Albert Camus: A Life.

Olivier Todd. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York: Knopf, 1997. 434pp. $30.00 (cloth).

Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life is a biography for the 1990s, devoted as much to the private foibles of the man as to the achievements of the gifted writer and the trials of the public intellectual. In the preface, Todd underscores what makes his own version of Camus' life original, and long overdue: he has relied on previously unexamined material, from eyewitness accounts to unpublished letters. The man who wrote that "there is no true creation without secrecy" was indeed quite protective of his privacy. The avowed purpose of this new biography is to reveal some of the best-kept secrets of a tormented life, beset by illness and self-doubt. According to Todd, the death of Camus' wife, Francine, in 1979, made those revelations possible, since "decency imposed a certain reserve" while she was still alive.

Undoubtedly, Camus' numerous love affairs and Mediterranean machismo will fare no better with most readers than did Sartre's callous mistreatment of Simone de Beauvoir, once it became publicly known. In Todd's narrative, the writer's infidelities played a major part in Francine's decline into suicidal depression in 1954. Where Herbert Lottman, who wrote the first authoritative biography of Camus twenty years ago, charitably glossed over the whole episode, content with remarking that Camus "was not then or ever prepared to give up the way of life which could have been the primary cause or one of the principal causes of the trouble" (527), Todd is far blunter, and much more explicit: "All she [Francine] did was cry, sleep, and talk obsessively about Maria Casares, her husband's lover" (318).

Camus felt lasting guilt for his wife's ordeal, writing to Arthur Koestler's wife, Mamaine: "I have no gift for love, nor for suffering, and I wander around without knowing what I am here for" (319). Francine Camus could only agree. When her husband showed her the manuscript of The Fall, a thinly disguised autobiographical narrative replete with self-deprecating irony, she told him: "You're always pleading the causes of all sorts of people, but do you ever hear the screams of people who are trying to reach you?" (342).

The conflict between the private man and his public persona, between the exile and the prophet, is at the core of Todd's biography, providing a useful key to the inner torments of the artist. Camus's life was indeed a study in contrasts, if not contradictions. A proclaimed son of the sunny Mediterranean, a lover of surf, desert, and beaches, he spent most his adult life as a modern-day Rubempre, in cold, gray, rainy Paris, a city he both admired and resented. Orphaned at an early age (his father died during World War I), hungry for friendships and attention, more at ease with the little people of Algiers he knew as a child or the revolutionary workers he later befriended than with the rich and the powerful, he found himself overnight the darling of the literary Tout-Paris before becoming the favorite whipping boy of the left-wing intelligentsia.

Hailed by many as one of the most brilliant representatives of existentialist atheism, a label he rejected, Camus relentlessly searched for an absolute, as did some of his most memorable fictional creations, repeatedly yearning, in the midst of his struggles, for the "asceticism, silence and inspiration" of the monastic life (158). As a result, he fared better with Catholic humanists than with his former companions in the secular Left. Having heard the novelist speak to Dominican priests soon after the war, Julien Green noted in his Journal that "Camus spoke in a way that I found very moving, about what Catholics are expected to do in France in 1946. He was moving in spite of himself, without any effort at eloquence, it's his honesty that does it" (230).

Todd's book, rich in revelations about Camus' private life, is less original on the public icon, whose works and times have been widely documented. However, readers unfamiliar with intellectual and political France from the thirties to the sixties will be introduced to the major events of the tumultuous decades that spanned the writer's life: the effects of the 1936 Popular Front victory on Algerian society, the early rumblings of the anti-colonial struggle just before the war, Camus' involvement in the theater and the Resistance press, and the bitter disputes of the Cold War.

As Camus reached the apex of international celebrity and was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature, his star had already faded in his own country, at least among his peers. In 1952, Camus published L'Homme revolte (The Rebel), in which he denounced Stalinism, the post-Hegelian religion of history, and the whole tradition of Cesarean socialism in the name of a rebellious, idealistic brand of libertarianism. Sartre's Les Temps Modernes published a scathing review of the book. Camus responded in kind, declaring that he was tired of receiving lessons from critics who "never placed anything but their armchairs in the direction of history." Sartre made clear what he thought of his former friend: he was a second-rate philosopher. "I don't dare advise you," he replied to Camus, "to go back to Being and Nothingness, since reading it would be needlessly difficult for you" (309).

The outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954 further increased Camus' isolation and despair. Camus agonized over the conflict, torn between his empathy for the plight of the Muslim population and his allegiance to his own people, the working-class pieds-noirs whose cause he championed to the very end. As it became clearer that his repeated calls for justice, nondiscrimination, and a peaceful negotiated solution to the struggle would go unheeded, Camus finally chose to remain silent on the Algerian tragedy. He did all he could, however, to help anti-war activists and opponents to the colonial rule imprisoned by the French authorities.

While in Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize in 1957, Camus was taken to task by a young Algerian during a meeting at Stockholm University, and the writer decided to break his silence of almost two years. He insisted, once again, that he remained "a partisan of a fair Algeria, where the two populations must live in peace and equality," but he unequivocally condemned "the terrorism that works blindly in the streets of Algiers and one day might strike at my mother and my family." He then spoke the famous words that further antagonized the anti-colonial Left: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice" (378). Albert Memmi, the Tunisian writer, dubbed Camus a colonizer, albeit a well-meaning one. "It must be understood," Memmi wrote of Camus, "that his situation is by no means easy; it is not emotionally or intellectually easy to have all of one's family on a side that is morally condemned" (382).

The polemics that ensued in the media and the intellectual community convinced Camus that he was destined to be misunderstood. He devoted the last years of his life to writing Le Premier Homme (The First Man), an autobiographical novel. Published posthumously in 1994, it was to be his literary testament. In the spring of 1959 he noted in his Carnets that he was now wandering "among the debris as an outlaw, drawn and quartered, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularities and weaknesses. And I must reconstruct a truth after having lived a lie all my life" (406). The related themes of strangeness and exile he had placed at the center of his literary creations had come to define his life in his own eyes. In the midst of his estrangement, he must have reached some of his goals, since he wrote to a friend a few months later that he had "finally arrived at the truth of art" (407).

In one of his last public appearances, he tried once again to set the record straight, striving as always to escape labels and definitions, denying he was either an intellectual or a philosophe. "I'm not sure I'm an intellectual," he told a group of students in Aix-en-Provence, "and as for the rest, I support the left wing in spite of myself and in spite of itself. . . . I am not a philosopher, because I don't believe in reason enough to believe in a system. What interests me is knowing how we must behave, and more precisely, how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason" (408). Three weeks later, he was dead, killed in the prime of life, at forty-six, in a car accident.

Camus was touchy and difficult, a charming, disarming man who could be arrogant, self-righteous, and theatrical. His forceful, uncompromising moralistic stance made him at times, like Rousseau, whom he closely resembles, the target of the Parisian salons' unforgiving witticisms. But history, the very history he blamed his fellow intellectuals for having shamelessly idolized, has vindicated his politics. Like Orwell, he will be remembered as one of the few voices from the European left who never wavered in their opposition to totalitarianism at a time when so many people turned a blind eye to its Stalinist version for fear of appearing to support capitalism and the Right. In the past twenty years, the major figures of the postwar intellectual Left in France, from Francois Furet to Andre Gluscksmann, have renounced and denounced their youthful support of the communist idea, while the French rediscovered the charms of liberal democracy after decades of ideological civil wars. Camus, as Todd rightly observes, "was correct too early."

In France, the ambivalence with which his fellow intellectuals viewed Camus' philosophical essays was only matched by the popular success of his novels. He was a best-selling author throughout his life, and remains one after his death. The Plague sold fifty-two thousand copies in the first three months following its publication in 1947; The First Man (1994) sold as many in the first week; and The Stranger remains Gallimard Editions' all-time best-seller. Our fin de siecle voyeurism knows no boundaries, and no public figure today can successfully shield his or her private life from the probing stares of contemporaries. Let us hope the English version (even abridged and edited) of Olivier Todd's detailed and well-written biography will move its readers to look beyond the man to his works, since, as Sartre said of his old foe, "generally in life writers are inferior to their books." If the narrative of his troubled life draws people to read (or reread) the best of his luminous prose, and revel in the spare intensity of L'Etranger, the sunny lyricism of Noces and L'Ete, and the lucid, ironic moralisme of La Chute, Camus' tribulations will not have been in vain.

JEAN-PHILIPPE MATHY