Begin the last part with this scene:
The blind donkey who for years patiently turns his wheel in a circle, enduring beatings, the ferocity of nature, the sun, the flies, still enduring, and from that slow circular motion, seemingly fruitless, monotonous, painful, water endlessly flows …
- L.C.’s1 war in Morocco. But, at the other end of Europe, Kaliayev.
The life of L.C. Entirely involuntary, except his will to be and to keep on. Orphanage. Farm laborer obliged to marry his wife. Thus his life evolves despite him—and then the war kills him.
He goes to see Grenier: “Men like me, I’ve conceded it, have to obey. They need a guiding rule, etc. Religion, love, etc.: impossible for me. So I have decided to vow obedience to you.” What follows (news).
After all, he does not know who his father is. But who is he himself? 2nd Part.
The silent movie, reading the subtitles to the grandmother.
No, I am not a good son: a good son is one who stays put. I’ve traveled far and wide, I’ve betrayed her with trivialities, fame, a hundred women.
“But, you loved no one but her?”
“Ah! I’ve loved no one but her?”
When, by his father’s grave, he felt the time go out of joint—this new course of time is that of the book.
He is a man of excess: women, etc.
So the [hyper] in him is punished. Then he knows.
The dread in Africa when the sudden twilight falls on the sea or on the high plateaus or on the rough mountains. It is the dread of the sacred, fear of eternity. The same as at Delphi, where nightfall produces the same effect, it makes the temples come forth. But on the soil of Africa the temples have been destroyed, all that remains is this immense weight on the heart. Then how they die! In silence, away from everything.
What they did not like in him was the Algerian.
His dealings with money. Owing in part to poverty (he never bought anything for himself), and on the other hand to his arrogance: he never bargained.
Confession to his mother to conclude.
“You do not understand me, and yet you are the only one who can forgive me. Plenty of people offer to do it. Many also shout in all sorts of ways that I am guilty, and I am not guilty when they tell me I am. Others have the right to say it to me, and I know they are right and that I should seek their forgiveness. But one asks forgiveness of those one knows can forgive. Just that, to forgive, and not to ask you to deserve forgiveness, to wait. [But] just to talk to them, to tell them everything and receive their forgiveness. The men and women of whom I could ask it, I know that somewhere in their hearts, despite their good intentions, they neither can nor do they know how to forgive. One person alone could have forgiven me, but I was never guilty toward him and I gave him my heart entire, and yet I could have gone to him, I often did so in silence, but he is dead and I am alone.
You alone can do it, but you do not understand me and cannot read me. And I am speaking to you, I am writing, to you, to you alone, and when it is finished, I will ask forgiveness without further explanation and you will smile on me …”
Jacques, at the time of the escape from the clandestine editorial office, kills a pursuer (he grimaced, staggered, a bit bent forward. Then Jacques felt a terrible fury rising in him: he hit him once more from below in the [throat], and a huge hole burst open immediately at the base of the neck; then, crazed with disgust and anger, he hit him again []1 right in the eyes without looking where he was striking …) … then he goes to Wanda’s.
The poor and ignorant Berber peasant. The settler. The soldier. The White with no land. (He loves them, those people, not those half-breeds with pointed yellow shoes and scarves who have only adopted the worst from the West.)
The end.
Return the land, the land that belongs to no one. Return the land that is neither to be sold nor to be bought (yes and Christ never set foot in Algeria, since even the monks owned property and land grants there).
And he cried out, looking at his mother, then the others:
“Return the land. Give all the land to the poor, to those who have nothing and who are so poor that they never wanted to have and to possess, to those in the country who are like her, the immense herd of the wretched, mostly Arab and a few French, and who live and survive here through stubbornness and endurance, with the only pride that is worth anything in the world, that of the poor, give them the land as one gives what is sacred to those who are sacred, and then I, poor once more and forever, cast into the worst of exiles at the end of the earth, I will smile and I will die happy, knowing that those I revered, she whom I revered, are at last joined to the land I so loved under the sun where I was born.”
(Then shall the great anonymity become fruitful and envelop me also—I shall return to this land.)
Revolt. Cf. Demain in Algeria, p. 48, Sender.
Young political commissars in the F.L.N, who took Tarzan as their pseudonym.
Yes, I command, I kill, I live in the mountains, under the sun and the rain. What do you offer me that’s better: laborer in Béthune.
And Saddok’s mother, cf. p. 115.
Confronting … in the oldest story in the world we are the first men—not men on the wane as they shout in the []1 newspaper but men of a different and undefined dawn.
Children without God or father, the masters they offered us horrified us. We lived without legitimacy—Pride.
What they call the skepticism of the new generations—a lie.
Since when is an honest man who refuses to believe the liar a skeptic?
The nobility of the writer’s occupation lies in resisting oppression, thus in accepting isolation.
What has helped me bear an adverse fate will perhaps help me accept an overly favorable outcome—and what has most sustained me was the great vision, the very great vision I have of art.
Except in [antiquity]
Writers started out in slavery.
They won their freedom—no question []1
K.H.: Everything exaggerated is trivial. But Monsieur K.H. was trivial before becoming exaggerated. He wanted to be both.
- answerable
a. Cf. Histoire de la colonisation.
- Clamence is the protagonist of Camus’s The Fall—Trans.
- Communist activist who put explosives in a factory. Guillotined during the Algerian war.
- Word illegible.
a. (he meets him again unarmed [and provokes] a duel). - Combat was a Resistance newspaper of which Camus was editor—Trans.
- Grenier.
- An illegible word.
- An illegible word.
- hospital—Trans.
- Circled by the author.
- “immense oblivion” circled by the author.
- An illegible word.
- An illegible word.
- Two illegible words.
a. Mondovi in 48.
b. The settlers from Mahon in 1850—the Alsatians in 72-73—14. - The author drew a box around this whole passage.
- An illegible word.
- Six illegible words.
- Two illegible words.
- Two illegible words.
a. he dreams it during his siesta: - An illegible word.
a. All this in a [not-true-to-life] style that is lyrical and not exactly realistic.
b. The French are right, but their lightness is oppressive to us. And that is why I choose Arab madness, the madness of the oppressed. - Probably Lucien Camus, his father.
- Four illegible words.
- An illegible word.
- Four illegible words.
Two Letters
19 November 1957
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honor, one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching, and your example, none of all this would have happened. I don’t make too much of this sort of honor. But at least it gives me an opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
Albert Camus
Algiers, this 30th of April 1959
My dear child,
I have received, addressed in your handwriting, the book Camus that its author Monsieur J.-Cl. Brisville was kind enough to inscribe to me.
I do not know how to express the delight you gave me with your gracious act nor how to thank you for it. If it were possible, I would give a great hug to the big boy you have become who for me will always be “my little Camus.”
I have not yet read this work, other than the first few pages. Who is Camus? I have the impression that those who try to penetrate your nature do not quite succeed. You have always shown an instinctive reticence about revealing your nature, your feelings. You succeed all the more for being unaffected, direct. And good on top of that! I got these impressions of you in class. The pedagogue who does his job conscientiously overlooks no opportunity to know his pupils, his children, and these occur all the time. An answer, a gesture, a stance are amply revealing. So I think I well know the nice little fellow you were, and very often the child contains the
