Camus’ First Man : A Masterpiece in the Making

Albert Camus was killed in a car accident in 1960 when he was 47. In the car was a 144-page handwritten manuscript, the draft of the opening of a large, ambitious and autobiographical novel. The manuscript lacks paragraphing and punctuation; the narrative turns back on itself, repeats itself. As he went along, Camus busily corrected the work, constantly writing notes about what to do later in revision. "The First Man" records a mind in motion -- a mind creating a masterpiece.

Camus' widow, Francine, prepared a typescript but decided against publishing it. Although Camus had won the Nobel Prize in 1957, that had only intensified the political controversies that were swirling around his work and reputation. Also she felt uncomfortable about publishing a work her husband had not finished. After Francine Camus' death in 1979, Camus' daughter Catherine became her father's literary executor. Last year she and her twin brother decided to publish the manuscript. As Catherine Camus explains in the preface she wrote for the American edition, "We believed a manuscript of such importance would sooner or later be published unless we destroyed it. Since we had no right to destroy it, we preferred to publish it ourselves so that it would appear exactly as it was."

So "The First Man" appears exactly as it is, with no attempt to fill in illegible words with guesswork, with second thoughts in footnotes, and an appendix of interleaves and sketches. "The First Man" became a best-seller in France, where the Camus controversies are now only of period interest, and where Camus remains a national icon, even to people who have never read him. And readers in this country are now eagerly turning to the excellent English translation by David Hapgood, as they should: It is one of the most extraordinary evocations of childhood, elegies for childhood's loss, that exists in any language.

Camus was born in Algeria; his father was killed in a battle in distant France when Albert was 4. He was brought up by his mother, hard-of-hearing and mostly mute, by his stern maternal grandmother and by his rough, kindly uncle. The book cuts back and forth between "Jacques Cormery" -- Camus -- in his mid-40s and his memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, but not by deprivation. He had the unswerving love of his mother, which he returned, and even his grandmother loved him in her intractable way. He had the comradeship of friends; he had street games, the beach, the sea, the school.

Some of the most moving pages of the book record how a schoolmaster opened the world to him; once Camus slips and uses the schoolmaster's real name (Catherine Camus closes the book with a letter Camus wrote to his teacher after winning the Nobel Prize, and with the last letter the schoolmaster wrote to his pupil). Even more moving are the pages devoted to the description of the lives of his mother, grandmother and uncle. A note to himself reads: ''Rescue this poor family from the fate of the poor, which is to disappear

from history without a trace. The Speechless Ones. They were and they are greater than I."

Camus obviously held high literary ambitions for his book, which was going to be large; in one of his notes to himself he invokes the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, and in fact the opening sentence recalls the opening of Musil's ''The Man Without Qualities." But there is another, contrary pull, clarified in another note: "Free oneself from any concern with art and form. Regain direct contact, without intermediary, thus innocence. To give up art here is to give up one's self."

Both the "direct contact" and the high art are evident throughout the manuscript, as in this description of the mother, whose sacredness has nothing to do with what Jacques is learning in catechism: "The warm, inward and ambiguous mystery that now bathed him only deepened the everyday mystery of his mother's silence or her small smile when he entered the dining room at evening and, alone in the apartment, she had not lit the kerosene lamp, letting the night invade the room step by step, herself a darker denser form gazing pensively out the window, watching the brisk -- but, for her, silent -- activity of the street; and the child would stop on the doorsill, his heart heavy, full of a despairing love for his mother, and for something in his mother that did not belong or no longer belonged to the world and to the triviality of the days."

No one knows how "The First Man" would have turned out; some hints for a plot survive in Camus' notes; the manuscript closes with Jacques on the cusp of adulthood. But what survives is nevertheless complete in design, detail and density; radiant; and deeply necessary.

By Richard Dyer
30 October 30 1995, Boston Globe