The deep, clear water, the hot sun, the girls, the physical life – there was no other form of happiness in this country. (page 49)

Camus’s later writings are more literary than logical. His biggest attempt at a philosophical work, L’Homme révolté, met with such harsh criticism on its publication in 1951 that he never again attempted a full philosophical work. Instead these later writings rotate around ‘ideas’, which are really more like symbols, complexes of meaning and emotion, with as much psychological or sociological as logical content.

For example, the early idea of the Absurd, which he developed in the 1930s/early 1940s drops away and is replaced by the more wide-ranging, richer idea of ‘exile’. ‘Exile’ can have several meanings:

1. The philosophical or maybe spiritual meaning of ‘exile’ is brought out in the section of The Rebel which deals with Nietzsche:

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ‘the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?’

In the godless universe, where on earth can the thoughtful man feel at home?

2. But ‘exile’ can also refer to literal exile from one’s homeland, legal banishment, expulsion from your community. Many of the revolutionaries who figure in The Rebel were unhappy exiles, in fact exile is often an intrinsic aspect of the life of l’homme révolté.

3. And there is a third sense of exile, biographically specific to Camus, whose life was stricken when his homeland, Algeria, rose up in revolt against French colonialism and the untroubled paradise of his boyhood memories ceased to exist, becoming instead a site of murder and torture, which it was now very dangerous to return to. He found himself exiled from this childhood.

‘Where can I feel at home?’

All these forms of exiles are looking, in their different ways, for ‘the kingdom’, real or imaginary, which they can return to, where they will finally feel ‘at home’, where exile will end, where values and meaning, love and security, will be found.

This polarity, this tension, this plight, is, as Camus himself might have put it, the climate in which the six short stories in Exile and the Kingdom were all written, the situation which, in different ways, they each explore.

1. La Femme adultère (The Adulterous Woman)
2. Le Renégat ou un esprit confus (The Renegade or a Confused Spirit)
3. Les Muets (The Silent Men)
4. L’Hôte (The Guest)
5. Jonas ou l’artiste au travail (Jonas or the Artist at Work)
6. La Pierre qui pousse (The Growing Stone)

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1. The Adulterous Woman (La Femme adultère)

The woman is Janine, tall, middle-aged but still alluring. She married short, bug-eyed Marcel, not so much because she was attracted to him, but because he so obviously needed her. His love made her real. That was 25 years ago, when Marcel was an ambitious law student. Things have changed. When his parents gave up their dry goods business, Marcel decided to abandon the law in order to run it. Then the war came with its privations. Soon their joy rides in the car stopped, the outings to the seaside ceased. Marcel became obsessed by the business. She became a shop-keeper’s wife. They had no children. Her life became entombed in the shuttered apartment above the shop.

After the war Marcel wanted to expand his sales to ‘the villages of the Upper Plateaus and of the South’, and that is why she is sitting jammed up next to him on the hard seat of a filthy local bus bumping its way through a sandstorm on the edge of the desert in the freezing cold.

They get to a town and Janine tags along after Marcel as he tries to sell his wares to Arab merchants. They end up going up onto the parapet of the local fort and looking out over the cold stony desert. They go to bed, Marcel falls asleep. But Janine is tormented by the lost years and the vanished opportunities.

She sneaks out of bed along the hotel corridor, and then runs through the dark streets back to the fort and up the stairs to the parapet where she looks up into the billions of stars in the freezing black sky and has an epiphany.

Not a breath, not a sound – except at

intervals the muffled crackling of stones that the cold was reducing to sand – disturbed the solitude and silence surrounding Janine. After a moment, however, it seemed to her that the sky above her was moving in a sort of slow gyration. In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon. Janine could not tear herself away from contemplating those drifting flares. She was turning with them, and the apparently stationary progress little by little identified her with the core of her being, where cold and desire were now vying with each other. Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last. At the same time, she seemed to recover her roots and the sap again rose in her body, which had ceased trembling. Her whole belly pressed against the parapet as she strained toward the moving sky; she was merely waiting for her fluttering heart to calm down and establish silence within her. The last stars of the constellations dropped their clusters a little lower on the desert horizon and became still. Then, with unbearable gentleness, the water of night began to fill Janine, drowned the cold, rose gradually from the hidden core of her being and overflowed in wave after wave, rising up even to her mouth full of moans. The next moment, the whole sky stretched out over her, fallen on her back on the cold earth. (Page 29)

What with the lying prone and the moans it would be easy to interpret this as some kind of sexual experience. And the title – the adulterous woman – suggests that she is being sexually unfaithful (somehow). But I think that’s too easy.

