Albert Camus: A Biography: A Biography

Albert Camus

The myth of Albert Camus—his personal, political and artistic legacy—has served to confuse and distort the facts of his brief, remarkable life. Herbert Lottman has written the definitive biography of the writer, a full-scale work incorporating testimony from those who knew Camus best—his family and closest friends, his literary peers, his admirers and enemies.

Here is a frank and revealing account of Camus’ early life in French Algeria, his stifling poverty as a child, his first serious efforts as a writer and thinker, his shattering adolescent confrontation with tuberculosis, a disease that would haunt and plague him all his life.

And here too is the true story of his Resistance work in occupied France during World War II: the growth of his fame as a writer; his friendship and his brutal break with Sartre; the gratifying and deeply disturbing results of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at such an early age. Through it all runs an appreciation of Camus’ work in the theater—the arena he loved best and never ceased to serve.

The result is a portrait not only of Camus, but of the times that made him. For Camus—solitary, eccentric, relentlessly moral—was in a very real sense the conscience of a generation. It was, as he often said himself, a lonely road—and one that led him through constant bouts of self-torment and self-doubt. This book is a record of his singular journey—of the extraordinary triumph he achieved without dogma, without compromise, without illusion, a progress through absurdity and revolt, to life.

Internationally recognized as the standard work on Camus’ life, Lottman’s Albert Camus has been translated into many languages.

This edition appears with a new preface by the author and is illustrated with 31 duotone photographs.

Cover design by Julie von der Ropp

Also by Herbert R. Lottman

The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War

Pétain, Hero or Traitor

The Purge

Flaubert: A Biography

Colette: A Life

The Fall of Paris: June 1940

The French Rothschilds

Jules Verne: A Biography

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

A Biography

Herbert R. Lottman

Gingko Press

Corte Madera, California

1997

Published by Gingko Press Inc.

5768 Paradise Drive, Suite J, Corte Madera, CA 94925

Phone (415) 924–9615, Fax (415) 924–9608

email gingko@linex.com

ISBN 978-1-584235-34-7

First published 1979 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Copyright © 1997 by Herbert R. Lottman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Book design by Julie von der Ropp

To all those who helped me

for truth’s sake

and to those who helped me

for love of their friend Camus.

A première vue la vie de l’homme est plus intéressante que ses oeuvres. Elle fait un tout obstiné et tendu. L’unité d’esprit y règne. Il y a un souffle unique à travers toutes ces années. Le roman, c’est lui. A revoir évidemment.

Carnets, II

Pour l’acteur comme pour l’homme absurde, une mort prématurée est irréparable. Rien ne peut compenser la somme des visages et des siècles qu’il eût, sans cela, parcourus. Mais, de toute façon, il s’agit de mourir. Car l’acteur est sans doute partout, mais le temps l’entraîne aussi et fait avec lui son effet.

Le Mythe de Sisyphe

At first glance a man's life is more interesting than his work. It is a stubborn, tightly constructed whole. Unity of spirit reigns. A single breath carries us all along his years. He himself is the novel. A notion subject to revision of course.

Carnets, II

For the actor as for the absurd man, a premature death is irreparable. Nothing can make up for the sum of facts and of centuries that he should otherwise have known. But in any case one dies. For the actor is surely everywhere, but time carries him along also, and does with him what it wishes.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Contents

Preface – Camus Confidential

Personal Foreword

Introduction – Albert Camus 1913-1960

Part IMediterraneans

Chapter1The First Man

Chapter2Family Dramas

Chapter3Growing Up In Belcourt

Chapter4Sudden Chill

Chapter5Awakening

Chapter6Simone

Chapter7Engagement

Chapter8Enlistment

Chapter9Death In The Soul

Chapter 10House Above The World

Chapter 11Hinge

Chapter 12The Party

Chapter 13Théâtre de l’Equipe

Chapter 14Encounters

Chapter 15Alger Républicain

Chapter 16September 1939

Chapter 17Paris-Soir

Chapter 18Oran

Chapter 19The Absurds

Chapter 20La Peste

Part IIExile

Chapter 21Who Is This Stranger...?

Chapter 22Occupied Paris

Chapter 23Combat

Chapter 24The Misunderstanding

Chapter 25Liberation

Chapter 26First Combats

Chapter 27Armistice

Chapter 28Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Chapter 29New York

Part IIIFame

Chapter 30Neither Victims Nor Executioners

Chapter 31The End Of Camus’ Combat

Chapter 32Best-Seller

Chapter 33Don Quixote

Chapter 34Europe-America

Chapter 35Relapse

Chapter 36L’Homme Révolté

Chapter 37Sartre vs. Camus

Chapter 38Jonas

Part IVForty

Chapter 39The Sea

Chapter 40Insurrection

Chapter 41L’Express

Chapter 42The Fall

Chapter 43Requiem For A Nun

Chapter 44The Nobel Prize

Part VThe Road Back

Chapter 45Stockholm

Chapter 46Silence

Chapter 47Lourmarin

Chapter 48Final Weeks

Chapter 49Villeblevin

Chapter 50Afterword

Appreciation

Methods

Notes

Index

Camus Confidential

Preface to the new Edition

The reader who comes to this book for the first time is more than likely to be an admirer of Camus and there is no shame in that, for he remains one of our time’s culture heroes. Still the new reader may find it difficult to believe that as recently as twenty years ago, when this biography was conceived and the interviews and research was under way, Albert Camus was only beginning to emerge from the purgatory that even France reserves for political non-conformists. Many of the people approached for help on the Left Bank—the intellectual heart of Paris and Camus’ home and workplace—were still uncertain what to think of him, when they were not downright hostile. In the circles through which I maneuvered, Albert Camus had as many enemies (and false friends) as genuine admirers. It seemed extraordinary to me that I was encountering so much doubt about Camus’ significance, so much apprehension—for I was stirring old bones, and guilt feelings.

