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Albert Camus is best known for his contribution to twentieth-century literature. But who was he, beneath the trappings of fame? Camus, a Romance reveals the French-Algerian of humble birth; the TB-stricken exile editing the war resistance newspaper Combat; the pied noir in anguish over the Algerian War; the Don Juan who loved a multitude of women. These form only the barest outlines of Camus’s life, which Elizabeth Hawes chronicles alongside her own experience following in his footsteps. Camus, a Romance is at once biography and memoir—wrought with passion and detail, it is the story not only of Camus, but of the relationship between a reader and a most beloved writer.
- Sales Rank: #1240873 in eBooks
- Published on: 2010-06-08
- Released on: 2010-06-08
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“What Hawes does brilliantly is bring to life Camus the human being...a delicately perceptive text.”—Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times
“A beautiful memoir of a life-long obsession…a rich and vivid portrait of Camus himself.”—Harper’s Magazine
“[A] memoir of literary obsession—that aesthetic wreck at the intersection of biography, confession, literary criticism, travelogue, love letter, and detective story.” —Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
“A rich hybrid of biography, literary criticism, intellectual history and memoir…[an] intriguing, multi-faceted portrait.”—Heller McAlpin, The Washington Post
“A statement about reading and its long-lasting effect on a reader’s sponge-like psyche…a fascinating spin on the mere biographies others produce.”—David Finkle, The Huffington Post
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Heller McAlpin It's not unusual for biographers to fall in love with their subjects. After all, researching and writing a life is a major commitment, longer and more intimate than some marriages. What is unusual is for a biographer to address a lifelong passion for her subject as directly as Elizabeth Hawes does in "Camus, A Romance." She has channeled her ardor into a rich hybrid of biography, literary criticism, intellectual history and memoir. Yet, despite her book's personal slant, its revelations are mainly about Camus. Hawes, I can personally attest, is not the only student of French literature to develop a crush on Albert Camus, the Humphrey Bogart-handsome French-Algerian author who, in books including "The Stranger," "The Plague" and "The Myth of Sisyphus," recognized the hopelessness of existence but made a convincing case for ethical engagement regardless. He was irresistibly endowed with what Susan Sontag called "moral beauty." Hawes fell for Camus while writing her college thesis on him in the late 1950s. Part of the attraction was "his basic message -- that in a world that was absurd, the only course was awareness and action." Another factor: "Camus's good looks and sex appeal," captured in Henri Cartier-Bresson's famous portrait of the author wearing a trench coat with upturned collar and the ever-present dangling cigarette that graces the cover of Hawes's book. Camus's death in a car accident in January 1960 did little to stifle Hawes's sense of their affinity, although her pursuit of the man behind the work waxed and waned for decades. In 1994, when Camus's daughter and literary executor, Catherine, finally published "The First Man," the unfinished autobiographical novel her father was working on when he died at 46, Hawes's quest shifted back into high gear. "After decades of devotion," she writes, "I wanted to understand why I cared so passionately about him." An astute literary critic, Hawes does a sensitive job relating Camus's novels, plays, essays, political journalism, journals and letters to his life. Quoting liberally from his writing, she evokes the author's impoverished childhood, which he described as "a glue that has stuck to the soul." Born in November 1913 in Algiers, he grew up in a crowded flat without electricity or running water. His mother, widowed in World War I, was illiterate and partially deaf. Hawes concludes that Camus became ambitious and activist in reaction to his mother's extreme passivity. Yet he remained devoted to her even after moving to France in 1942. A grammar school teacher was the first of many mentors to recognize Camus's promise. With his help, Camus attended a lycee in central Algiers on scholarship as "an orphan of the French state" before studying philosophy at the University of Algiers. The onset of tuberculosis at 17 -- which was to plague him for the rest of his life -- disqualified him from the degree required for teaching. Also rejected from military service, he turned to writing, journalism and theater. Hawes spotlights examples of Camus's "irrepressible conscience" and "moral leadership" in his essays against capital punishment, Nazis, Stalin and the atomic bomb -- many written for the underground Resistance paper Combat, which he edited during World War II. She untangles his bitter feud with Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the criticism he sustained around the time of his 1957 Nobel Prize, for failing to take sides during the bloody Algerian war for independence. (A lifelong champion of Muslim equality, he was unable to relinquish hope for a multicultural state in Algeria that included the French.) Like her onetime New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm, Hawes reflects on the biographical process, adding depth to her project. She notes, for example, "the unpredictability of interviews, in the way important sources sometimes have fuzzy memories or offer canned stories," and she describes her frustration when Roger Quilliot, an early expert on Camus, committed suicide shortly before their long-anticipated appointment. Also exasperating is the inaudible tape of her first, hard-won interview with Catherine Camus, drowned out by barking dogs. Hawes admits feeling "more than a little proprietary" toward Camus, which may explain why she treads delicately on his family life and numerous affairs (which she stereotypically attributes to his "Mediterranean libido"). In this intriguing, multifaceted portrait, she openly acknowledges her bias: "Sometimes I feel almost like his wife or sister as well as his reader, student, and Boswell, watching over him, worrying about his health or his spirits."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
28 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
"I was like an author who has fallen in love with one of his own characters"
By S. McGee
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...)
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Endless Summer
By Larry Verburg
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).
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
One woman's quest to know Albert Camus
By R. M. Peterson
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."
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