Brave Genius

by Sean B. Carroll

  Enough of “you must.”

  Completely depoliticize the mind in order to humanize it …

  Remain close to the reality of beings and things. Return as often as possible to personal happiness …

  Recover energy—as the central force.

  He reminded himself, “My job is to make my books and to fight when the freedom of my own and my people is threatened. That’s all.”

  In order to do that job, he decided that he must find a refuge away from Paris, a retreat where he could create in solitude. He found it in the quaint village of Lourmarin in Provence, far from Paris in southeastern France. He and Francine bought a house in the middle of the village with the prize money from the Nobel. It was purchased, coincidentally, from Dr. Olivier Monod, a distant cousin of Jacques’s.

  In the spring of 1959, after the opening of The Possessed, Camus escaped to Lourmarin to once again attempt a fresh start at writing a new book. The only way to conquer his doubts, as well as those of his critics, was to create something worthy of his prominence. Camus had been outlining and making notes for a novel for more years than he wished to count. He had conceived of the title, The First Man, and sketched a general plan for the book as early as 1954. It was to be an autobiographical story of his journey from youth to adulthood, and would feature all of the people who had shaped his life—family, friends, teachers, and lovers. He described the book to Jean Grenier as “a ‘direct’ novel … something that is not, like the previous ones, a kind of organized myth. It will be an ‘education,’ or the equivalent.” Camus had in mind a coming-of-age story.

  Over the years, Camus’s ambition had grown in scope to make the novel more than just his own history, thinly veiled by fictitious character names. Inspired by Tolstoy, one of his major literary heroes, Camus envisioned The First Man as an epic novel of Algeria. Just as War and Peace told the story of the lives of its characters through the period of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia and the decline of the tsars, Camus intended to set his story against the backdrop of the saga of his people, the Pieds-Noirs who settled in Algeria and made it their homeland.

  The comparison with Tolstoy’s masterpiece was conscious and explicit. He had told a close Algerian friend that he wanted to write a “fresco of the contemporary world,” like War and Peace. Camus was perpetually mindful of the productivity and careers of the great writers he admired—Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy—and often noted what they had accomplished when at a similar age as he was. When he was thirty-six, Camus jotted Tolstoy’s particulars in his notebook: “He wrote War and Peace between 1863 and 1869. Between the ages of 35 and 41.”

  Despite his frustrations and uncertainty about the still-unwritten book, Camus had been unusually open with the press about the project. As early as February 1957, he surprised an interviewer for the New York Times by divulging its title. Later that year, on the day before the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, he was also asked about what he was writing. He replied that it was a traditional novel—the first time he applied that term to any of his books. He added, “It’s also the novel of my maturity, if you like. In consequence, I attach more sentimental value to it than to other books.” Talking about the book, of course, only raised expectations.

  Camus’s plan was for The First Man to be part of his third cycle—on love—after the previous cycles on the absurd (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula) and rebellion (The Plague, The Rebel, The Just). This third cycle was also to include a play and an essay.

  Camus both relished and agonized over the solitude of Lourmarin. He knew that isolation was the only way he could create. He wrote Jean Grenier: “I am finding a little peace and inner silence again after a season full of work and problems. I needed solitude like bread. Or rather solitude was my last chance to find the way back to my personal work, all the others having failed.” He likened Lourmarin to a monastery, even signing letters to friends “Frère Albert, O.D. [Order of the Dominicans].”

  He desperately missed the company of family and friends. Francine was teaching in Paris, and the twins were enrolled in school. They could be together in Lourmarin only during holidays. Camus combated his loneliness both by writing to and about his closest friends. Since the book was all about them, they were never out of his mind, nor were the ghosts of his literary heroes. He told Jean Grenier, “Nietzsche is here … in this book, and you too.” Lourmarin held special significance for both the master and his pupil. Grenier had also been inspired by the place and published the essay “The Wisdom of Lourmarin” in 1936. He was even married in Lourmarin City Hall. Camus told Grenier, “I put my footsteps in yours.”

