Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  Before addressing the merits of Camus’s arguments, or lack thereof, in The Rebel, Jeanson critiqued Camus’s style. Jeanson suggested that Camus’s style in the book was excessive, saying that “his protest is too beautiful.” As for the book itself, Jeanson summed up The Rebel as “incoherent”—a “pseudophilosophical pseudohistory of ‘revolutions.’ ”

  Jeanson’s tone was a deliberate choice. He later admitted that he took his approach in order to counter the special privilege that he perceived Camus enjoyed, that was “the privileges of the sacred: ‘Albert Camus,’ in essence the High Priest of absolute Morality.”

  The gauntlet had been thrown.

  Camus was stunned. He felt insulted and disrespected, and he believed that the arguments in his essay had been ignored. Worse, however, Camus knew that, as editor, Sartre was responsible for the content of the magazine and had allowed Jeanson to say what he did. He could ignore such a review from a Communist publication, but not one from his friend’s magazine. Sartre’s secretary let Camus know that, if he so wished, the magazine would print a reply to Jeanson’s review.

  Camus hesitated. He was so upset by his treatment in Les Temps Modernes that, at first, he had no stomach for a rebuttal. But he decided that he could not remain silent in the face of what he felt as an unjust and misleading review. He adopted a tone similar to Jeanson’s in his seventeen-page retort that he sent to the journal at the end of June:

  Dear Editor,

  I will use the article that your journal has devoted to me, under an ironic title, as a pretext in order to bring to the attention of your readers a few observations concerning the intellectual method and attitude that this article reveals. This attitude, with which I am sure you are in agreement, really interests me more than the article itself, whose weakness surprised me … I apologize for having to be as long-winded as you were. But I will try to be more clear.

  I will first attempt to demonstrate what may have been the real intention of your collaborator when he indulges in omissions, makes a travesty of the thesis of the book he sets out to criticize, and fabricates an imaginary biography for its author.

  In addressing his article in the manner that he did, Camus was doing much more than replying to Jeanson. Indeed, in his entire article, he never referred to Jeanson by name, preferring instead to refer to him as “your collaborator” and to the review as “your article.” Camus thus redirected responsibility for the article from Jeanson to Sartre, whom he alleged shared the same attitude expressed in the review. He expressed his offense that his longtime comrade had not taken responsibility for the review and addressed the serious subject matter of the book himself: “A loyal and wise critic would have dealt with my true thesis.” In Camus’s eyes, the review was an act of betrayal: “In it I have found neither generosity nor loyalty toward me.”

  Camus got his digs in, some aimed at Jeanson, others at Sartre. Referring to an episode during the liberation of Paris when Camus found Sartre sleeping in a seat at the Comédie Française, he wrote: “I am beginning to become a little tired of seeing myself … receive endless lessons … from critics who have never done anything more than turn their armchair in history’s direction.”

  That summer, Sartre was moving decisively in the opposite political direction from Camus, toward becoming the leading pro-Communist intellectual in France. After several years of tension and criticism, he had decided to draw closer to the Communist Party as a means of countering what he saw as the expanding influence of capitalism and American hegemony in the Cold War. Outraged over press coverage of an aborted workers’ strike, Sartre began a series of articles titled “The Communists and the Peace.” The first installment, published in the July 1952 issue of Les Temps Modernes, stated that “the revolutionary living in our epoch … must indissolubly associate the Soviet cause with that of the proletariat.” Moreover, Sartre claimed, “the USSR wants peace and proves it every day.” When Sartre read Camus’s reply to Jeanson’s review, he took it as a provocation and decided that he would answer it in the same August issue, and invited Jeanson to do so as well. Sartre was not in a generous or forgiving frame of mind:

  My Dear Camus:

  Our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it. If you break it off today, that undoubtedly means that it had to end. Many things drew us together, few separated us. But these few were still too many … I would have preferred that our present quarrel went straight to the heart of the matter and that the nasty smell of wounded vanity was not mixed in with it … I didn’t want to reply. Whom would I convince? Your enemies certainly, perhaps my friends. And you, whom do you hope to convince? Your friends and my enemies.

