The Gallimards made Camus and a Gallimard killed him. From L’Étranger onwards, all his works were published by the family firm, the most prestigious in twentieth-century French literature. In fact, one of the first people whom Camus met at the newspaper Paris-Soir, when he arrived in Paris in early 1940, was Janine Thomasset, who would later be the wife, successively, of Pierre Gallimard and his cousin, Michel Gallimard. She was also to be a passenger in the car driven by Michel Gallimard in the crash that killed him and Camus in January 1960. Janine survived.

The publishing house did not wait long before bringing out a couple of tomes in its Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in honour of the dead Nobel Prize-winner: the first appeared in 1962, under the general editorship of Roger Quilliot; Théâtre, récits, nouvelles, devoted to Camus’s fiction, was complemented in 1965 by a volume of non-fiction, Essais. However new material has appeared since then, most notably the final, unfinished novel Le Premier Homme and, at the other end of Camus’s career, a precursor of L’Étranger, La Mort heureuse, which was not published until 1971. There has also been some scholarly work on his writings which needed to be taken into account, for example the attribution of his certain, probable and possible contributions to the clandestine newspaper Combat by the great Camus specialist Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, which appeared in 2002 (published by Gallimard, needless to say). It was time for a brand new memorial, so we have this Pléiade Camus, destined eventually to consist of four volumes and arranged chronologically rather than thematically. The editorial team was led by Professor Lévi-Valensi, who also wrote the general introduction to the series, but whose death in November 2004 means that overall editorial responsibility for the final two volumes will pass to someone else.

 
 
The Pléiade volumes are a superb tribute for any writer. Soberly introduced and, on the whole, admirably researched by the leading specialists, complete with scholarly notes and variant readings, bibliographies, chronology and the rest, they come bound in their traditional livery with gold tooling, preserved in a clear plastic jacket, each volume individually housed in its white slipcase. They are intended to be the authorized version of the chosen author’s oeuvre. It is only if you attempt to read them that they seem less than perfect: the minute type, the still smaller footnotes and the thousand or more pages on flimsy paper, of a kind usually associated with bibles and prayerbooks, are a drawback to actual use. Sliding the first volume of Camus out of its slipcase on a train to Cambridge the other week felt inappropriate, especially in second class, like reading a leather-bound folio in McDonald’s. One should be sitting in a private library, able to open each volume on one’s knee or on a table, and turn the pages slowly, with respect. The Pléiade now includes writers such as Simenon, whose canonization rests on more dubious grounds than that of Camus, but the Pléiade’s physical presence (not to mention its price) demands reverence both for itself and for its author. You would not want to underline anything, jot down page numbers on the flyleaf or put a sceptical query or even an amendment in the margin (for example, beside the incorrect page number given in a reference to Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus in a footnote to Volume One, page 1,273).

If the Pléiade Camus is to be the bible of the writer’s work, then the best commentary to guide one through the first of these volumes is Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi’s Albert Camus ou la naissance d’un romancier. This book started as her doctoral thesis in 1980, but it was not until much later that she got round to revising it for publication. She was still doing this at the time of her death, with the help of Agnès Spiquel (who finally saw this edition through the press). Lévi-Valensi’s account of the early Camus begins with a turning point in his life when, in 1930, he became aware both of his vocation as a writer and of his own mortality: in December of that year, a month or so after his seventeenth birthday, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was not until the following October that he was able to resume his studies at the Grand Lycée in Algiers in the class of Jean Grenier (who would be an influential friend of the writer throughout his life).

Lévi-Valensi takes us through the dozen or so years that preceded the publication of L’Étranger (1942) and examines what Camus wrote, with the hindsight provided by a knowledge of that novel: the publisher advertises her book as “Camus avant L’Étranger”. This perspective inevitably involves some distortion, making the interest of Camus’s varied literary activities – journalism, essays, theatre and fiction – more or less conditional on their relation to his first major work; La Mort heureuse, for example, which Camus was writing from 1936 to 1938 before finally abandoning it, she describes baldly as “une erreur”; despite that, Penguin Modern Classics have included A Happy Death in the uniform set of Camus translations which it brought out in July.

It is true that Camus, once he had decided on his vocation, was a remarkably self-aware writer. His statement in 1935 that “L’oeuvre est un aveu; il me faut témoigner” could stand as the epigraph to all his subsequent writings. Already, in a notebook that he kept between 1938 and 1942 (published here for the first time as “Sans lendemain”), he was plotting “une oeuvre à faire”, divided into essays, plays and novels, starting with a first group which he describes as: The Absurd (essay), Caligula (play) and “a free man” (novel). By June 1947, his notebook had developed this into a more detailed outline of his work, existing and yet to come, dividing novels, essays and plays into five groups: first, “L’Absurde” (L’Étranger, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Caligula, Le Malentendu); second, “La Révolte” (the recently completed novel La Peste, the essay L’Homme révolté and the play Les Justes – the last two then unfinished); third, “Le Jugement” (a category that might apply to the much later La Chute, though it seems unlikely that he had planned that novel so far in advance); fourth, “L’Amour déchiré”; and, finally, “La Création corrigée ou Le Système”, which includes “grand roman + grande méditation + pièce injouable”.

