Jonathan Rée recently presented a series about William Hazlitt on Radio 3.
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Vol. 27 No. 2 · 20 January 2005
pages 20-22 | 4997 words
Bound to be in the wrong
Jonathan Rée
- Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It by Ronald Aronson
Chicago, 291 pp, £23.00, February 2005, ISBN 0 226 02796 1
The heroes of Albert Camus’s books can be quite annoying: surly, self-dramatising Hamlets who like to think of themselves as strong, silent loners, wise to human folly. But although they are often arrogant, self-absorbed and predictable, they are also susceptible to the weather, and happy to be upstaged by unseasonable storms, torpid nights, fierce sunlight, or the chance of a swim in the limpid sea.
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 6 · 17 March 2005
From Adam Shatz
In his otherwise admirable essay on Camus and Sartre, Jonathan Rée writes that ‘following a series of battles in Algeria’, Camus ‘came to the conclusion that the French state must intervene to restore order and protect both the Arab population and the French settlers’ (LRB, 20 January). These battles, sparked in early May 1945 by the killing of scores of French settlers in pro-independence rallies, were indeed ‘savage’, but the casualties were overwhelmingly Algerian, the perpetrators overwhelmingly French soldiers and pieds noirs. The restoration of order which Camus defended took the lives of between 5000 and 45,000 Algerians, most of them civilians. Needless to say, these ‘Arab hunts’ were not intended to ‘protect both the Arab population and the French settlers’. Nor was Camus’s position on the Algerian war of independence that erupted in 1954 one of ‘silent perplexity’. Despite his objections to torture by the French army (which he preferred to express in private communications with French officials), Camus rejected Algerian independence, insisting that the Algerian nation was a myth fostered by Nasser and the Soviet Union, and opposed negotiations with the FLN – a position that ultimately placed him in the pied noir camp.
Adam Shatz
New York
