A LIFE WORTH LIVING A LIFE WORTH LIVING Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning robert zaretsky the belknap press of harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, En gland 2013 Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College all rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Zaretsky, Robert, 1955– A life worth living : Albert Camus and the quest for meaning / Robert Zaretsky. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 72476- 1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Camus, Albert, 1913– 1960. 2. Conduct of life. I. Title. B2430.C354Z37 2013 194—dc23 2013010473 CONTENTS Prologue 1 1. Absurdity 11 2. Silence 59 3. Mea sure 92 4. Fidelity 117 5. Revolt 148 Epilogue 185 Notes 199 A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 2 2 1 Index 223 A LIFE WORTH LIVING PROLOGUE “Even my death will be contested. And yet what I desire most today is a quiet death, which would bring peace to those whom I love.”1 Albert Camus’ prediction, written in the last decade of his life, has been borne out, though perhaps not his hope. Over the past several years, contests have simmered and burst over the French Algerian writer’s legacy. Shortly after becoming France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy made a state visit to Algeria. The visit garnered more than the usual attention, in part because Sarkozy had come to offi ce with a reputation as a bluntly spoken conservative who saw no reason for France to apologize for its role as a colonial power. One of the stops on his itinerary was Tipasa, a mountainous town overlooking the Mediterranean. Not only does Tipasa boast a stu- pendous array of Roman ruins—the graveyard of an ear- lier colonial enterprise— but it is also a site to which prologue 2 Camus had made a series of pilgrimages during his short life. Two of his most lyrical essays, “Nuptials at Tipasa” and “Return to Tipasa,” express his deep attachment to the village. The fi rst essay, written in 1936 when Camus was an underemployed young man with oversized ambi- tions, describes his experience at Tipasa in frankly erotic terms: “Everything seems futile here except the sun, our kisses, and the wild scents of the earth. Here, I leave order and moderation to others. The great free love of nature and the sea absorbs me completely.”2 Nearly twenty years later, now a world- renowned and self- doubting writer, Camus returns to Tipasa. As he ap- proaches the village, he remembers a visit he had made right after the end of World War II. Events had trans- formed the ancient site: soldiers and barbed wire now surrounded the columns and arches where he had once posed shirtless, smiling, and surrounded by female friends. During that postwar trip, Camus’ spirit also seemed im- prisoned; there was, of course, the backdrop of a world that had run amok: “Empires were crumbling, men and nations were tearing at one another’s throats; our mouths were dirtied.” But there was, as well, a youth now lost: “On the promontory I had loved in former days, between the drenched pillars of the ruined temple, I seemed to be walking behind someone whose footsteps I could still hear on the tombstones and mosaics, but whom I would never catch up with again.”3 But these bleak recollections give way to something much older, yet at the same time “younger than our prologue 3 drydocks or our debris.” The abiding splendor of Tipasa, Camus discovers, stubbornly resists the modern world’s insanity: “I found an ancient beauty, a young sky, and mea sured my good fortune as I realized at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky had never left me. It was this that in the end had saved me from despair.” Algeria was by then lurching toward civil war and though Camus makes no explicit mention of the events that were already set in motion, he seems to steel himself for the future: “I have not been able to deny the light into which I have been born and yet I have not wished to reject the responsibilities of our time.”4 Posed in front of a sparse crowd dutifully waving fl ags of both countries, President Sarkozy gazed at the sea while listening to a member of his entourage recite a passage from “Nuptials at Tipasa.”5 Perhaps “Return to Tipasa” was too ambiguous or too po liti cal a text. In any case, when the production ended, actors and audience returned to their cars and the presidential motorcade continued to its next stop, leaving behind the ruined temple and young sky, as impervious to po liti cal posturing as are the elusive meaning and deep beauty of Camus’ essays. Three