Many Latin Quarter intellectuals had taken the side of Jean-Paul Sartre in the political schism but by then (after the exposure of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the excesses of Mao Tse-Tung’s self-styled cultural revolution) they were beginning to be ashamed of themselves, ashamed but also irritated at the prospect of being questioned about recent history and their relations with the pariah whose biography I was writing. There were still plenty of unreconstructed Sartrians around, and even more fence-sitters (and whose fence-sitting at a time when totalitarianism seemed to be on the move again was tantamount to intellectual treason).

But in those days a biographer could still come up against other equally perilous obstacles. Because of imagined loyalty, some of Camus’ friends were reluctant to reveal buried truths. And indeed Camus himself had been concerned about the things a biographer might divulge, doing what he could to throw writers off the scent. Those reckless enough to attempt even cursory biographical sketches got no help from him, which may be why the least accurate accounts of Camus’ life were produced within the walls of the publishing house for which he worked (one hapless writer was only a door down the corridor). Camus’ private life had to be protected; the reader of this book will learn why his friends thought so.

In the end the present writer succeeded only by convincing old friends and lovers that this might be the only hope for an honest and complete record of their friend’s life, for otherwise their precious knowledge would disappear with them. I had never done anything as difficult; now I can look with satisfaction at this compilation of eyewitness testimony which can never be duplicated.

There was another serious problem, one I haven’t written or spoken about until now. Even before he was buried Camus had been taken over by well-meaning family members who sought to protect their own pride as well as a dead warrior—and they held essential papers. Because of family concerns, no one had ever tried to publish a serious biography before, not even in France. Here it is tempting to say, especially in France, for in Camus’ own nation there was little chance of seeing such a book to press. Camus’ publisher, then still the dominant literary house in Paris, would not displease the heirs by allowing an unauthorized book to see the light of day.

In the end I obtained the cooperation of Camus’ widow, with no strings attached; I ought to remember Mme. Camus with sympathy for she had no idea how deeply I would probe or what I might write. She was concerned for her own and her family’s image, although she may have thought it was Camus’ image she was protecting—for he had been anything but a family man. It also happened that Francine Camus had her own strong views about French Algeria and the independence war, views she would have liked her husband to share. And her power over the Camus papers made it possible for her to see that no scholar desiring access to manuscripts stray from the narrow path she traced.

Copyright laws from country to country have become increasingly standardized, which in practice has meant that the United States, after joining the strictest international copyright treaty, the Berne Convention, has been adjusting its own law and practices to norms worked out earlier in Europe. Until very recently, however, an American biographer could still be unsure of his right to use unpublished correspondence and other documents of a living or recently deceased person, especially when the material is available in a public institution. But in France, even twenty years ago, the law spelled everything out. I knew that I could not quote from unpublished letters and manuscripts without permission not only of the holder of the material but of the copyright owners—in this case the Camus estate. I also knew that I wasn’t going to obtain the estate’s permission without on my side agreeing to prepublication vetting of this book.

One of Camus’ correspondents, for example, had a considerable collection of intimate material which she decided to share with me, even though she herself didn’t have the power to authorize its publication—and I could only use it as an aide-mémoire. When I showed up at the agreed hour to begin reading she wasn’t home, but her neighbor opened the door and held out two large shopping bags filled with papers. Take these, she said. You can’t read them here. But when can I bring them back? Not for another month or six weeks, came the neighbor’s reply. She’s on tour. And so I found myself in uneasy possession of hundreds of letters spanning all of Camus’ Paris years, an extraordinary set of documents with no equivalent (my problem was to keep them safe over a summer holiday). From this experience I learned nearly as much about the remarkable and trusting person who lent them to me as about the subject of my quest.

She happened to be Maria Casarès, Camus’ confidante and first mistress from the end of the war nearly to the end of his life. Daughter of a cabinet minister in the pre-Fascist Spanish government, a fugitive with her family after Franco took Madrid, she more than anyone or anything else determined Camus’ commitment to Spanish freedom. She died in November 1996, as this book was on the way to the printer.

On original publication my book was actually embraced by French readers, and no matter that it aroused keen jealousies in the writing community. (I almost forgive the jealous, for some had truly known their Camus and might actually have written a book about him—had they dared.) I think that there was also a certain respect for my refusal to trade in sensation. Once it became clear that Camus knew many women—why cause unnecessary pain?

This is what led me to avoid identifying a young Scandinavian woman, to cite one case. Call her Torve. In the course of my probing I discovered that in the last year of his life this stunningly attractive student had become vital to Camus, who was tempted—or said that he was—to give up everybody and everything else for her; she is the ravishing young woman associated with neither his literary life nor his theater whom I place in Camus’ final weeks.

I learned that she had been with him during his last days in Lourmarin (leaving only when his family was expected for the Christmas holidays); his intention, as she understood it, was to return to Paris to announce to those it might have concerned that he was going to marry her; of course he never got all the way to Paris.

I supposed that Torve had returned to her country long since, but then one of my friendly sources, Jean Bloch-Michel, mentioned having seen her only one week earlier on a Paris bus. I reached for the telephone directory, an object that inspires disbelief in most Parisians but which at times can be helpful all the same; I found her there! She readily accepted a rendezvous; it was only when we began going over old souvenirs that she became apprehensive. She was now married and had a fully satisfactory life, and few if any of her friends knew that Albert Camus had ever shared it.

Nevertheless Torve agreed to help me. It was not a matter of further exploration of Camus’ love life, of adding another case history—for this book was never meant to be a Guinness Book of Records—but of obtaining more first-hand details of what he did and said and when and where he did and said it; Torve held some of the answers in letters she hadn’t opened since his fatal accident.

Soon after that my French publisher received a phone call from my new source. And this good man was about to publish the book you are holding in your hands—an act (he knew) that would displease his colleague, Camus’ publisher, asked me not to mention Torve. Of course I didn’t have to.

