Picked-Up Pieces (44 page)

Françoise Sagan reads Proust, is the answer. But her Proustian meditations have an unstately way of dwindling to nothing, to a flirtatious self-mockery.

Proust interweaves his speculations and confessions with the exhaustively evoked details of a world he powerfully loves; Mlle. Sagan has for fabric only the shreds and scraps of a world she has come to despise. She confesses on the first page “the distaste I now feel for a way of life that until now … has always attracted me.” Later, she rises to the defense of her “Saganland” of the privileged and idle and frivolous; “The majority of critics are appalling hypocrites.… What could be more enjoyable than to know that a whiskey on the rocks awaits you at a villa on the other side of this golf course, among people as lively as yourself, and as free from material worries?” But the defense rings hollow. The details are tired. The furniture and chitchat, the spongers and spongees of
Scars on the Soul
are dismissed in the same breath that evokes them; only the
aloof weather and landscape of Normandy arouse the writer’s respect, that reverence without which description is so much word-trundling. We have indeed come a long, heavy way from
Bonjour Tristesse
, with its sparkling sea and secluding woods, its animal quickness, its academically efficient plot, its heroes and heroines given the perfection of Racine personae by the young author’s innocent belief in glamour. The van Milhems, those blond leeches, seem by this retrospect degenerate forms of the incestuous affection between Cecile and her father in
Bonjour Tristesse
. Incest, self-love’s first venture outward, feels deliberately burlesqued; Mlle. Sagan—at this juncture in her career, at least—has ceased to love herself, and with love has lost the impetus to create a fictional world.

An abundance of love nearly overburdens
The Bridge of Beyond
, the first novel by Simone Schwarz-Bart. The novelist, a native of Guadeloupe, married to the French author of
The Last of the Just
, describes her intention in an autobiographical note: “For me, the essence of Guadeloupe will always be the most oppressed and proudest Negroes of the island, ‘unbroken and unbreakable.’ I early dreamed of speaking about them someday so that justice might be done for them.” She has written
The Bridge of Beyond
(whose title in French is the very different
Pluie et Vent sur Télumée Miracle
) “in memory of an old peasant woman of my village who was my friend.” Telumee tells her story, beginning with her genealogy; she is the daughter of the black woman Victory, who was the daughter of Queen Without a Name, who was the daughter of Minerva, who was “a fortunate woman freed by the abolition of slavery from a master notorious for cruelty and caprice.” These matrilineal generations overlap those of Mme. Schwarz-Bart’s husband’s recent short novel,
A Woman Named Solitude
, which brings slavery to Guadeloupe in the person of Bayangumay, a girl abducted from an African village of pre-Adamic pleasantness. Schwarz-Bart is a European Jew writing about slavery; his wife is a native Guadeloupean writing about Guadeloupe. Though the two books have a companionable closeness of tone—a kind of tranced lyricism, as if, in her phrase, “dreamed in broad daylight”—her novel is the less surreal and the more substantial, the more convincing as a testament of life. The imagery of rivers flows through it, and its radiant shimmer and feeling of unforced movement are drawn from the center of the stream. “We were steeped in day, the light came in waves
through the shifting leaves, and we looked at one another astonished to be there, all three, right in the stream of life.” The book takes for its theme nothing less than living: Queen Without a Name “went on doing what God had created her for—living,” though she can also ask, “To see so much misery, be spat at so often, become helpless and die—is life on earth really right for man?” Her granddaughter, Telumee, who acquires the title of Miracle, searches for “the thread of [her] life” and pronounces the verdict on her life and on life simultaneously:

The events of the book are numerous; the author follows three heroines through their lives’ adventures—their children, their lovers, their shacks, their occupations on the edge of survival. It is a frontier world, this post-slavery village of Fond-Zombi, where harsh disappointments suddenly wipe out years of tranquil harvesting; the human—or, more particularly, the female—capacity to survive sorrow and reconstitute the work of cultivation is a theme illustrated several times over, always movingly. The “miracle” attached to Telumee’s name and present in the French title may be that of the human spirit, with its immortal resilience, its quicksilver moods admirable even when malevolent, its—as the book puts it—
panache
. Another theme is the special shape and tactics forced upon the black spirit in a land ruled by white proprietors. Telumee is advised, “Be a fine little Negress, a real drum with two sides. Let life bang and thump, but keep the underside always intact.” The word “Negro” recurs insistently, not as a demoted term of racist distinction but as a metaphor for all men who are oppressed and scant of hope. To be Negro is to be human in a heightened degree: “however beautiful other sounds may be, only Negroes are musicians.” Telumee comes to understand “what a Negro is: wind and sail at the same time, at once drummer and dancer, a first-class sham, trying to collect by the basketful the sweetness that falls scattered from above, and inventing sweetness when it doesn’t fall on him.” We are all, this novel makes us feel, “Negroes
at the back of beyond,” “flat on our bellies,” our main defense “the Negro’s ingenuity in forging happiness in spite of everything.” “What happiness!” comes as the book’s concluding phrase, and if words of wisdom are spoken by too many sibylline Negresses, and a Caribbean brand of black populism pushes some passages into sentimentality, the book’s gift of life is so generous, and its imagery so scintillant in the sunlight of love, that we believe every word.

