Books: Strangeness of the Stranger

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ALBERT CAMUS by Herbert R. Lottman; Doubleday 753 pages; $16.95

The French have two words for it: homme engagé, a man involved in the ideas and actions of his time. Some definitions are more detailed, but only one is shorter: Camus. The name is enough to evoke the romantic figure of a revolutionary philosopher, fighter in the French underground, disillusioned radical and Nobel laureate, outfitted in trenchcoat, hands cupped around the eternal cigarette: Bogart as existentialist.

Since Albert Camus's death in a 1960 car crash, these images have totally obscured the writer. Journalist Herbert R. Lottman's voluminous work attempts to sweep away rumor and legend in the hope that a man will emerge. But Camus is much too elusive for mere biography. After 753 pages, the subject seems as melodramatic in death as he was in life.

From his earliest days in Algeria, young Albert was transfigured by irony. When he was eleven months old, his father was killed in the Battle of the Marne. The intellectual, curious boy was raised by an illiterate mother and grandmother. In adolescence he developed the physique of an athlete and the lungs of an invalid. By the age of 17 he was coughing blood, and soon afterward retired from the soccer field. Other arenas soon presented themselves. Not quite 21, Camus married Simone Hie, a beautiful young woman and a drug addict. Within a year the couple were estranged, and Camus began his lifelong exploration of "the tender and reserved friendship of women." He became an actor-director in a workers' theater, a profession that taught him the value of public postures, and he joined the Communist Party, with which he would have his bitterest wrangles.

By 1939, the young writer had started a new life. He planned to marry again: Francine Faure, whose father had also died at the Marne. When Francine's sister observed that Albert's ears stuck out of his head in simian fashion, Francine replied defensively, "The monkey is the animal closest to man." Three years later, the monkey was famous. Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus's first novel, The Stranger, characterized the Absurd Man who lives outside of sentiment or tradition: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure..."

Jean-Paul Sartre hailed it as a new classic, and he was soon joined by a choir of enthusiasts. As Lottman notes, "Fame traveled by train in those times." It took some months for the author's reputation to reach beyond the precincts of Paris. By then, the Nazi-occupied city had other matters to contend with. Camus joined the Free French, writing for the underground newspaper Combat.