No, these were not the serious things. The serious things were already in this book. One problem was that not all readers were prepared for them. Camus himself had 20/20 political vision and most of his chosen friends came close enough to that, but a successful writer much in demand couldn’t always choose. I had explored acts of courage unknown to his closest associates, sometimes even to his family, for Camus had gone out of his way not to reveal them. He had never explained his expulsion from the French Communist party in Algeria, even though it was a consequence of his defense of the indigenous Arab and Berber population. The facts, which he concealed and I revealed, were all to his credit.

Another fact, if he had ever talked about it, would have shamed many of his contemporaries, some of them within the publishing house in which he worked. He had been ill and without expectations in Oran when the time came to publish The Stranger. His publisher in German-occupied France, the house of Gallimard, also wanted the novel for pre-publication in the once-prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary journal that had been the light of Camus’ university days. Yet Camus said no to that. He said no because—although far removed from friends who might have counseled him—he understood that one simply could not appear in a magazine controlled by the Nazi occupation authorities. Meantime some older and seemingly wiser writers, writers who lived in Paris where they could see what was going on, continued to let themselves be exploited by the collaborationist press.

His sacrifice would never be known if I hadn’t written this book. In the same way, he was alone when he challenged Jean-Paul Sartre—Sartre who proclaimed his alliance with the Stalinists no matter what, Camus refusing to join the radical chic crowd that trucked with murderers; for this he was mocked and humiliated by the Sartrians (and nearly everybody was a Sartrian then). Camus’ interior exile was transformed into art in his curious novel The Fall, but who then had the key to it?

When my book was published—and this may be the hardest thing to imagine now—some of the supposedly mature men and women of intellectual Paris were only beginning to accept the evidence that Sartre had led them astray. It would comfort me to feel that my book helped turn the tide but I really don’t think so; events did.

Writing the biography of a creative artist, so I had always believed, required that one leave out nothing—for the writer may use everything. My immediate model was Richard Ellmann’s encyclopedic James Joyce. After my book came out I was often teased for having recorded what Camus ate for breakfast, and perhaps I did go too far here. This is not a historian summing up a life, a leading critic wrote in France’s most serious daily, it’s the FBI on the trail. While the writer’s private life is treated with proper discretion, the first reaction is embarrassment. One suffers retrospectively for Camus, whose discretion was legendary.

But the critic decided that he liked the new method all the same. The neutral accumulation of naked fact leaves us alone with the subject...These 700 pages of investigation give [Camus] back his mystery.

Certainly the total lack of attention to detail practiced by Camus’ contemporaries was in part to blame for my going so far in the other direction. The worst offender was a quasi-official collected works, enhanced by a critical apparatus weighted down with error. (I discovered this simply by comparing the notes of the first volume with those of the second.) The scorn for exact science among literary folk in France at the time spawned a generation of men and women of letters incapable of getting their dates right; some appeared never to have read a newspaper, and would not have known where to look up an old one.

This lack of sérieux was of course my fortune. I had to start from scratch. The result is a portly volume not to everybody’s taste, but if the reader cares, something will be learned about this tortured man and the times that formed him, and then about the times he was able to form.

Although this book has never gone out of print in France, it remains apart from the shelf-wide output of what might be called the Camus industry—writers who claimed to have been close to Camus but who pillaged my book to make their own. Today one can say that this biography is the most read and consulted in France, although often under other people’s signatures.

By default, Camus has been taken over by his natural enemies, survivors of the Sartre-Camus wars who would have assassinated Camus had the trees along the highway not done the job. A biography published in Camus’ lifetime might have defended Camus from his enemies. Now the danger comes from his friends, among them sun-worshippers who would have had no place under Camus’ harsh sun. Indeed, some of them have made a living misinterpreting his thought, duly excerpted and polished. Surely it is a tragedy that in his own country Camus’ reputation is administered by some of the people who failed to understand or to comfort him, or who actually turned their backs on him in his last painful decade.

When the first copies of the present volume were ready—it happened to be the French translation, released in 1978—a copy was delivered by my publisher, as a courtesy, to the Camus heirs. Their response was to file an urgent request for a court order to ban publication, and to seize all extant copies—a procedure possible under French law. The grounds were divulgation, i.e., my alleged use of the unpublished The First Man, which of course is the autobiographical novel Camus was working on when he died.

I hadn’t used The First Man, which was kept locked up, and when my publisher’s attorney proved that I had uncovered and exploited my own sources to reconstruct Albert Camus’ childhood and school days the case was thrown out. It happened that I had tracked down Camus’ childhood friends, French Algerians since repatriated to mainland France, where they were then living in southern French cities such as Marseilles, Avignon, and Aix-en-Provence. I had gotten one of Camus’ classmates to describe—for example—the daily tram ride he took with young Albert across Algiers to their high school. To his punctilious description I added background detail found in old travel guides.

Camus had done more or less the same kind of research in seeking to recapture his growing-up years for The First Man. I was luckier. For some reason he hadn’t been able to trace his paternal ancestry, and so accepted the family legend that he descended from Alsatian émigrés who had chosen France at the time of the Prussian annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the war of 1870-71. I discovered the registry office data he hadn’t been able to find in his own research tour from village to village—data which showed that there were no Alsatians at all in Camus’ ancestry; they were simply Camus’ of Bordeaux, like the Cognac brandy of that name.

It was clear to my publisher that the Camus estate hadn’t resorted to the grave and unusual call for seizure of a book just because of a tram ride to school. It was more likely that I was revealing a Camus too different from the soulless, sexless and apolitical littérateur surviving family members were hoping to pass on to future generations. And not a moment to soon.

