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RW: There are times in his letters to Jean Grenier
[Camus’ philosophy professor in Algeria, published
in the Selected Notebooks] when he sounds unhappy
with his work on The First Man. After receiving his
Nobel Prize, did he feel pressurised to produce his
definitive work?
CC: He wasn’t writing under the influence of the Nobel
Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in
him. The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it’s a social
recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a
true artist is driven by interior necessities. We can’t talk
about the book he wanted to write because we have
barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it,
but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look
at the style of The First Man it conforms much more
to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely.
RW: Will we get a clearer notion of his ideas through
The First Man?
CC: Perhaps not, because it’s in quite a crude state.
But then, in this condition one sees more, without any
of the artifices of art, without anything having been
erased. It is, perhaps, at the same time, more truthful.
I think he wanted to write something to explain
who he was, and how he was different from the age
that had been conferred upon him. He was viewed by
many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football
pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his ‘morality’.
It’s something sensed, it won’t pass uniquely through
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
thought. It couldn’t possibly. He started thinking
through sensation. He could never think with artefacts
or with cultural models because there were none. So
it’s true to say that his morality was extremely ‘lived’,
made from very concrete things. It never passed by
means of abstractions . It’s his own experience, his
way of thinking. There are those who will find his notions
about absurdity appealing, and others who will
be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria,
the heat and so on.
RW: Since The First Man deals with Camus’ birth and
childhood in Algeria, it seems strange that Camus’ deep
personal involvement with the Algerian nationalist crisis
tends to get overlooked in the traditional portrayal
of him as a French writer. Do you think The First Man
will re-emphasise the importance of Algeria in our
consideration of Camus?
CC: I hope so. Camus’ was born in Algeria of French
nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony,
although the French colonists rejected him absolutely
because of his poverty. Politically, he was in favour
of a federation, and effectively he considered that like
South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there
should be a mixed population with equal rights, the
same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as
well as all the other races living there.
RW: Do you think he saw himself as the first member
of a race of the uprooted, given the absence of his father
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