Albert Camus: Elements of a Life by Zaretsky Robert

Author:Zaretsky, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8014-6237-5
Publisher: Cornell University Press

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Sartre admired The Plague. In 1945, he told an audience in New York that the novel, which he had read in manuscript, embodied the new spirit of resistance and engagement in French letters. And Camus himself, Sartre added, heralded a new kind of artist, committed to bettering society, as well as a new kind of literature—one “without illusions, but full of confidence in the grandeur of humanity; hard but without useless violence, passionate yet restrained.” This young writer’s courage in dark times and his obstinate belief in the possibilities of humankind offered hope to a generation formed in the crucible of war, occupation, and liberation: “The constant pressure of death, the perpetual threat of torture, made such writers as Camus measure the powers and the limits of man.”39

By then, the two men had become close friends: Camus had in fact asked Sartre to go to New York as Combat’s special envoy. The relationship formed quickly in the tumult of the events of 1944, when Camus brought Sartre into the fold of Combat, tasking him with writing a series of articles on the city’s liberation. On August 21, while the retreating German forces and the French Resistance were still exchanging gunfire in Paris, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the newspaper’s office to deliver his copy. The scene they found there was electrifying: the building was a hive of excitement and fear, with Camus and his colleagues “working with guns at the ready.” The doors were locked shut and the staff worried that “at any moment German soldiers could come and it would have been a bad mess.”40

Under the headline “A Stroller in Paris Unbound!” Sartre’s name was the first byline to appear in the newly public newspaper. Yet Sartre’s byline was sheer fiction: Beauvoir, in fact, wrote the eyewitness reports. As she confessed late in life, Sartre was himself “too busy” to do so.41 And in a separate incident, Sartre appeared too tired to take care of Resistance business. During a meeting, he was assigned the task of protecting the vacated Comédie Française in the confusion of half-liberated, half-occupied Paris. Sartre accepted the mission and made his way across the alternately chaotic and empty city to the venerable theater. Once he reached the building, however, he promptly fell asleep in one of the orchestra seats. When Camus found his friend napping, he burst out laughing: “You’ve placed your seat in the direction of history!”42 It seemed, as Camus’s lighthearted jest suggested, that Sartre was doomed to be forever a spectator, not a participant. But Camus’s friendly joke would subsequently take on a far darker hue.

By 1945, Camus’s and Sartre’s reputations in France and abroad had grown in tandem. The French and foreign press portrayed the two friends as a kind of philosophical tag team, advocates of a new school of thought, existentialism, and practitioners of the new vocation of political engagement. Yet almost nothing could be further from the truth. In 1945, just days after Sartre’s celebrated lecture in

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