Herbert R. Lottman, Paris 1997

Personal Foreword

to the original edition

I had imagined biography to be written in an atmosphere of pipe smoke, in a wood-paneled study, perhaps even with a quill pen. Instead my chief activity during the preparation of this book would be field investigation, tracking down eyewitnesses, convincing some of them to break what they had felt to be honorable silence, urging even sworn enemies or those indifferent to offer, at least this once, full and objective witness. I was obliged to uncover original documents, often lovingly preserved, but also innocuous-seeming scraps, tracts, clippings. Often my greatest joy would be to locate a lost but capital source, or to confront a reluctant witness with information prompting his own fuller confession. My constant concern was how to deal with the mountain of previously published, widely disseminated, and totally erroneous data: confused chronologies, inaccurately dated manuscripts and letters. A whole shelf of books about Camus had been based on such materials, and I winced each time I saw a pile of them in a bookshop near a university. Clearly everyone interested in Albert Camus was getting his serving of error.

An incidental effect of Algerian independence (1962) is the gradual effacement of evidence of the 130-year presence of the French in that territory. The biographer of a man who was born and who spent all his formative years in French Algeria is confronted with the destruction or disappearance of vital records, not to speak of the dispersion of surviving witnesses. Finally the best records of Camus’ childhood are the impressionistic, only slightly fictionalized evocations by the author himself, whose natural reserve (the pudeur endemic to the French which exasperates many visitors—or commands their respect) otherwise made the biographer’s task a formidable one.

And if the Camus heirs allowed me access to documents and manuscripts, it was nevertheless on the understanding that they take no responsibility for the manner in which I have utilized or interpreted this material. They did not see or approve the book; this is no authorized biography. But I am grateful for the patient help of Madame Albert Camus and of her sister Christiane Faure. This book is my thanks. Camus himself was afraid of "biophages", but I’d like to think that if he could read the present work he would understand the author’s intentions.

For one of the risks of literary biography is that the reader may be lulled into thinking that all the essential is here, one need read no further, when in fact the essence of the life of the writer is his expression. Sometimes the biography of an author can seem like a banquet from which the guest of honor is absent. So what the biographer must do is to draw attention to the work without pretending to substitute his book for the collected works of his subject.

Albert Camus

Introduction

Albert Camus 1913-1960

Camus seemed to have everything: youth, good looks, early success (sufficient to evoke jealousy, even bitter jealousy, among some famous contemporaries). He had first come to the attention of his country with a short novel, L’Etranger (The Stranger), and this stranger obtained even greater fame, and an international reputation, with La Peste (The Plague). Sharing the mystical aura of the underground resistance, he had come out of the Second World War a young hero. In the early post-war years his daily newspaper Combat was a moral guide to a generation demanding change. A longtime friend (and then an enemy), Jean-Paul Sartre, recalled the magic of that time in an often-quoted description of Camus the admirable coming together of a person, an action, and a work. No one seemed to bear more of the hope of young France and of the world.

He shirked no battle then, became a friend in need of Spanish anti-Fascist exiles, victims of Stalinism, young radicals and conscientious objectors, after having been among the first to protest unequal treatment of North Africa’s Moslems. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy cited him as one of the world’s foremost literary antagonists of totalitarianism.

For at a remarkably early age—only Rudyard Kipling had been younger—he was given that prize. His is one of the few literary voices that has emerged from the chaos of the post-war world with the balanced, sober outlook of humanism, a New York Times editorial greeted the award.

But by then Albert Camus was in trouble, and he knew that he was in trouble. The controversy provoked by his outspoken support of unfashionable causes, private stress brought on by the Algerian war, family illness and his own, had in incalculable proportions led to writing block—years of it (even if screened from public view by an abundance of ancillary activity). His worst critics of right and left had known how to make use of that, mocking him as on the decline, a self-satisfied impostor. On his side, the young man raised in poverty and humility who had always kept away from literary salons and literary glories, awards and decorations, refused to become reconciled to being a statue labeled Albert Camus. If they only knew who I really was, he lamented to his secretary, one of his few confidantes.

And then at last he thought that he had found a way to climb out of the morass: in a new house, a new routine. A return to important literary work (a major novel) and to his favorite kind of work (the theater) was now to become possible.

It was then that he was killed in an automobile accident.

Part I

Mediterraneans

1

The First Man

He sees in outline the image of his father. Then all is erased. Finally there is nothing. It was always like that on this earth.

Note for Le Premier Homme*

When Albert Camus died in an automobile accident on the road back to Paris on January 4, 1960, he was carrying with him a bulging black leather briefcase, the expanding accordion type, with reinforced corners and a three-position lock he never used. Caked in mud, it was found on the road near the tree against which the car had smashed. Inside the briefcase, along with personal effects such as a journal, some letters, and a passport, was the manuscript of the novel he had been working on in his recently acquired Provençal retreat at Lourmarin. The book would have been called Le Premier Homme (The First Man). Camus had written only part of the first draft—145 closely written manuscript pages, some eighty thousand words. According to the schedule he had mapped out for the project and for himself in the new year just beginning, he would not have completed the final version before 1961.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance he attached to this work in progress. In the last decade he had published two major books, L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), a political essay, and the short, curious monologue of La Chute (The Fall), considered his most personal book by those who had the keys to it, composed as it had been in the wake of the storm which had crashed over his shoulders with the appearance of L’Homme révolté, leading to the shock of his break with Jean-Paul Sartre. It also coincided with a personal crisis, illness in the family. Then in October 1957 came the announcement of his Nobel Prize, which if it brought joy to his friends and admirers seemed one more affliction to its beneficiary, implying as he thought it did that all his important work was behind him. His enemies in the literary and political worlds, in any case, had been quick to make that point.

But Albert Camus was just as certain that his work was only beginning. In a state of psychological stress bordering on depression, increasingly alarmed by the nationalist insurrection in his native Algeria, harassed by those who wished him to play a role in that drama which he himself felt unable to assume, he believed that he was functioning at only half-speed. Of course he could pursue his theatrical activity, adapting and producing other people’s work, of course he was publishing occasional essays and articles for the press. Yet he was clearly dissatisfied with his incapacity to undertake the significant work which he felt he had in him.