Needless to say, the existence of such a plan does not mean that it would have been adhered to, even if Camus had lived, but it suggests a strong sense of purpose behind his vocation – with a touch of humour in the final section – as well as a willingness to believe that his tuberculosis was not necessarily a sentence of death. On the other hand, these same notebooks contain many jottings for projects that do not fit into the scheme and were never carried out: “Étude sur G. G Comme esprit opposé à Malraux”, for example (where the Pléiade note tells us that G stands for “Grenier”, though it might also be Gide, a living writer whom Camus admired, as he did Malraux); or “Nouvelle ou roman Justice”; or “Pièce Dora . . .”. All of these occur at around the same time, in 1947 or early 1948. And while it is fascinating to see, in the notebooks and abortive projects, the groundwork for what would eventually become Camus’s major contributions to literature, it is equally fascinating to watch him engaged in what may seem like diversions from that route, for example as a working journalist. Viewing the work of the 1930s from the point of view of its relation to L’Étranger, Lévi-Valensi has very little to say about the writer’s involvement with the Communist Party or with the theatre collective for which he collaborated on the play, Révolte dans les Asturies (1936), banned as subversive by the Mayor of Algiers, the first work included in the first volume of the Pléiade Camus.

On the other hand, Lévi-Valensi’s book does highlight the persistence of certain themes in Camus’s work, starting with the idea of the Absurd. There is a clear link here with the writer’s early discovery that his life was threatened by tuberculosis: the Camusian notion of the Absurd derives from the certainty of death: “juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue, c’est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie”, he writes, at the start of Le Mythe de Sisyphe. “Le sujet de cet essai est précisément ce rapport entre l’absurde et le suicide, la mesure exacte dans laquelle le suicide est une solution à l’absurde.”

By the time that book was ready to be published, however, the outbreak of war and the Occupation of France had reformulated all the questions about the value of life and what might give it meaning. Indeed, Raymond Queneau, an editor at Gallimard, was obliged to write to Camus in 1942 to explain that because of some “local difficulties” Gaston Gallimard wanted the chapter on Kafka to be removed from Le Mythe de Sisyphe: it would not be prudent to publish a study of a Jewish writer during the Nazi Occupation. Though Pascal Pia suggested having the book published in Switzerland, Camus agreed with Gallimard’s request and the chapter on Kafka did not appear until after the war.

The other two panels of the triptych on the Absurd are Camus’s best-known novel, L’Étranger – which Sartre, to Lévi-Valensi’s annoyance, called “une illustration concertée des thèses soutenues dans Le Mythe de Sisyphe” – and the play, Caligula, in which the Roman Emperor becomes an absurdist hero; the Pléiade allows us to follow the play through its various rewritings. A recurrent theme in interviews and other occasional pieces is Camus’s rejection of the idea that any of his works is an “illustration” of philosophical ideas, whether his own or anyone else’s. This is why he takes the trouble to write to the Editor of La Nef in 1948 to express his irritation at Henri Troyat’s description of Caligula as “an illustration” (that hated word) “of the Existentialist principles of M Sartre”.

As Camus insisted in his review of Sartre’s La Nausée: “Un roman n’est jamais qu’une philosophie mise en images”; and he was determined to preserve the distinction in his own work, respected in the original Pléiade, between novel, theatre and essays; that is between art and stheory.

The second volume of this new Pléiade contains only one of the major novels, La Peste, and is mainly composed of newspaper articles and other occasional pieces. Camus always had an elevated idea of journalism as a profession, and his experience in the war years naturally enhanced this: “Pour des hommes qui, pendant des années, écrivant un article, savaient que cet article pouvait se payer de la prison et de la mort”, he wrote in Combat in August 1944, “il était évident que les mots avaient leur valeur”. However, one result of telling journalists that what they write is a matter of life and death is to give them an inflated idea of their own importance, and Camus’s own journalism can become excessively moralizing.

Overcoming the physical drawbacks of these over-precious volumes, one discovers a lot of fascinating material, especially in the minor writings: book reviews, interviews, prefaces and notebooks. In the pre-war period, there is an interesting article on Algerian nationalism, published in 1939, but otherwise Algeria seems to be largely absent. One reason for this is that Camus’s articles on his homeland, particularly the important series that he wrote for Combat in May 1945, at the time of the massacres at Sétif, were later published in the collected volume Actuelles III: Chroniques algériennes, 1939–1958 and will have to wait their turn until the final part of this collection. The problem of Algeria was one that, understandably, preoccupied and, eventually, tormented Camus: one is bound to speculate on how his ideas would have evolved if he had lived to see the country’s independence in 1962 and the murderous campaign of the OAS that was the response of the pieds noirs. If only he had kept to his original intention, which was to take the train back to Paris, instead of accepting a lift from Michel Gallimard. Nothing, Camus had been heard to remark earlier, was more absurd than to die in a car crash.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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