The First Man: Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Albert Camus’s last work, The First Man, (London: Penguin,1996) though incomplete, is a vividly autobiographical book, which throws light into the early years of the writer, his family life and school days. But the unmistakable touch of the mature Camus is evident throughout, especially as most of the incidents are recalled by the forty year old Jaques Cormery, who is none other than Albert Camus himself. The book is divided into two parts: “ In Search of the Father” and “ The Son or the First Man”. The various ‘interleaves’ collected in the ‘Appendices’ together with the text offer an interesting perspective on the works of Camus as a whole, and on The Outsider (London: Penguin,1982) in particular. This paper proposes to focus on some of these connections and contends that The First Man is a clear restatement of some of the fundamental preoccupations of Camus.

The First Man begins with a short chapter which shows Henri Cormery coming to a farm in Solferino where he is to be the manager of the Saint-Apotre property. It was in the autumn of 1913. He is accompanied by his pregnant wife, who gives birth to Jaques Cormery immediately after reaching the village. The next chapter begins forty years later, and thereafter, the whole story is narrated by Jaques. Henri died in the War in 1914, and now Jaques is going to Saint-Brieuc to visit his father’s grave. Like Meursault who will never pretend to feel more than he actually feels, Jaques is also an alien who ‘ could not muster a filial devotion he did not feel’ because he ‘loathed conventional gestures and behaviour’ (19). Visiting this ‘dead stranger’ made no sense to him, but as he gazed vacantly at the grave, he was struck by an idea: “The man buried under that slab, who had been his father, was younger than he”; what he felt for the dead man was “the overwhelming compassion that a grown man feels for an unjustly murdered child”; it was a very unnatural world when “the son was older than the father” (20). As he looks around, he becomes aware that the place was “strewn with children who had been the fathers of greying men” (21). The secret of life, which he had sought to learn through books and people, seemed to him to be “intimately linked with this dead man, this younger father” (21); he must try to find out who he was. But the next chapter in which he visits Victor Malan suggests the futility of the search. Malan tells him about a man who was under the impression that his wife did not like pastries, and after twenty years’ of living together, he once caught her stuffing herself with coffee éclairs. In this life, we never know anyone completely. So an enquiry is “bound to be superficial forty years after a man’s death” (25). Jaques feels that he needs someone to blame him and praise him, “ by right not of power but of authority, I need my father (29, n.a). At the end, he will discover that he is the first man, the man without a father and history, like his own country, ‘a land without forefathers and without memory’(220).

What follows are the reminiscences of Jacques on his way to see his mother in Algeria, and also afterwards. Camus notes in ‘Interleaves’ that Jaques ‘recaptures childhood and not his father. He learns he is the first man’ (225). He recalls the various games he used to play with his friend Pierre, how his grandmother used to punish him, his relations with his uncle Ernest who was stone-deaf but full of vitality, how his teacher Bernard helped him to enter the lycee, etc. In Part-2, “The Son or the First Man”, his life is divided into two: the childhood world of poverty and the new world of the lycee. During his vacations he used to work, ‘some absurd hurrying about which his grandmother called work’(209). The book stops with the growth of the boy into a youth.

