Camus came to see the French Communist Party and its intellectual supporters as ‘apologists for premeditated, organised, rationalised murder’.
This ended his friendship with Sartre, their quarrel coming after the publication of L’Homme révolté in 1951. In one of his many illuminating footnotes, Bloom describes how, in February 1945, Orwell waited for Camus in Les Deux Magots in Paris. But Camus had been felled by one of his recurring bouts of tuberculosis, so the two men never met.
If only. If only Camus had used his return train ticket on 4 January 1960. The notebooks are full of such shadows, such possibilities. The play about Don Juan that Camus planned all his life but never wrote. The original notebooks, as Camus first wrote them, before they were redrafted. In his introduction, Bloom explains that Camus was responsible for many but not all of these second-pass edits; further changes were made by his wife, Francine, and a friend, Roger Quilliot. Some edits are minor, some more substantial; passages are reordered, suggesting a clear, determined evolution of works such as La Mort heureuse (1936–8; published 1971; A Happy Death). Some entries are redacted entirely.
Perhaps this is one more case of an imaginative author inventing not only their novels but also their writerly persona. Yet, as Bloom points out, Camus also constantly drafted and redrafted his main works. In his notebooks he is tormented by doubt and self-criticism. He thinks about giving up writing. What’s the point? he asks. Not just in a general absurdist way, but with a more specific anxiety about reception:
I’ve always believed creation is a dialogue. But, with whom? Our literary society whose driving precept is second-rate spite, where offense takes the place of a critical method? Society as a whole? A population that doesn’t read us … that, in a given year, peruses the papers and two trendy books.
Camus also deserves a shadow prize for his despondent response to the news that he has won the Nobel: ‘strange feeling of overwhelming weight and melancholy’. Yet on he goes, telling himself to do better next time. In 1958, shortly before his death, Camus is to be found wandering ‘amid the wreckage’, having ‘lived my whole life in a sort of lie’, preparing once more to ‘rebuild a truth’. It’s brilliant writing – febrile, passionate, moving. Bloom’s is also a brilliant translation. But don’t take it from me. Camus is such a pro that, from beyond the grave, he manages to come up with the perfect blurb. In 1942, in Saint-Etienne, he writes: ‘Do you love ideas – passionately, pulse pounding? Does the idea keep you up at night?’ Well, do you? Does it? If so, read this book.
