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The liberation of Paris in 1944 marked the freeing of talent and energy. Camus was awarded for wartime courage, oversaw the production of his flawed drama Caligula and began intensive work on The Plague, an allegory of moral infection and individual salvation. By the age of 35 he was a candidate for the Nobel; when he was 40 Camus found that his work, along with George Orwell's and Arthur Koestler's, was one of the rallying points for Europe's non-Communist left. His loathing for totalitarianism brought him into sharp conflict with Sartre, then in lockstep with the Stalinist party line. Much was made of Camus's ambiguous feelings about Algeria: the anti-imperialist could neither condone terrorism nor endorse France's colonial policies.
More and more he withdrew from public life, seeking the obscurity of the old days. He suffered from a crippling writer's block, and complained of sterility and decay. Even the Nobel, awarded in 1957, was perceived as both an honor and an invasion of privacy. "I'm castrated!" he complained to a friend. The cry, like many of his statements, was pure theater. Yet as Lottman shows, Camus produced no more major work. He retreated to the sanctity of his home, to Francine and their twins, and was at work on a new novel, The First Man, when he was suddenly killed. He was eulogized every where; even Sartre wrote a lyric tribute.
But the reputation swiftly diminished, and Camus's tone of stoicism and forbearance was swallowed in the crowd noises of the '60s. Only now has the canon been appraised as a coherent statement about the possibilities of secular salvation. One sentence in The Fall, Camus's last published novel, sums up a life and a work: "Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."
In a strenuous effort to help readers make their own last judgment about Camus, Lottman seems to have talked to everyone who ever shared an espresso or a bed with the author. But the book offers an utter catholicity of research and taste.
The name of some forgotten dog competes with book critiques. Analysis of a philosophical essay mixes with scuttlebutt of a gossip column: a horoscope predicted a bad end; a Vassar campus newspaper considered the writer's visit to New York "one of the cultural events of the season."
At the violent conclusion, as at the start, Lottman's Camus is the projection of a cinematographer, made up of thou sands of irrelevant and vital images that constitute a film—but which are, after all, only flickering suggestions of the truth.
Even after this lengthy examination, readers must still be advised to go else where on the shelf for the real Camus:
you've seen the movie, now read the books.
Stefan Kanfer
Excerpt