Now he was beginning to write again. With the money received from the Nobel prize he had purchased the house in Lourmarin, a village off main roads in the southern French Vaucluse region he loved. He was determined to live an increasing proportion of his time here. In what was to be the final year of his life, 1959, he spent part of the spring in Lourmarin, returned in midsummer, and then settled down in November to work through the end-of-year holidays.

So that Le Premier Homme would be the return to creation he had been promising his friends and himself (through his journal). But he wanted it to be considerably more than that. He was hoping to write what he called to friends, not jokingly, his War and Peace. In his journal he reminded himself: He was born in 1828. He wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1869. Between the ages of 35 and 41. Camus, born in November 1913, was forty-five in the year he began to work seriously on Le Premier Homme, although he had been planning it for a dozen years. Among personal papers found after his death was an elaborately prepared astrological prediction which contained the phrase: The work bringing immortality takes place between 1960 and 1965. In any case it would be, as he told reporters in Stockholm the day before he received the Nobel Prize from the hands of the King of Sweden, the novel of my maturity.

Leo Tolstoy had taken as his stage the great and declining empire of the Czars and the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Camus would write the epic novel of Algeria, then still a French territory. He had lived there over half of his life, all of his formative years, so that the book would also be a growing-up novel.

Settlers, most of them penniless, had come to Algeria from all parts of France, but also from Spain, Italy, and other European nations, to build what they saw as a new country with limitless possibilities. Algeria was a melting pot, its pioneers winning if not the wealth they hoped for then the right to live under French protection alongside the large indigenous majority. The parallel with the colonization of the New World was not lost on the settlers. Camus himself would say (in L’Eté): The French of Algeria are a bastard race, composed of unexpected mixtures. Spaniards and Alsatians, Italians, Maltese, Jews, Greeks, finally met here. These brutal cross-breedings produced, as in America, happy results.

He was one of these unexpected mixtures. Of Spanish ancestry on his mother’s side, he believed (without foundation, as will shortly be seen) that his father’s family migrated from Alsace, that eternal battleground between France and Germany. Europeans who migrated to Algeria virtually waived their ancestry. Like soldiers of the Foreign Legion who abandon their identities when they enlist, like former prisoners and other rejects of society who assume a new life in a far-off colony, these settlers who found a place in the countryside or in an old or a new town among the Berbers and Arabs of North Africa were given an opportunity to start afresh. They could be what they made of themselves. It was happening at the same time and in the same way in the United States of America but was then no longer possible in old Europe.

The First Man, then, was the first-generation French Algerian. It was Albert Camus’ father, who was killed in World War I before Albert was a year old. But it was also Albert Camus himself, growing up in a cultural and historical vacuum accentuated by his family’s illiteracy, symbolized by a home without books. Thus I imagine a first man who starts at zero, he told an interviewer as early as 1954, who can neither read nor write, who has neither morality nor religion. It will be, if you like, an education, but without an educator.¹* He also informed his former teacher and lifelong mentor, Jean Grenier, that at age forty he was ready to write his éducation (à la Rousseau), and indeed he was beginning to outline its contents at that time, six years before his death.² Camus did not live long enough to see his First Man as the last man. For the Moslem Algerians, who had acquired a sense of nationhood in the mid-twentieth-century thrust of nationalism, would take possession of this territory only two years after Albert Camus’ fatal accident.

Le Premier Homme in its present form (the family has not authorized its publication)* is a painstakingly detailed description of the sorrows and the joys of growing up in French Algeria, in the shadow of a mythical father.³ Camus had thought of calling his book Adam.⁴

The first First Man had to be the father of Albert Camus, for the son could not trace the paternal line much beyond him. Nearly everything he would learn about his father and his father’s parents would come to young Albert from his mother and his mother’s mother, neither of whom could read or write. Written records were virtually nonexistent. It has often been said and written that the Camus family migrated from Alsace; Albert Camus himself was convinced that his paternal grandparents, Alsatians, had opted for France in 1871, as he wrote in his preface to Actuelles III. The authorized edition of Camus’ works accredits this version of the family’s origin. And then in the autobiographical novel he was writing at the time of his death he would attempt to give an epic dimension to the arrival of the Alsatians; although he probably did not have the analogy in mind, his future readers may be reminded of the legendary ocean voyages of the Pilgrims, and their landing on the shores of the New World. If there has been any variation in the family legend, it is in the story that the Camus came not from Alsace but from the neighboring province of Lorraine. Albert’s cousin Emile Camus, for example, was told this by his own mother. Albert’s brother Lucien felt that both Camus and Cormery (maiden name of their paternal grandmother) are typical of Lorraine. He also recalled hearing his mother’s sister, Aunt Marguerite, refer to his father’s family as those Germans. The epithet might be applied to natives either of Alsace or of Lorraine, since the Moselle district of Lorraine contains a German-speaking population.

Alsace? Lorraine? In the context of Algerian colonization the ensuing story would have been the same. When the Franco-Prussian War ended in January 1871 with the siege and fall of Paris, one result was the cession of the Alsace-Lorraine provinces to Germany. By the Treaty of Frankfurt the inhabitants of these provinces were offered the opportunity to elect French citizenship and the right to live in France. To help in the settlement of this new population, the French legislature voted to attribute nearly 250,000 acres of the best available land in Algeria to migrants from Alsace and Lorraine who opted for French nationality.

In the final decade of his life Albert Camus made a pilgrimage to Ouled Fayet, where he knew that his father’s parents had lived, in an attempt to trace the origins of the family. Had he succeeded in his quest, his findings would have appeared in the early pages of Le Premier Homme. They do not. In the small book he wrote on his student Albert Camus, Jean Grenier revealed that when Camus had tried to trace his origins he discovered that Algerian municipal authorities do not possess this information, which in mainland France is a part of every Frenchman’s birthright.

