When Camus looked back over his early autobiographical writings, where he had tried to depict his feelings about his family background of poverty and cultural deprivation in Algiers, he felt very dissatisfied. He said he was only too conscious of the immaturity of these essays: he even believed that if he did not make another attempt at this subject he would have achieved nothing. So Camus began thinking about The First Man, a novel that was to be different from anything he had written before. It would be a “traditional novel,” although he had doubts about whether he was really a “traditional” writer. The new work was to be the truly authentic novel of his maturity.

Propelled by the tragedy of the French-Algerian conflict (1954–62), with its twin horrors of torture and terror, Camus was aiming at an epic on a Tolstoyan scale, his own personal War and Peace. This book would at last fully explain his Algeria to the French, and especially to his erstwhile friends, those self-righteous Left intellectuals who had moved from utter indifference toward the colony to support for the Algerian terrorists. Where the youthful essays had been marked by his well-known reserve and discretion, the new work would be distinguished by simplicity and directness. He said that he aimed to free himself from worrying about art and form, to find once again what he called “direct contact.” Moreover, he declared, “I am going to speak of those I loved,” and he expressed his “profound joy” at the prospect.

He said that he aimed to free himself from worrying about art and form, to find once again what he called “direct contact.”

In his briefcase, found at the scene of his death in a senseless car accident in January 1960, were the 144 manuscript pages of all that remains of the ambitious project of The First Man. They are written in a barely decipherable minute scribble, without punctuation, and the impression they leave is of an intense unstoppable outpouring of memory, an overflow of hitherto repressed passionate feeling. At the time of his death, the stance Camus had taken—in vain—for reconciliation in Algeria, followed by his agonized decision to stay silent, had left him isolated. Although he was “a classic,” read at school and university, his reputation in France was now not as high as once it had been. Some even thought that he was already dead and buried under the consecration of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had published no important work of fiction since The Fall in 1956.

Consequently, his widow and his friends decided not to risk publication of an un-corrected fragment. But over thirty years later matters were different. The once fashionable Left intellectuals were discredited. Sartre was no longer the dominating guru. Camus the supreme humanist was widely seen to have been on the right lines after all. At this point, in 1994, his daughter opted to publish the manuscript as it stood: where words are missing the gap is shown. Punctuation has been added, together with a few explanatory footnotes and relevant passages from the author’s notebooks. It is this edition which is now presented in translation.

There seems little doubt that, when revising, Camus would have modified the tone of direct autobiography with his characteristic reticence and irony. Yet what he has left us is a document so charged and so consistently moving that it must vary the light in which we view him and his sensibility. The French Algerian factor in Camus can no longer be seen merely as one element in his makeup but rather as the dominant element. I do not think that the shattering effect of these pages is due entirely either to the tragic circumstances in which they were found, or to our contemporary inclination to prefer the torso to the statue, and to favor the unfinished sketch over the completed artwork. Certainly, Camus had written about his childhood, about his impoverished mother, grandmother, and uncles and their endless round of extenuating labor under a harsh sun. In any case, the facts were known from the excellent 1979 biography of Camus by Herbert Lottman, who had indeed seen the manuscript of The First Man. But now we can read these pages for ourselves, in all their unvarnished simplicity and unadorned passionate feeling. And we cannot be other than struck by the concentrated attention to minute and vivid detail that is the mark of the great writer.

The First Man is dedicated to Camus’s illiterate mother: “To you who will never be able to read this book.” In a note that embraces the author as well as his protagonist and alter ego, Jacques Cormery, we learn that “what he wanted most in the world, which was for his mother to read everything that was his life and his being, that was impossible. His love, his only love, would be forever speechless.” The new novel was to be Camus’s Flaubertian-style sentimental education, where private sensuality and public political upheavals are intermingled. It takes place on several levels: in Cormery’s childhood, in his life as an adult and Don Juan, in the historical past of his family and his country, and from time to time in the present of parachute patrols and the indiscriminate killing of civilians during the French-Algerian war.

Camus’s widowed mother, like Cormery’s, worked as a cleaning woman. She, too, was partially deaf, and she suffered from a speech impediment. Lottman showed that —unknown to Camus—this last disability was the result of trauma on being suddenly informed of her husband’s death in battle in 1914, and thoughtlessly given shell fragments taken from his body. Unable to encompass an idea, after a day’s hard toil she would sit vacantly looking out of the window of the cramped apartment, which she shared with her tyrannical mother, her retarded brother, and her two sons. To young Jacques Cormery his mother seemed almost indifferent, passive in the hands of the domineering grandmother, who had also worked since she was a child, and who was not averse to dealing out blows to punish the lively boy. The women work without interruption because not to do so means less to eat.

As a child Jacques Cormery feels doubts about his mother’s affection, then gradually perceives her unspoken tenderness. In the notes, the mother is conceived in terms of Dostoevsky’s saintly “idiot,” Prince Myshkin, and even as suffering Christ. For it is plain that the novel is an attempt at reparation, a search for forgiveness. It records the pain of the moment at school when, asked to state his parent’s profession on a form, Cormery puts “domestic servant,” feels ashamed, and then ashamed at his shame. According to Lottman, young Camus would later tell college friends, who never visited his home, that his mother was mentally ill and living in Oran. “No, I am not a good son: a good son is one who stays put. I’ve traveled far and wide, I’ve betrayed her with trivialities, fame, a hundred women.” The mature Camus could guiltily see himself as an insensitive brute, and he suggests that the members of his family, judged at their true worth, were really far better than he was.

