Foreign News: The Rebel

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The Question. He paid his own symbolic tribute to the Resistance in his second novel, The Plague, but the book, as Camus noted, was also his most antiChristian. Its theme was man's common struggle to fight evil "without lifting our eyes towards the Heavens where God stays silent." As one character puts it, "Can one become a saint without God?" The question was to be asked in 17 different languages and Camus found himself famous.

France took a fond pride in its rising young star. Hatless, in rumpled trenchcoat, cigarette dangling, he became a familiar figure along the Boulevard St. Germain, and on his arm there always seemed to be a pretty woman. But life still remained a procession of causes. He resigned from UNESCO when Franco's Spain joined the U.N.; he campaigned for German workers killed by Communist police in East Berlin. Alone in his hotel room, standing at a chest-high desk, he wrote. In 1951 his fiercely anti-Marxist The Rebel burst upon Paris.

Horrified by the nihilism that came out of the 19th century and the tyranny of the 20th, Camus declared "the evil geniuses of contemporary Europe" to be Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. Communism was no better than Naziism, for "all executioners are of the same family." He refused religious and political absolutes. Justice, he said, "is both a concept and a warmth oi soul. Let us ensure that we adopt it in its human aspect without transforming it into the terrible abstract passion which has mutilated so many men."

The Heresy. Having examined suicide, in The Rebel he had turned to the problem of murder—the murder committed in the name of future Utopias. "End satisfies the means?" he demanded. "Is this possible? But what will justify the ends?" Sartre raged against him, and their quarrel reverberated through those intent Left Bank circles whose proud boast is that they dispute only about essentials. Sartre's onetime great and good friend, Simone de Beauvoir, cruelly lampooned Camus' life and loves in her novel The Mandarins.

"Every revolutionary," Camus declared, "ends up by being an oppressor or a heretic." Just how far his heresy would take him, he himself did not know. "If one could create a party of those who are not sure they are right," he said, "it would be mine." Yet, at last, the heavy weight of nihilism and Marxism seemed lifted. "It may be necessary to fight a lie in the name of a quarter-truth," said Camus. "That is our situation at present. The quarter-truth that Western Civilizations contain is called liberty. Without liberty it is possible to improve heavy industry, but not to increase justice or truth."

The Visitor. In 1957, for the light he had shed "on the problem posed in our day by the conscience of man," Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature—the youngest man except Kipling ever so honored. With the money, he and his wife bought a Provencal farmhouse near the village of Lourmarin. There, with their 14-year-old twins, they put their marriage together again. Camus' friend Michel Gallimard, the nephew of his publisher, stopped last week with his wife and daughter on his way from Cannes to Paris. The car he was driving was a sleek Facel Vega, and Gallimard asked if Camus would like a ride to Paris.

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