During and after the war, Camus worked as a newspaper editor at Combat but also as a book editor at Gallimard, where he curated his own series (publishing, for the first time, writers such as Simone Weil and Violette Leduc). Still, Camus didn’t let his day job get in the way of his own writing. His illness had taught him that time was short, and so he didn’t waste any of it. Unlike Orwell, however, Camus would work on several projects at once. Despite his journalism, and essay writing, Camus tended to develop what he called ‘cycles’ of work, based around a common theme. His aim was to write a novel, a play and a book-length essay to make up each cycle of work. Although the reality never entirely matched the plan, he kept to this method throughout his life. At the same time that he was working on his novel The Stranger, for example, he was also writing his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and working on the play Caligula. Meanwhile, the seeds of his next cycle were already being sown in his notebooks, and rehearsed in his journalism and essay writing.
Part of the reason for these different attitudes and approaches to writing may be due to their different social backgrounds. For Orwell, that background was middle-class, old Etonian – even when he rebelled against it he was still inculcated by the attitudes that came with it. He had seen several of his classmates – such as Cyril Connolly – go on to become writers and editors of literary journals and newspapers, and so he was never in any doubt that a literary career was not something he could pursue. His five years in the Burmese Police were, he later said, partly an attempt to actively avoid becoming a writer – as if it was always inevitable.
Camus, on the other hand, came from very poor, largely illiterate, working-class French Algeria. There was hardly anything inevitable in Camus’ becoming a writer. Growing up, there were no books in the house, and no privacy. During the school holidays, he worked with his uncles and older brother in a wine-barrel factory. His older brother didn’t go to high school, but went instead to work full-time with their uncles. Camus was supposed to follow suit, but an intervention from a schoolteacher, Louis Germain – and later the encouragement of a high school teacher and then university lecturer, Jean Grenier – made Camus see new possibilities. But even here, these possibilities extended mainly to the goal of becoming a high school teacher, and the need for a steady, honest job. Writing was certainly a possibility, but it was always something besides, something you did after work hours. For a working-class family in 1930s Algeria, writing was not considered legitimate work.
Tuberculosis affected Orwell and Camus in very different ways. Orwell was often sickly, and his illnesses were always lung-related. From early childhood he had bouts of chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, and influenza, often resulting in hospitalisation. In September 1938, when he was thirty-five, he went to French Morocco to recover from his first official bout of tuberculosis, although an older tubercular lesion was also found on his lungs. He became acclimatised to illness early on, to the extent that he didn’t let it get in the way of his more adventurous activities. He fought in Spain in 1936, for example, where he was shot in the throat. It was not until the Second World War that tuberculosis stopped him from enlisting. Even then, he threw himself into the home guard, and later – at the time he was supposed to meet Camus – worked as a war correspondent.
Camus contracted tuberculosis when he was seventeen, much younger than when Orwell became aware of his illness, but older than Orwell in his having to cope with illness in general. It therefore came as more of a shock to Camus when he was first diagnosed. Despite the poverty of his childhood, Camus was a robust and active child, playing soccer and swimming in the ocean. But tuberculosis, during the 1930s in French Algeria, was effectively a death sentence. Camus only received basic treatment because his father had died fighting in the First World War, which made the Camus children eligible for free medical care. The severity of the illness restricted his activities. He was unable to enlist to fight in Spain during the civil war in the mid-1930s, and later, at the start of the Second World War, he was again unable to enlist, despite repeated attempts.
Tuberculosis shaped Camus’ life more so than it did Orwell’s. The latter often treated his illness as an annoying aside, something he acted in spite of. It helped that his brother-in-law, Laurence O’Shaughnessy, was a leading thoracic surgeon and attending doctor at the sanatorium where Orwell would often stay in the late 1930s. Although it could be argued that Orwell’s pervasive pessimism – especially in his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, written when he knew he was dying of tuberculosis – could, in part, be due to his own sense of mortality, illness never really became a prominent subject for his writing (his essay ‘How the Poor Die’ being a notable exception).
Camus, on the other hand, constantly referred to tuberculosis in his writing, both explicitly and implicitly. In the original version of The Stranger, for example, the protagonist dies from tuberculosis. Although by the time he reworked the material into The Stranger, he had removed overt references to the illness, the mood pervades. The description of Meursault on the beach, for example, moments before shooting the Arab, was the same as his description of tubercular fever found in an earlier draft of the novel – but also the same as in his own notebooks, when describing his own experience. One of the earliest existing prose pieces by the young Camus, from 1933, soon after his first stint in hospital, is a piece called ‘The Hospital in a Poor Neighbourhood’. Like Orwell, even in his own suffering Camus becomes aware of the suffering of others, and the cumulative effects of poverty and illness on the mind:
Early in his illness, the man had found himself prevented from working, weakened, with no resources, and in despair over the poverty that had settled on his wife and children. He had not been thinking of death, but one day he threw himself beneath the wheels of a passing automobile. ‘Like that.’
