The First Man by Albert Camus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Hunger for Discovery

This is Camus’s last work. But for anyone interested in his philosophy, or more importantly the reasons for his philosophy, this should probably be the first to read. The First Man is intensely emotional without being sentimental, self-critical without regrets, and above all human with a humanness which is, I think, the key to everything else he wrote.

The book shows Camus as a person shaped in his intentions as well as his vices by a most remarkable and unlikely multi-cultural background of poverty, intellectual depravation and what can only be called highly disciplined love: “They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.” The narrative is not so much biographical as episodic, recounting the obviously most important emotional events and recognitions of his life. The dominant theme, only emerging explicitly in middle age, is the search for the hidden personality of his dead father, killed in the Great War during Camus’s infancy.

Jacques, Camus’s fictionalised Self, was aware of some vague deficiency, “There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurt,” he says. The source of this feeling only becomes clear upon the discovery of his father’s war grave almost forty years after his death. The epiphany at the graveside is instant and profound:

“... in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling – that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but for ever.”

Is it right to think that this is a confession of a moral conversion, a conversion from a sort of resentful resistance to the world to a sympathetic acceptance of its infinite depth and complexity? I think so. And it certainly changes my appreciation of Camus in his roles as writer, philosopher, and political activist. Although he is in many ways representative of his time and place - the radical post-war politics of France - he was never a product of his times. He was from elsewhere, literally in his Algerian upbringing, and intellectually in his appreciation of the non-intellectual foundations of life. His family, his neighbours, his friends “looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it.”

Camus was, if we take Jacques literally as his mouthpiece, a “sceptical believer,” not in religion or fate or ideology, but in the necessity for ever wider and deeper human discovery. Ultimately this belief is an aesthetic, a filter which allows him to reconfigure the previously perceived ugliness of the France of his adulthood in terms of the impoverished but definite beauty of his Algerian mother, the devotion of his remarkably tenacious family, the care of an outstanding teacher, and the unhesitating dutifulness of his mysterious father. But it is this last that psychically drives all the rest; the skeleton key to his life. Only by opening himself to this loss was he able to relax into himself: “at last he could sleep and he could come back to the childhood from which he had never recovered.”

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