Family legend can seldom have been as misleading as it turns out to have been in the case of Albert Camus. The biographer begins with the discovery that the Camus name—see any genealogical dictionary—is present in widely separated parts of France: in Lorraine and points north and east certainly, but also as far west as Brittany, as far south as Provence. There exists for the historian (and any Frenchman can obtain this information about himself and his family) a public records office called the Etat Civil, which since the late eighteenth century has been recording the vital statistics of every citizen of France. Algeria was part of the French nation, and the same type of record was maintained for inhabitants of that territory. Then why didn’t Camus, in the search for his father and his father’s father, call upon the Etat Civil? We shall never know.

Whatever the reason, the fact is that Camus’ biographer possesses information that neither Camus nor any member of his family ever had. And this information simply overturns the myth of Algerian ancestry. It places the Camus line in Algeria a full generation earlier than has been believed. And there is the irony that in his search for ancestors Camus could have found some of them in the region where he lived for over a year during World War II, when he was at times so desperately alone, and where he would return many times in pilgrimage or to rest.⁵

The first recorded Camus was named Claude, born in 1809 in Bordeaux, the large southwest French port and wine center. With his wife Marie-Thérèse (née Béléoud) he migrated to Algeria at the very dawn of French settlement of the colony.⁶ They found a home in the agricultural village of Ouled Fayet (in Arabic of the Fayet tribe or family), on the outskirts of Dély Ibrahim, near Algiers. The villages of Dély Ibrahim and Ouled Fayet lie in a stretch of hill country known as the Sahel, a narrow ridge just inland from the Mediterranean Sea which runs a sinuous path parallel to the shore for about sixty miles (one hundred kilometers) between Algiers and Cherchel to the west.

We can imagine that the Claude Camus had been poor or at least landless back in France. Their son, we shall soon see, would never learn to read and write (but that had something to do with the absence of schools in the new colony). Whatever they hoped to find in French Algeria, it must have been a harsher life than they had been promised. The French had not yet completed the pacification of the Algerian territory. Their military conquest, which had been undertaken after a series of real and imaginary incidents culminating in the landing of troops in 1830, was to be pursued by an army of over 100,000 men under Marshal Thomas Bugeaud. From 1841 to 1847 the main effort would be directed against the legendary warrior Abd el-Kader. Although the French were more or less in control of the territory by the time of the Revolution of 1848, the final battles against the Berbers of Kabylie would be waged until 1857. All the while, colonization was being encouraged, and by 1848 the settlers numbered nearly 100,000. If life was rough in the colony for the newcomers, it was rougher still for the native Moslem population. Faced with a Wild West frontier mentality, the government in Paris often had to exercise as much effort to protect the Moslems and their lands as to encourage colonization by mainland Europeans.

The son of Claude and Marie-Thérèse, Baptiste Jules Marius Camus, was born not in Ouled Fayet but in Marseilles, on November 3, 1842. We can only guess that his mother journeyed there from Algiers (regular boat service connected the two ports) to obtain proper medical care as well as respite from the war then raging against Abd el-Kader. Baptiste Camus (and it is he who in Albert Camus’ family legend migrated from Alsace after 1871) pursued his father’s work as a farmer in Ouled Fayet.

He married Marie-Hortense Cormery, an Ouled Fayet girl, at the town hall of that village on December 30, 1873. Town hall is perhaps not the right term for it; an old blockhouse was utilized for official functions such as these. Ouled Fayet was not important enough to have a town administration of its own, so that the mayor of neighboring Dély Ibrahim and his deputies performed whatever public acts were necessary. The little pillbox fort was also symbolic of the colonial war which was only then drawing to an end. Later, and until Algerian independence in 1962, the pacification of the natives would be commemorated in Dély Ibrahim by a monument to a member of Napoleon’s corps of engineers who had mapped out the area in preparation for the French landing, and a hilltop memorial to the soldiers of the 1830 expeditionary force, represented by a bust of their general, the Duc des Cars.

Another thing we know about this marriage, thanks to records of the Etat Civil, is that Albert Camus’ grandfather did not sign his name to the marriage act, for he could not write.

If the Camus were from Bordeaux, what about the Cormerys? Are they the link to Alsace-Lorraine? Again no. Mathieu Just Cormery, father of the bride Marie-Hortense, migrated to Ouled Fayet from the Ardèche in south-central France, a mountainous district of forests and fertile valleys, although on balance the rural population is poorer than it is rich. Mathieu was born in 1826 in Silhac (son of Julien Cormery and Elisabeth Dumont), in a countryside of small farms on hilly slopes, whose inhabitants were occupied in cattle and goat-raising, raising wheat and tree fruit. In the nineteenth century the region was more densely populated than it is now. Today if the stranger passes through Silhac, it may be that he has lost his way to neighboring Vernoux-en-Vivarais, a popular vacation community offering pleasant walks or riding through wooded mountain scenery, views of the Rhône River valley, a visit to the ruins of an old castle-fort on the frontiers of the Languedoc region. But what is more significant is that Albert Camus lived not far from Silhac in virtual exile during what must have been the longest year of his life, during the grim Nazi occupation of France, when he was cut off from his family and his friends in Algeria. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he resided then, is less than thirty miles (fifty kilometers) from his great-grandparents’ ancestral home.

Marie-Hortense Cormery, Albert’s paternal grandmother, was born in Ouled Fayet in 1852, the daughter of Mathieu Just Cormery and Marguerite (née Leonard). When Marie-Hortense married Baptiste Camus, her father was dead only a month, and although she just turned twenty-one it was recorded that her mother consented to the marriage.

Baptiste is listed in the marriage act as a farmer, although family legend has it that he was a blacksmith by trade; perhaps he was good at both jobs. He and Marie-Hortense would have five children. The first two were girls, then came three boys in a row, and Albert Camus’ father Lucien Auguste was the last of the lot. Baptiste Camus was just forty-four when he died. His wife is believed by family legend to have died at the same time or soon after; in fact she survived him by seven years. Their two daughters Thérèse and Marie were placed as domestic servants, the two oldest sons were taken in by a maternal aunt, sister of Marie-Hortense, at Chéraga, less than two miles (three kilometers) north of Dély Ibrahim, where she and her husband were small landowners.

