In a post a couple of months ago, I wrote about the wild and often elusive journey that a piece of art can take. Often with art, as with life, we don’t know what the final result will be or what our efforts will produce. But it’s imperative that we push through obstacles and discouragement, even if the original plan seems to be falling apart. In many ways, the story told in this book — Looking For the Stranger, by Alice Kaplan — typifies this lesson.
Publication of Camus’s The Stranger was always an uncertain matter. The immense success and influence it would come to have — on both sides of the Atlantic, for both Camus’s generation and following ones — could hardly have been predicted. Yet his slim novel, along with many of his other works, graces library and bookstore shelves and lives permanently on the syllabi of philosophy and literature courses. The success of his writing is abundantly clear.
Born in 1913, in Algeria, Albert Camus grew up in quite dismal circumstances. The family was poor, Camus’s father had died in World War I, and his mother (as well as an uncle) was virtually deaf. Kaplan describes in the book how growing up in a “silent household” influenced Camus, in both life and work. Indeed, the object-centered orientation that Kaplan brings up when discussing the stylistic aspects of The Stranger reflects this silent world that he inhabited. Not all of Kaplan’s analyses about this apparent source of influence are convincing, but they are intriguing nonetheless.
As for an education, Camus lucked out more than he did with material comforts. He was fortunate to have guidance and encouragement from teachers, and in fact his education probably would have ceased after its traditional ending had it not been for one teacher who encouraged him. Thanks to this emotional support, Camus would go on to earn the equivalent of an MA in philosophy. Along the way he would form several important relationships while maintaining old ones, including one with a teacher named Jean Grenier.
Grenier was an enormous influence on Camus, in the form of both interlocutor and model. Grenier taught, wrote, and embodied the kind of life that Camus more or less sought. Camus himself wanted to be a teacher — which he figured would allow him time for writing — but the tuberculous from which he suffered meant that the government would be unwilling to make an investment in him. As a result, teaching was ruled out.
Grenier is a figure that Kaplan describes at one point as “the fussy and often disapproving teacher”; and indeed Camus did not always like what Grenier had to say. Kaplan illustrates this most clearly in her discussion on Grenier’s reception of Camus’s A Happy Death and The Stranger manuscripts. Grenier could be harsh, sometimes selfish, and it would irritate Camus that Grenier failed to understand his work or try spin conversations so that it was always about his own work. However, despite the sometimes chaotic and emotional exchanges between the two, there’s no doubt that Grenier played a prominent role in Camus’s development.
Another pivotal figure in Camus’s life was Pascal Pia. It was through Pia (who was, among other things, a journalist) that Camus would get a job writing for the newspaper Alger-Republicain. Camus was not thrilled with this line of work, but it did provide him with a job. And the stories he covered and the experiences he gained proved to be influential in his writing of The Stranger. Kaplan writes of Camus’s time at the paper that he learned “He could wrestle with justice and sometimes affect its course” (p. 37). Camus became intimate with the court and saw a variety of injustices played out.
While Camus was writing for newspapers (after Alger-Republicain he worked at Paris-Soir) he worked on his own writing (including a play called Caligula, part of his plan for an absurdist trilogy). Productivity waxed and waned, but eventually the stalled novel of A Happy Death gave way to the inception of The Stranger. And, on May 1, 1940, Camus was finally able to write in his notebooks that he had completed the novel.
On June 3 of that same year, however, Paris experienced its first air raid of the war. So much of Camus’s writing took place within the chaotic midst of World War II, and it’s this context of continuous upheaval that really shows how uncertain it was that Camus’s novel would ever see the light of day — let alone go on to have an international audience.
But slowly Camus’s manuscript found its way into the right hands. Pia, a very well-connected individual, was prominent in facilitating this. On Dec. 8, 1941, Camus received a letter of acceptance from Gaston Gallimard. Obstacles still remained — “the cultural branch of the occupying forces determined the fate of every new book by veto, by censor, or by an allocation of paper for a few, or many copies” (p. 140) — but this hurdle was overcome and the book finally came to be printed.
The Stranger received mixed reviews and stirred up a variety of intense reactions. Most notable among these was Jean-Paul Sartre’s response (an overall positive one) and it was his voice that helped solidify Camus’s book as one worthy of attention. Kaplan writes, “The attention he paid to Camus, the seriousness of his analysis, defined The Stranger as an essential contemporary novel. Once Sartre had spoken, the Stranger’s future was all but guaranteed.”
The journey of Camus’s novel — from its inchoate ideas which first lingered in the pages of A Happy Death to its publication in the environment of war-torn France — is fascinating. The twists and turns are everywhere, and there were countless times when the novel could have been abandoned or failed to find a publisher.
As for Kaplan’s Looking for the Stranger itself, the book is thoroughly researched and detailed, but she might have done a better job at times of being clear about what is conjecture (be it her own or someone else’s) and what is fact. In one place, for example, she quotes Camus writing to Francine (his girlfriend and then wife) about “viscous rainy spring nights”; she then writes immediately after this quote, “[This] longing from home was a powerful inspiration when he portrayed Meursault lying in his cell, cataloging every object in every inch of his room.” While this might very well be true — Kaplan is the expert, after all — it wasn’t clear to me how she knows this. The endnote cites nothing more than the letter. Is this apparent source of motivation, then, Kaplan’s conjecture? Are there other hints of this contained in the letter? Is there some additional source she’s drawing on? It wasn’t clear to me.
The prose of the book can be somewhat dull, and the story never feels consistently conveyed with a kind of regular movement that might have helped make it more entertaining. And while Kaplan does her best to add vividness to the creation of The Stranger — by peering over Camus’s shoulder, as it were, with her close third-person narration — I’m not sure this amounts to a more entertaining reading experience than it would have with a more distanced, and slightly less intimate, narration. In fact, in some places (as mentioned above) it might even have contributed to some ambiguity in the analyses.
On the whole, Looking for the Stranger is worth reading, though it’s strongest appeal will almost certainly be to passionate devotees of Camus’s life and work.
Spectatio 