In the last few sentences Janine retraces her steps to the cheap hotel, slips back into bed beside Marcel, who wakes up to find her weeping inconsolably.

Camus had a kind of gift for making everything he wrote seem pregnant with meaning, with allegory or symbolism. But the obvious level of meaning is, here, also the most powerful. It is a story about loss – lost time, lost life, lost love, the loss which is somehow central to life.

2. The Renegade or a Confused Spirit (Le Renégat ou un esprit confus)

This is a weird one, a real oddity in the Camus I’ve read so far. It is the dramatic soliloquy of a man who’s gone mad. He was a not very bright student at a theological seminary. He came out to Algeria to preach the Word of God. He had a personal mission/obsession with suffering, with undergoing ‘the offence’ all the better to demonstrate to the heathen how superior his God was, how it enabled him to turn the other cheek, and so on. So he ran away from his seminary in Algeria heading south until he reached the region around Taghaza in the country to the south of Algeria, Mali.

Here he was captured by brutal, pagan ‘natives’ who tortured and beat him. He was imprisoned in their ‘House of the Fetish’, home of a primitive idol, and here he witnesses various holy ceremonies conducted by the Sorcerer, which include beating a number of native women and then choosing one to mate with, like an animal, in the face of the Fetish.

The narrator is imprisoned in this pitch black hut made of salt and mud and fed on grain thrown onto the floor, while defecating in a hole he gouges. He is reduced to a condition of complete animality. On one occasion a native woman enters and apparently offers herself to him sexually, which he is beginning to act on when the Sorcerer and other tribesmen enter, beat him up and then tear out his tongue, making him pass out with pain. He comes round to find his bloody mouth stuffed with grass.

As his brutal treatment continues the narrator makes the transition to becoming the willing slave of the Fetish, a wordless devotee of the tribe and its god.

All this is being narrated as flashbacks from a ‘present’ in which he is lying in wait for a missionary. He heard, from his prison inside the House of the Fetish, French voices, apparently two army officers explaining that they are going to garrison twenty men outside the village to guarantee the safety of a Christian missionary who is on his way. The slave narrator decides to escape the House of the Fetish and kill the missionary. He wants to spark an incident, to get the French to retaliate against the tribe in order to cause a Holy War, and (in his fantasies) prompt the tribe to invade and conquer Europe overthrowing the wretched God which he now curses and despises.

And so, through the slave’s garbled consciousness, we gather that he does indeed waylay the missionary and beat him to death, as he tells us how good it feels to strike ‘goodness’ in the face with a rifle butt.

I laugh, I laugh, the fellow is writhing in his detested habit, he is raising his head a little, he sees me – me his all-powerful shackled master, why does he smile at me, I’ll crush that smile! How pleasant is the sound of a rifle butt on the face of goodness…

But the tribe has noticed his absence and come looking for him, and start to beat him up. As they approach, knowing he’s going to be punished, beaten, humiliated again, the narrator experiences a confused longing to escape, to be free of his demented damaged mind, to go home.

Here, here who are you, torn, with bleeding mouth, is it you, Sorcerer, the soldiers defeated you, the salt is burning over there, it’s you my beloved master! Cast off that hate-ridden face, be good now, we were mistaken, we’ll begin all over again, we’ll rebuild the city of mercy, I want to go back home.

But here, right at the end of the ‘story’, there is one short throwaway last line, apparently spoken by a new, third-person, narrator, which brutally describes the demented man’s pitiful death.

A handful of salt fills the mouth of the garrulous slave.

***********

Wow. This is a strong story, a fierce imagining, told in a rambling, demented style completely different from Camus’s usual philosophical detachment (the gra gra describes the sound he makes with his tongueless mouth), with long disjointed sentences conveying the persona’s mad raving.

