Customer Reviews

Camus, a Romance

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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...)

While still in college, Elizabeth Hawes (later a staff member at "The New Yorker" in the 1960s), developed a keen interest in Camus, verging on an obsession. Camus was the subject of her college thesis. That began a forty-year quest to know Camus better, to "connect" with him as well as she could. Around 1994 she actively began researching and writing this book. Among other things, she studied collections of Camus's correspondence in library archives and interviewed 18 people who had known Camus, including his daughter (and literary executor) and his son.

First, the negatives. Even allowing for the author's understandable affection for her subject, the book is too personal, and there is too much information about Hawes, her life-long obsession, and her quest. It occasionally lapses into being mawkish. One example is at the end when she visits Camus's grave: "I didn't have any particular thoughts as I stood before the grave, but I was content just to be there in Camus's proximity. Eventually, I sat down in the gravel path next to him." At times, Hawes seems surprisingly naive. A more minor complaint is that her presentation of Camus's life is less chronologically linear than I would like, which also leads to some unnecessary repetition.

But withal, I am glad that Elizabeth Hawes shared her obsession and quest in this book, as I get a very good picture of Camus. CAMUS, A ROMANCE covers well the major aspects of his life and character: his morality, which defined him intellectually much more than "existentialism"; his love for his homeland Algeria (when he accepted the Nobel Prize, he did so as a French Algerian); his love for the theater; his tuberculosis, which forced him to grapple with mortality at a much earlier age than most; his good looks, elegance, and attractive personality (he reminded virtually everyone of Humphrey Bogart); women; and his mother (a near deaf-mute housemaid). Appropriate attention is given to his stint as editor of "Combat" and the importance of his journalism and editorials to the Resistance and to France immediately after the Occupation, as well as to his condemnation of Stalinist communism and the highly publicized break with Sartre (or, more accurately, Sartre's malicious repudiation and belittlement of Camus). There also is adequate discussion of his major works of literature. In addition, Hawes does a good job of culling Camus's journals and his letters, uncovering and bringing to the fore useful and instructive excerpts. For example, in 1946, observing a post-War world roiled by strident ideologies and political manifestos, Camus wrote: "Justice is the concern of everyone, freedom of only a few. That is what must change."

The Camus that Hawes gives us (I think accurately) was a very admirable person -- more so than most literary giants (at least literary figures of sufficient magnitude to be awarded the Nobel Prize). The personal qualities that are evinced are dignity, reserve and forbearance, honesty, "self-respect and endurance", and "a certain elemental morality." His one weakness was his inveterate womanizing and attendant infidelities, but then both his marriages might be characterized as unfortunate.

In the end, CAMUS, A ROMANCE, convinced me to make Camus one of the authors whose major works I read (or re-read) in 2010. That, and the comments on Camus by Clive James in his "Cultural Amnesia", including his remark, "The widespread notion that Camus's mind was not really very complex at all is the penalty he paid for being blessed with good looks, the Nobel Prize, too many women and too much fame."

Many biographies are based on the "more is more" principle, with few details too trivial or associations too marginal to merit exclusion. This often makes biographies unappealing to readers like me, who read them to learn what affected a person as he or she underwent important experiences or--in the case of Albert Camus--produced great books. Call me superficial, if you will. But I like a concise biography that illuminates, not a data dump.

As a result, I thought CAMUS, A ROMANCE was a terrific book. You see, this year I've read THE STRANGER, THE PLAGUE, and THE FALL and I was interested to learn something, but not everything, about the artist who produced such amazing work. For example, how did Camus's experiences affect such themes in THE STRANGER as North Africa, the sea, and the gentle indifference of nature? What are the connections between Camus's TB, the Nazi occupation of France, and THE PLAGUE? And, what emotional forces contributed to the perplexing THE FALL? Well, CAMUS, A ROMANCE addresses these and other questions that might occur to readers of these novels. The artist, though sui generis, didn't come from nowhere.

In providing this information, Elizabeth Hawes takes a somewhat unusual approach to her biography. Instead of functioning as a detached narrator who gathers, organizes, and interprets information, she admits to being profoundly affected by Camus and his work. Thus, the second subject of her book is the mystery of her interest in Camus. She wants to know, in other words, why the man and his work are so meaningful to her. While Hawes actually reveals little about herself (she likes dogs, she has a summer house near the ocean), she does put front-and-center the highly personal relationship that readers develop with writers who affect them. In this case, Hawes describes herself as feeling, at times, like Camus's wife or sister, as well as a reader and student. Ultimately, she ends up in the right place, where she considers Camus her friend.