  Camus read for inspiration. From newly crowned Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak, whom he admired for his creativity in the oppressive climate of the USSR, he uncovered a pearl on autobiography: “The greatest works in the entire world, while speaking of the most diverse things, in fact tell us of their own birth.”

  He was refreshed by walks among the “marvelous roses,” blooming rosemary, and violet irises of his garden, and by jaunts into the village, where he enjoyed mingling with the townsfolk. He made some progress before returning to Paris at the end of May, but he had not conquered his doubts. He told a friend, “I think it’s all over. It’s not coming anymore.”

  NEVERTHELESS, ON AND off during the summer and fall, in between engagements in Paris, Camus returned to Lourmarin to attempt to write. By November, sequestered in his “monastery,” he was finally gaining momentum. He had developed the main character, Jacques Cormery, who, at age twenty-nine (the same age at which Camus published The Stranger), Camus described as “ailing, tense, stubborn, sensual, dreamy, cynical, and brave.” Cormery also just so happened to have “four women at the same time and thus is leading an empty life.”

  Yet Camus’s life was not so empty and was far from monastic. He took turns writing to each of his own four women: a new lover, Mi, a young painter; the actresses Maria Casarès and Catherine Sellers, who had recently starred in The Possessed; and his wife, Francine. He updated his progress, shared his frustrations, and occasionally reported small triumphs.

  He wrote to Mi: “I have never worked with such dense material, and this afternoon I had the fleeting impression that my characters had taken on that density and for the first time in the twenty years that I have been searching and working, I’ve finally arrived at the truth of art. It was a delicious lightning bolt to the heart, but a fleeting one, followed by blind work and constant doubt.”

  The book’s title carried a double meaning. The First Man was Camus/Cormery, and as Camus told a journalist that summer, every man is the first man in his own story. But the First Man was also any man who left France to colonize Algeria and thus started a new life from scratch.

  One of the crucial incidents that inspired the novel was Camus’s visit to his father’s grave in Saint-Brieuc in 1947. His father had gone off to fight for France without ever having seen the country, and died from injuries at the Battle of the Marne. Camus’s mother had begged her son to visit the grave. In chapter 2 of his nascent novel, Camus had Jacques Cormery recount the shattering experience.

  While the search for his father would be a major element of The First Man, Camus’s love for his mother, whose heart was “the best in the world” was always brimming. On the first page of the manuscript, he scribbled his dedication to his illiterate mother: “To you who will never be able to read this book.”

  AS THE NEW Year approached, Camus paused to enjoy the holiday with his family and close friends. The Gallimards, among others, were due to come to Lourmarin. He had written 144 pages. He still had a long way to go. He told a friend from the theater that it would be a while before he could return to the stage: “I must finish the first draft of my enormous story, and I am far from completing it … I have eight months to finish this before getting back to the theater, only eight months … I will hang on as long as possible.”

  But the progress had lifted his mood. That and the prospect of seeing his lov
ers had him looking forward to his next visit to Paris just after New Year’s.

  On Tuesday, December 29, he wrote to Mi to tell her that he would see her in Paris shortly: “By the time you read this letter, we will only be separated by two or three days.”

  The next day he wrote to Maria Casarès to tell her the same: “Alright, this is a last letter just to say that I’m arriving Tuesday by car, leaving with the Gallimards on Monday. They are passing this way on Friday, and I’ll phone you when I arrive, but maybe we can already set a dinner date for Tuesday. Let’s say Tuesday in principle, taking into account surprises on the road, and I’ll confirm dinner by phone … I kiss you and hug you tightly until Tuesday, when I can start all over again.”

  On December 31, he wrote to Catherine Sellers: “This is my last letter, my tender one, to wish you a heart-fulfilling year … see you Tuesday, my dear.” He added, “As long as this monstrous book is not done, I’ll have no peace.”