What a jumble, what a rage, gra gra, drunk with heat and wrath, lying prostrate on my gun. Who’s panting here? I can’t endure this endless heat, this waiting, I must kill him. Not a bird, not a blade of grass, stone, an arid desire, their screams, this tongue within me talking, and, since they mutilated me, the long, flat, deserted suffering deprived even of the water of night, the night of which I would dream, when locked in with the god, in my den of salt. (p.48)

Literary critics have gone to town with numerous interpretations and the ideas invoked – colonialism, Christianity, the death of God, his replacement by a savage idol, sexual submission maybe rape, the denying of language to the white man (his tongue being torn out), his Stockholm Syndrome identification with his tormentors, his mad nihilist desire to provoke a Holy War and the conquest of Europe by Muslims hordes – there’s plenty of dots here to join up more or less any way you want.

I choose a psychological interpretation. I think it is Camus letting off steam in what amounts to a really long cry of agony.

3. The Silent Men (Les Muets)

They are silent because these men, the handful who work at a small cask-manufacturing workshop in a city on the coast, had gone out on strike for twenty days but then, eventually, been forced back to work for the usual reasons – the need for money, the refusal of the boss to back down. And so they file one by one into the knackered old workshop and, in silence, start up the old routines of work.

One by one, they went to their posts without saying a word. Ballester went from one to another, briefly reminding them of the work to be begun or finished. No one answered. Soon the first hammer resounded against the iron-tipped wedge sinking a hoop over the convex part of a barrel, a plane groaned as it hit a knot, and one of the saws, started up by Esposito, got under way with a great whirring of blade. Saïd would bring staves on request or light fires of shavings on which the casks were placed to make them swell in their corset of iron hoops. When no one called for him, he stood at a workbench riveting the big rusty hoops with heavy hammer blows. The scent of burning shavings began to fill the shop. Yvars, who was planing and fitting the staves cut out by Esposito, recognized the old scent and his heart relaxed somewhat. All were working in silence, but a warmth, a life was gradually beginning to reawaken in the shop. Through the broad windows a clean, fresh light began to fill the shed. The smoke rose bluish in the golden sunlight; Yvars even heard an insect buzz close to him.

The owner, M. Lassalle, tries to be friendly with his workers but they all resolutely silent. He thinks they’re sulking, but as Yvars, the lead figure in the story, explains to himself, that:

they were not sulking, that their mouths had been closed, they had to take it or leave it, and that anger and helplessness sometimes hurt so much that you can’t even cry out. They were men, after all, and they weren’t going to begin smiling and simpering.

I liked this story very much because it’s about work and manual labour at that, and so, for once, Camus actually gives sustained descriptions of things, of the world around him, rather than his usual retreat into characters’ feelings which almost always become extreme meditations on death and God and meaninglessness and so on.

It’s an oddity that the man who made so many general statements about the joyful physicality of the body really devoted so few pages to its description. I’ve done scores of manual labouring jobs. I grew up in a village shop and gas station, working in the shop from age 11, working on the pumps from age 16 and then working in the dark, oily, noisy tyre bay, handling the long heavy wheel jacks and the pneumatic bolt remover to undo the bolts holding a wheel to the car axle, alongside other lads swapping banter, walking past the Pirelli calendar on the wall, washing your hands in the tub of swarfega, sitting outside sharing a fag in the sun between jobs.

Descriptions of work, real physical work, of manual labour, are so rare in polite and ‘serious’ fiction that I always relish them.

Again the hammers rang out, the big shed filled with the familiar din, with the smell of shavings and of old clothes damp with sweat. The big saw whined and bit into the fresh wood of the stave that Esposito was slowly pushing in front of him. Where the saw bit, a damp sawdust spurted out and covered with something like bread-crumbs the big hairy hands firmly gripping the wood on each side of the moaning blade. Once the stave was ripped, you could hear only the sound of the motor.

There is a story of sorts, more an incident. Half way through the afternoon the foreman, Ballester, rushes through to say the owner’s little girl has had a fit. He dashes off to fetch an ambulance, which arrives soon after. At the end of the day the owner returns to the workshop to say a very pale and listless goodbye. Now the workmen don’t know what to say because they are embarrassed by their emotions of pity and compassion which, being rough men, they can’t express.

And so the story contains two kinds of silent men, or men who are silent in two ways. Even in this slight text Camus can’t help being schematic.

Yvars cycles home, admiring the darkening sea. He is 40 now, married to Fernande and they have a school-age son. He wishes he was 20 again and could go swimming in the warm sea. More than that,

If only he were young again, and Fernande too, they would have gone away, across the sea.

Another man who lives where he has lived all his life, who has a job, a wife and child but… but… somehow is not at home.

