Camus, a Romance

"Every author in some degree portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will." - Goethe One of Algeria's greatest sons, the late Albert Camus, is back where he rightfully belongs--center stage! Thanks to Elizabeth Hawes' delightful and vibrant book, "Camus, A Romance," and Robert Zaretsky's scholarly and insightful tome, "Albert Camus: Elements of a Life." Albert Camus: Elements of a Life Camus, a talented writer and philosopher, has again risen from the literary ashes. His clarion call for "limits" in the pursuit of otherwise laudable causes; and for truth-telling in the realm of political injustice and social inequities, is as relevant today, as it was during his turbulent lifetime. Camus was a French-Algerian. He was born in 1913, and raised in the city of Algiers, in a run-down neighborhood. His father, whose ancestral roots were French, was killed fighting in WWI for France against the Germans; while his mother, of Spanish stock, was half-deaf, uneducated and rarely spoke. Is the latter, the origin of the importance of "silence" in Camus' persona? Zaretsky thinks it played a relevant part and I agree with him. Algeria, in Camus' days, was a French colony, although its Arab population, was in the majority. Life was hard for the budding writer and for his family, but for many of his Arab contemporaries, discrimination, starvation and illiteracy were often their lot. When I was in high school, at Calvert Hall, a Christian Brother institution, in downtown Baltimore, I remember mostly counting the bricks on a wall located across the street, I was so terribly bored! One of the exceptions was in my "literature" class with Brother Gregory at the the helm. He truly loved what he was doing and it showed. When he read something aloud from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens or Washington Irving, the room lit up for me. Brother Gregory, bless his memory, was an inspiring teacher. Enter into Camus' life, one Louis Germain. He was an elementary school teacher. Hawes labeled him as Camus' "first surrogate father." Both authors detailed Germain's importance to Camus' eventual career and to his intellectual development as a philosopher. Not only his mentor, Germain became Camus' life long friend and trusted advisor. He helped get him into the "lychee," and later accepted at the University of Algiers. After graduating from the university, in 1937, Camus became a reporter. In 1939, he documented a famine in the mountainous area of Kabylia, Algeria, not too far from its capital city. His damning report for the "Alger-Republicain" newspaper, was entitled, "Misery in Kabylia." Camus' editor was Pascal Pia, another mentor and significant figure in his success as a literary icon. Both biographies highlighted incidents such as the above in Camus' experiences. Why? They seemed to have shaped, and, in some cases, reaffirmed, his political and philosophical views. Seeing first hand the evil effects of French colonialism, and th

Camus, A Romance is indeed a brave and charming book. For starters, it successfully does more than one thing, almost inventing a new literary genre: the memoir combined with biography. Hawes never pretends to be objective. This is a love letter and a record of a passionate amatuer's devotion to excavating parts of her subject's life that only profound love engenders. Throughout, she is always respectful, and always in love. Hawes almost dares the critic to call her on it, and some have, carping just a little that parts of it are like a school girl gushing, which, given the title is kind of silly on their part. Obviously, this is a book full of school girl gushing; as a sister in Camus -- 4 years younger than the author -- reading it, I experienced the eerie sensation at times that I was reading my own school girl diary. The title tells it all: Camus, A Romance, itself a multiple pun in two languages, English and the author's fluent French. Hawes' obsession with Camus is not at all that unusual; several biographers and critics, notably, male, have expressed what they can only call love for both the man and his work. Anyone who has read him with an open heart knows Camus was intensely lovable. As a literary memoir, this exploration of the author's life long relationship with the writer she never met, is moving and personal. The author does a masterful job of not gloating while still celebrating as she spirals closer and closer to the man's secret life, in the process meeting those who knew him -- including his children. Most enlightening for this reader is the post WWII history Hawes reveals of Camus' long and noble struggle toward his truly tragic death at age 46, occurring just, it would seem at the moment he was experiencing rebirth in both his life and his work. This book gets closer to the man experiencing the last ten years of his too short life than any of the many others I have read. Hawes brings the suffering Camus to real life. In her skillful hands, one truly experiences his adult life long battle with tuberculosis, the pain caused by the cruelly derisive rejection of him and his ideas on the part of the people he had thought his friends in Paris intellectual society, and of course the intense horror and impotence he felt over his inability to change for the better the political differences tearing apart his beloved Algeria. The picture Hawes paints of the last decade of Camus' life is one of pain, suffering and and tragic rebirth. It's moving, powerful stuff. One emerges feeling profound empathy for Camus as more than a great writer and moralist, but more importantly, since we all know he was those things, as a fully alive human being. If you love Camus, you will love this book; if you don't know Camus, you will want to.

My first assignment as a foreign correspondent was covering the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s against French colonial rule. Then Camus's eloquent anguish over that savage conflict in his native land was constantly in my mind. Now Elizabeth Hawes in this masterful study has shed light on the full range of contradictions and qualities that in the decade-and-a half after World War Two made Camus the quintessential romantic hero of "existentialism" and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Read this book and understand why he and his writing exercised such fascination on his contemporaries, especially among the young.

Elizabeth Hawes first fell in love with Albert Camus while studying his work in college in the United States, thousands of miles from the environs frequented by the French novelist/playwright/philosopher in the final months of his life. Camus' premature death in a car accident in January 1960 put an abrupt end to Hawes's dreams of encountering her hero in real life, but not to her fascination with the man, his works and his ideas, as this fascinating book shows. I read this work -- part-biography, part-intellectual history, part-memoir and completely riveting -- on the subway, walked along the streets with the book in my hand and devoured bits of it in spare moments standing in line to pay for my groceries. I read late into the night, relishing Hawes's sense of style, her ability to move seamlessly from conventional biography to writing about the process of memoir, from describing places and people to tackling her own inner feelings about her subject. The latter is a process all too unfamiliar to those of us who read biographies; even the best rarely come with the perspective of the biographer attached, and yet it's hard to imagine that any historian or writer who has lived with his or her subject for years doesn't have some kind of emotional connection of some kind to that individual. The difference is that Hawes shares her thoughts. At one point, she recounts how, handling a letter written by Camus, she inadvertently smudges the ink on the document to the extent that it is now illegible. She's horrified, but fascinated at the same time. "In a very real way I had just interacted with Albert Camus," she informs the reader. Sometimes these ruminations are touching (reminding me of adolescent crushes); sometimes they become a tad irritating and repetitive, as when she wonders whether Camus might have met other people she knows, or people those people knew. (Those particular ruminations are fueled by the realization that during the brief time she and A.J. Liebling overlapped working at the New Yorker, the latter must have been working on his review of Camus's notebooks without her knowing.) Hawes's self-awareness, along with her willingness to reveal both her own emotions and her research process to the public eye, is refreshing. For me, it transformed this book from a four-star read (for the diligent scholar or Camus devotee, there is relatively little in the way of new material here) into a five-star triumph. The story of Camus is told, in his own words and through those of his contemporaries, from his earliest days as a 'petit blanc' (lower-class white) in Algeria, where scholarships and a mentor transformed his life, to his Nobel Award for Literature in the late 1950s, a time when he was at one of his lowest ebbs professionally, after a falling out with much of the postwar French left-wing, his former allies. It was fascinating to see that as he became lionized, he became more self-conscious and more despairing of his ability to live up to t

A beautifully written, fascinating and intimate portrait of Albert Camus by one of his greatest fans. Elizabeth Hawes follows Camus' journey from Algeria to France to New York, unearthing clues along the way that help to reveal the true nature of one of our most beloved and misunderstood writers.