicate, but anyone fa- word even as they were incompetent miliar with the congealing of tradi- to perform a socialist deed. Camus, for tional leftist opinion in France knows example, took a position on Algeria he was primarily right. that some of us might at first glance And then Camus understood the reject: he did not favor unconditional primacy of the idea of liberty in this Algerian independence, though he did age. He was not the kind of intellect- speak out for Algerian self-determina- ual who would sacrifice, in behalf of tion. He called for an end to the ter- fidelista rhetoric, his fidelity to the rorization of civilians by both sides, he idea of liberty; he was not the kind of proposed an autonomous Algerian intellectual who could be swerved by community linked to France, he spoke production statistics, the rapture of for a restoration of civil freedom and mass meetings, and the lure of rising order.