When Camus wrote of the question of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, it was not therefore a theoretical or rhetorical problem he was raising, but a practical and personal one. Later, in The Plague – Camus’ fictional equivalent of Nineteen Eighty-Four – the pervasive metaphor of illness is used to describe the same totalitarian atmosphere that Orwell described in his own novel. The aetiology of the plague in Camus’ novel is conspicuously ambiguous, however, although the symptoms are remarkably similar to those of his own tuberculosis.
2.
February 1945 was a significant moment in the life and work of both Orwell and Camus, regardless of them not actually meeting. Even had they done so, it is unlikely they would have been aware that their individual actions over the previous months would have great consequences for each of them. The previous February, Orwell had finished Animal Farm, but was unable to get it published, because of its literary style, its political implications – even because of a wartime paper shortage. It is the novel that, when finally published, would make him immediately famous across the world. But by the time he was supposed to meet Camus, the novel remained in manuscript form, its potential unknown, even to Orwell himself.
Camus was already famous for The Stranger (1942). But since late August 1944, his renown had steadily grown, as he was also famous for being the editor of Combat. Since the liberation of Paris in late August the previous year, when Combat began publishing openly, the fame Camus had previously known as a novelist had been compounded by his journalism: he was now a public intellectual. Yet his general exhaustion, the liberation and subsequent purge of collaborationists, had taken its toll on Camus’ already weakened health. It was in January 1945 – the month before he was supposed to meet Orwell – that the most significant event occurred, although it was not considered so at the time. Even Camus needed a longer period to reflect on its significance.
Camus was initially in favour of the purge trials, but he quickly became disillusioned by the arbitrariness of their application. The turning point came when he was asked to sign a petition to commute the sentence of Robert Brasillach, a notorious collaborationist journalist. After a sleepless night on 25 January 1945, Camus signed the pe
tition. It was not successful, however, and Brasillach was executed. It would not be until November the following year – in a series of eight articles published in Combat under the title ‘Neither Victims nor Executioners’ – that Camus would publicly write about the ideas that were born from this moment, particularly to do with his rejection, on principle, of the death penalty. This series would rehearse the basic arguments that Camus would later expand in his book The Rebel, completed in 1950 – several months after Orwell’s death – and published in 1951.
For Orwell, the most significant event occurred in March 1945, the month after his failed meeting with Camus. It is perhaps the reason why they never managed to reschedule. Orwell was also ill at this point, and in March he entered a hospital in Cologne. The seriousness of his condition is accounted for by his writing, for the first time (on 31 March), instructions for his literary executor. What he didn’t know at the time, but found out almost immediately afterward, was that two days earlier in England, on 29 March, his wife, Eileen, had died undergoing routine surgery. When he found out, although still deathly ill, he hurried back to England. The death of his wife numbed Orwell, and he threw himself into his work. By April, he had returned to Europe to continue his war correspondence, but by this stage the Allies were already into Germany and Austria, with Orwell trailing behind.
Meanwhile, Camus had also left Paris. He was already back in Algeria, picking up his pre-war investigations and criticisms of the effects of colonialism. He had already published a series of articles in Algeria in 1939 on this topic, and now he returned for a series of articles that would be published in Combat in 1945. Later, while Camus had completed and published The Plague, and was hard at work on what would become The Rebel, Orwell was already in Jura, Scotland, working on his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four – and dying.
In August 1945, Animal Farm was finally published to instant acclaim. Orwell would later send Camus a copy of the French translation of the novel – interestingly, in the French version, the name of the pig, Napoleon, was changed to Caesar, so as not to hurt French sensibilities. Camus, writing The Rebel at that time, would have been amused, had he known.
3.
Although Camus was already famous in France for his work from the early 1940s, it was his post-war work – beginning with the publication of The Plague – that brought him international renown. Orwell became internationally famous at about the same time. It is from the 1950s onward that the reputations of both figures were truly established. But such reputations – often disproportionate to the work in question – are almost always based on misunderstandings and oversimplifications. For Orwell, this process largely occurred after his death (21 January 1950). Camus struggled against his own growing reputation, often in vain, throughout the 1950s, until his own death on 4 January 1960.
Even here, in these misunderstandings and oversimplifications, a comparison between Orwell and Camus is worth pursuing. Their reputations have been secured, largely through the imposition of a false binary over each of their work, with one half being brought narrowly into relief against the attempted suppression of the other half. The dividing line is between their fiction and their non-fiction, their art and their politics: Camus is seen as a great literary figure, but a poor political thinker, while Orwell as a great political writer, but a poor literary figure.
