Albert Camus at 100

Certain writers— they are very rare— speak to us across time directly and personally. They pose questions rather than offer answers. A good question is almost always better than its answer, and Camus had a very large question to pose: How should we live in a world where anything was possible and everything was happening and nothing, any longer, was forbidden?

He made his first mark in Nazi-occupied France with two slender books, both published in 1942, that described the condition of men living in a moral void. The Stranger, his first novel and his best-remembered work, features a protagonist who commits an utterly meaningless murder that he cannot explain to himself or to anyone else— and, for that matter, doesn’t care to. Murder, since Cain slew Abel, has been the most consequential human act— the moment when, according to Genesis, sin and death entered the world. In a year when more deaths would be inflicted than in any other previous year in human history, Camus’ Meursault kills for no other apparent reason than to add one more corpse to the pile, although Camus makes no mention of politics or the great war raging around the globe; it’s simply a single act that reveals the absurdity of an entire world.

Sartre’s scorn

The book of essays that accompanied The Stranger was The Myth of Sisyphus. In the Greek legend, Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a heavy stone up a mountain, only to resume his endless task when it falls back again. Sisyphus has no choice, but the rest of us, confronted with the stone of each day, do. Accordingly, Camus writes, “There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” By the same token, there is also only one uncircumscribed freedom, which is the decision whether or not to live. Society itself begins each day with the sum total of all who affirm it— or resolve to change it— by continuing themselves.

The moralist is inevitably an individualist, because he stakes everything on the person. He is also, if fully engaged, a rebel, who must necessarily demand of society what he demands of himself. This is his solidarity with his fellow man, a solidarity that insists on change but rejects coercion. The result is a radical liberalism that demands everything but imposes nothing. For his more practically minded contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre (a man of many answers), this stance rendered Camus a hopeless case, since without power— the very coin of politics— nothing could be accomplished. Camus would only be happy, Sartre suggested, on the Galapagos Islands, where he could found a one-man republic.

Sartre’s gibe contained truth as well as wit; but Sartre’s own personal choice— to embrace Soviet Communism— wouldn’t wear well historically. Camus, meanwhile, remained deeply involved in the world of his time. If his ideal for it was unattainable, his practical goal in it was what men of good will could agree on, the word for which was decency. This was a recipe for misunderstanding.

Wrong for the right reasons

As a native French Algerian who was agonized by the injustice visited on the colonized population of his country, Camus found himself denounced by both sides when Algeria’s War of Independence broke out in 1954, lamenting the atrocities committed by each but hoping nonetheless—and in vain—for reconciliation. By 1957, as his reputation was increasingly clouded and his delicate health began to fail, Camus became one of the youngest recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This honor spread his international fame but did little to restore his stature at home. Some regarded it simply as an epitaph. New stars were in the ascendant, and, for many, Camus seemed to have outlived his historical moment.

We appreciate him differently now, on the centennial of his birth, with the controversies that abraded him long in the past and his singular voice reaching us in its distinctive register, at once lucid and lyrical, tentative yet compelling. Like his elder English contemporary George Orwell— also a tubercular who like Camus died at 46— he has nothing to sell us but a wholly unmarketable commodity: integrity. Camus had far the deeper and more capacious intelligence than Orwell, but both men shared the same quality: They might be wrong, but never for the wrong reasons. What they achieved was decency.

Joy and sadness

Camus changed my own life many years ago. I had never thought deeply about the death penalty, and saw no particular reason to do so. Then I chanced to read “Reflections on the Guillotine,” his essay on capital punishment in France. I arose from it a committed abolitionist, my life forever changed. I embraced not simply his arguments, but the moral universe he had shown me. It’s the one I try to live in myself.

Camus wasn’t perfect. His diaries show him to have been a womanizer and a man often racked by self-doubt. By temperament, choice and circumstance he was an outsider, so it’s unsurprising that he often felt beleaguered and, in the dogmatic air of French intellectual life, misunderstood. Although he was conscious of his powers, he was at the same time devoid of vanity or pretense.

Camus was capable of intense joy, both in love and in relation to the natural world, yet a great sadness emanates from him too. He would not have been easy to know. In the end, though, he remains an indispensable voice, and one we must reckon with still.