That left Albert’s father Lucien Auguste Camus. (His middle name is used here to distinguish him from his son, Albert Camus’ older brother Lucien.) We know that Lucien Auguste was born on November 28, 1885; he was just a year old when his father died. Too young to be of any use, he was left by his older brothers and sisters in a Protestant orphanage. The story goes that at some point in his adolescence he ran away from the orphanage, and was then placed as an apprentice laborer in a vineyard at Chéraga.

Although it should not have been easier to trace his mother’s Spanish family than his father’s purely French one, Albert Camus himself had been able to go as far back as his great-grandparents Miguel Sintes Sottero and Margarita Cursach Doncella, who were married in Ciudadela at the westernmost tip of the Balearic island of Minorca, a Spanish territory. They had migrated to Algeria before the birth of Camus’ maternal grandfather Etienne Sintes,* who was born in Algiers in 1850. Camus’ maternal grandmother Catherine Marie Cardona (and not simply Marie Cardona, as some who found her named in L’Etranger have thought) was born in 1857 on the opposite coast of Minorca, in the village of San Luis on the outskirts of the capital, Mahón, where most of the island’s population lives. Catherine Cardona was the daughter of José Cardona y Pons, who in Algeria would become Joseph Cardona, and Jeanne Fedelic.

The second largest of the Balearic islands, Minorca has a history of successive occupations, by the Moors, the British, the French, before final return to Spain in 1802. In legend the Minorcans descended from giants, and the island still abounds in megaliths recalling the primitive stone formations of Stonehenge and Brittany. More significant to our story, the centuries of occupation by Moors from North Africa is known to have left, with a heritage of Moorish architecture, traces of Moorish blood. We do not know whether Albert Camus was conscious of this further tie to Africa, a more deeply rooted one than the political occupation by the French of a colony.⁷

Then Etienne Sintes, a farm worker as his father before him, and Catherine Cardona (sans profession) were married in 1874 in Kouba, a town on the outskirts of Algiers. They had nine children, seven of whom lived to be adults: Jeanne, Marguerite, Catherine (mother of Albert Camus), Antoinette (who would marry Gustave Acault, Albert’s first benefactor), Marie, Etienne (the barrelmaker who would be one of Albert’s fictional characters after failing as a father substitute), Joseph. Catherine, born in Birkadem on November 5, 1882, was an unusually frail and delicate child.⁸

In Chéraga young Lucien Auguste Camus (Albert Camus’ father) was brought back into his family’s care, put to work by one of his brothers, a transporter of wine.⁹ When he was drafted for military service, he listed his occupation as coach driver. Here at Chéraga he met young Catherine Sintes, three years his senior. Soon Lucien Auguste was virtually adopted by the large Sintes family. When father Etienne Sintes died in 1907, his widow moved from Chéraga with her sons and two of the daughters (Catherine included) to a working-class district of Algiers called Belcourt. On his return from military service Lucien Auguste decided that he himself did not want to go back to Chéraga, and so one of the Sintes boys, Joseph, employed by the large wine shipper Jules Ricôme, got him a job with that company. The Sinteses also took on the grudges of young Lucien Auguste. Because he smarted at the memory of the orphanage, and what his sisters and brothers had done to him by abandoning him to it, the Sintes never associated with the other Camus.

* Quoted in Roger Quilliot, La Mer et les prisons.

* Footnote numbers that are repeated in a chapter refer to the same source as the footnote with that number.

* Le Premier Homme was published by Gallimard, Paris, 1994, by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995 (The First Man)

* The Spanish spelling of Sintes was eventually changed to the preferred French spelling Sintès after the family became established in French Algeria.

2

Family Dramas

The curious feeling the son feels for his mother constitutes all his sensibility.

Carnets, I

When Albert Camus spoke of his father it was necessarily at a remove, for no articulate witness, scarcely a document, survived to bridge the bottomless chasm separating a father who died after wounds received in the Battle of the Marne and an infant less than a year old when it happened. There would be respectful homage by the women of the household, grandmother Catherine Sintes, and Albert’s own mother Catherine Camus, partly deaf and now (under the shock of her husband’s death) with troubled speech. The growing child had little access to the Camus family, for reasons already mentioned. In his several attempts to conjure up memories of the forever absent father young Albert counted on the help of his mother. Is it true that I resemble my father? he would ask her. The spitting image. (From L’Envers et l’Endroit.) At the end of his life, in writing Le Premier Homme, he would try again, but then he would create a father who was greater than life.

In fact Albert Camus hardly had more to go on, in recalling his father, than his biographer has.

Lucien Auguste Camus was drafted for a two-year tour of military service in 1906, an obligatory requirement which dates back to the nineteenth century in France, and which helped to keep the French Army in strength for decades of colonial war. He was just in time to serve in the expeditionary force which invaded Morocco in 1907. This era of North African conquest is closely linked to Great Power rivalry on the European Continent. France was expanding its colonial holdings at the beginning of the twentieth century, but in Morocco it came up against Kaiser Wilhelm II, who supported the ruling sultan. At the Algeciras Conference of 1906, which brought together France, Germany, and other European states with the United States of America, agreements were worked out to guarantee the internationalization of trade (thus protecting German interests) while placing police powers in the hands of the French and the Spanish. In fact the conference opened the door to domination by the French, who began their penetration of Morocco from Algeria with the occupation of Oujda by General Louis Lyautey. Then on the pretext that Europeans had been killed in Casablanca, the French landed a division there in August 1907, with 6,000 men under General Antoine Drude. France established a protectorate over Morocco five years later, which was to last until Moroccan independence was recognized in 1956.