  What is certain is that both of us will give our common enemies—and they are legion—a good laugh. Unfortunately, you have implicated me so deliberately, and in such an unpleasant tone of voice, that I cannot keep silent without losing face. Thus, I shall answer you, without anger, but, for the first time since I have known you, I shall speak bluntly.

  Sartre blasted away, telling Camus: “The mixture of dreary complacency and vulnerability that typifies you always discouraged people from telling you unvarnished truths … Sooner or later, someone would have told you this; it may just as well be me.” Sartre echoed Jeanson’s criticism that Camus placed himself above reproach: “You do us the honor of contributing to this issue of Les Temps Modernes but you bring a portable pedestal with you … But tell me, Camus, for what mysterious reasons may your works not be discussed without taking away humanity’s reasons for living? By what miracle are the objections made to you transformed immediately into sacrilege?”

  The attack, or counterattack, ran twenty pages. It was brutal and personal. Sartre accused Camus of attempting to terrorize Jeanson by summoning his supporters against the critic, of pomposity (“which comes naturally to you”), and of behaving like a criminal prosecutor by feigning calm so as to make his wrath more dramatic. Sartre twisted in the knife: “Perhaps the Republic of Beautiful Souls should have named you its Chief Prosecutor.”

  With regard to the criticism of the book, Sartre asked: “Suppose you were wrong? Suppose your book simply attested to your philosophical incompetence. Suppose it consisted of hastily assembled and secondhand bits of knowledge? … And suppose you did not reason well? And suppose your thinking was muddied and banal?”

  Halfway into his dissection, Sartre shifted his tone, acknowledging Camus’s creative work and much of his actual biography: “You have been for us—and tomorrow you could be again—the admirable union of a person, an action, and a work. That was in 1945 … You were not far from being exemplary; for in you were summed up the conflicts of our times, and you transcended them through the ardor with which you lived them … You united the sense of grandeur with the passionate love of beauty, the joy of life with the sense of death.” In 1944, Camus had been the future, but in 1952, Sartre declared him a thing of the past, that his personality had become a “mirage.” He closed by saying, “I have said what you meant to me, and what you are to me now. But whatever you do or say in return, I refuse to fight you. I hope that our silence will cause this polemic to be forgotten.”

  It was not forgotten. The newspaper headlines heralded the “Spat Among the Existentialists” and “Sartre Versus Camus,” with one lowbrow weekly declaring (accurately): “The Sartre-Camus Break Is Consummated.”

  For Camus, publishing Jeanson’s review was an act of disloyalty, but Sartre’s reply to his letter was an act of excommunication. What Camus struggled to digest, what pained him most, was that an important ten-year friendship had been dissolved in an instant. Camus had played a role in its undoing by provoking Sartre, but he did not expect such a violent response. He and Sartre had always had philosophical and political differences, but managed to enjoy each other’s company for years. To Camus that was evidence that at least he valued people over ideas, and placed a premium on loyalty. In his notebook, he scrawled: “Sartre, the man and the mind, disloyal.”

  The personal criti
cism stung. Camus recognized kernels of truth about his weaknesses. He avoided cafés and restaurants where he might run into Sartre. Leaning on those closest to him for support, Camus retreated to his corner to nurse his wounds. He wrote to Francine, who was away from the capital: “I am anguished by Paris … Les Temps Modernes came out with twenty pages of response from Sartre and thirty from Jeanson … As for the replies, one is nasty and the other foolish. Neither answers my questions, except for Sartre at one point, but the fifty pages are deliberately insulting … Decidedly, this book has cost me dearly, and today I only have doubts about it, and about myself, who resembles it too much.”

