Looking for “The Stranger”: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic with Alice Kaplan

you meeting session welcome to the Washington history seminar welcome to the Wilson Center I'm Christian Osterman delighted to welcome so many of you on this beautiful afternoon glad you you found us here I'm delighted is always to co-chair this seminar session with Professor Eric Arneson from George Washington University and to acknowledge our partnership with the National History Center we've now been running this seminar together for three or four years or five or six of gaash because I was there at the creation I should know but anyhow I delighted to have so many of you here for this very intriguing session on looking for the stranger Albert Camus in the life of a Latorre classic Eric will produce our featured speaker today professor Alice Kaplan in just ajust a moment let me as always acknowledge the support we get from our teams various teams Peter beer Stecher my team all the way in the back and Amanda Perry did I see Evan Daria hiding in the back Amanda the assistant director at the National History Center thank you so much for your help getting us organized the seminar is co-sponsored by part by the Society of Society of historians of American foreign relations Schaffer the George Washington University history Parkman a number of other donors we really appreciate their support let me ask you to quiet your cell phones or other devices that you have on you so we can be focused on today's lecture and discussion and let me say next week we'll meet here at the same time to launch Gregg Burzynski's new book on winning the third world sign American competition during the Cold War but now it's over to Eric and thank you it is my real pleasure this afternoon to introduce our speaker Alice Kaplan who is the John and must sir professor of French at Yale University she is a specialist in twentieth century France she works at the intersection of literature and history using a method that allies archival research with textual analysis she is a former Guggenheim Fellow a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the French Legion donor as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history for her earlier work the collaborator published in 2000 recent books include dreaming in French published in 2012 and looking for the stranger Albert Camus and the life of a literary classic and this afternoon she will be speaking on the subject of that book how they call she became the stranger literary translation in the long life of a classic house Catholic thank you so much I'm really I was so pleased to be invited by the national history seminar I want to thank all the people who helped organize Peter Beard speaker and Amanda Perry and our moderators Eric Arneson and Christian Osterman this is in some way a talk about foreign relations and you will see how but first to have a question I want to know with a show of hands how many of you have read camis novels a stranger he felt self-selecting audience right how many have read it in French and how many in English Oh fantastic okay so you're the ideal audience you are also one of over 10 million people who've read the novel in over 60 languages reading the stranger is a rite of passage people all over the world connect the book to their coming-of-age to grappling with the questions of existence the story of milk so a man whose name contains a plunge and soo into death ma is a deceptively simple one his mother dies and in old people's home and he travels to her funeral when he gets back he goes swimming with a girlfriend and takes her to the movies he writes a letter for a friend who's a pretty rough character he kills an Arab on a beach in Algiers he is tried and sentenced to death and as the novel ends he awaits execution it's not much to go on yet the stranger is a gripping and puzzling today as it was in 1942 with its images both ordinary and unforgettable a view out the balcony on a lazy Sunday the whimper of a dog being beaten the light shooting off of steel knife and four quick knocks on the door of unhappiness echoes of a stupid vigilante killing it's easy to forget that there is nothing natural about the stranger of success it's been a best-seller for so long we forget it was ever anything else but literary classics are made not born and so today I want to tell you one part of a very complex story about how the stranger a book very few readers understood or appreciated when it was published in 1942 became a household name a regular on width of the great books of the century cited in this country in the company of other classics Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men I'm going to focus on a key episode in The Strangers American career the first translation of the novel into English in the United States and in England four years after its publication in 1946 the war in Europe had been over for only a year the story I'm about to tell you is a tale of two cities involving an author his publishers his translator and his readers and reviewers although few Americans had read li-qua-che when it first came out in French and been almost impossible to find a copy in wartime France word of the novel had crossed the ocean Blanche Knapp who founded cannot with her husband Alfred in 1915 had a special interest in publishing translations of contemporary European literature she had been cut off from France for the duration of the war but by February 1945 she was back in touch with her agent in Paris software the great sup had lauded a newcomer novel still in manuscript called the plague in a lecture he gave at Harvard in 1945 Blanche kenapa cabled Paris asking to see the manuscript the plague with its link to the suffering and heroism of France during the German occupation was bound to make a splash and she understood that cannot might also have to buy the stranger in order to get the plague which he considered a more exciting and relevant book alfred cannot cabled the agent bradley in february eager to acquire the plague but cami hadn't finished the novel cannot hesitated in march 1945 he decided to make an offer of three hundred and fifty dollars for translation rights on the stranger with an option to buy rights for the play when it was finished and the British were somewhat more enthusiastic than the Americans cyril connelly a magazine editor and critic a real eccentric who is on record declaring that the european novel was a wasteland saw a whole new start for fiction itself in what comer had ittan he brought the stranger immediately to the attention of publisher Jamie Hamilton who purchased British rights in February 1945 with an advance of 75 pounds Hamilton asked Connelly to provide an introduction and Hamilton also chose the translator Stuart Gilbert a friend of James Joyce who had a good track record translating novels like man's fate by only might hold kenapa and Hamilton