“A beautiful memoir of a life-long obsession, a peek behind the curtains at the biographer’s art, and, not least, a rich and vivid portrait of Camus himself.”
—Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine

Interview With Elizabeth Hawes

Q: What inspired you to write Camus, a Romance?

A. I was in France in the mid-1990’s when Camus’s daughter decided to publish his last and unfinished work, a novel entitled Le Premier Homme or The First Man. I had always loved Camus, but he was a very private man and a distant subject. Reading that book, however, which describes his childhood in Algeria in poignant detail, was like entering his life. I didn’t want to leave.

Q: Camus, a Romance isn’t the usual type of author biography in that your own story is woven into your discussion of Camus’s life and work. How and why did you decide to tackle Camus in this manner?

A. My relationship with Camus has always been very personal, the way it is with an author with whom you identify, who becomes a literary hero. In college, Camus changed my way of thinking about life and humankind. When I was writing my honors thesis on his work, I was already trying to crawl under his skin, to figure out who he really was, and why I cared so much about him. Decades later, it seemed natural to resume this same sort of pursuit. I knew by then that my approach had to be subjective, because inevitably, the story was about me, too.

Q: In an essay in her collection Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag wrote, “Kafka arouses pity and terror. Joyce admiration, Proust and Gide respect, but no modern writer that I can think of, except Camus, has aroused love.” What do you think she means by that? Is this a sentiment you agree with?

A. I was excited when I first read Sontag’s thoughts on Camus, because she was describing precisely what I had experienced – that I had engaged emotionally with Camus because I was grateful for his lessons in morality, for his passion for justice and belief in spiritual revolution. His voice was compassionate and noble, but it also betrayed a yearning for happiness that made him seem vulnerable. It was easy to identify with him, which is why the image of the man gets mixed up with his work and why Sontag, too, said “One wants to know this man.”

Q: Obviously you’ve read Camus in both English and his original French. Is Camus an author who loses something in translation?

A. It is particularly rewarding to read Camus in French, because he was very involved with language and in his succession of books used different styles and aesthetics to convey his message. But Camus also wrote in an eloquent, compressed, off-hand way that converts well to English as well as other languages, which is one of the reasons his works continue to be widely read around the world. In America, Camus was called the French Hemingway after the publication of The Stranger and compared to Melville with The Plague.

Q: If a reader is coming to Camus for the first time, what book (or books) should he or she start with?

A. In a letter to his editor, Camus suggested that Americans might begin with one of his novels, which are more accessible than his philosophical essays or his plays. The Stranger, the most famous of Camus’s works, is the standard choice for new readers, with which I concur, not only because it is short, deft, intriguing and Camus’s first novel, but because it recounts a young man’s first encounter with the absurdity of the world, which was Camus’s starting point too. The First Man, which in its unfinished state is transparently autobiographical, would be a tempting next read.

Q: Which of Camus’s work is your favorite?

A. I still find The Stranger as provocative and moving as I did in high school, an exotic drama and a meditation on life. It is a small gem of a book, almost perfectly written. Its first lines are deservedly famous. “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe. I don’t know.” Knowing what I know now, I also see the book as a portrait of Camus, the young Algerian. The setting is his Algiers, his sun and sea. Puckishly, Camus wrote himself into the scene of his protagonist’s trial, near the end of the book. I also turn readily to his notebooks to be in touch with his voice, his moods, his notes to himself.

Q. Why does Camus still seem to be “a hero for our times?”

A. As an ethical man, who feels a responsibility to speak out on his times, Camus has never seemed more relevant. In 1957 the Nobel Prize honored him as the conscience of a generation, but his thoughts on violence, terrorism, capital punishment, and guilt are ageless. Pages of The Rebel, his essay on revolution, were circulated underground, page by thermo-faxed page, in the U.S.S.R. and the eastern bloc countries during the Cold War. Camus said simply that his concern was how to live, and he set an example on navigating morally difficult times with honesty and humanism.

Q. What is the most important thing you learned in spending all these years with Camus?

A. In the end, after following him through work, politics, friendships and romances, I learned that Camus was always constant. This meant that he was effectively who I felt he was in college, just bigger, more complicated, more life-sized, and in many ways more heroic. In a private way, I felt pleased with myself for having chosen such a steady hero, and I was also proud of him for remaining himself.

Q. What is the least known aspect of Camus?

A. His humor. He was very playful, witty and well as ironical, even comical, which shows in his language as well as his friendships. His quips often made me laugh out loud. I still smile when I think of his delight in having been taken for a famous criminal or his decision to to stop saying “that’s absurd” because people took him too literally.