  AS THE WEEKS passed, Camus struggled to rebound from Sartre’s blows, the humiliation of their public split, and the waves of commentary it provoked. Camus turned down invitations to participate in a public debate, telling the organizer, “At this point, the least sentence I might say will be used in a way that disgusts me in advance … It would be impossible for me in that case to continue expressing myself with academic politeness. I am mistaken for a deliberately polite man whom one may insult in all safety.”

  Support arrived, however, from many readers who offered encouraging words. Polish artist Józef Czapski, who was taken prisoner by the Soviets at the outbreak of the war and survived to expose Soviet atrocities at Katyn (where some 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals were massacred on Stalin’s orders), wrote to Camus: “Immediately after the attack that was concentrated on you, I wanted to write to tell you why I love you, and why you have more friends than you think.”

  Camus regrouped. Nothing any critic wrote or said changed his assessment of the problems he had identified. Camus wrote Czapski, “Leftist intellectuals in particular have chosen to be the gravediggers of freedom.” He told another correspondent, “The core of the problem remains intact … and I feel that they offered nothing serious to oppose to my diagnosis. I therefore consider myself authorized to continue the same road, which I know, besides, is the road of many.”

  AS WINTER APPROACHED, he left the political and literary battlefields of Paris for the place where he had always gone to restore himself—home to Algeria to see his family, the countryside, and the sea.

  RETURN TO TIPASA

  Camus arrived from Marseille in early December. After visiting his mother in Algiers, he planned to tour parts of the southern region of the country he had never seen.

  But he learned that there had been some unrest in the south and postponed his trip for a few days. He decided to take a day trip to Tipasa, the main attractions of which were its extensive Roman ruins that were perched on several hills overlooking the sea.

  It was familiar ground for Camus. Many years earlier he had walked among the ruins as a young man and was inspired to write a short story, “Nuptials at Tipasa,” which was published in Noces in 1938. He hoped that his pilgrimage in 1952 might rekindle memories of his happy youth, of a time when he once slept “open-eyed under a sky dripping with stars.”

  The sixty-nine-kilometer road to Tipasa was also a familiar route, one that he had first taken as a teenager by bus to the beaches along the coast, where he would try to impress girls—a time before he contracted TB, before the war and his long exile in France.

  Arriving at Tipasa, Camus found an opening in the barbed wire that now surrounded the ruins, and started walking among the stones. He was struck by the silent scene around him—the perfect brown columns of the ruins, the fragrant wormwood plants, the still blue sea below, the Chenoua Mountains looming in the distance against the clear sky, all illuminated by the intense Algerian sun:

  And under the glorious December light, as happens but once or twice in lives which ever after can consider themselves favored to the full, I found exactly what I had come seeking, what, despite the era and the world, was offered me, truly to me alone, in that forsaken nature … In this light and this silence, years of wrath and night melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself as if my heart, long stopped, were calmly beginning to beat again.

  Camus lingered at the ruins, listening carefully. Gradually, he began to recognize “one by one the imperceptible sounds of which the silence was made up: the figured bass of the birds, the sea’s faint, brief sighs at the foot of the rocks, the vibration of the trees, the blind singing of the columns, the rustling of the wormwood plants, the furtive lizards.”

  Camus had found the “refuge and harbor” he had come for, and at Tipasa he discovered, or rather rediscovered, perhaps the most vital secret to his creative life:

  Je redecouvrais à Tipaza qu’il fallait garder intactes en soi une fraîcheur, une source de joie … [I was rediscovering at Tipasa that one must keep intact in oneself a freshness, a cool wellspring of joy,] love the day that escapes injustice, and return to combat having won the light. Here I recaptured the former beauty, a young sky, and I measured my luck, realizing that in the worst years of our madness the memory of that sky had never left me. This was what in the end had kept me from despairing …

  In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.

  HE RETURNED FROM Algeria to Paris, reporting to friends that he felt “bucked up and calmed down.”