From the ‘Appendices’ it is clear that this is only a small portion of the book Camus was planning to write. The importance of this unfinished manuscript lies in its very rawness, the way his real feelings are expressed here, and so it will be interesting to relate them to his other works. About the plan of this book, Camus writes: “ Ideally, if the book were written to the mother, from beginning to end – and if one learned only at the end that she cannot read – yes, that would be it” (237). Writing to a person who cannot read expresses the essential loneliness of all his characters. The silence which pervaded the family, enforced by the deafness of his mother, had created a background of absolute isolation for the child Camus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he expresses the idea of the absurd through the image of a man talking from a phone booth. The glass is transparent to the actions and gestures of the speaker but it is opaque to sound and hence to meaning. Thus if the book had been completed according to his plan, it would have been an illustration of his basic metaphor of the absurd, as given in The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus’s mother is an important figure in his emotional and artistic make-up. In The Outsider, Meursault has nothing in common with his mother. They have nothing to tell each other, so she is sent to a home. But there is an unsentimental understanding between them and he respects her for what she is: “No one, no one at all, had any right to cry over her” ( The Outsider, 117). The First Man presents the non-verbal relationship between the mother and the son. She is an ignorant old woman, she does not know anything about the outside world, she has worked and worked with no holidays except in her old age when she is provided for by her children. She is always seated in her chair, looking out into the street. When Jaques sees her with her hair cut, he wants desperately to tell her that she is beautiful, something which he had always wanted to tell her but could not, because “it would have meant breaching the invisible barrier behind which for all his life he had seen her take shelter”(46). He used to be regularly whipped by his grandmother for several minor offences. His mother would not interfere, but at the end of the punishment, there would be a word or smile or look from her which would affect him tremendously. That was when he would let go the restrained tears. Once he was severely beaten by a priest for misbehaviour during catechism class but he would not cry because “for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution” (132). Her inability to communicate is due to the fact that she has only a few words at her disposal, her vocabulary consists of only four hundred words, and perhaps Meursault’s inability to communicate is reminiscent of her silences. Again, Meursault is referred to as ‘the only Christ that we deserve’ in the ‘Afterword’ to The Outsider; in ‘Appendices’, Camus writes that his ‘mother is Christ’(232). He adds later that ‘Christ did not set foot in Algeria’(237). Nobody ever spoke of God in his house. “ In fact, that was a word Jaques never heard spoken throughout his childhood, nor did he trouble himself about it. Life, so vivid and mysterious, was enough to occupy his entire being”(129).

The love of life which Camus celebrates in The Outsider is given great importance in The First Man too. Jaques was always running about, swimming, playing, and in complete harmony with nature. In his rough world of shouting, sweating and dust, the mad passion for living – “ the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him” (219) – was still unchanged, but the terrible feeling that the time of his youth was slipping away is heart-rending, though the book closes with the hope that this obscure force of life, “ as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion”(221). In The Outsider, Meursault tries to accept rationally the inevitability of death, “ that it doesn’t matter very much whether you die at thirty or at seventy”, but this kind of reasoning is always upset by the ‘terrifying leap’ his heart gave at the ‘thought of having another twenty years to live” (109). After the violent outburst with the chaplain, he felt purged, he thought of mother for the first time in a very long time, looked at the sky and stars, and “laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world”(117). Jaques hoping to die ‘without rebellion’ is quite akin to Meursault accepting the ‘benign indifference’ of the world.

Searching for a meaningful life, Kafka’s Joseph K found only a meaningless death. ‘Like a dog’, he died. On the other extreme is Zorba of Kazantzakis who died standing, with his nails digging into the window sill and shouting: ‘People like me ought to live for a thousand years’. The French man has something of the Czech-German and something of the Greek in him, but his perception seems to be a passion for life tempered by an equally strong awareness of its absurdity. The two do not cancel each other, and the unresolved tension between the two invests his books with a controlled energy.

One of the important parallels between The Outsider and The First Man is to be found in the attitudes of the protagonists towards truth and falsehood. Critics of The Outsider have always highlighted the author’s own words about Meursault and often refer to him as a martyr for truth. But there are many others as well who think that Meursault can tell lies without any difficulty at all. For example, Conor Cruise O’Brien observes: “ Meursault in the novel lies. He concocts for Raymond the letter which is designed to deceive the Arab girl and expose her to humiliation, and later he lies to the police to get Raymond discharged, after beating the girl up. . . . These episodes show him as indifferent to truth as he is to cruelty” (Camus, Fontana/Collins,1970,p.21). It is quite true that he is willing to tell lies about several things, but he is also strangely reticent about certain other things as well. Perhaps parts of The First Man clarify this issue to a great extent. Jaques was ‘ready as he always was to lie for pleasure but incapable of doing so out of necessity’ (213). Once as he was coming home, a two franc piece fell through a hole in his pocket. That gave him the idea that he could really have lost it like that. He wanted the money to see a soccer match. Finally he told his grandmother that he had lost it in the toilet. It was likely. He feels bad about this lie when he sees his grandmother searching for it in the toilet. The sense of shame this aroused in him was due to the awareness that “it was not avarice that caused his grandmother to grope around in the excrement, but the terrible need that made two francs a significant amount in his home” (70). He knew that their poverty “made it impossible to pass judgment on those who were its victims”(96). During one of his vacations while he was at the lycee, the grandmother decided that he should work during the holidays. It was difficult to find temporary work just for a couple of months, so they had to conceal the fact that he would have to quit after two months. The grandmother told him that they would believe him if he told them that they were too poor to continue at the lycee.