  The Gallimards—Michel, Janine, and their daughter Anne—arrived on New Year’s Day. The two families celebrated Anne’s upcoming eighteenth birthday. Camus gave Anne, whom he fondly called “Anushka,” a book on contemporary theater.

  The next day, they all lunched together in the village before dropping Francine and the twins at the station in Avignon so they could catch the train to Paris. Camus, too, had a ticket, but the Gallimards had convinced him to make the trip back with them by car. They wanted to wrap up their holiday with a more leisurely two-day journey, and to stop to enjoy several restaurants en route.

  Before departing Lourmarin on January 3, the Gallimards and Camus gassed up Michel’s sporty Facel Vega HK500 at the local garage. The owner had been holding on to a copy of The Stranger for Camus to sign the next time he stopped in. Camus obliged, telling him, “You shouldn’t have bought it, I’d have given you as many as you want.”

  The plan was to break the 470-mile journey into several legs. The first took them to the village of Thoissey, where they had reservations to stay overnight and to dine at the Chapon Fin. The second leg the next day, January 4, took them 180 miles to Sens, where they lunched at the Hôtel de Paris et de la Poste, a restaurant Camus knew.

  The four travelers then started the last, sixty-five-mile leg to Paris.

  Shortly before two p.m., they were fifteen miles out of Sens on National Highway 5 when the Facel Vega suddenly swerved left across the road. It slammed into one of the trees lining the route, then wrapped around another tree forty feet away. The violent crash broke the car into pieces and scattered parts for as far away as five hundred feet.

  Michel, Janine, and Anne were each hurled from the wreck.

  Camus, sitting in the front seat, was thrown into the rear window.

  He died instantly.

  WHEN THE POLICE arrived on the accident scene, they found Michel on the ground, bleeding and badly injured (he would die in a Paris hospital six days later). Janine and Anne were also taken to a nearby hospital; they would survive.

  The police gathered up the luggage and other personal items that were strewn about the scene. On the road, near one of the trees, was Camus’s mud-caked briefcase. It and Camus’s body were taken to the nearby village of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket, examiners found his unused return train ticket to Paris. And inside his black leather briefcase there were some letters, Camus’s passport, some personal photographs, a copy of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, and the unfinished 144-page manuscript of The First Man.

  Camus was placed on a cot in the Town Hall and covered with a sheet, and a bouquet of flowers was placed on his body. Members of the town council watched over Camus while his family and friends, France, Algeria, and the rest of the world learned of his death.

  THE SHOCK AT the sudden loss of a national figure reverberated through the government and the capital. André Malraux, de Gaulle’s minister of cultural affairs, quickly issued a statement: “For over twenty years the work of Albert Camus was inseparable from the obsession with justice. We salute one of those through whom France remains present in the hearts of men.” Word of the accident reached Paris in the evening, around theater time. The director of the Théâtre de France promptly closed his doors and refunded his patrons’ money; other theaters observed a minute of silence before their performances.

  “Absurde” was the single-word headline in Paris-Presse. The large, bold headline across the special edition of Combat declared ALBERT CAMUS IS DEAD. Although his association with the newspaper had ended thirteen years earlier, the front page was devoted to Camus, with the two lead stories, entitled “A Conscience Against Chaos” and “The Best of Us.” The New York Times, in addition to reporting Camus’s death on its front page, offered a short editorial that summarized the writer’s philosophy as “a creed which calls on men for the most heroic kind of affirmation of life,” and concluded that Camus’s memory was assured “such immortality as mere men can give.”

  As the stunning news spread, business as usual in French literary and political circles came to a halt—the criticism that had long dogged Camus gave way to grief and eulogies over an extraordinary life that had been cut short. François Mauriac, who had been critical of Camus’s silence on Algeria, said that Camus’s death “is one of the greatest losses that could have affected French letters at the present time. A whole generation became aware of itself and its problems through Camus … And it is all youth that mourns him at this moment.”

