A Bonfire

Page by page, the flames transformed paper and ink to ash, and more ash. Into the fire went letters from girlfriends, from teachers, from school chums. It was an unexpected act of destruction for the young man who vowed in his notebook to produce an œuvre, a body of literature, within two years. He underlined the word œuvre with a thick stroke of his pen, three times.

He burned the letters in October 1939, a month after France declared war on Germany. Troops were mobilized, waiting on the Maginot Line. Albert Camus, unfit for military service, journalist at a newspaper about to be shut down by the government, was staying with his mother in the apartment where he'd lived for the first seventeen years of his life. A three-room flat on the rue de Lyon in Belcourt, the working-class neighborhood of Algiers. The place was sparsely furnished, with shared toilets on the landing — impoverished, even by the standards of working-class Europeans in Algeria. His brother, three years older, had married and moved downtown; his grandmother was dead. Only his mother remained, and his Uncle Étienne, both of them deaf and nearly mute. The flat was a shabby, silent place.

Albert Camus was twenty-five years old that October 1939. His hooded eyes were grayish green and his brown hair was combed straight back, emphasizing his high forehead. If you had to guess a nationality, you might see something Spanish in his prideful gaze — his mother's people were from Minorca, one of the Balearic Islands. After work he favored fashionably baggy high-waisted trousers and plaid shirts, but in his job as a reporter he was never without a coat and a tie, and a trench coat or tweed overcoat. His face was handsome, but not so handsome as to be uninteresting. Something horsey and asymmetrical about his face, despite his fine features, gave him an expressive force that moved deftly from comic to tragic, from gangster to prince. His scrawny chest, his long legs and arms, his broad hands and physical grace made him seem taller than five feet eight. He was a passionate, deliberate young man whose energy overflowed the small rooms and low ceilings of his childhood.

He dragged out the two trunks of correspondence he had left in the apartment for safekeeping, set himself up in front of the tiny stove in the empty parlor, and fed the pages to the flames in crumpled heaps. "I have five years less weighing on my heart," he wrote to Francine Faure, his fiancée, after the bonfire did its work. It must have taken him a long time. Five years in the life of an ambitious young writer means a lot of paper.

That apartment was the place where he felt most deeply, where he'd honed his sense of observation, his ear for language, and his sense of what he began to call, from the wisdom of his twenty-five years, the absurd. He had studied the absurd in philosophy class, but his own sense of the concept came from his own body, from an illness contracted at age seventeen that threatened his sensual delight in the world around him. All men were condemned to death, some sooner than others. It was absurd not only that life was finite but also that humans were meaningless before the physical world. He was determined that his first important artistic creations be born out of these simple truths.

* * *

In the jargon of the colonies, you would say that Albert Camus came of age in a world of petits blancs (little white men) or petits colons (small-time settlers): "poor white trash" would be too harsh a translation for an expression that meant a working-class European who was neither a colonizer — a big landowner — nor a disenfranchised native. He was part of a settler class, at the bottom of the European hierarchy but with privileges of race and citizenship virtually unknown to the native population. He grew up in Algiers, a city of mixed ethnicities — Spanish, French, Arab, Berber, Jewish — in a country conquered in 1830, which France had not only colonized but annexed, turning the territory into three départements (states).

Though technically they were living in France, most Algerians, whatever their ethnicity, had never seen the mainland. That was the case for Camus's father, Lucien, who saw France for the first time as a soldier in the Battle of the Marne, where he promptly lost his life. Albert was less than a year old. His father's death made him a "pupil of the nation" — a scholarship student. His mother worked as a cleaning lady; his uncle made barrels. School gave him his chance. A primary school teacher named Louis Germain recognized his talent and talked his grandmother, the real head of household, into letting him go on to secondary school rather than start an apprenticeship like his brother Lucien. For a boy from this family, from this neighborhood, going on to lycée was an almost unheard-of step, transporting him into a totally unfamiliar environment.

Albert Camus was a child who could barely sit still, whose exuberance in class, on the soccer field, at the beach, was exceptional. He was a force of nature, physically unstoppable until, in 1930, at age seventeen, he began to cough up blood. He'd contracted tuberculosis. He was sent to live with his uncle Gustave Acault, a butcher who had a ground-floor flat on the rue Languedoc with a large library and a courtyard garden. His uncle's comfortable home became a refuge for Camus, the place where he began to read seriously and where he could eat regular portions of red meat, considered essential for a cure. He was told he might die, and if he were lucky, he faced a lifetime of repeated treatments: months of bed rest, x-rays, and injections to collapse the affected lung so that it might heal.

The diagnosis coincided with his most formative intellectual relationship. In 1930, Camus met Jean Grenier, his lycée and then his university teacher, who guided his early reading and encouraged him to take the double path of philosophy and literature. Writing became essential, a conquest of the silence he grew up with and a compensation for the breath that began to elude him. Still only seventeen, he wrote literature and music criticism in a student magazine, Sud, with an acumen beyond his years, and he started to draft the barely disguised scenes from his childhood that he would transform, over the next seven years, into a first collection of...