In Travels in the Americas, Notes and Impressions of a New World, by Albert Camus (University of Chicago Press, 2023), I read this arresting entry:
Here in New York, thousands of would-be admirals and generals are doormen, captains, and boys. The elevator operators like so many bottled genies going up and down in their big boxes.
Sometimes you read a sentence and it’s not so much that you wish you’d thought of it first, more that you aspire to utter something equally original. Camus visited New York just after the end of the Second World War. We all have a notion of what New York must have been like then, because of the movies. For post-war Britain, which had been starved not quite into subjugation, but nearly so, the New World seemed impossibly glamorous. Cary Grant and Myrna Loy and Claudette Colbert and Lauren Bacall and so on. I got a sense of it back in the 80s, when I saw Lauren Bacall perform in Melbourne, in Sweet Bird of Youth. She was wonderful, and still very glamorous.
But I don’t think Albert Camus was taken in by the bright lights, even although he had just emerged from the blackout in Europe. Churchill, who was half American, said that the US and the UK were two countries separated by a common language. The common language may tempt the Brit to forget that he is venturing abroad into foreign territory. When Churchill looked the wrong way in NY in 1931, stepped off the kerb and got run over, he committed a cultural faux-pas in a very stark manner. You think you know the norms and customs, and then you foul up. Camus didn’t share a common language and so he never made this mistake. (Perhaps that’s a little crass. In 1960, three years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was killed in a car crash.) He was fascinated by the USA, but it remained very strange to him. In Travels in the Americas, there is a picture of a huge billboard on Times Square, advertising Camel cigarettes. As Camus says, “A G.I., his mouth wide open lets out huge puffs of real smoke. All of it yellow and red.” Only in America. I can once remember coming out of the theatre in Broadway and passing a man taking his llama for a walk, while somebody in a kiosk at a street corner offered to take my blood pressure. That would have been equally ridiculous to Camus. Under the intense glare of the city lights, he saw the benighted plight of the individual trapped on his own peculiar treadmill, swallowed up by the maw of unfettered and insatiable capitalism. To him, it seemed quite absurd.
My father had an extraordinary experience in New York during the war. What on earth, you may ask, was a young man from Saltcoats, Ayrshire, doing in NY, NY in 1942? Well, long story short, he had been a policeman in Glasgow when the Nazis bombed Clydebank, he took umbrage, joined the RAF, and crossed the Atlantic on a troop ship to Canada in order to learn to fly. I have pictures of him, lying on a beach on Prince Edward Island, surrounded by beautiful women with big hair, and, like Lauren Bacall, “the look”. During a period of leave, he visited New York with a comrade-in-arms. They were dining in a restaurant when the actor Paul Douglas spotted them in RAF uniform, and invited them to dine at his table. That is one trait you cannot deny our American cousins evince in spades. Hospitality.
My mum’s brother went to live in NY back in the 1930s, as a result of which I have extended family in the Big Apple. When I first visited in 1982, my uncle met me at JFK and said, with a sense of profound irony, “Welcome to the land of the free.” Like Camus, he too saw through it all. I think he just missed Scotland.
I first encountered Camus a lifetime ago when I studied French in a liberal arts course in Glasgow for a year. We read La Peste. I have vague memories of an allegorical tale of Nazism infiltrating the French colonial territory in Oran. This was near the North African port of Mers el Kébir where the French fleet was anchored and sequestered at the time of the defeat of France in 1940. Britain gave France an ultimatum that unless the French fleet were delivered to the British, it would be sunk. The French called the British bluff that wasn’t a bluff, and the fleet was attacked and disabled, with great loss of life. And we wonder why De Gaulle said “Non” to the UK’s application to join the Common Market (he probably anticipated what trouble the Brits would be), and why M. Macron is saying “Non” to the appointment of Ben Wallace as Secretary General of NATO.
Camus constructed an entire philosophy out of his sense of the absurd. I can even remember a young female French lecturer advocating the adoption of the principles of the Absurd, the way you might proselytise on behalf of a religion. I was aware at the time of The Theatre of The Absurd, as typified by Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Then there was Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King. I saw a performance which took place, for some obscure reason, in Glasgow Unitarian Church on Pitt Street. I can see the attraction in looking upon everything that occurs in life as being inherently ridiculous. I thought of this when I heard Mr Gove yesterday touring the television and radio studios to apologise unequivocally about the latest Partygate video footage. I took it all in with a shrug, a pout, and a Gallic flick of the wrist.
The French can be every bit as absurd as the Americans. A strange event took place on June 4th on the Champs Élysées when 1,650 people seated at desks in serried columns took dictation longhand from a man on stage with a mic. They were trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records. Why on earth?
But I find myself nowadays more drawn to the east than to the west. Frankly, the Americans all work too hard in endless pursuit of the dollar. Why would you want to hold down three jobs, and only take two weeks’ vacation, if that, once a year? I would much rather chill out in some remote sun-kissed village in Provence, playing pétanque in the heat of the afternoon, and paying homage to the great French Holy Trinity of bread, cheese, and wine.
jamescalumcampbell 