  Even Sartre, who had neither seen nor spoken to Camus in the eight years since their split, joined the public mourning with a tribute to Camus’s work and life: “We shall recognize in that work and in the life that is inseparable from it the pure and victorious attempt of one man to snatch every instant of his existence from his future death.”

  But to Camus’s friends and longtime admirers the loss was, as Germaine Brée put it, “an irreparable catastrophe.” Said another critic, “We are not just weeping over the premature disappearance of one of the greatest talents of our time; with the death of Camus, the very value of man seems diminished. Thanks to him, we were less hesitant, less uncertain in the confusion that always surrounds us.”

  Those who knew that he had resumed writing and knew of his great ambitions for his novel—Grenier, Bloch-Michel, and Monod—grieved the loss both of their friend and of the work that was still to come.

  Kövesi offered his condolences to Monod in a short note, the first time he had written any words to Monod in French: “Je suis triste pour toi; pauvre Albert Camus.” (I am sad for you; poor Albert Camus.)

  Monod replied, “The death of Camus has been a terrible blow for his friends. Those who knew him well knew that he had not yet produced his greatest work.”

  CHAPTER 32

  MESSENGERS

  Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

  —THUCYDIDES, The History of the Peloponnesian War

  FOR TWO MONTHS, THERE HAD BEEN NO PROGRESS WITH THE furniture-truck scheme. On February 18, Monod received a typewritten postcard from Kövesi in Vienna. The message on the back read:

  Dear Jacques,

  There are good hopes for our friends on the 29th of February or on the 1st of March. I do not bother you with details—please keep your fingers crossed, in about ten days I can tell you more.

  Love, Andre

  PLAN D: THE CIRCUS

  It was just as well that Kövesi did not give Monod the details beforehand. This time Kövesi had concocted something that, at least to Ullmann, seemed right out of an Ionesco play. The basic idea was to smuggle her and her husband, Tamás Erdös, out of Hungary under the cover of a traveling circus troupe that was headed for Poland and Czechoslovakia. Ullmann met the circus’s contact in Budapest to get the details. The contact proposed that she would travel in the lion’s cage … with the lion! The animal was to be drugged with sleeping pills, and the contact assured Ullmann that the great cat would not move. Ullmann thought at first that the man was joking and asked him, “What would happen if
the lion wakes up and is hungry?”

  Ullmann told Tamás that she thought it was a crazy idea. The director of the circus ultimately decided that there were too many risks involved and scratched the plan.

  After the scheme had been abandoned, Kövesi informed Monod, who tried to be encouraging: “A. and T.… now have experimental proof that things are moving and that they have not been abandoned and that you are still busily working for them. It should be a comfort and give them some patience to wait for the next turn.”

  Monod had been thinking about taking more responsibility upon himself by traveling to Hungary to set up an operation. On March 7, he let Kövesi know that he had received an official invitation from the Hungarian Academy of Science to lecture in Budapest. He asked Kövesi, “Would you let me know as soon as you can whether there would be any organization or reason to prefer one or another week in May or June?”

  “X” IS A MESSAGE

  There was much for Monod to do in addition to preparing for the trip to Hungary and hatching a plan with Kövesi. His and Jacob’s continuing transatlantic collaboration with Arthur Pardee had borne new and important rewards.

  The very first results of the PaJaMa gene-transfer experiments in late 1957 had demonstrated that enzyme synthesis began very promptly after the transfer of the galactosidase gene into cells—within minutes. Ever since those observations, Monod, Jacob, and Pardee had doubted the prevailing idea that individual ribosomes were devoted to the production of particular proteins. It did not seem plausible that ribosomes could be assembled so quickly and then dedicated to the making of a new protein. Their doubt had led Jacob to propose the existence of the unstable intermediate “X” that carried information between DNA and protein.