The First Man, Albert Camus
Contents
Editor’s Note
Part One: Search for the Father
Intercessor: Widow Camus
Saint-Brieuc
3: Saint-Brieuc and Malan (J.G.)
4: The Child’s Games
5: The Father. His Death The War. The Bombing
6: The Family
Étienne
6A: School
7: Mondovi: The Settlement and the Father
Part Two: The Son or The First Man
1: Lycée
The Chicken Coop and Cutting the Hen’s Throat
Thursdays and Vacations
2: A Mystery to Himself
Interleaves
The First Man (Notes and Sketches)
Two Letters
Acclaim for Albert Camus’s The First Man
A Note About the Translator
Editor’s Note
Judith Jones, editor of the American edition of this book, has asked me for a more explanatory preface than the one I wrote for the French edition. Knopf has taken such pains with this book that I cannot refuse. But I must warn the reader that I am neither a writer, nor an academic, nor even an expert on Camus. I am just his daughter, and so I ask you to read this note with forbearance and to forgive any awkwardness in it.
Why publish this manuscript so long after my father’s death? To understand this delay we must evoke the mood of 1960, the year my father died, and my mother, Francine, and his friends decided not to publish his manuscript. I shall try briefly to summarize the mood of that time by means of what is certainly an oversimplified sketch of people’s opinions as they related to the question of publication.
French intellectuals were preoccupied with two topics: the Soviet Union and the war in Algeria. On the first, the prevailing opinion on the left forbade criticism of the Communist regime on the grounds that any such criticism would, by damaging the regime’s credibility, delay humanity’s progress toward a better world. On the second topic, the same people favored independence for Algeria under Arab rule and supported the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale).
Camus, for his part, condemned the Gulag, Stalin’s trials, and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, in the belief that ideology must serve humanity, not the contrary, and that the ends did not justify the means. He went so far as to say that the means used by totalitarian regimes destroyed any hope for a better world. As for Algeria, he advocated a federation in which the Arab and European peoples would be equally represented. Those who read this book may better understand his position.
So, in denouncing totalitarianism, and in advocating a multicultural Algeria where both communities would enjoy the same rights, Camus antagonized both the right and the left. At the time of his death he was very much isolated and subject to attacks from all sides designed to destroy the man and the artist so that his ideas would have no impact.
In these circumstances, to have published an unfinished manuscript—144 handwritten pages, often lacking periods and commas, never revised—might well have given ammunition to those who were saying Camus was through as a writer. His friends and my mother decided not to run that risk. My twin brother and I had no say in the decision, for we were only fourteen years old.
The years went by, my mother died in 1979, and I assumed the responsibility that had been hers. Between 1980 and 1985 voices began to be heard saying that perhaps Camus had not been so wrong, and little by little the old disputes died down. As for me, I first had to learn how to deal with a work of literature. I prepared Camus’s Carnet III for publication, and then in the early 1990s my brother and I had to confront the question of Le Premier Homme. Two considerations persuaded us. First, we believed a manuscript of such importance would sooner or later be published unless we destroyed it. Since we had no right to destroy it, we preferred to publish it ourselves so that it would appear exactly as it was. Secondly, it seemed to us that this autobiographical account would be of exceptional value to those interested in Camus.
Finally, it is obvious that my father would never have published this manuscript as it is, first for the simple reason that he had not completed it, but also because he was a very reserved man and would no doubt have masked his own feelings far more in its final version. But it seems to me—and I say this with hesitation, for I can claim no objectivity—it seems to me that one can most clearly hear my father’s voice in this text because of its very rawness. That is why I hope readers will come to it in a spirit of brotherhood.
Catherine Camus
March 1995
The text of this edition was established from the manuscript and from a first typescript by Francine Camus. Punctuation has been added as an aid to comprehension. Words that were not clear are bracketed. Words or parts of sentences that were not decipherable are shown by white space between brackets. The author’s variants, written at the top of the manuscript page, appear as footnotes indicated by an asterisk; his marginal inserts are indicated by letters; the editor’s or translator’s notes, by numbers.
In the appendix are the author’s interleaves, which have now been numbered I to V. Some of these were inserted in the manuscript (sheet I before chapter 4, II before chapter 6A), and the rest (III, IV, and V) were at the end of the manuscript.
Also in the appendix is “The First Man (Notes and Sketches),” the contents of the author’s small spiral notebook with graph paper. These notes will give the reader an idea of the author’s plans for the rest of the book. It seems certain that what he wrote was only the beginning of a novel that would have been longer by several hundred pages, about Algeria from the arrival of the French to the Second World War, including the war itself, and the Resistance to the German Occupation as lived by the protagonists in a love affair.
Once you have read The First Man you will understand why the appendix includes the letter Albert Camus wrote to his teacher, Louis Germain, after he received the Nobel Prize, and the last letter Louis Germain wrote to him.
PART ONE
Search for the Father
Intercessor: Widow Camus
To you who will never be able to read this book.a
Above the wagon rolling along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dusk. Three days ago they had inflated over the Atlantic, had waited for a wind from the West, had set out, slowly at first then faster and faster, had flown over the phosphorescent autumn waters, straight to the continent, had unraveledb on the Moroccan peaks, had gathered again in flocks on the high plateaus of Algeria, and now, at the approaches to the Tunisian frontier, were trying to reach the Tyrrhenian Sea to lose themselves in it.
After a journey of thousands of kilometers over what seemed to be an immense island, shielded by the moving waters to the North and to the South by the congealed waves of the sands, passing scarcely any faster above this nameless country than had empires and peoples over the millennia, their momentum was wearing out and some already were melting into occasional large raindrops that were beginning to plop on the canvas hood above the four travelers.
The wagon was creaking over a route that was fairly well marked but had scarcely any surfacing. From time to time a spark would flash under a metal wheel rim or a horse’s hoof, and a stone would strike the wood of the wagon or else would sink with a muted sound into the soft soil of the ditch. Meanwhile the two small horses moved steadily ahead, occasionally flinching a bit, their chests thrust forward to pull the heavy wagon, loaded with furniture, continuously putting the road behind them as they trotted along at different paces. One of them would now and then blow the air noisily from its nostrils, and would be thrown off its pace. Then the Arab who was driving would snap the worn* reins flat on its back, and the beast would gamely pick up its rhythm.
The man who was on the front seat by the driver, a Frenchman about thirty, gazed with an impenetrable look at the two rumps moving rhythmically in front of him. He was of medium height, stocky, with a long face, a high square forehead, a strong jaw, and blue eyes. Though the season was well along, he wore a three-button duckcloth jacket, fastened at the neck in the style of that time, and a light pith helmetc over his close-cut hair.d When the rain began streaming across the canvas above them, he turned toward the inside of the vehicle: “Are you all right?” he shouted.
On a second seat, wedged between the first seat and a heap of old trunks and furniture, sat a woman who, though shabbily dressed, was wrapped in a coarse woolen shawl. She smiled feebly at him. “Yes, yes,” she said, with a little gesture of apology. A small four-year-old boy slept leaning against her. She had a gentle look and regular features, a warm gaze in her brown eyes, a small straight nose, and the black wavy hair of a Spanish woman.
But there was something striking about that face. Not only would fatigue or something similar momentarily mask its features; no, it was more like a faraway look, a look of sweet distraction, such as you always see on some simpletons, but which would burst out only fleetingly on the beauty of this face. The kindness of that gaze, which was so noticeable, would sometimes be joined by a gleam of
