The First Man: Writing the Lives That Left Few Records

Part of: The Deep Reader

This essay discusses the surviving narrative and working notes of Camus’s unfinished novel.

A son’s questions can come long after his family has stopped telling the stories he needs. Jacques Cormery, in The First Man, asks his mother about the father who died when he was an infant, and his questions have the orderly ambition of a biography: names, dates, the orphanage, the beginning of a marriage. Her answers are brief, uncertain, easily interrupted by the street outside. She can remember his father’s practical intelligence more readily than the year he learned to read. What matters to her keeps slipping past the information Jacques wants to collect.

Camus builds much of the novel through this discrepancy. The search for a father yields an abundance of childhood: smells, games, household work, gestures that surface with greater precision than the answers to his questions. As we follow these recollections, their richness becomes inseparable from the son's difficulty in sharing what he has learned to describe with the people who inhabit it.

The book itself needs care about what we call a completed design. Camus died in 1960 with the novel unfinished; it was published in 1994, and Catherine Camus’s editorial note explains that punctuation was restored during preparation of the text. The surviving scenes can sustain close reading, while the appended plans show possibilities he had yet to realize. We can judge the relations the writing creates without pretending to know which repetitions he would have cut or how he would have settled its contradictions.

A date that changes the direction of memory

The father first becomes intensely real through an elementary calculation. At his grave in Saint-Brieuc, Jacques reads the dates and discovers that the man buried there died at twenty-nine, while he himself is forty. Camus delays this arithmetic until after the cemetery’s routine exchanges, the identification of the grave, the son’s distracted attention to clouds and smells. A date gains its force because the visitor has arrived with so little feeling for what it records.

Now the familiar hierarchy of father and son turns over. Jacques feels an adult’s compassion for someone younger, and the narrative’s orderly passage through time breaks into the language of surges and backwash. Through the calculation, the son begins imagining someone who had once been alive, unfinished in his own desires, as Jacques had been at twenty-nine. The uncertainty that follows is newly painful because the father has become imaginable.

Back in Algiers, memory operates at two markedly different levels. Jacques takes the stairs to his mother’s apartment without missing a step, as though his body has retained their exact height, but once inside he cannot establish a reliable sequence of family events through conversation. The mother sends him to the family record book; its dates correct her estimate of the age difference between herself and her husband. Documents settle that small question, giving him very little of the life between the dates.

Camus gets these unequal forms of knowledge to govern the book’s movement. On the voyage to Algeria, the adult’s resistance to an afternoon nap leads into the grandmother’s compulsory siesta, the crowded bed, her aging feet, the child watching flies. Light on the ship’s porthole joins light passing through a missing knot in a shutter. Then the narration notices something: those flies are absent at sea, and the remembered ones are long dead. We move into childhood through a resemblance that the prose also interrupts. Sensation brings the past close while the interruption preserves the distance from which it is being remembered.

The detail has an advantage over the missing family story. A boy’s allotted position in a bed can contain domestic authority, physical discomfort, an attempted escape, and the expectation of games outside. It makes a repeated afternoon available to us without supplying a retrospective explanation from the grandmother. This is one of Camus’s great resources here: the ordinary arrangements of life carry relations that his characters would never sit down to formulate.

What the son learns to call his mother

Language gradually changes those relations. Looking back at the household’s scant possessions, Jacques remembers growing up among common nouns: the pot, the vase, the plates. More prosperous rooms offered things identified by origin, material, and distinction. Camus turns a grammatical difference into a difference in what can be passed on. A named object arrives with a history ready to be asked about; an indispensable household utensil may remain absorbed in its use.

The distinction becomes more painful when a school form asks for his parents’ occupations. Jacques knows the work his mother does, although he has never needed the category into which the form requires him to put it. A friend supplies domestique, domestic servant, and the boy discovers shame in the act of writing. At home, the labor has been understood through those it supports: she works for her children. The administrative word classifies her through those who employ her. Both descriptions refer to the same exhausted woman, but they place the child differently beside her.

Camus follows this small change of vocabulary into a double estrangement. School learning becomes increasingly impossible to explain at home; at school, Jacques cannot convey the singularity of the family he comes from. We can sense the pleasure and dignity of his education without overlooking the silence that grows alongside it. The narrative also specifies that Arab children face a more severe exclusion, with the few Arab pupils at the lycée drawn from wealthy families. Jacques’s loneliness is not cancelling his relative access.

