Albert Camus: A Life by Olivier Todd

Author:Olivier Todd [Todd, Olivier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary, Biography
ISBN: 9780307804761
Google: nrvLNBjEuXgC
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 1997-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty The Island with Three Rivers

On January 31, 1946, in Washington, D.C., Frederick B. Lyon, head of the State Department’s Foreign Activity Correlation division, wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that the State Department had received news that “Albert Camus alias P. F. Corus, New York correspondent of Combat (a newspaper in Paris, France), has been filing inaccurate reports which are unfavorable to the public interest of this country.” Lyon asked Hoover to “make a preliminary investigation of Mr. Camus and his activities.” Two weeks later, an FBI agent in Washington, Guy Hottel, found that “Albert Canus” and P. F. Corus were both unknown to the U.S. State Department, and so the FBI tried to find out more about him. They studied the February 23, 1946 issue of The Nation, in which Hannah Arendt wrote about French existentialism, and confirmed that “the subject [of the present report] and Jean-Paul Sartre” were the leading exponents of existentialism. It seemed suspicious that Sartre and Camus had refused the French Legion of Honor when it was proposed to them. Camus had also refused to be a candidate for the French Academy, saying, “The life or death of the French Academy seems to me a futile thing.”

Since September 1945, his American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, had been inviting him to New York. Knopf’s wife, Blanche, a frequent visitor to Paris and an ardent Camus fan, served as intermediary for the invitation. So the writer made the request known to the head of cultural affairs at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which would pay his travel expenses, suggesting two topics for speeches: “One Year of Free Journalism” and “A Plea for Europe.” He noted that his topics would have no “political impact,” and he filled out the usual forms to ask for an American visa, which asked him to promise not to assassinate America’s president and to state that he had never belonged to the Communist Party. Camus affirmed without hesitation that he had never been a Communist, not merely on his visa application but also privately to colleagues like Maurice Nadeau, who was astonished when he found out the truth years later.

He boarded the ship Oregon at the French port of Le Havre on March 10, 1946, a cargo freighter which contained a few passenger cabins. The ship was slow and comforts were few, among the few luxuries being cocktails in the captain’s cabin. Camus shared a stateroom with a psychiatrist named Pierre Rubé and another Frenchman, who refused to wash himself. Camus tried to study a little English in preparation for his visit to America, and although he could read the language fairly well, he spoke it badly. He also kept a travel diary: “Once again I look [at the ocean] as I have done for years, at the drawings which foam and wave create on the water’s surface, lace formed and dissolved, liquid marble … and once more I look for the exact comparison which will capture for me that marvelous blossoming of sea, water, and light, which has escaped me for so long.

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