“ That was not what Jacques meant, and actually he did not worry about whether he would be believed. But it seemed to him that this sort of lie would stick in his throat. Of course he had often lied at home, to avoid punishment, to keep a two franc coin, and far more often for the pleasure of bragging. But if to lie to his family seemed a venial sin, with strangers it seemed mortal. In an obscure way he felt that you do not lie on essentials to those you love, because then you could no longer live with them or love them. All the employers could learn about him was what he told them, and so they would not know him, the lie would be absolute” (204-05).

So he felt terrible when the manager of the hardware store where he was working shouted at him and called him a liar when he wanted to leave. He ran home, ‘crying and gripping his collar with both hands to avoid touching the money that was burning in his pocket’ (213). At the same time he was also somewhat proud of having done something to reduce the poverty of his family.

But it seems that Jaques’s analysis of lying is not completely applicable to Meursault. The only excuse, if excuse there can be, for this kind of lying is poverty. Meursault is not poor, so he does not have that kind of excuse when he lies to the police. In the terms of The First Man, Meursault’s lie to the police is ‘mortal’. If Jaques could lie ‘to avoid punishment’, Meursault could not lie, even to save his life which he loved very much. Thus Jaques looks like an older and perhaps a more mature version of Meursault. This is not to suggest that Meursault should not have lied to the police, or that he should have lied to the judges, but rather to indicate the theoretical gap between the two positions represented by these two characters.

Another important point is the role played by the sun in both novels. In The Outsider, while on the point of killing the Arab, Meursault was on the verge of a sun stroke, he could feel ‘the blast of its hot breath’ (58) on his face, it was ‘the same sun as on the day of mother’s funeral’(59), the light reflected from the blade of the knife was ‘like a long, flashing sword lunging at my forehead’(60). In The First Man, life in Algeria is one of ‘exhausting labour under a ferocious sun’(65); men are abominable ‘especially under a ferocious sun’(149); in short, it drove everyone crazy. There was a barber who had gone mad while shaving an Arab and had cut deep the exposed throat. When the barber was subdued by other customers, he was howling horribly (201-03). The Mediterranean sun remains a constant presence in both books.

In The Outsider, Meursault had an old piece of newspaper in his cell from which he had read the story of a man who had left home early and years later, when he returned to his mother and sister, they killed him for his money without knowing who he was. Camus’s play, Cross Purposes, is a dramatization of this story. Similarly, the story of an execution which Meursault’s father witnessed, reappears in The First Man but in greater detail. The abject conditions under which the poor Algerians lived find a vivid expression here: “Unemployment, for which there was no insurance at all, was the calamity they most dreaded” (200). They accused the Italians and the Spaniards and the Arabs of stealing their work – “an attitude that is certainly disconcerting to those intellectuals who theorize about the proletariat, and yet very human and surely excusable” (200). His criticism of the communist intellectuals is an interesting point to observe.

The change of Jaques from a boy to a man is presented towards the end using the idea of rebellion: “And if one day he who till then had patiently accepted being beaten by his grandmother as if it were one of the inevitable obligations of childhood, if he tore the leather whip out of her hands, suddenly crazed, in a furious rage, so determined to strike that white head . . . – she recoiled and went to close herself in her room, sobbing . . . but already knowing she would never beat Jaques again, . . .” (214). This is exactly like the beginning of The Rebel where Camus talks about a ‘slave who has taken orders all his life, suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command’ (19). Similarly the image of Sisyphus engaged in his endless task reappears in ‘Appendices’ as ‘the blind donkey who for years patiently turns his wheel in a circle’ (252).

To conclude: In spite of its fragmentary nature, the book is interesting to read in itself, but it will be more interesting to read it so as to reread his other works. Though it does not offer any new development in Camus’s thoughts, it restates many of his fundamental preoccupations in his usual style.