4. The Guest (L’Hôte)

Daru is schoolteacher in a really remote part of southern Algeria, atop a barren plateau. This year has seen an appalling drought, with Daru becoming a distribution point for government food aid. Now it has suddenly and unexpectedly snowed, in the middle of October. He’s looking out the schoolroom window when he sees figures approaching. It’s the local gendarme, Balducci, riding a horse and leading an Arab on foot with his hands tied together.

They greet Daru who welcomes them inside. Balducci explains that the Arab (who is never named) is under arrest for murdering his cousin in a nearby village, apparently in an argument over grain, cutting his throat like a sheep. Now the Arab is docile, edgy, silent.

To Daru’s horror, Balducci announces that he’s handing over the prisoner to Daru, going back to his post, and it will be Daru’s responsibility to take the prisoner on to the police headquarters at Tinguit! Daru emphatically doesn’t want the responsibility. He doesn’t want to be involved. It’s not his business. Nonetheless, Balducci makes Daru sign a document accepting responsibility, then leaves, first giving Daru his spare revolver.

There follows an uneasy night. Daru behaves decently if gruffly. He undoes the rope binding the Arab’s hands and makes them both some food. The Arab appears puzzled by this kindness but, after some hesitation, eats. Then Daru makes up two camp beds in the schoolroom, but lies there awake. In the middle of the night there is the promise of some excitement when Daru becomes aware that the Arab is getting up, with infinite slowness and stealth.

You and I have seen a thousand Hollywood thrillers so we’re expecting the Arab to make a move on the apparently asleep Daru. So does Daru. He pretends to be asleep and watches the Arab, in the event, quietly leave the schoolroom. Daru breathes a long sigh of relief thinking his onerous responsibility is over. Except that a few moments later the Arab returns. He had gone to the loo. After this act of not attacking him or escaping, Daru is able to fall asleep.

Next morning he makes them both breakfast and then orders the Arab to get dressed and follow him. He leads him some way south of the school building but then stops the Arab and hands him a package of food and 1,000 French Francs. Darus is not going to take him anywhere.

Instead Daru shows the Arab two alternative routes: the track south leads to the nomads who will give him shelter. Then he shows the track heading east. A day’s travel in that direction is the police station at Tinguit. It’s the Arab’s free decision.

Daru turns and heads back towards the school. After a little way he turns and looks and sees the Arab still standing in the same spot. OK. Daru continues. Closer to the school he turns again and at first can see no-one in either direction. Then, straining his eyes, he realises he can make out the figure of the Arab amid the vast stony waste of the desert. He is on the path east to Tinguit, presumably to hand himself in.

Is this a comment on the docility, the lack of independent-mindedness, the village stupidity of the Arab? Or his sense of honour? Or his reluctance to hand himself over to the nomads?

Whatever the Arab’s motivation, Daru grunts and returns to his school building. But not to his former life. That is gone for good. For on the blackboard he finds a simple sentence has been scrawled, presumably by Algerian rebels: ‘You handed over our brother. You will pay for this.’ Daru thought he had behaved decently. He thought he had given the Arab the freedom to choose his destiny. He thought he’s managed not to get embroiled in the conflict between the Algerian rebels and the French authorities. Looks like he was wrong on all counts.

Daru looked at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invisible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.

This story really sums up a lot of the qualities of Camus’s prose and fiction which you hear so much about. The setting is bleak and elemental. The prose is pared down and simple. It is factual, descriptive, minimal, and yet pregnant with meaning.

The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One was on horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the schoolhouse built on the hillside. They were toiling onward, making slow progress in the snow, among the stones, on the vast expanse of the high, deserted plateau. From time to time the horse stumbled. Without hearing anything yet, he could see the breath issuing from the horse’s nostrils.

Interpretation

Like almost all Camus’s story it is a parable, designed to have higher meanings read into it.

1. Contemporary readers had no difficulty reading it as a comment on the by now three years-old Algerian War (which started in 1954). Daru is caught between two worlds. Not part of metropolitan French culture, but not part of the native Arab world. The French authorities try to drag him into the conflict. He refuses to take part, insists on treating the Arab decently, and even gives him his freedom to decide his fate. Although this could also be interpreted as trying to shirk his responsibilities. But, either way, his fine intentions are turned to dust by the last-page promise of revenge. He is caught up in the conflict whether he wants to or not, regardless of what he does.