agreed to share translation clause in June Blanche cannot made her first post-war buying trip to Paris and finally met Cameron in person in her old spot at the Ritz Hotel on the Place Vendome she liked to meet authors early in the day smoking Chesterfield on a couch in the hotel's vast corridor a space that remained quiet until afternoon tea was served she would ask for information about up-and-coming French writers and she was known to say that's not good enough for America when she didn't like a suggestion with coming however she let down her guard and listened it was the beginning of a long and devoted literary friendship stuart gilbert worked fast by september 1945 he'd sent his complete manuscript to canal fan Hamilton with instructions and with a title the stranger On January 10th Jamie Hamilton sent corrected galleys of the translation to Blanche Knopf in New York and by galleys of course I mean the bound typeset pages that always precede a published book allowing author and editor to make last-minute Corrections but there was a bombshell in his letter the announcement of effect accompli there it is I send you here with a set of corrected galleys of use Netaji which we have decided to call the outsider both because we consider this a more striking an appropriate title than the stranger and because Hutchinson's recently called one of their Russian novels the stranger so in 1945 Hutchinson's arrival British publisher released what was actually a Polish novel in English translation which bore the unfortunate titles of stranger Hamilton feared that kemi's book might be confused with it on the New York end it was too late to switch titles from the stranger to the outsider Hamilton was sending galleys but these galleys were as unexpected as the title change for kenapa had already types at the book for themselves so that it could be available for camis visit to New York that spring Blanche Knopf responded tersely to Hamilton's announcement here's her letter I had assumed when I read the man when I received the manuscript because it had instructions on it from Stuart Gilbert it was setting copy we read it very carefully and made any necessary Corrections certainly if I had known there was a chance of corrected galleys I would not have set and I wish you might have cabled me the new title which I can well understand you're using Hamilton hadn't cabled nor had he telephone this was the immediate post-war world obviously there was no internet no cell phones but I think even harder for us to imagine in our tempest contemporary context is the fact that people didn't just pick up the phone in London to call New York Canal and Hamilton the two publishers may have shared the English language but they were separated by a vast ocean and very different expectations on the English side it hadn't occurred to Jamie Hamilton that cannot would go to the trouble of producing the book separately without waiting for his own galleys with Hamilton being patronizing with cannot being presumptuous the combination of an assumption for control on the British side and an assumption of Independence on the American aside make for a fine allegory of British American relations going back to the revolutions that separated us for years no one has been able to explain why Tammuz li-qua-che has two different english-language titles an Algerian critic argued recently in a review of Sandra's Smith's 2013 translation of an apology for Viking England that the title the outsider is politically scandalous for it of faces the ambiguity in the French word in the apology and substitutes a more banal idea of someone being excluded he thought this algerian critic thought that smith's 2013 title was new not realizing that the british have used that same title since 1946 the two titles tempt us to fill in the blanks with cultural or political theories certainly I had them I hadn't imagined so for example that in melting pot New York the immigrant firm of canal had a sense of foreignness that directed them towards the stranger where is Hamilton and class-conscious Britain with more aware of social exclusion hence the outsider this is you know a literary historians fantasy world neither series hold water as we see from this exchange between Hamilton and Knopf only marketing issues and timing explain why Leto J was born into the English language as fraternal twins same text different typography covers and titles I like to think of the two editions as existentialist twins the doubling has continued to this day even as new translations have replaced Gilbert's no matter who is translating the British Edition is called the outsider the American edition the stranger books about the stranger the outsider when they're published in the US and England have to change titles in each addition or risk disorienting readers yeah existentialist twins right if you ask someone English or American which title they prefer chances are they will answer the one I'm used to and an in discussion it would be great to talk about which title you prefer and why the British edition of the outsider bore a cover featuring an Arab and strong mosaic design and a critical introduction by Cyril Connelly what strikes me about this design is that the Arab represented does not look anything like an Algerian Arab from those years he looked more like a Saudi Arabian Arab right so I think there's a certain amount of British projection going on calmly reminded readers in a really remarkable a remarkable introduction that's been completely forgotten he reminded readers that Algeria was a colony of France and that chemin seemed to give to the Arab characters in the novel particularly the Moorish woman beaten and reviled none of the sympathetic attention to their dilemma that he had given to Mel so Connelly was writing with an acute sense that India was about to gain its independence from the British Empire which was fading despite or perhaps because of the political salvo launched from the book introduction Jamie Hamilton was certain he had a best-seller on his hand and he planned a first print run of 10,000 copies over twice galley miles wartime print run of 4400 in Paris at Knopf in New York there was much more hesitation in house readers reports were less than stellar see if you can even recognize the novel you've read in their remarks Herbert Weinstock opera specialist that says it all right opera specialist and Knopf advisor had this to say about the stranger quote this extended short story the translation does not exceed 30,000 words is pleasant an exciting reading it seems to me neither very important or very memorable and it also seems to me to be padded with extraneous detail he attributed the piling up of details the flat tone and what he called quote deliberate heartlessness to quote a philosophic theory called existentialism of which the stranger could be considered a demonstration quote my best guess is that it will appeal to