A Vision Vindicated

That curiosity was heightened when Camus' widow, Francine, refused to publish the manuscript. In her editor's note, specially written for the English translation, Catherine, Camus' daughter, explains why her mother took the decision she did and why she, in turn, chose to overturn that decision in the early '90s. The two explanations are significant in many respects.

The reason why Francine Camus did not allow the publication of Le Premier Homme was quite simply because of the prevailing intellectual atmosphere in 1960. Camus was the target of the Left which then held a hegemonic position in French culture. The Left fiercely attacked anyone who dared to proffer even mild criticism of the Soviet Union. It did not tolerate any opinion which did not endorse its own stand on another issue which also occupied centre-stage at that time: the war in Algeria.

Camus broke ranks with the Left in the early '50s when he began to denounce the Gulag, Stalin's trials and totalitarianism as such. He had no use for an ideology which did not serve humanity and which claimed that the ends justified the means. On the issue of Algeria, he advocated a federation in which Arabs and Europeans could co-exist. The Left, on its part , favoured independence for Algeria while the Right dismissed the idea of a federation out of hand. Under these circumstances, to publish Le Premier Homme would have damned Camus' reputation even more.

The exceptional success of the novel on its publication in 1994 was a clear acknowledgement by the French that Camus was right and that his Left detractors had led an entire generation up the garden path. The collapse of the Soviet empire and of the ideology which had propped it up were ample proof that Camus' vision had been vindicated whereas that of his one-time friend-turned-rival, Jean-Paul Sartre was tragically flawed.

However, the publication of The First Man vindicates Camus as an exceptionally gifted writer as well. The novel evokes a poverty-stricken childhood, the love of a mother, solitude in an alien land and the sights and smells of his native Algeria with a precision and sensuality unmatched in contemporary fiction. It is as close to an autobiography as you can get and it leaves you with the distinct impression that the author sought through this book a reconciliation, however evanescent, with his alienated mother and his alienated land of birth. The reconciliation has poignant undertones, for Camus' best-known works— The Outsider (1942) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1943)— had established him as one of the leading figures of existentialism, a philosophy which emphasised the absurdity and arbitrariness of life leading, precisely, to a relentless sense of alienation.

The novel opens when Jacques Cormery, moves into a remote village in the Algerian countryside with his father and pregnant mother. The mother delivers on the day of their arrival, surrounded by unknown women while the father has gone off in search of a doctor. The next scene is Jacques' visit to his father's grave in France. The father had died in 1914 at the beginning of the war at the age of 29. Standing alone in the graveyard, the son realises that he is older than his father was at the time of his death.

Between these two scenes unfolds a chronicle of growing up in Algeria amidst poverty (" which had no past") and wonderment (" where everything needs a start, where everything needs to be inaugurated"). An illiterate and ill-tempered grand-mother who, to his great embarrassment, asks her grandchild to read aloud the sub-titles of a film in the cinema hall; the meek mother resigned to her fate; the teacher who spots his talent and prepares him to win a scholarship to study in France. Add to this, the evocation of a life which seems to be one of relentless humiliation, the fun and frolic with friends and the compassion he feels for the Arabs.

Taken together, The First Man retrospectively illuminates in another light Camus' previously published writings. It reveals the tensions this intensely private man nursed within himself: between his deep sensitivity to the ordinary things of life and his unease about the worlds of history, politics, philosophy and literature in which he had chosen to shape his destiny. One question remains: if The First Man is a masterpiece in its unfinished state what would it have been like had Camus been able to complete it? The answer is by no means obvious, for its transparent tentativeness— its hesitations, the absence of punctuation marks— makes for compelling reading.