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 the expectations of his 'fans'. Particularly poignant is watching Camus plan a new cycle of works, as both Hawes and the reader are aware that he will die before he can complete them. "It is easy, even quite thrilling, to imagine how richly, and perhaps erotically, he might have written on the subject of love," Hawes muses. "Given the lyricist (SIC?) with which he invokes the physical and sensual world, and the tenderness and emotion that spill over into his love letters."
While this book will be most welcomed by those who are familiar with the world that Camus and his contemporaries (such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) inhabited, perhaps the ones who will get the most from it are those with only a passing familiarity with Camus's most iconic works -- particularly The Stranger and The Plague -- in high school or college. It reminded me of the fascination with which I encountered those books as a teenager, a fascination that later led me to read some of his latter books, as well as many of his essays but never led me to the same extreme attachment that Hawes experienced. At the same time, I relished getting 'behind the scenes' in the process of crafting a book about a literary figure, his works and his world, something that I imagine would appeal to any reader curious about the art of biography. Happily, at the end of the day, Hawes retains her sense of her own identity as distinct from that of Camus, making it possible for her to craft a remarkable book: "whatever the perceived intimacy, I was clearly the most distant of observers, a secondhand witness, a third party."
Highly recommended; one of the best books I've read this year.
(edited to address typos...)
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