William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Indeed, Camus often thought that fame came too early to him: in the late 1940s he was an internationally bestselling author, his name (to his constant irritation) was for ever linked with Sartre as a founder of Existentialism and his life subsequently became that of the classic Left-Bank intello moving in all the right socio-cultural circles. He worked for his publishers, Gallimard, he travelled, he had many love affairs, he hobnobbed in the fashionable cafes and brasseries but he always remained, it is clear from Todd’s account, something of an outsider. This may simply have been a matter of temperament, or it may have been the ever-present proximity of death (the severity of Camus’s tuberculosis is one of the book’s key illuminations), or it may have been the fact that he was a pied-noir, an Algerian, never feeling truly at home in France.

In the event, he quarrelled bitterly with Sartre and after the start of the Algerian war in 1955 found himself even more isolated by his refusal both to support the FLN freedom fighters and to condemn France’s colonial oppression. Ironically, it was at this stage, in 1957 aged forty-four, that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and his elevation to the pantheon was assured.

And then he was killed, on 4 January 1960, in a car crash, being driven back to Paris from his new home in Provence and the legend, and the disputes about his greatness, or lack of it, began.

Todd’s biography is both remarkably thorough and candid, and will prove indispensable to all those interested in Camus’s life. However this English translation falls short on several counts. First it has been severely abridged: “some material not of sufficient interest to the British and American general reader has been omitted,” so runs the translator Benjamin Ivry’s introduction. This is disingenuous — only the economics of publishing could explain such significant cutting. Much has gone: notwithstanding the natural brevity of English, Todd’s 767 pages of French text somehow become 420 English ones. Furthermore, in Todd’s concluding chapter in the French edition he makes a profound and highly important comparison between Camus and George Orwell as exemplary figures of the heterodox left. This is mysteriously omitted in the English edition — but surely this would be “of sufficient interest” to the anglophone general reader? Further comparisons between the two texts throw up other anomalies. For example: a chapter entitled “Un regard myope” becomes in English “Algerian Grief.” The harmless adjective “foutu” (“done for” in my dictionary) is a coarse “fucked-up” in the English text (Ivry tends to inflame the mildest profanities). “Je n’ai plus un sou” is rendered as “I don’t have a dime” (what could be wrong with “I don’t have a sou”?). Certain infelicities of style draw attention to themselves: “His palling around deepened into friendships, as Albert became more choosy.” The French is: “Des copains deviennent des amis. Albert cloisonne.” Todd’s own style is punchy and terse and written in the present tense — which one would have thought would have favoured the English version, but here all present tenses have routinely been made past.

Still, despite these nagging worries and a sense of disquiet at being served up something indubitably boiled down, this biography remains completely fascinating for the portrait of Camus that emerges and, incidentally, for its depiction of the snake-pit of post-war French intellectual and political life. The debate over Camus’s status still rages across the Channel (interestingly, it is far more secure here) but Todd, I think, establishes the nature of Camus’s appeal and importance with great insight and skill. Its essence is contained in Camus’s own modestly couched ambition: “What interests me is knowing how we should behave, and more precisely, knowing how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason.” These are, in the end, interests we all possess, and answers we all seek. This is what provides the universal element in Camus’s work and this is what will make it endure.

1997

This is volume three of the late Maurice Cranston’s magisterial and definitive biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Volume one appeared in 1983, volume two in 1991 and now the grand project is completed. Alas, Maurice Cranston did not live to see the final volume published but those of us who have been impatiently reading and waiting over the last fourteen years will not be disappointed. All of Cranston’s scholarly and writerly credentials are on full display: the vast learning, quietly incorporated, the feel for the eighteenth century in all its social, cultural and intellectual aspects and, most importantly for the non-academic reader, a prose of limpid readability, a dry and worldly sense of humour and the ability to fix a character or a place or a moment with apparently effortless skill.

Volume three begins in 1762 in Switzerland with Rousseau at the height of his fame and notoriety. The Social Contract had been written, his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse has enjoyed wild success throughout Europe, turning him into a cult figure, and his treatise on the education of children, Emile, has fomented acclaim and hysterical derogation in equal measure. In fact it was the spiralling controversy over Emile that led the French parlement to order the burning of the book and the arrest of the author.

So Rousseau fled to the land of his birth seeking exile and asylum, but this last phase of his life was to prove as unsettled and disturbing as anything that his earlier career had witnessed. The fifty-year-old Jean-Jacques cut an eccentric figure: still living with his slatternly common-law wife Thérése Levasseur, he was plagued by urinary problems that necessitated use of a catheter and the wearing of an Armenian kaftan to make him more comfortable (he had need of a chamber pot every few minutes, he claimed). He settled in Môtiers in the canton of Berne trying to write his biography and going for long botanizing walks in the mountains. But a quiet life was always to be denied Rousseau, however arduously he tried to create one: he had powerful friends to protect him but also many enemies determined to make his life difficult. Also his renown was such that however reclusive and anonymous he sought to be admirers would beat a path to his door for audiences. One of the most amusing and best detailed of these was with the young James Boswell (who introduced himself as “I am a Scottish laird of ancient lineage”).

Rousseau was never wholly secure or at ease in Switzerland — the cantonal governments saw him as a dangerous dissident — and his few years there were fraught with vain lobbying to confirm his residential status. Rousseau’s paranoia grew, not unjustifiably, and he saw himself as dogged by malevolent enemies and persecutors. Voltaire, malignity personified, the arch rival, published an anonymous pamphlet recounting the scandal of Rousseau’s children by Thérése, all of whom he had left at the gates of an orphanage. Thus stimulated, local clerics stirred up their congregations with claims of heresy and depravity and Rousseau’s house was stoned by a mob on one memorable and terrifying night. He came to loathe the village and the canaille who inhabited it, longing to find a country where he could be left in peace.

The philosopher David Hume, then living in Paris, invited him to England and Rousseau reluctantly accepted his offer. Hume, another well-disposed Scot, was a genuine admirer of Rousseau but the history of their relationship ended badly — in typical Rousseauesque fashion. Rousseau was a man of spontaneous impassioned emotion and illogical mood swings. Hume records a moment when Rousseau, in a bad temper, suddenly “rose up and took a turn about the room: but judge of my surprise, when he sat down suddenly on my knee, threw his hands about my neck [and] kissed me with the greatest warmth.” It was not to last. In 1766 Hume accompanied Rousseau to London and a wealthy patron installed him in his house in Derbyshire. Boswell escorted Thérése thither separately from Switzerland, during which journey they had a brief, energetic affair (Boswell noting in his journal “gone to bed very early and had done it once. Thirteen in all”). And all for a while was well until Rousseau got it into his head that Hume was the author of a satirical letter published in the English press (in fact it was by Horace Walpole) and he accused Hume of betrayal and of covertly opening his mail. Rousseau’s affection and gratitude had turned immediately to passionate vilification and disdain. Hume was hurt and baffled and eventually equally outraged at the accusations. So the English period of Rousseau’s life ended on this tone of mutual defamation and aggrieved self-justification. He and Thérése returned to France where, finally, at Ermenonville near Paris, another wealthy patron provided the philosopher with a rural retreat and he passed his last years in some form of comfort and peace, dying of a stroke on 2 July 1778.