“The First Man”: the decades-long unpublished autobiography of Albert Camus
LITTLE BOOKS, A DIARY, some letters, a horoscope foretelling “tragic death” and a 144-page manuscript. These were the personal effects delivered to Albert Camus’s widow by a representative of the French Ministry of Culture after the car crash that claimed the Nobel Prize-winning author’s life on January 4, 1960.
Written in pen, sometimes without punctuation, in nervous, hard-to-read handwriting, the pages of the above manuscript still needed a lot of work. Which is why Camus’s heirs kept The First Man a joke for three and a half decades.
Suspicious of those he called “biophiles”, Albert Camus had decided to write his own biography, chronicling the life of a French family in Algeria: “I imagine a man who starts from scratch, who can neither read nor write, who has neither religion nor morals.” He would speak of himself and, above all, he would speak of those he loved.
In its first form, First Man had all the hallmarks of a fictional autobiography. In its final form the autobiographical elements would have been more well hidden. But in 1994, when Gallimar published this unfinished work, what Camus had not had time to “cover up” proved valuable.
In its first form, The First Man had all the characteristics of a fictional autobiography. In its final form the autobiographical elements would have been more well hidden. But in 1994, when Gallimar published this unfinished work, what Camus had not had time to “cover up” proved valuable.
Donning the mask of Jacques Corméry, Camus begins his narrative on an autumn night in 1913, the night of his birth. He recalls his childhood in a poor and uneducated environment, setting up the mosaic of images from the past from the beginning. A mother immersed in her silence and, in place of the father, a huge void. Mortally wounded in the First World War, the father remains a big question mark for the hero.
Forty years later, Jacques Cormeri returns to Algeria. He returns to the light and to the “warm poverty that had helped him to live and heal everything.” In front of his father’s grave he realises that he has outlived him in age – the son is older than the dead man.
And there, the man who had tried to sort out good from evil on his own from a young age feels abandoned. And he admits, at last, that he needs someone to show him the way, to scold or praise him, not because he will be stronger, but because he will have authority. In other words, he needs his father. The only one who could talk to him about him is his mother. But, alas, she doesn’t help him at all.
Copied from the first edition of the book in Greek (ed. N. Karakitsu Douge, Livanis, 1995 – followed by that of Kastaniotis in 2017, translated by R. Kolaitis): “The memory of the poor is not fed like that of the rich. It has fewer signs in space, as they rarely leave their place, it has fewer points of reference during a life of grey and monotonous. Of course, there is the memory of the heart, which is said to be the surest, but the heart is worn out by grief and work, it forgets more quickly under the weight of toil. Lost time is recovered only by the rich. For the poor, it merely marks with light footsteps the road to death. And then, to truly endure, one must not be long, one must live day by day, hour by hour, as his mother did, inevitably perhaps, as that sickness of her youth (after all, from what Grandma said, it was a typhoid fever. But he leaves no such vices. Maybe typhoid. Or something else? Black darkness here too) this illness left her deaf and unable to express herself easily, prevented her from learning all that was taught even to the outcasts of society, forced her into mute resignation; but this was the only way she found to face her life, and what else could she have done, who in her position would have found another solution? He would have liked to see her passionately describing to him a man who had died forty years ago, with whom they had shared a life (I wonder if they had really shared it?) for five years, but she could not, and he was not even sure that his mother had loved this man passionately, and in any case he could not ask her, he himself stood silent – sad in his own way – in front of her, and in his heart he did not want to know what was between them, he had to give up trying to learn something from her…”
Few writers have come under as much fire as Camus. Perhaps because he was careful to distance himself in time.
He stayed in the Communist Party for only two years, from 1935 to 1937. He opposed fascism without embracing Moscow’s dictates. He organised himself into the resistance in 1943, believing in values such as freedom, justice, reason and education, but after the Hiroshima bombing he became convinced that the world had taken another step towards barbarism.
Albert Camus was one of the few intellectuals who considered the cost to humanity of revolution in the name of a better future. When in 1951 he published “Man in Revolt”, venturing a critique of communist regimes, he provoked Sartre’s wrath, and today one is surprised by the acuity of his analyses.
However, his attitude to the Algerian war – Camus was among those who believed that Algeria was France, insofar as one and a half million Frenchmen had been born there – was long considered a dark page on his CV.
The publication of The First Man came to shed more light on this attitude. Reading the book, one realises that on this particular subject it was impossible for him to distance himself. With the Algerian war and the prospect of independence for his native land, Camus had felt twice uprooted. He considered the French of Algeria – and himself – to be ‘natives’, while the demand for a national liberation struggle he saw as yet another manifestation of Arab imperialism. “I must condemn the terrorism being carried out blindly in Algiers, of which my mother may fall victim, he said.“I love justice, but I also love my mother”
Camy couldn’t bear the idea of being considered a stranger in his homeland. He wished a thousand times for the creation of a confederation, constantly suggesting the path of dialogue and consensus, but at the same time declaring: “If there were a party for those who are not sure of anything, I would be a member of it too.”
His emotional charge prevented him from seeing clearly, but the fact that he knew the Algerians very well allowed him to maintain not the slightest illusion towards the National Liberation Front. Since the 1950s, he had discerned its nationalist, populist tendencies and its animosity towards intellectuals. And on this point, history has vindicated him.