years later, in 2010, with the approach of the fi f- tieth anniversary of his death, Camus was again at the heart of French politics when Sarkozy suggested that Ca- mus’ remains be moved to the Pantheon. Voices on the Left immediately assailed Sarkozy for trying to “recuper- ate” Camus’ legacy for his own po liti cal benefi t. They insisted that his remains be kept in Lourmarin, the Pro- vençal village that he discovered soon after the war and prologue 4 where, with the aid of his close friend, the poet René Char, he moved a few years before his death. The Right, for whom Camus is a neoconservative avant la lettre, declared itself shocked by these accusations. The controversy also divided Camus’ twin children: while his son Jean denounced Sar- kozy’s effort to turn his father into an icon of the Right, his daughter Catherine, executor of her father’s literary estate, thought that Camus’ “pantheonization” would crown his lifelong desire to speak for those who had no voice.6 M While Camus’ remains are still at rest in Lourmarin, the meaning and signifi cance of his work will never be.7 In part, this is due to his Algerian heritage. In Alix de Saint- André’s novel Papa est au Panthéon, the government ap- proaches the daughter of a dashing and dead writer named Berger— a thinly veiled caricature of André Malraux— whom the French president has decided to induct into the Pantheon. The motivation is, well, po litical. As the di- rector of the Pantheon tells the daughter, few things are more eco nom ical than a pantheonization. “We bring out the students, bring out the Republican Guard and bring out a new stamp: and all of this costs nothing.” The pub- licity for the government is free, automatic and overwhelm- ing. Still, there is a caveat: “You need a good client.” Some “engaged writers” are too Catholic (Charles Péguy and François Mauriac), others are too Communist (Louis Ara- gon and Paul Eluard); one was not enough of a re sistance fi ghter (André Gide), while another was too much of a fl ake prologue 5 (Marcel Proust). And Sartre? Forget it, laughs the direc- tor: he is “still always wrong.” He then mentions Camus, only to note that he also fails the test because Algeria had failed him.8 Few writers were more confl icted over personal and na- tional identity than Camus. He was a pied- noir, the moni- ker given to immigrants who during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to French Algeria from other parts of Eu rope, becoming citizens of a nation, France, whose language they did not speak, whose history they did not know, and whose soil they would probably never step foot on. But this seemed unimportant at the time: Algeria was considered part of France, not a foreign na- tion containing several million Arabs and Berbers deprived of the rights of citizenship. By the 1950s, Camus resem- bled his mythic hero Sisyphus, bolted not to a pillar, but instead to the tragic impasse of Algeria’s re sis tance to a foreign occupation— a French occupation. For many years, Camus labored for a solution that would satisfy the im- peratives of justice for both Arabs and pieds- noirs, risking his life in pursuit of an impossible peace. Camus failed and fell silent— a silence he maintained until his death in 1960. While Camus the Algerian continues to divide opinion in France, there is a movement toward consensus in Alge- ria, where an increasing number of Algerian writers claim him as one of theirs. This has been especially true since the mid- 1990s and the so- called Second Algerian War fought between the government and Islamic fundamentalists. The Algerian novelist (and member of the Académie prologue 6 française) Assia Djebar has enrolled Camus in her cortege of Algerian po liti cal martyrs. He is, she writes, one of the “heralds of Algerian literature”— a fraternal spirit she calls to her side in order to gaze and refl ect upon together the bloody shambles of Algeria’s past.9 Similarly, during a recent debate in France over the insuffi cient number of mosques, Abdelkader Djemaï, the author of Camus at Oran, recalls that Camus marveled at the beautiful simplicity of Arab cemeteries. During a visit to Lourmarin, Abdelkader discovered that the “gravestone is just like those of my own deceased family.”10 What draws these Algerian writers to Camus is less his particularity as an Algerian writer, than the universality of his concerns. This is yet another reason why he contin- ues to make us uneasy. Whether seen from Tipasa or Paris, Camus remains the man whose life stands as witness to a kind of desperate heroism.