CAMUS, A ROMANCE is not only about Camus's books and the grip they exert on many imaginations. While not going into unnecessary detail, Hawes also discusses the pied noir in Algeria, intellectual life in post-war France, the famous exchange with Sartre following the publication of THE REBEL, Camus's writer's block, the Algerian War, Camus's Nobel Prize, and so on. But this information exists to illuminate the man and his work, which always has a serious moral dimension. Data doesn't dominate.

Even so, I would have cut the paragraph where Hawes relates her most recent dream of Camus. "...he was full of ordinary life. I had joined him walking down a crowded city street, and as we duck around people trying to keep abreast of each other, we laughed..." Regardless, recommended.

Elizabeth Hawes was in college when she fell in love with Albert Camus. By her senior year, she was writing an honors thesis about him and planning overseas study where she hoped to meet her idol. But on January 4, 1960, the French writer - who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature just three years before, at age 43 - died in a car accident.

Nearly 40 years later, Hawes has authored what her publisher terms a biography-memoir: it charts her search for, and feelings about, Camus as well as the arc of his life. She describes the places she visited, the archives she sifted, the people she talked with who had known Camus (including his daughter, son, and an actual lover or two). She also describes how she feels about the trek, how her discoveries affect her view of Camus, how well the search is going.

The chapters are arranged partly in chronology and partly by topic (Camus's writing and resistance work during the war, the women in his life, the friendship with and rancorous estrangement from Sartre, his anguish over the bloody colonial struggle in his native Algeria).

It's tempting to say there's a little too much of Hawes in the book and not enough of Camus, but that's not quite right. It would be more accurate to say there's not enough of her to get us firmly and securely to him. Of course Hawes is concerned not to get in the way of her subject, but if we're going to spend time with her at all, we need to know enough about her to be able to trust her assertions.

Otherwise, remarks such as "His voice ... is almost audible," "these documents seem invaluable for their revelations, and the words ring true," and "this made him seem familiar, like someone I actually had once known" come to sound like protesting too much - telling us rather than showing.

She includes notes by Blanche Knopf, Camus's American publisher's rep, about finding a suitable dress for the Nobel ceremony and declares that such small details are "strangely satisfying." This sort of thing may ring true in a fan - each of us has silly obsessions with celebrities, whether they're T.S. Eliot or Michael Jackson - but it's not necessarily helpful in a biographer. If we don't already admire Camus, it's harder to feel with Hawes from scratch, no matter how well she writes.

Now and then, the biographer acknowledges the possible futility of her labors: "But I was not able to summon forth any more of the life that had gone on in that small studio than I had sitting at my desk in Manhattan."

This book would make an adequate introduction to Camus for a reader who knows nothing about him, but those who have read his books or an earlier biography (e.g., Herbert Lottman's or Olivier Todd's) might find it a little thin and precious.

Note: This review is of the Kindle version of "Camus, A Romance," and the rating is for that reason a low one. If I could, I would give the book five stars and the Kindle edition one star, the one star being quite generous. (As it is, so that this review is not passed over as crackpot, I have given two stars.) However, I recommedn that you do not purchase the Kindle edition of this book; it's a monstrous travesty and could ruin your acquaintance with this brilliant memoir. Examples: Footnotes don't work and are impossible to navigate, words are misspelled or hyphenated in the middle of a paragraph (like "vio -- lence"), punctuation is miserable (quotations are especially erratic); all in all a pretty pathetic edition, the worst I have seen in a purchased Kindle book; in fact, many free Kindle books have better spelling, punctuation, and formatting.

The book: I must say from the first that this book is a must read for anyone interested in Albert Camus. The name of the book is apt, though I don't know if it was chosen by the publisher or Ms. Hawes. As a "romance," the memoir is written from the standpoint of one in love with the author's work and the man himself. Ms. Hawes confesses in the first pages of her book the impulse and passions that drove her to desire to know Camus as man, writer, Nobel Prize winner, product of the working class. Her interest in Camus is not so much an obsession (though it sometimes seems close to it) as a compelling need to know the man who is such an important part of her working life as a university professor.

The book is also remarkable for its profound sympathy for the man and his struggles, his triumphs and defeats, and the illness that often debilitated him and made him anxious and bitter at times. In this brilliant memoir (which is not a typical biography but something much better), Elizabeth Hawes has written a haunting beautiful, poetic reverie, a true labor of love that is often understated yet poignant and always fresh with insight, the insight that only a life-long acquaintance with the writer's works and the biographies and memoirs of his friends and colleagues could provide.