A H
APPY
D
EATH
, by Albert Camus, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 192 pp. Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Albert Camus’ first novel,
A Happy Death
, which he did not allow to be published during his lifetime, has now been issued in a handsome, annotated edition. Read in conjunction with the other writings of the young Camus—the notebooks begun in 1935, the two small collections of essays
The Wrong Side and the Right Side
(1937) and
Nuptials
(1938), the play
Caligula
(composed in 1938 but not performed until 1945), and his second novel, the classic
The Stranger
(completed in 1940 and published in 1942)—his first attempt at extended fiction offers an instructive lesson in the strategies of the imagination. Though shot through with brilliant rays,
A Happy Death
is a chunky, labored work, cumbersome for all its brevity, so cluttered with false starts and halting intentions that it occludes its own themes. In Camus’ published
Notebooks
, it first appears as some chapter titles listed in January of 1936, when he was twenty-two; the last relevant notation occurs in March of 1939, when work on
The Stranger
was well advanced. An entry in June of 1938—“Rewrite novel”—implies a finished draft of
A Happy Death
by that time, but a month earlier, in a sketch of a funeral in an old people’s home,
The Stranger
had begun to germinate, and some months later the uncanny, chilling first sentences of the masterpiece were written out intact. During the interval when passages for both novels compete in the
Notebooks
, those relating to
A Happy Death
suffer by comparison, seeming febrile and flaccid amid the sharp glimpses of the novel eventually published. Wisely, Camus let the first novel be consumed by the second, reusing a number of descriptions, recasting the main theme (a happy death), and
transforming the hero’s name by the addition of a
u
—Mersault, the man of sea and sun, darkening to Meursault, with its shadow of
meurtre
, of murder. Technically, the third-person method of
A Happy Death
, frequently an awkward vehicle for alter egos (see, see the sensitive young man light his cigarette; now let’s eavesdrop on his thoughts), becomes the hypnotic, unabashed first-person voice of
The Stranger
. Substantively, Camus has located, outside of autobiography, the Archimedean point wherefrom he can acquire leverage upon his world. Often in art less is more, and one must depart to arrive. In the first novel, the author fumbles, trying to pick himself up by too many handles, and growing more handles in the process; in the second, he takes a short but decisive side-step, becomes less himself, and with this achieved narrowness penetrates to the heart of his
raison d’écrire
.

The youthful Camus evidently had many attributes of a normal Algerian working-class lout. He liked soccer, girls, beachbumming, movie-going, and idleness. He had decided, one feels, to cherish the image of himself as a citizen of the Belcourt slums, a spiritual mate to the proletariat of whom he wrote, in “Summer in Algiers”:

The Camus whose gifts for reflection and self-improvement were early recognized and nurtured by a grade-school teacher, the Camus who entered the
lycée
at the age of ten, who studied philosophy at the University of Algiers from 1932 to 1936, who by the age of twenty-five was a working, travelling, published intellectual and the mastermind of a theatre group—this Camus figures little in the early essays or in the character of Mersault. Mersault, though his consciousness is brushed by philosophical speculation, confesses no ambition for his future and almost never reflects on his past.

By any standards, Camus’ upbringing had been bleak. His father, an agricultural laborer, was killed in the Battle of the Marne ten months after Albert was born. His mother, a Spaniard, took the infant and his
older brother Lucien from the village of Mondovi to the poor district of Algiers, where she became a cleaning woman. Camus was raised in a ménage that included his mother, a partially paralyzed uncle, and a domineering grandmother. These three adults were all illiterate and, in various ways, ill. The grandmother eventually died of cancer of the liver; Camus wrote of her, “She fainted very easily after family discussions. She also suffered from painful vomiting caused by a liver complaint. But she showed not the slightest discretion in the practice of her illness. Far from shutting herself away, she would vomit noisily into the kitchen garbage can.” His mother, he wrote, “could think only with difficulty”; deafness, a speech impediment, and a docile temper combined to enforce a habit of silence. Camus once described his literary career as the attempt to speak for the “silent mother”—the inarticulate and disenfranchised of society. An early sketch portrays a grandmother who persistently asks a child, “Whom do you like best? Your mother or your grandmother?”

Death for a father, silence for a mother: with such a parentage, Camus would never become a fluent or frivolous creator. At the moment of beginning his first novel, what, indeed, was his artistic treasure? A good education, a normal sensuality, a fond ear for working-class dialect, a rapturous sensitivity to nature, a conviction that paganism was being reborn around him in Europeanized North Africa. “For twenty centuries, men have strived to impose decency on the insolence and simplicity of the Greeks, to diminish the flesh and elaborate our dress. Today, reaching back over this history, young men sprinting on the Mediterranean beaches are rediscovering the magnificent motions of the athletes of Delos.” Two events in his early maturity urged him toward energetic use of his capabilities: in 1930 he nearly died of tuberculosis, and in 1934 he joined the Communist Party. Yet always, in the heart of this young man, coexistent with the desire to celebrate and explicate, lay an unshakable lassitude and a blankness. Caligula (a part Camus wrote for himself to act) says, “There’s something deep down in me—an abyss of silence, a pool of stagnant water, rotting weeds.” At the age of forty-five, great in
fame and accomplishment, Camus wrote of “the profound indifference that haunts me like a natural infirmity.” Around this natural infirmity, then, the novice artist must shape his strategies—no, not around it; he must point himself
into
it, for this silence is his message.