  Eschewing polemics for more poetic pursuits, Camus polished his short story “Return to Tipasa.” One of his most evocative writings, Camus drew on the spirit that was reawakened at Tipasa, and renewed his artistic and political commitments:

  I have returned to Europe and its struggles. But the memory of that day still uplifts me and helps me to welcome equally what delights and what crushes …

  There is thus a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this world …

  There is beauty and there are the humiliated. Whatever may be the difficulties of the undertaking, I should like never to be unfaithful either to one or to the others.

  The story was published in a volume entitled L’Été (Summer). On the title page of Monod’s copy, Camus jotted a new inscription:

  à Jacques Monod,

  en amicale et fidèle pensée

  [To Jacques Monod,

  with friendly and loyal thoughts]

  CHAPTER 24

  THE ATTIC

  There is an element of chance to the root of genius.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, Notebooks, 1942–1951

  JACOB LIKED TO START HIS DAY EARLY, BEFORE MOST PARISIANS were out on the street. The walk to the Pasteur was relatively short, about a mile from where he, Lise, and their young son, Pierre, lived near the Carrefour Montparnasse. His route took him along the boulevard Montparnasse, past the train station, left onto the boulevard de Vaugirard, then right onto boulevard Pasteur, before he turned left down rue du Docteur Roux to the wrought-iron gates of the Institute grounds, and then made his way up to Lwoff’s attic. The quiet morning journey often reminded him of how much he had missed Paris and longed to return while exiled in Africa during the war.

  The walk also built his anticipation of the results of the previous day’s experiments. One of the great advantages of working on bacteriophage (or “phage”) was that, although invisible to the naked eye or conventional microscopes, the viruses quickly left a mark of their bacteria-killing power. One single phage multiplied so quickly that it made a visible hole, a kill zone on a lawn of bacteria that grew overnight in a laboratory dish. Arriving before most of the other scientists, Jacob delighted in entering “his” laboratory, looking at his bacterial dishes, and then figuring out what experiment he should do that day.

  The “induction of the prophage” that Lwoff had proudly mentioned to Jacob at his pivotal last-chance interview was a mysterious property of phages—so mysterious, in fact, that prior reports of the phenomenon had been doubted or discarded. The observation dated back decades: certain bacterial strains, when apparently freed of any bacteriophage in their surroundings, would sometimes burst, or “lyse,” spontaneously and release bacteriophages. Such strains were dubbed “lysogenic.
” While a few scientists interpreted the phenomenon as evidence that viruses could exist in a hidden, quiescent state in bacteria and then somehow be triggered to reproduce, others attributed the observations to flawed experimental design and the contamination of the medium with phage.

  Lwoff, however, was a meticulous and clever experimentalist. He thought that he could settle the issue by studying one large species of bacteria—so large that it could be seen and manipulated under a microscope. Using a micropipette under a microscope, he was able to isolate the bacteria in tiny droplets of sterile media, which ensured that no extraneous bacteriophages were present. He then observed which individual bacteria released phage. He called the quiescent state of the virus in these bacteria the “prophage.” He then searched for conditions that affected the efficiency with which lysogenic strains released viruses, and found that ultraviolet light caused almost all such bacteria to lyse and release viruses—this was the “induction of the prophage” he’d mentioned to Jacob.

  Thanks to Lwoff’s guidance, and the reproductive properties of bacteriophage, Jacob got off to a fast start in the attic. He first studied thirty strains of a different species of bacteria from the one Lwoff used to see which were lysogenic and whether induction with ultraviolet light was a general phenomenon. By taking the medium from the culture of each strain and placing a few drops of it on a lawn of each of the other strains, he quickly found out which strains harbored prophage. Then he examined those strains and determined that ultraviolet induced some viruses and not others. In a strain harboring two types of prophage, he learned that one was inducible and one was not. This result revealed the important fact that inducibility was a genetic property of the virus, not the bacterium. Within just a few months, he produced his first scientific paper, a moment of great pride.