On Jan. 4, 1960, on a road southeast of Paris, a car lurched out of control and crashed into a tree. The driver and two of his passengers were injured; the fourth was killed instantly. When news of the tragedy emerged, the only appropriate word was one that the dead man had made famous: absurd.
For more than two decades, Albert Camus had been the lyricist of the absurd, a condition, he wrote, "born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world." To fill that silence, he wrote essays and fiction that have become part of the century's testament. His climb from obscurity was rapid: the poor North African upbringing was obscured by the Parisian celebrity.
Book followed book, honor followed prize until, at 44, he was awarded the Nobel.
Even those who had never read Camus became familiar with the chain-smoking figure in a trench coat, fatefully evocative of Bogart and Yves Montand. Much was made of his celebrated statement that in a purposeless world the only vital question was one of suicide. His novels The Stranger and The Fall describe souls out of touch with a moral landscape; The Plague watches townspeople succumb to a literal and spiritual disease. It is small wonder that at his death Camus seemed the spokesman of despairing existentialism, a cinematic figure as doom-ridden as any of his characters.
The portrait endures like a retinal image after the lights are turned off, at once romantic and classical: the artist as stoic.
It lacks only one component—truth. As two newly reissued volumes show, Camus was not a mourner of the human condition but its celebrant. The two-volume Notebooks (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $3.95 each) follow the writer from 1935 to 1951 and neatly cleave the legend from the man. In the process they show why his formal works are as pertinent as the day they were written, a world ago.
The very first entry has an astonishingly religious tone for an unbeliever: "For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it really is: an infinite grace."
In the mid-'30s, he writes a note that might have been minted for the Me Decade: "The Cult of the Self presupposes either optimism or a dilettante's attitude toward life. Both nonsense. Do not select a life, but make the one you have stretch out."
An observation that antedates Woody Allen by a generation: "Not only is there no solution but there aren't even any problems."
Of course there were problems-philosophical, psychological and physical. Camus, afflicted by tuberculosis, struggled merely to survive. "Illness is a convent," he writes, "which has its rule, its austerity, its silences, and its inspirations."