A fragment of a first draft of a novel, the 145-page manuscript was found in the wreckage of the car accident that killed the 46-year-old Camus in 1960. This autobiographical description of childhood in colonial Algeria is a raw work by Camus’s high standards. His widow refused to publish the book, because at the time of his death his anti-Stalinist views had left him ostracized by leftist French intellectuals, and she feared that the manuscript in its rough state might further damage his reputation. But the passage of time has rendered her caution unnecessary, and Camus’s children were right to publish the manuscript at last. This book will only enhance their father’s reputation. Extensive notes in the margins of the manuscript suggest that he was far from finished. Still, while it is too ragged around the edges to be called a great book, “The First Man” has a lot of greatness in it.
Plainly, Camus planned to incorporate the circumstances of his own “poor and happy childhood” in Algiers into a more complicated novelistic framework. Names were changed–Albert Camus becomes Jacques Cormery–and a few scenes, such as Jacques’s birth on a rainy night in a provincial farmhouse, were dearly invented. Mostly, though, this is more memoir than fiction, and as such it makes splendid reading. Camus began his writing life as a journalist, and he never lost the reporter’s instinct for the details that make stories come alive. As always, he excels at evoking the sensual side of life. Recalling trips to the beach with his pals, he describes how “the sun fell lightly on their soaked heads, and the glory of the light filled their young bodies with a joy that made them cry out incessantly.” But he is equally adept at pinpointing how his own intellectual awakening alienated him from his impoverished, illiterate kin: “For Jacques’s family, Latin, for example, was a word that had absolutely no meaning.”
Personal but never sentimental, this is a bittersweet story about finding one’s place in the world without betraying one’s origins. Had he lived, this fatuously private author would probably have chosen to reveal less about himself in a more finished version of “The First Man.” The ironic bright spot in the otherwise tragic circumstances of his death is that he never got that chance. “The First Man,” incomplete and raw, is fine just the way it is.