2. There is also the ‘existentialist’ interpretation. (Camus insisted he wasn’t an existentialist – ‘I do not have much liking for the famous existential philosophy and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false’, Resistance, Rebellion and death, page 58 – and Sartre said he wasn’t an existentialist, and having looked at their respective philosophies I am perfectly clear why Camus wasn’t an existentialist – nonetheless, when you read essays about him many if not most commentators casually describe him as an existentialist.)

Anyway, the existentialist focuses on the image of a man alone in the vast desert, abandoned by God etc, thrown back on himself. According to Sartrean existentialism, he has to create himself by means of his actions, which are utterly free, for which he must assume complete responsibility. Thus he shrugs off the duty imposed by the state and acts out his independence. But according to Camus’s very different philosophy of the Absurd, Daru rebels not only against the duty imposed on him, but also against the world of blood and death which the Arab represents. He seeks – as the long argument of Camus’s philosophical work, The Rebel, requires, to revolt against the world of bloodshed and against the world of binary choices – France v. Algeria. He seeks to create a space for individual freedom and dignity. He gives the Arab his own choice and human dignity back.

In this reading, the final message on the blackboard asserts the primacy of Camus’s philosophy of the Absurd over Sartre’s philosophy of freedom because it highlights the limits of Daru’s freedom. We can only operate within the restraints of the society around us. We are not absolutely free, as Sartre claims.

3. A third interpretation simply picks up the theme of exile. A long passage describes the impact of the summer-long drought on the villagers of the region and Daru’s role in trying to help them. It is designed to show the primal experiences and human solidarity which tie Daru to this bleak barren landscape. And by extension suggest the huge tug Camus felt for the land where he grew up and where he felt tremendous solidarity with the poorest of the poor pieds noirs, the most impoverished of the European settlers in Algeria, and therefore the acute pain of his exile once the war began.

The little room was cluttered with bags of wheat that the administration left as a stock to distribute to those of his pupils whose families had suffered from the drought. Actually they had all been victims because they were all poor. Every day Daru would distribute a ration to the children. They had missed it, he knew, during these bad days [of the recent snowfall]. Possibly one of the fathers or big brothers would come this afternoon and he could supply them with grain. It was just a matter of carrying them over to the next harvest. Now shiploads of wheat were arriving from France and the worst was over. But it would be hard to forget that poverty, that army of ragged ghosts wandering in the sunlight, the plateaus burned to a cinder month after month, the earth shriveled up little by little, literally scorched, every stone bursting into dust under one’s foot. The sheep had died then by thousands and even a few men, here and there, sometimes without anyone’s knowing. In contrast with such poverty, he who lived almost like a monk in his remote schoolhouse, nonetheless satisfied with the little he had and with the rough life, had felt like a lord with his whitewashed walls, his narrow couch, his unpainted shelves, his well, and his weekly provision of water and food. And suddenly this snow, without warning, without the foretaste of rain. This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without men – who didn’t help matters either. But Daru had been born here. Everywhere else, he felt exiled.

5. Jonas or the Artist at Work (Jonas ou l’artiste au travail)

Astonishingly, this is a comedy. Yes, it’s funny. Many parts of it could come from Oscar Wilde or Saki, with their dry sardonic humour. Even the protagonist’s name is English – Gilbert Jonas is an artist. Usually Camus’s stories are set in real time: the previous four stories all take place in the course of a day, or 24 hours, or even a brief hour or so with flashbacks (as in The Renegade). But this story gives a bird’s eye view, so to speak, of Gilbert’s entire career, his appearance, his rise, his peak and his fall.

There are numerous incidents but the outline is simple: Gilbert casually takes up painting; to his surprise his work is popular, he acquires an agent who successfully sells it. He allows himself to be married to sweet Louise who loves him with a selfless devotion, and they move into a cramped apartment characterised by an enormous studio with high windows. But as word gets around fashionable Paris, critics and society ladies drop by his little apartment, followed by disciples asking his opinion of their work, the phone is ringing all the time with invitations to lunch or dinner, his wife produces one, two, three babies who are parked around the flat, bawling continuously, until Gilbert is living in a state of siege.