The most searching account of that distance takes place over an open book. Camus first gives reading a physical appetite. Jacques can distinguish publishers by the smell of their paper, and the promise of a book begins abolishing the surrounding room before he has entered its story. Orders to eat or set the table barely reach him. Food seems less substantial than what he is reading.

His mother then approaches from within the world that the child has stopped attending to. She recalls the cover, smells the pages, passes her laundry-stiffened fingers over the lines. The same paper offers him an apparently inexhaustible life and offers her marks she cannot decipher. Following her hand from the page to his head, the narration transfers our attention to the person his reading has excluded, and when he fails to respond to her caress, we follow her withdrawal.

The scene makes the cost of reading perceptible without asking us to renounce its pleasure. Its change of attention also gives the adult narrative a responsibility the child has failed to exercise: it can dwell on the mother’s effort to approach him. Making that effort visible to readers does not complete an exchange between mother and son. The gap Marc Leclerc identifies between public testimony and reciprocal communication remains, even when literature enables strangers to appreciate the life from which the writer has emerged.

When the narrator knows too much

The strength of these scenes makes Camus’s larger pronouncements vulnerable to their own evidence. “Lost time can be recovered only by the rich,” the narrator declares after an inconclusive conversation with the mother. The sentence gives exhaustion a historical consequence: a life spent keeping a household alive leaves little leisure for arranging its memories. Later, the boy’s summer work supplies the bodily duration behind that claim, making days oppressively long while the available life seems to shorten.

But the maxim’s exclusiveness exceeds what the novel has established. This family preserves documents, gestures, stories, particular loyalties. Jacques’s deaf uncle Ernest retells hunting exploits through such exact physical mimicry that he becomes the party’s commanding storyteller. His small spoken vocabulary coexists with a lively power of representation. Once we have watched him perform, we cannot readily accept scant language as scant experience, or the absence of an orderly family history as the absence of memory.

The same enlargement becomes more consequential in the passages on Algeria. The writing moves from forgotten relatives and worn gravestones toward generations without names or a past, finally opposing a Europe that conserves its memories to a land where traces disappear. The repeated language of absence gives the family’s loss a vast surrounding landscape, while it also risks making their difficulty in inheriting a history describe the history of an entire country.

Camus leaves material in the narrative that resists that expansion. In the same movement, he records European settlers receiving land taken from killed or imprisoned insurgents, compressing their changed position into persécutés-persécuteurs: the persecuted becoming persecutors. Such a relation requires a specific past, with unequal losses and beneficiaries. The lyric sweep toward universal anonymity threatens to soften distinctions the passage has just made available. Here the prose’s ambition to gather everyone into a common condition becomes less exact than its own historical particulars.

An unfinished manuscript leaves us unable to say how Camus would have revised that tension. In the writing we have, the novel is most persuasive when the recovered detail qualifies the narrator’s reach. After luxuriant recollections of his uncle, Jacques doubts whether these abundant memories are truly faithful to the child he was. The admission changes what we have been reading: the adult’s language gives the child’s experience a fullness that the adult himself knows he cannot verify.

His mother introduces an even more immediate, perhaps necessary limit. In their reunion, the narrative interprets her sudden withdrawal, then adds a small reservation: “or at least that was his impression.” A woman the son has described with extraordinary tenderness retains the possibility of feeling something he has misunderstood; the slight hesitation in the narration is what keeps that possibility available to us.

Among Camus’s working notes is a proposal for alternating chapters that would give the mother a voice. Those chapters were never completed in the surviving novel.

Their possibility makes the difficulty plain: how could the writing let her answer, in a language of her own, the son who possesses so many words?

The dedication already addresses someone who will never be able to read the book. What the surviving narrative fulfills is an unusually exact attention to the distance within that address. We notice her hand on the page, her attempt to come closer, and the child’s failure to look up, while leaving her own account of that moment unwritten.

Sources

Albert Camus, The First Man (Le premier homme, Gallimard, 1994; electronic edition, 2013), including Catherine Camus’s editorial note and the working notes and plans. Read in French. English quotations are translations prepared for this essay.

Marc Leclerc, “A. Camus, S. Weil et J. Wresinski. La portée du langage”, Revue Quart Monde 229 (2014/1), on the difference between public testimony and reciprocal communication.