What is ultimately compelling about these men, however, is that they are both consummate literary and political writers. The two aspects of their work – the literary and the political – cannot be pitted against each other. It is the balance between the two that is responsible for the creative force behind each man’s work. By reconsidering Orwell and Camus in relation to each other, the prominent aspect of each can be used to rehabilitate the suppressed aspect of the other.
Both rehearsed their literary and political thinking throughout the 1930s. Orwell’s thinking evolved more publicly in various book reviews, as well as articles and books. Camus rehearsed his ideas more privately, in his notebooks and unpublished essays, but also in the occasional published book review (in Algeria). It was not until The Myth of Sisyphus was published (1942) that his mature ideas on aesthetics would become known, albeit largely ignored. What is essential to note is that, for both men, these ideas, both literary and political, were developed in unison, and were forged in the act of writing, and in response to the same climate of political and social unease.
Although Orwell became famous for his final two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, their reputation is built on the political message they carry. And to get at that message, the literary and artistic aspects of these works have been pushed to the side. The retrospective appraisal of his pre-war books holds up his non-fiction works (The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia) and downplays his novels (A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air), except when (as with Down and Out in Paris and London and Burmese Days) they can be mined for autobiographical and social or political import. His political journalism and essays are seen as the core of his thinking, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as popular illustrations of these ideas.
But Orwell himself, very early in his career, argued against this style of reading literature. In one of his first book reviews, in 1930, for example – on Lewis Mumford’s book Herman Melville – he argues that such interpretation (an ‘unpleasant but necessary word’) is a ‘dangerous method of approaching a work of art. Done with absolute thoroughness, it would cause art itself to vanish.’ Reducing a work of art to an allegorical message, he said, ‘is like eating an apple for the pips’. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus also argued against reducing novels to what he called a ‘thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all … the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought’. For both men, a novel is not supposed to tell the reader what to think, but rather to create the conditions through which the reader can experience thinking for themselves. This idea became the creative spark that fired also their political imaginations, especially their opposition to totalitarianism.
Throughout the 1930s, both Camus and Orwell saw the problem of the contemporary novel in terms of the tendencies toward either formalism or realism. On the one hand, empty formalism focused on technique, on art for art’s sake; on the other, social realism or naturalism revealed the world, but without any structure, or by attaching a simplistic morality to the work. Both men recognised the merits of each, but also the absurdity of allowing each aspect to dominate a work of art.
For Orwell, the two most influential books throughout the 1930s were James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. He argued, both publicly (in reviews) and privately (in letters), that Ulysses perfectly used various formal techniques to examine, for the first time, both the outside and the inside of the ordinary man, and to bridge the gap between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘man-in-the-street’. Tropic of Cancer focused the reader’s attention on the brutal and often ugly facts of everyday life. But Orwell also felt that both books went too far in each direction – the formalism of the former, and the brutal naturalism of the latter. He strove to develop his own style that joined the best of both, while jettisoning the worst. Incorporating the political into his writing – thinking about the political in literary terms – is what allowed him to strike a balance.
This is one of the often missed points of his otherwise well-known essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. Although he explicitly states that he is not examining the ‘literary use of language’, he is still looking at the use of literary language in political writing. The whole focus of the essay is to examine the use of imagery and metaphor, and the misuse of cliché and abstract language – the way that politics uses language to corrupt or prevent thought, and the way we can rejuvenate our language in order to allow and clarify our thinking.
Moreover, the reason Orwell wasn’t looking at the ‘literary use of language’ in that essay is that he had already done so in a previous one, ‘The Prevention of L
iterature’ – which, in many respects, provides the context and the conditions for understanding more clearly the argument in ‘Politics and the English Language’. (The two essays were written almost in conjunction with one another in late 1945, soon after Orwell and Camus were supposed to meet.)
In this earlier essay, Orwell makes the explicit link between literature and totalitarianism, and shows how a politics that tends toward totalitarianism not only reduces the capacity of literature to be created and read, but also that totalitarianism achieves its own goals, in part, through the very process of preventing literature from being created and read. The reason for this, Orwell argues, is that literature is concerned with increasing consciousness, free thought, the imagination, all of which are anathema to totalitarianism. For him, literary thinking is inextricably linked to intellectual honesty. ‘At some time in the future, if the human mind becomes something totally different from what it is, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.’ For Orwell, reading a novel for its allegorical message, while ignoring its literary context, is a form of intellectual dishonesty. For Camus, such a reading is inspired by a ‘smug thought’: ‘You demonstrate the truth you feel sure of possessing.’
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 31