His friend, Rateau, sardonically observes his friend’s rise into fan-infested chaos, observing his productivity slowly drop off, and also his inspiration. Gilbert finds himself going out during the day to avoid the scrum of fans and socialites in his flat, at first to find ‘subjects’ in the streets and parks but quickly taking comfort in snug little cafés and then in the snug little arms of the complaisant women he encounters there.

Drunk and unfaithful, his output tails off, until a tear-stricken scene with the faithful Louise reveals all and he promises to reform. But the crowds continue to throng the studio and they are now joined by Louise’s sister and her daughter, come to help, so that eventually Gilbert constructs a kind of loft flat high up in the big studio room, climbing up there by a ladder each morning and not coming down. His fans, his disciples, the critics and the ladies who lunch decide he is being hoity-toity now he is famous and start to abandon him. Rateau hears the critics dismissing his work and a once-loyal disciple remarking that Jonas is now ‘finished’. His agent calls to say sales are falling off and he will have to reduce his monthly stipend to Gilbert. But Gilbert sits every day in his loft, oblivious to the world around him, his eyes glazed over, now reduced to complete inactivity, staring blankly at an empty canvas all day long.

**********

The story is an obvious satire on the perils of fame, and of the type of people who infest Paris’s intellectual world. But it’s actually quite a simple-minded portrait. In its simplicity it kept reminding me of Oscar Wilde’s elegant witty fairy tales for children. It has a tenderness, a gentleness and charm which are all the more surprising when set against the unremittingly harsh, bleak, bare desert world of the other stories. Here is Gilbert gently struggling to conceal from his wife that her stealthy creeping around the studio puts him off painting much more than loud bold interruptions would do. There is a sweet kindness in every sentence and in the entire sentiment which is missing from pretty much everything else Camus published.

But when the rooms were full of paintings and children, they had to think up a new arrangement.
Before the birth of the third child, in fact, Jonas worked in the big room, Louise knitted in the bedroom, while the two children occupied the last room, raised a great rumpus there, and also tumbled at will throughout the rest of the apartment. They agreed to put the newborn in a corner of the studio, which Jonas walled off by propping up his canvases like a screen; this offered the advantage of having the baby within earshot and being able to answer his calls. Besides, Jonas never needed to bestir himself, for Louise forestalled him. She wouldn’t wait until the baby cried before entering the studio, though with every possible precaution and always on tiptoe. Jonas, touched by such discretion, one day assured Louise that he was not so sensitive and could easily go on working despite the noise of her steps. Louise replied that she was also aiming not to waken the baby. Jonas, full of admiration for the workings of the maternal instinct, laughed heartily at his misunderstanding. As a result, he didn’t dare confess that Louise’s cautious entries bothered him more than an out-and-out invasion. First, because they lasted longer, and secondly because they followed a pantomime in which Louise – her arms outstretched, her shoulders thrown back, and her leg raised high – could not go unnoticed. This method even went against her avowed intentions, since Louise constantly ran the risk of bumping into one of the canvases with which the studio was cluttered. At such moments the noise would waken the baby, who would manifest his displeasure according to his capacities, which were considerable. The father, delighted by his son’s pulmonary prowess, would rush to cuddle him and soon be relieved in this by his wife.

The concern for his wife and his children; the comic observation of people’s foibles: it is all touching and sweet and gentle in a way you wouldn’t have thought Camus capable of.

6. The Growing Stone (La Pierre qui pousse)

‘I used to be proud; now I’m alone…  I never found my place. So I left.’

D’Arrast is a French engineer. He is driven by a black driver, Socrates, through the jungle of Brazil to Iguape, a remote settlement on the coast. Here the pompous Mayor and drunk Chief of Police make a fuss of this great man, honouring them with his presence, who has come to build a jetty to protect the town from the periodic floods of the vast river. D’Arrast for his part is a man adrift. He nods and shakes hands but his mind is elsewhere. He asks to be taken to the miserably impoverished Negro quarter and into a typically squalid hut.

Socrates introduces him to a black ship’s cook who tells him about the town’s precious stone statue of Jesus which is kept in the Garden of the Fountain. The story goes that one day it floated up the river and was found on the bank. Supposedly you can chip bits off the statue as relics, as good luck charms, and the stone regrows. The ship’s cook was in a ship which sank. He was going to drown and prayed to the stone Jesus, promising he would carry a 100 pound stone on his head in the annual procession, if he was spared. Jesus heard his prayer, the waters were stilled and he was able to swim to shore. Now he is going to carry his weight in the procession which takes place tomorrow. He asks D’Arrast if he ever made a promise, and asks him to help him keep his.