Lucien Auguste Camus was a simple soldier, a deuxième classe in the French term, assigned to the 1st Regiment of Zouaves. After a period of basic training starting in August 1906 he was to serve in the Casablanca operation from December 1907 to August 1908—in what precise role we do not know, but he left the corps de débarquement with a certificate of good behavior. He was rated a rather good marksman. These Zouaves were a particularly colorful arm of the French infantry, outfitted with baggy trousers and loose berets in an evocation of North African dress. Indeed the word zouave is of Arab origin, honoring a Berber tribe which furnished the first recruits for the corps (founded in Algeria in 1831). In a sense they were shock troops. Brave as a Zouave was a popular expression (although in later popular speech zouave was more likely to signify braggart or clown). After his service Lucien Auguste transferred to the reserves, and he would become a Zouave again when called up for duty at the outbreak of World War I.¹

On his return from the Casablanca campaign two things changed in Lucien’s life. He decided that he did not wish to go back to rural Chéraga, and through Catherine Sintes and her family he got the job at Ricôme already mentioned, joining the Sintes clan in Belcourt. Then he married Catherine Sintes, on November 13, 1909. At this time we know, thanks to his carefully conserved military papers (the only official records in family hands apart from the documents having to do with his death), that Lucien was five feet eleven in height, with chestnut-brown hair, blue eyes.² He had learned the rudiments of reading and writing in the orphanage, and his military papers attested to his literacy. But according to his son Lucien it was thanks to the job at the Ricôme company that he became functionally literate. The reports he would send to his employers show stilted elegance, as well as evident pleasure in having the opportunity to express himself. His wife never learned to write; their marriage certificate attests that neither Catherine nor her mother could sign her name to it.

The French had discovered that one nonindigenous crop grew well in Algeria: grapes for pressing. The territory was soon covered with vineyards, often to the dismay of mainland French wine growers, for the North African wine was both cheaper and stronger, and was of course exported to France. Jules Ricôme et Fils was a major dealer and shipper; its cellars which have apparently survived in Algiers, could hold over two million gallons of wine, and quayside warehouses offered additional storage facilities. What Ricôme would do, was to buy the produce of vineyards in various parts of the country for shipping to its customers. By 1912, Lucien Auguste Camus was being sent out to represent the firm during the pressing of the grapes by local suppliers, and then to supervise its shipping.³

That year he was in Sidi Moussa, not far from the capital in the canton of Alba. When living in Algiers the family would continue to reside in Belcourt. After a Rue Lamartine apartment, when Lucien Auguste’s first son Lucien was born on January 20, 1910, they would live on the adjacent Rue de Lyon, the street to which he would return just before his death and his widow would never quit.

After the autumn grape harvest of 1913, Ricôme sent Lucien Auguste with his pregnant wife Catherine and infant son Lucien for a long-term assignment at a vineyard called Domaine du Chapeau de Gendarme (literally, Estate of the Gendarme’s Hat) near Mondovi, in the richest growing country of the Bône region. Bône, now called ‘Annaba, was French Algeria’s principal port at the eastern extremity of the country, near the Tunisian border. Eight miles to the south, on the road running parallel to the railroad line along the Seybouse River valley, Mondovi was named for Bonaparte’s victory over the Piedmontese at that Italian city in 1796. It was one of a number of Algerian townships bearing the names of Napoleonic victories, which the French created in 1848 simply by putting an X on the map, in order to settle convoys of unemployed urban workers from mainland France.⁴

It happened very quickly: Family legend⁵ seems to be confirmed by family papers.⁶ As soon as they reached their destination Catherine Camus gave birth, at 2 A.M. on November 7, 1913, to her second child.

The birth was declared in the town hall of Mondovi at ten the next morning by Albert’s father, who gave his age as twenty-eight and his profession as cellarman. His wife, then thirty-one, was recorded as a housewife. The witnesses to the declaration were Salvator Frendo, an office employee, and Jean Piro, also a cellarman; Frendo would have been of Maltese origin according to his name, Piro a Neapolitan.⁷ The place of birth was given as the Ferme Saint Paul; the village of Saint-Paul was some five miles north of Mondovi, and that much closer to Bône. Apparently the infant was delivered in a low whitewashed bungalow with a tile roof, part of a compound of similar houses. This is the way it appeared to a visitor in the 1960s.⁸

Since the augmented Camus family was booked for a long stay at the Ferme Saint Paul, Lucien Auguste registered the move as a permanent change of address (the same day he declared Albert’s birth). Then he settled down to deal with the pressing and storing of the wine, processes the French call vinification, and arranging for its delivery to the port of Bône for shipment. His son Albert would keep, in a chest in the dining room of his Paris pied-à-terre apartment, some of the letters his father had composed in careful flourish for his employers back in Algiers.

On July 4, when Albert was not quite seven months old, Lucien Auguste reported to Ricôme that he had received notice for a seventeen-day training period in the Zouaves for September just at the time of the forthcoming harvest. It had been understood that he would stay on at the Chapeau de Gendarme estate through the harvest and pressing. Yet he didn’t dare request a postponement, because he feared that the colonel would refuse it, and he asked for his director’s advice.

But events were not going to allow Lucien Auguste or his director, or his colonel for that matter, to linger over a decision. The Great War was approaching, the great meat grinder of a generation of Frenchmen. On June 28, just a week before Lucien Auguste’s letter to his director, Archduke Francis Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo. On July 28 Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany followed on August 3 with a declaration of war on France, after declaring war on Russia. The German invasion of Belgium and Northern France began in August. In fact the war might have come closer still to the Camus, for on August 4 the city of Bône was shelled by the off-lying German cruisers Goeben and Breslau.

But by that time Catherine Camus and her two young sons were back in Algiers, as Lucien Auguste reported to Ricôme on August 1. He had shipped back his furniture to the capital two days before.⁹ And he himself was now called back into the Zouaves, assigned to the 1st Regiment, 54th company. A souvenir postcard photograph often reproduced shows him to have been a handsome man in his embroidered dress uniform. Look closely, and the tassel dangling from his cap can be seen.

The regiment was badly needed in mainland France, where the German advance had taken on alarming proportions. Paris itself was threatened, and fresh troops were being sent to relieve it. The soldier was within commuting distance of