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Soon afterward, that convent was invaded by the chaos of Nazi occupation. The hero of the French underground says little of his hazardous wartime activities. After the fall of France, he takes time for a note of Proustian sensuality: "Every year, the young girls come into flower on the beaches. They have only one season. The following year, they are replaced by other flower-like faces which, the previous season, still belonged to little girls. For the man who looks at them, they are yearly waves whose weight and splendor break into foam over the yellow sand." The minutes stolen for reflection concern the values of action vs. creation: "I ought not to have written; if the world were clear, art would not exist."
But the postwar epoch was not clear and the artist continued to compose. His underground newspaper was called Combat. That might have served as the subtitle for all of Camus's work. He tried the Communist Party and found it guilty of hypocrisy. He refused to endorse extremist positions on either side of the Algerian struggle for independence. "I must condemn a terrorism which strikes blindly in the streets ..." he declared, "and which one day might strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice." The famous phrase caused Camus to be mocked for 20 years by leftist intellectuals who uncritically backed the Algerian revolutionaries. He broke with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre when the philosopher tried to suppress news of Stalin's gulag.
Given this pugilistic stance, this unwillingness to cut his conscience to fit the reigning Paris fashions, it is not surprising that Camus became a figure of global controversy. It was a difficult role to assume; he struggled with it until his death, aware that any political or artistic statement would be distorted. "One never says a quarter of what one knows," he confessed. "Otherwise all would collapse. How little one says, and they are already screaming." Even posthumously the man was not safe. In the '60s the New York Times listed him as one of seven heroes of the New Left, a pantheon figure alongside Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse and Frantz Fanon. The assumption was clear: had Camus lived he would have joined the students on the barricades. But if the dead can be enlisted in any battalion, the facts cannot. To be commemorated properly, Camus ought to be seen not as a statue but as a man, as flawed as his fellows. His loyalty to France, for example, could blind his foresight. "America," he declared in 1952, "is the land of the atomic bomb." When an American critic, Lionel Abel, countered, "You'll have one here, too, as soon as France can afford it," Camus confidently replied, "Never."
He found "nothing less excusable than war and the appeal to national hatreds." But he added: "Once war has come, it is both cowardly and useless to try to stand on one side under the pretext that one is not responsible."