That night D’Arrast meets up with the cook and family, for a meal and then onto the hut where he witnesses, and takes part in, a prolonged pagan ceremony, involving frenzied dancing, howling and barking, supervised by a sorcerer. Although different in detail, it recalls the pagan sex ceremonies witnessed by the demented missionary in The Renegade.

The next morning D’Arrast is taken by the Mayor to watch the official Catholic celebration, consisting of a procession round the town with a statue of Jesus. This is the procession his friend the ship’s cook vowed to accompany bearing a heavy stone on his head. By the latter stages of the procession, though supported by his family, he is staggering. D’Arrast leaves the balcony where the mayor had taken him to run down and be with the cook. Suddenly his ordeal and his promise seem important to the Frenchman. When the stone falls off the cork mat which is protecting the cook’s head and falls to the ground, the Frenchman bends down, puts the mat on his head and the enormous stone on top of it.

And then staggers after the Christian procession into the main square. But he abruptly turns away from the church and heads off towards the poor black quarter he had visited the night before. Despite the yelling of the crowd to turn round he staggers on towards the poor hut of his friend and there throws the stone into the primitive fireplace where it comes to rest in the flickering flames and ashes.

Exhausted, D’Arrast slumps against the wall, and the shattered cook, his brother and the rest of their family join him.

No sound but the murmur of the river reached them through the heavy air. Standing in the darkness, D’Arrast listened without seeing anything, and the sound of the waters filled him with a tumultuous happiness. With eyes closed, he joyfully acclaimed his own strength; he acclaimed, once again, a fresh beginning in life. At that moment, a firecracker went off that seemed very close. The brother moved a little away from the cook and, half turning toward D’Arrast but without looking at him, pointed to the empty place and said: ‘Sit down with us.’

It would appear that in the last few sentences of the last story one, at least, of Camus’s characters does finally overcome their feeling of exile and in some way manages to ‘come home’.

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The irrational in Camus

The book’s title and most of the commentary I’ve read about it foreground the cool rational concepts of ‘exile’ and ‘kingdom’, but in fact the stories also contain a lot of the irrational – the two descriptions of frenzied pagan rituals, the demented monologue of the mad missionary, the semi-sexual epiphany of Janine on the parapet of the fortress, even the brutal murder committed by the unnamed Arab in The Guest – all suggest that the book is just as much an exploration of the irrational, the animal and the bestial in human nature as of dry intellectual ideas.

There’s far more of the weird and strange, of the uncanny, in Camus than his critics usually bring out.

The night was full of fresh aromatic scents. Above the forest the few stars in the austral sky, blurred by an invisible haze, were shining dimly. The humid air was heavy. Yet it seemed delightfully cool on coming out of the hut. D’Arrast climbed the slippery slope, staggering like a drunken man in the potholes. The forest, near by, rumbled slightly. The sound of the river increased. The whole continent was emerging from the night, and loathing overcame D’Arrast. It seemed to him that he would have liked to spew forth this whole country, the melancholy of its vast expanses, the glaucous light of its forests, and the nocturnal lapping of its big deserted rivers. This land was too vast, blood and seasons mingled here, and time liquefied. Life here was flush with the soil, and, to identify with it, one had to lie down and sleep for years on the muddy or dried-up ground itself. Yonder, in Europe, there was shame and wrath. Here, exile or solitude, among these listless and convulsive madmen who danced to die.

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The translation

Like all the Penguin editions of Camus I’ve read, this one is clumsily translated. The clumsiness is demonstrated in at least two ways: word order and idiom; and the use of subordinate clauses.

As to word order, almost every paragraph contains sentences where the original French word order has been kept and sticks out in English.

By subordinate clauses, I mean that although Camus’s prose is regularly praised for its spare simplicity, the actual texts we have in English are very often characterised by the addition of subordinate clauses which make his sentences long and clunky.

Modern spare prose was pioneered in English by Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s. Rule one is for each sentence to contain only one declarative statement, with one main verb and no subordinate clauses. A quick search of the internet reveals that there is an online Hemingway app. The first thing it does for you is identify long complex sentences in your prose and show how they should be split up into shorter, simpler ones.

