Something Royal

John Sturrock

• Le Premier homme by Albert Camus
  Gallimard, 331 pp, FRS 110.00, April 1994, ISBN 2 07 073827 2

It is all but thirty-five years since Albert Camus was killed, when the Facel Vega sports car in which he was a passenger went off the road between Sens and Paris. Among his things was found Le Premier homme, the manuscript he had been working on for nearly a year at the time of the accident and on which there was still some way to go. Only now are we given it to read. It is extraordinary that it should have taken so long, disappointing that there should be no editorial word in the current edition to explain why. It’s not as if the book is so underweight that Camus’s reputation will shrink as a result of it, nor does it show him in any ugly new light personally or philosophically. Le Premier homme runs as a continuous text to some two hundred and sixty pages, and should do his reputation more good than harm – especially with those of us who always found L’Etranger and La Peste more stilted than persuasive in their death-defying humanism. Le Premier homme, too, has its stilted moments but they are more than offset by an uncharacteristically mundane account of Camus’s childhood in his native Algiers.