Writers are children of their times, cradled by the zeitgeist, buffeted by the currents in vogue, victims to the passions of the times. Albert Camus, dead these fifty years since his motor accident in 1960, would have been a different writer had he lived through the 1960s and the 70s, seen the flower power generation, heard Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, or lived to hear the crash of the Berlin Wall. But Camus started his journalism in the 1930s, fiction mainly in the 1940s. Bad times, when, in Auden's words,
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait
Each sequestered in its hate…
Out of despair
The French psyche was badly bruised by the German Occupation of Paris and the Vichy saga. After the horrors of war, Auschwitz, Treblinka and Nagasaki (not forgetting the pre-War Gulag) something had to give. God, who had been in the wings since the 19th century, now made a clear exit. He asked for his hat and stick and just walked off! Into this void rushed votaries of the ‘Absurd', Existentialists, Existential Marxists (Like Sartre) and God help us, the Marxists themselves.
Existentialism was hot, but different from what its founder Kierkegaard, a good Christian, had envisaged. Rational arguments could never prove Christian teaching, he thought. This could be found only “in the lonely anguish of the sinner separated from God”” Camus fell for the absurd. His fairly despicable protagonist Clamence says in La Chute (The Fall), “I have never been able to believe, deep inside, that human affairs are serious matters,” and he goes on to talk of the “frivolity of seriousness”.
The Fall is one long monologue on the duplicity of Clamence. It is only with The Rebel that he changed. Camus never acknowledged that he was an ‘existentialist', but he was, to quite an extent. And he was never far from paradox, not that that makes one an existentialist. In his Notebooks Camus wrote paradoxically, “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” (Almost sounds like Sharukh Khan.)
Different take
Sartre's take was different. In a lecture L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (1945) Jean Paul Sartre said, “The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism,” and added: “Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said something like this — ‘God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it… Nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity'…” But existentialists “found it embarrassing that God does not exist; for there disappears with him all possibility of finding values in an invisible heaven.”
But along with Existentialism, Marxism was on the prowl, both in the political and philosophic domains. (The French Communist party garnered as much as 25 per cent of the vote in an early election). Camus was once a member of the Algerian Communist Party himself, but saw through the atrocities of the Stalinist system. Sartre leaned leftwards and went to the extent of saying that an anti-communist was a dog. Sartre espoused both existentialism and Marxism. In that case could Existential Marxism be far behind (?), a non-Leninist Marxism that didn't concentrate only on relations of production, and which emphasised creativity and subjectivity. The two seemed odd sleeping partners. The proletariat and absolute faith in subjectivity don't go together. Sartre stood up for Marxism stridently. In La Critique de la Raison Dialectique, he says: “There was a period of Decartes and Locke, then the period of Kant and Hegel, and since then there has been the period of Marx. Each of the three philosophies has been in turn the soil from which all individual ideas sprang…” He also stated “I have said, and I repeat, that dialectical materialism is the only valid interpretation of the history of mankind.”
The die-hard Marxists would not tolerate his efforts to ‘existentialise' Marxism. Sartre's “narcissistic philosophy of anxiety” went against the struggle of the proletariat and social determinism. “An irrationalist who flirted with the absurd” could not lead or represent the masses in their plight. His popularity went against him. Mark Poster in his book Existential Marxism in Postwar France says, “Ex-Vichyites, youngsters from the bourgeoisie, the fast crowd who spent their time idly in cabarets, the outcasts of society — these motley followers of existentialism found in the new doctrine justifications for their despair, for their capricious and disreputable lives.” Sartre had become fashionable in the worst sense of the term.
To be expected
Philosophers fall out. They wouldn't be philosophers, each with his set of dogmas, if they didn't. They are generally good with language, sometimes with expletives. With their confreres they recognise a kinship in thought. Desertions from ideological planks are not forgiven. Friendships are sealed through written texts. Camus and Sartre knew each other much before they first shook hands. Camus was more novelist than philosopher; Sartre the other way round. Yet Camus, a pied-noir(Algeria-born Frenchman ) in his review of Sartre's Nausea in 1938 had given no indication that he knew of Sartre's philosophic stature.
He called the novel an “extravagant meditation”. The review was mixed. He made sweeping generalisations: “A novel is nothing but philosophy expressed in images.” In a good novel, however, the philosophy becomes one with images, and Nausea didn't measure up to this standard. He faulted it as a novel but praised the thought. Each chapter “reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth.” He added, “This is the first novel from a writer from whom everything may be expected. So natural a suppleness in staying on the far boundaries of conscious thought, so painful a lucidity, are indications of limitless gifts.” But “theory harms life” he said. He almost said the book wasn't really a novel, that it was long on philosophy but short on the fiction writer's art. His review of Sartre's second book, Wall, was more glowing. Equally glowing was Sartre's review of L'Etranger. But he did imply that Camus' forte was not philosophy.
The battle, rather war, came with the publication of Camus's L'Homme revolte (The Rebel) in 1951. One could have seen it coming. In a notebook entry (October 29, 1946) Camus wrote:
–You're a Marxist now?
–Yes.
–Then you'll be a murderer.
The disillusionment with the USSR and Stalin and the camps was evident. Now he attacked revolutions, including the Jacobin one of 1789. The execution of Louis XVI was described as murder. “Russian communism gives the lie to every one of its principles.” He says earlier, “Frenzy, in terms of history, is called power. The will to power came to replace the will to justice…Marx never dreamed of such a terrifying apotheosis.” He called Lenin a mediocre philosopher, “Lenin's Jacobinism” false and devoid of virtue. Lenin believed in “every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of penetrating the labour unions and of accomplishing… the communist task.”
Acrimonious
Sartre waited months before he got it reviewed by Francis Jeanson. In the annals of philosophy the rest (excuse the cliché) is history. The attack was vitriolic and Camus' reply and then Sartre's riposte were all classic, though dipped in vitriol.
Yet today if you look back, there were many more linkages in their thought than schisms. Let's not forget it was also their differing personalities, one handsome , dashing, a national footballer, active in the Resistance. The other, who had dug his heels deep into philosophy. The patron versus the patronised (“dark-skinned” as Simone de Beauvoir described Camus), artist versus philosopher, political practitioner versus theoretical Marxist. But let us not forget, both searched for a meaning in life, and left us the richer.