At its most characteristic, Camus’s prose is certainly like as simple as his fans describe:

The coffee was ready. They drank it seated together on the folding bed as they munched their pieces of the cake. Then Daru led the Arab under the shed and showed him the faucet where he washed. He went back into the room, folded the blankets and the bed, made his own bed and put the room in order.

But there are also numerous places where the translation literally follows the French way of describing things, including the tendency to dangle subordinate clauses qualifying the object of the sentence. This is contrary to Hemingway rules and also to good English style.

Homeless, cut off from the world, they were a handful [of nomads] wandering over the vast territory she could see, which however was but a paltry part of an even greater expanse whose dizzying course stopped only thousands of miles farther south, where the first river finally waters the forest. (The Adulterous Woman)

This sentence should be split in two after ‘see’, the next sentence starting ‘And this itself was…’

Struck by the change in his voice, D’Arrast looked at the cook, who, leaning forward with fists clenched and eyes staring, was mimicking the others’ measured stamping without moving from his place.

Again, the sentence should end at ‘cook’, and a new sentence start ‘He was leaning forward…’.

Sentences like this give you a continual, slightly uneasy sense that this is not English prose, make you aware that it is a translation from a foreign language with its own rhythms and rules. And from time to time the text crosses a border to become completely alien in style and voice.

She did know that Marcel needed her and that she needed that need, that she lived on it night and day, at night especially – every night, when he didn’t want to be alone, or to age or die, with that set expression he assumed which she occasionally recognized on other men’s faces, the only common expression of those madmen hiding under an appearance of wisdom until the madness seizes them and hurls them desperately toward a woman’s body to bury in it, without desire, everything terrifying that solitude and night reveals to them. (The Adulterous Woman)

Could be simpler, couldn’t it? The paragraph should probably be split up at ‘die’. The next sentence could begin something like: ‘On those occasions he had the set expression which she occasionally…’ To go full Hemingway this second sentence should stop at ‘faces’, the next sentence starting ‘It was the expression common to all those men who gave an appearance of wisdom until…’ But even with these surgical repairs, this sentence is still a mess.

In particular, the French obviously has a habit of qualifying the key noun in a sentence with a subordinate clause which can’t help but break up the flow.

When D’Arrast, his head in the vice of a crushing migraine, had awakened after a bad sleep, a humid heat was weighing upon the town and the still forest.

There is too much going on here. It should be two sentences:

D’Arrast awoke after a bad sleep to find his head in the vice of a crushing migraine. A humid heat was weighing upon the town and the still forest.

Even this could be phrased better, but it’s a start. From this and scores of other examples the reader learns that French obviously allows for, permits or encourages more convoluted sentences than English normally does, sentences made up of two or more clauses whose stitching together often leads to the inversion of traditional English word order. None of the Camus translations I’ve read are without plenty of these blemishes.

If I had my way I’d commission a new edition of Camus, rewriting all the prose to put it into English word order and rhythm, and properly introducing and annotating every text. Both The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel are, at an absolute minimum, crying out for proper indexes. It is a scandal that Penguin are still republishing the same badly translated and unannotated editions which are 60, sometimes 70 years old.

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Credit

L’Exil et le royaume by Albert Camus was published in France in 1957. This translation of Exile and the Kingdom by Justin O’Brien was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1958. It was republished as a Penguin paperback in 1962. All quotes & references are to the 1974 reprint of this Penguin edition.

Related links

• Exile and the Kingdom on Amazon
• Exile and the Kingdom online
• Exile and the Kingdom Wikipedia article

Reviews of other Camus books

• Caligula (1939)
• L’Étranger (The Outsider) (1942)
• Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus ) (1942)
• Essays from The Myth of Sisyphus
• Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding, or Cross Purpose) (1944)
• La Peste (The Plague) (1947)
• Camus’s style in The Plague
• Les Justes (The Just Assassins) (1949)
• L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) (1951)
• La Chute (The Fall) (1956)
• L’exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom) (1957)
• Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961)
• Camus by Conor Cruise O’Brien (1970)
• Edward Said on Albert Camus (1994)

Reviews of books by Jean-Paul Sartre

• The Age of Reason (1945)
• The Reprieve (1945)
• Existentialism is a Humanism (1945)
• Iron In The Soul (1949)
• The Last Chance (1)
• The Last Chance (2)

The Algerian war of independence

• A Savage War of Peace by Alistair Horne (1977)