THE COMPLETE NOTEBOOKS, by Albert Camus; translated by Ryan Bloom
The first volume of Albert Camus’s notebooks appeared in 1963, three years after his death in a car accident at the age of 46. The book, with entries from 1935 to 1942, received two especially notable English-language reviews, from two strikingly different writers.
The first was by A.J. Liebling, the journalist and gourmand, in The New Yorker. Liebling had struck up a friendship with Camus when the French Algerian writer visited America in 1946. Liebling, a Francophile and press critic, especially admired Camus’s work during World War II as the editor of the Resistance journal Combat.
Liebling called Camus’s notebooks “intensely enjoyable” and “a book to which one can return, at almost any page, with assurance of pleasure.”
The second review was by Susan Sontag, in The New York Review of Books. Sontag opened with this provocation: “Great writers are either husbands or lovers.” Because of his tranquillity and air of reasonableness, Sontag suggested, Camus was “the ideal husband of contemporary letters.” (She could not have known that, according to his later biographers, he was serially unfaithful to his wives, the actress Simone Hié and the pianist Francine Faure.)
The rest of Sontag’s review was a takedown of Camus both as a novelist and as a philosopher. “Was Camus a thinker of importance?” she writes. “The answer is no.” She heaped more contumely on the notebooks themselves, calling them sketchy and impersonal and “not great.”
Several more volumes of Camus’s notebooks would appear over the years, and they’re collected in full for the first time in “The Complete Notebooks.” Picking the book up, I had Liebling’s and Sontag’s warring voices in my mind. Putting it down, after completing its nearly 700 pages, I was surprised to find myself, a committed Liebling fanatic, on the Sontag side of the divide.
Camus’s notebooks, which run from 1935 to 1959, aren’t to be confused with diaries. They contain almost nothing about his friends or his family, his experiences during wartime or much about his personal life. He was an intensely private man who found gossip and confession repellent.
Indeed, when he received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming at 44 the youngest person to have done so, he wrote in a notebook, “Frightened by what’s happening to me, what I didn’t ask for.” He reported having panic attacks. A few days later he wrote, “Never talk about your work” and “Those who truly have something to say never speak of it.”
What these journals do contain are philosophical notes for the novels published during his lifetime — “The Stranger,” “The Plague” and “The Fall” — books that are sui generis explorations not just of the absurdity of existence but of isolation, guilt, redemption and resilience. They’re told with clarity and resounding depth.
Like many readers I returned to “The Plague” (the book’s title in French, “La Peste,” is scarier and more vivid) during Covid, finding in that novel some of the husbandly reasonableness Sontag described. A doctor who works bravely and tirelessly in the Algerian town where the plague breaks out, for example, denies that he is a hero. He says, in words that also speak to a moment in 2020: “The whole thing is not about heroism. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.”
Camus’s notebooks also contain gleanings from his intense reading, of everyone from Milton and Goethe to Faulkner and Rosa Luxemburg, quotations that comprise a personal commonplace book. He was always seeking the core of things. He lived in his mind more than most men did. What emerges especially is his sense of literary vocation. He whipped himself onward. “Withdraw completely and run your own race” is a typical dictum.
These notebooks, in this translation by Ryan Bloom, are dense and inward-facing and not, one thinks, meant for public consumption. (He did edit the early notebooks, but it’s unclear what his position might have been on publishing everything in bulk.) They are not quite for the casual reader.
This casual reader was glad to make their acquaintance anyway, even if searching for the more lucid and interesting bits is like panning for gold. Some of the better known entries here, accounts of Camus’s travels in the United States in 1946 and in Latin America in 1949, have also been published in earlier books — first as “American Journals” (1987) and, more recently, in a new translation as “Travels in the Americas” (2023).
There is other material here to admire. Camus comments occasionally on his critics, writing in 1942: “Three years to create a book, five lines to ridicule it — and with inaccurate quotations.” He later writes: “Malice is the only industry in France that doesn’t suffer underemployment.” About politics, he decides: “I prefer committed people to committed literature.”
The sensualist in him is occasionally allowed to peek out. He goes with friends to a whorehouse; he admires women in the street “with their breasts free.” He seeks to attach the ephemeral to the eternal:
To lick your life like a string of rock candy, to shape it, sharpen it, to love it at last, in that same way you search for a word, an image, the definitive sentence, this one or that one that’ll wrap things up, that’ll bring things to a stop, the one with which you’ll set out, which will form, from then on, all the colors through which your eyes view the world.
Some of the comments are outraged and funny. “I always wonder why I attract socialites,” he wrote in 1949. “All those hats!”
Others are moving: “The pleasure of male relations. A subtle pleasure that consists of giving or asking for a light — a complicity, a freemasonry of the cigarette.” Camus looked better with a cigarette than nearly every other man of his time. But because of his tuberculosis — feeling ill is a motif in these notebooks — he should not have been smoking at all.
Camus’s Mediterranean spirit comes through, especially in his love for swimming and for the sun. He liked travel, but not ostentatious luxury. “Fear is what makes travel valuable,” he writes in an early entry — it should be an “ascetic experience.” He mostly disdained fancy restaurants as well, praising the city of Oran, Algeria, as a place where “you can still find extraordinary cafes that have grime-varnished counters sprinkled with fly parts, a leg, a wing, and where you’re served in chipped glasses.”
Camus’s notebooks are something like those countertops. We’re down to the twigs and seeds, as the stoners used to say — or as James Fenton does, in his remarkable poem of that title. But if these notebooks are messy and a bit chaotic, honest sustenance does appear. “There are days the world lies,” a 24-year-old Camus writes one spring evening, and “days it tells the truth.”
THE COMPLETE NOTEBOOKS | By Albert Camus | Translated by Ryan Bloom | University of Chicago | 704 pp. | $45
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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