More importantly, however, Ms. Hawes provides a portrait of Camus so convincing and detailed that only someone close in spirit to the writer (a sister, wife, or lover) could hope to write. The memoir is above all fascinating, well-written, showing all aspects of Camus's life, from his interactions with erstwhile friends like Sartre, who betrayed him; his many romances and affairs (which devastated his wife and brought him immense guilt and shame); his sense of honor and justice; and his boundless love for his children (his twins Catherine and Jean). The women in his life are portrayed sympathetically and with measured sensitivity (first wife Simone Hie, "S"; Maria Casares, the Spanish-born actress who starred in several of his plays; second wife Francine Faure); as are his close relationships with a handful of life-long male friends (Jean Grenier, his teacher and early mentor; Pascal Pia, his friend at Combat; Michel Gallimard, and several others, perhaps lesser known, to whom Hawes introduces us).

Throughout the memoir, like leitmotifs, run the twin themes of summer and Algeria, which must be understood in order to appreciate Camus and his work. Although Paris was the location of his success as a writer, the golden city of his ambition, his ideal "city," yet Algeria was potent in his blood, as was the endless summer and blue skies of North Africa. As Camus once said, "Au milieu d'hiver, j'apprenais qu'il y avait en moi un été invincible" (In the midst of winter, I learned that there was in me an invincible summer).

I finally gave up on this book half way through it because the author annoyed me so much with HER thoughts - obviously she had done much research and knew his works well but I wasn't interested in the author whose life is worthwhile only by having a crush on a celebrity. Poor Camus - he would have gone crazy knowing someone like the author, and wouldn't have wanted to waste time with her (I didn't!).

I have loved Camus's work since I discovered it--as a teacher--in my twenties. Since then I have read nearly everything I could find, including several biographies. For much of a forty year teaching career I attempted to "teach" Camus and, as is always the case, learned more through those efforts than I ever would have "only" as a reader. And each time I tried to explain to my students why Camus was a man who mattered, my sadness and frustration at his premature death increased.

I wish Elizabeth Hawes had written Camus, A Romance long ago, not only so that my students might have read and discussed the book with me, but because the book brings the man to life in a way that no ordinary biography could. I relished every page (as I suspect Hawes relished writing every page) because for the first time I had a sense of the kind of person Camus was and what his life was like in the times in which he lived and wrote.

I recommend this thorough and extraordinary book.

"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 the world's indifference to it, left an indelible mark on the psyche of Camus. Later, that influence would be revealed in his books, like: "The Rebel," "The Fall," "The Plague," and "The Myth of Sisyphus."

Camus championed the notion of the "absurd" in his writings. The novel, "The Stranger," his first acclaimed work of art, which catapulted him to fame, is probably the most cogent example of what exactly that concept meant to him. This made Camus' death in an automobile accident, in 1960, even more poignant.

Hawes described Camus' fate of dying in a car crash, "the ultimate absurdity for the man who named the absurd. [He] had in his pocket a round-trip ticket travel by train with his family, but he had been persuaded at the last moment to drive to Paris." The driver was speeding, the car went off the road, striking one tree and then another. The impact broke "Camus' neck," and killed him.

One of Zaretsky's book best strength is how he takes "The Stranger," and the other major literary efforts of Camus, and brilliantly dissects them for the reader. While doing so, he lets you know exactly what was going on in Camus' life at the time each of them were written. For example, when "The Stranger" was published, in 1942, WWII was raging in Europe, and huge parts of France were occupied by the German Army. Camus joined the "French Resistance" and was also the editor of its legendary news organ, "Combat." He was then only 29 years old.

Nevertheless, Camus remained an "outsider" in France, as both Hawes and Zaretsky showed. He was an "outsider" to humanity itself, also. Why? He'd contracted a killer disease--tuberculosis!

Camus' experience of French Algeria, where the Arab is the "other," also impacts his views. The themes: "outsider," "the other," and "separate," runs through Camus' thoughts and are reflected in many of his novels, essays and plays.

Zaretsky sees this, particularly, in Camus' short story, "The Guest." It was published, in 1957, only months after he won the "Nobel Prize" for literature, and around the same time that he had briefly addressed the horrific events then raging in Algeria. Nationalists were violently responding to the French heel on their neck. That conflict, where some of the male victims had their "genitals cut off" and stuffed in their mouths, and "women's breasts were sliced off," by the enflamed nationalists, lasted from 1954 to 1962. Tens of thousands of "Arabs and Berbers were killed" in retaliation by the French military. Zaretsky said the slaughters, on both sides, were perpetrated, "in a grisly fashion."

