Into the mind of Albert Camus

The first volume of Albert Camus’s notebooks appeared in 1963, three years after his death in acar accident at the age of 46.

- DWIGHT GARNER

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 JLiebling, 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 Il 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 take-down of Camus both asa novelist and as a philosopher. “Was Camusa thinker of importance?” she writes. “The answeris no.” She heaped more contumely on the notebooks themselves, calling them sketchy and impersonal and “not great.”