His was the common fate of those who receive an education that takes them out of their milieu. Camus was cherished by his primary schoolteacher, Louis Germain (Monsieur Bernard in the story), who recognized at once the boy’s pleasure in learning. (The author had dedicated his Nobel address to his old schoolmaster, and in the appendix to the novel there is a touching exchange of letters between them.) When the grandmother wanted the child to start work instead of studying for the baccalauréat, the dignified teacher decided to pay a visit in order to explain, to her and to the boy’s mother, how a scholarship would enable him to better his prospects. Understanding that they could not afford to pay for extra lessons, he gave his services gratis. So Camus passed to the lycée and into a new and wider world. Louis Germain had changed his life. But of course there was a price to pay, as Cormery shows, in youthful alienation from his family.

Part of the draft novel is concerned with Cormery’s vain search for traces of the shadowy father he never knew.

Part of the draft novel is concerned with Cormery’s vain search for traces of the shadowy father he never knew. In a sense it is also a search for himself. His father, like the author’s, was killed at the battle of the Marne in 1914, when the younger son was not yet a year old. He had never even set foot in France before, just like most of his comrades, including the Arabs, who were thrown unequipped and unprepared against the German guns. Camus was not the only one to be convinced that the war with its huge losses governed the lives of generations to come.

The manuscript opens in 1913 with the harrowing journey made by Cormery’s parents into the Algerian countryside in a horse-drawn wagon: the long-suffering heavily pregnant wife, the elder child, the birth of the boy with the help of Arab and French strangers in Mondovi, in the Bône region, Camus’s birthplace, where the father had just been appointed to manage the vineyards. When planning the novel, Camus visited Mondovi with his elder brother, but could find no memory of his parents. As long ago as 1947, he had made a pilgrimage to Saint-Brieuc in Brittany—like Cormery—to visit his father’s grave. As it happened, his philosophy teacher and friend, the writer Jean Grenier (Victor Malan in the draft), whom Camus acknowledged as his spiritual father, had been brought up near the place where his true father was buried. All that Camus/Cormery took from seeing the grave was the sudden fall into passing time, the realization that he himself was now older than his father had been when he was killed. It was not much use asking questions of his mother and his relations about his father: in the poverty of their outlook, they harbored no memories. Camus holds that the ignorant laboring poor have no space and time for the luxury of memory.

And that is, too, the fate of his paternal ancestors and their like, the indigent French immigrants to Algeria in the nineteenth century. No records of these humble people were kept in Algeria. Camus firmly believed that his father’s family had emigrated to Algeria in 1871 from Alsace, after choosing France when Alsace was ceded to Germany. He gave Cormery the same ancestry. In fact—as Lottman showed after consulting French archives—his father’s family left Bordeaux to settle in Algeria at the time of its conquest in 1830. A further wave was lured to the colony after the defeat of the revolutionaries in 1848, with promises of land and a golden future. They arrived after a debilitating journey to find nothing but a few army outposts, and many of them died like flies, from disease, hardship, and marauding Arabs. These immigrants, too, left no trace. In his novel Camus seeks to give an idea of their wretched destiny.

In his novel Camus seeks to give an idea of their wretched destiny.

His mother’s family, equally poor, came from Mahon on the Spanish island of Minorca, to join the vibrant melting pot of French, Spaniards, Italians, Jews, and Arabs that Camus found so attractive. In a sharp dig at his former friends, the Parisian Left intellectuals, Camus points out how different is their notion of the proletariat from the reality of these ordinary unsung individuals. Too honest to overlook their failings, only too well aware of their casual cruelties, he shows how, in their gut reaction of hostility to other races in the quest for work, they were “fighting for the privilege of servitude.” As a journalist in 1939 Camus had seen the Arab children of Tizi-Ouzou in rags as they fought with dogs for the contents of a dustbin. He had expressed his outrage at the powerful French colonialists who blocked necessary reforms, the exploiters and oppressors. He wanted to make it clear that the underprivileged to whom his own family belonged were not among them.

What is unforgettable in the draft novel is the presence of Algeria itself, in all its harshness, strangeness, and beauty. Camus had written lyrically elsewhere about his country, which he did not want to lose, but here the personal tone is more marked, perhaps because he grasped that he was writing about a doomed world. A mere two years after his death, when Algeria became independent, most of the French Algerians fled to France. Algeria would ultimately lapse into the civil war between the government and the Islamic extremists that Camus had foreseen and dreaded.

Here, in the draft novel, is the Algeria he knew and loved, not least the teeming streets of the poor district of Belcourt. Here are the sights and sounds, tastes and odors; the delights of the small boy, the games with his friends, the free pleasures of the sun and the seaside, the rare joys of a hunting trip with his uncle. How dazzling are the descriptions of animals, of fruits, flowers, and trees, the powerful wind, the sudden torrential rains! There is the enthralling daily tramride to the lycée that embraces the whole arc of the bay of Algiers in early light and at dusk. Everything is recalled and projected with sensual intensity and avidity for life (doubtless enhanced by the tuberculosis that undermined Camus at seventeen). It seems almost as if we have trod those streets with the boy and his friends. Were these rich memories faithfully those of the child he had been? inquires Camus/ Cormery with unfailing honesty. Whether they are faithful or not, the writing bears the stamp of total conviction.

Who is “the first man”? It is Camus/Cormery, alienated by his education and talent from his misty past and his milieu. Moreover, the obscure hardworking French Algerians, like the ancestors and members of the author’s family, without private and public memory, are each “the first man.” With the approaching demise of French Algeria, the theme blends with Camus’s enduring anxiety about death and nothingness. All the same, in the draft novel, the voiceless are given a highly potent voice. In a letter to his friend Jean de Maisonseul in 1937, Camus had observed: “It is my heart and my innermost being that have written well, not my intellect.” That is certainly true of what is left of this searingly poignant document.