With respect to "The Guest," Zaretsky wrote: "Yet Daru [the protagonist of the story and a French Algerian] discovers he is also a `stranger' in what he always believed to be is own land. He had spent his life feeling like an `outsider' anywhere but in Algeria but is now also `exiled' from his native land. And awful truth dawns on Daru: the historical, cultural, and linguistic division between the `pied noirs' [the settler class of which Camus belonged] and the Arabs [the indigenous people]--both of whom are simultaneously hosts and guests to each other--is too great to bridge."

Getting back to Hawes. What I loved about her chronicle of Camus is how she gets so very personal, indeed, intimate, about his life. Her book is, in a real sense, about her love affair, her "crush" on a man, that she only knows from a distance--from his writings.

Hawes' book is passionate, enlightening and terrific fun to read. She even tracked down Camus' surviving children, Catherine and Jean, and interviewed them about their father. Hawes ended her ode to Camus--visiting his grave, at Lourmarin cemetery--not far from his last home, in France. I say: Take Hawes' book with you to the beach for a read this summer. You won't regret it.

There is much more in both of these fine books: Such as the many writers that influenced Camus' craft, namely: Saint Augustine, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Balzac, Synge, Mann, along with the Greek Tragedies; the fact that Camus' first wife was a drug addict; his love of soccer and his womanizing; Camus' visit to New York City; his love of acting, directing and the theatre; his brief membership in the Communist Party; Camus' views on the Hungarian Revolution; his take on the bloody dictator Josef Stalin, the Soviet Labor Camps and the Purges; and of course, Camus' earthshaking break with another literary titan--Jean-Paul Sartre.

It is on this controversial subject, where Zaretsky shines again. I think it's the professor in him. During the frantic days of the "half-liberated, half-occupied Paris," Sartre was assigned the "task of protecting the vacated "Comedie Francaise." When Camus went there, he found Sartre, "napping," and jokingly cracked to him: "You've placed your seat in the direction of history."

In 1952, the two clashed openly over a scathing review of Camus' book, "The Rebel," which appeared in, "Les Temps Modernes," a magazine controlled by Sartre. This was also after Sartre had made it clear that he was "siding with" the Stalinists. (2) Camus' response to the review went directly to Sartre himself.

Zaretsky quoted from Camus' famous letter: "I am growing tired of seeing myself, and especially of seeing veteran militants who `never ran from struggles' in their own times, receive countless lessons in effectiveness from critics who have done nothing more than point their `seats in the direction of history.'"

Finally, I submit that both Hawes and Zaretsky deserve credit for adding to our knowledge of Camus' legacy, and to his importance to our perilous times. Let's face it, we live in an era where screwball ideologues are running amuck. Dissenting voices can find no better model for taking on these crazed warmongers than looking to Camus--one of humanity's finest moralists.

The book is as much about the author as it is about Camus and if this was your first introduction to the non-fictional Camus you would want to go further, much further. But if you had read other biographies this book would be at best redundant and at worst frustrating since so much time is spent on the author's love for her subject. Elizabeth Hawe's romance never rises about an adolescent obsession and she unfortunately fails to have the humor to see it in that light. The too brief section that feature interviews with Camus' son, daughter and lover fail to present us with the living Camus. It is ironic that on the last pages of her memoir Hawes speaks to Robert Gallinard on the seeming failure of most biographies on Camus. "...it as a sense of Camus the charmer. It was the way he walked, the way he danced, the way he liked to kick a pebble down the street." Well Hawes does describe the way he walked and danced but the prose is prosaic.

This romance starts out being very likeable indeed: it's a quest, a memoir, it's real and imaginary at the same time, it includes some trips to Paris (always a good selling point), and the first person narrator is not only a very good writer but likeable as well: open, honest, charming. One has read Camus' three novels and remembers them well. So, where's the problem?
About halfway through, suspense begins to build, and questions and concerns that have been lurking in the background begin to make themselves felt:
Will she love him still at the end?
He has become a self-righteous whiner. Will she tire of him before he dies? After?
Will something happen to turn him back into a man?
Will the collateral damage of his compulsive womanizing - exposing his amours to his TB - ever turn her off?
Does she smoke as much as he does? More? Less?
How long will she have to put up with the insufferable Sartre and deBeauvoir?
Will she continue to find more excuses to go to Paris than to the Knopf archives in Austin, Texas?
Will we ever learn how she managed to finance this ambitious and costly project? Will the enjoyment of her writing outlast the tedium of spending so much time with Existentialists?
Will one be able to finish this book and find out the answers to these questions that have barged in on her story?
I guess I'll have to post a comment on my own review when I find out.