very few readers and produce something less than a sensation another advisor called Leto J quote too slight to be worth translating and this advisor filed a report with cannot in January 1945 dissatisfied with the scene that has gone down in literary history as the most stunning part of the novel quote the actual moment of the shooting is not altogether convincing the turning point in the story isn't credible the book is limited so cannot pad its work cut out here's this first American edition with a kind of you know ambiguous figure we don't know if this is the era of the Frenchman whatever chemical AAB had its work cut out as the stranger was about to go on sale in American bookstores the publisher placed a full-page ad in Publishers Weekly it was signed by Blanche can off and entitled on the new literature of France actually Blanche cannot convince Justin O'Brien a professor in the Columbia French Department to ghostwrite the ad she wrote to O'Brien the bookstores are not buying this novel and do not know anything about the entire a French trend Jamie Hamilton always referred to it as Blanche's and substantial astad she was going to do everything possible to make the stranger accessible and exciting and it's really hard to imagine Publishers Weekly today doing a full-page ad to explain say I'll post colonialism or deconstruction but there she was all ready to go so the advertisement began by sympathizing with the average readers dilemma it says she writes there is no use trying to talk about new French literature unless you are willing to tackle existentialism now this is a frightening word everyone likes to show that he can pronounce it but no one enjoys undertaking to define it well here goes existentialism the ad continued is the notion that a consciousness of the universe's meaninglessness can make us free passing mentioned was then made of the fact that Kemmer sombre countenance gazed out from the upper right of the page refused to be classified with the existentialist because their emphasis on meaninglessness with it odds with his belief in political justice the author of the stranger was introduced as a man who had lived a double life during the occupation publishing with the approval of the Nazi Center while editing a resistance newspaper underground the stranger was then presented in a few words a novel as simple and straightforward as John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men pitching the stranger as both a lofty existentialist novel and a straightforward populist novel with clever since reviewers could pick up on either strand high or low pitching camera as an existentialist and a champion for social justice was also a good idea here was an author both intelligent and heroic after a month of what Blanche cannot considered fan a stick press 2,500 copies of the novel had sold in 1946 the stranger was not yet a best-seller in the long run there I think the ad accomplished something far more important than immediate sale it introduced camera to American magazine and newspaper publishers as a leading figure of a school of French literature called existentialist and it established that school as the most important new intellectual current coming out of France you would have to read this advertisement in Publishers Weekly twice over to gleam that Khemu disavow the existentialist label and in fact he detested it he joked in an interview with a French magazine that he and Sark had decided they ought to put out their own ad stating that the undersigned have nothing in common and refused to respond to any debts they might have incurred mutually yet it was salsa who prepared the way for camis New York welcome southla described Kemmer in Vogue magazine as the emblematic writer to emerge from the resistance the only writer who corresponded to his theory of a committed literature essential to the renewal of France as Blanche cannot learn southla had read an early version of Tammy's forthcoming novel to play in manuscript and he was ready to vouch that the world was about to see a new chemin the absurdity of the world in the stranger and the myth of sisyphus gave way in this new work the plague to positive revolt and struggle the plague based on camis own commitment to the resistance demonstrated that the human spirit could come to rule over the absurd world soccer made camera a key to the future of literature and he spoke in English and said it is likely that in the sombre pure work of cammer are discernible the principal trait of the French letters that is the French literature of the future for Sacco whose influence was been tremendous Hemi represented most vividly the aspirations of post-war literature at a shining moment when writers and intellectuals felt the world was theirs to remake no other writer I think could have fit the bill for salsa Mahal was too much of an individualist gano and more yak much older men had chosen to publish nothing above ground while the Communists were indebted to their own masters Camus had done exactly what needed to be done during the occupation he'd marked time but he hadn't accepted the oppression he had chosen struggle rather than silence 32 years old in 1945 he had reached the perfect age when youth meets maturity back in the u.s. in January 1946 and speaking to students at Yale about the French view of the American Novel Sharples singled out the stranger as quote the French novel which caused the greatest furor between 1940 and 1945 he focused on Camus debt to Hemingway the short disruptive sentences which in Hemingway were a feature of the writers temperament but incomin seemed rather to be a deliberate technique for expressing a philosophy of the absurd Sarkis said that each sentence of the novel was like an island separated from the next sentence by a sense of nothingness then he entertained his audience with stories of the symbolic value of American literature under German occupation he described the café de Flore and abou Belgium and a play as the headquarters for a black market in American books not only did reading Faulkner and Hemingway novels become a symbol of resistance he claimed it was even the case he could not resist a sexist joke that secretaries believed they could demonstrate against the Germans by reading Gone with the Wind in the metro sow promised his audience three months before the english-language publication of the stranger that the first French novels written during the occupation were about to appear in the United States he was rolling out a thick red carpet for his friend so a lot of preparation went into the publication of the stranger in the US after the confusion over the title the tepid readers reports and the big push of the Publishers Weekly ad came one more important step a visit by the author into the United States under the auspices of the cultural services of the French Embassy in the second half of my lecture then I'd like to recount that visit and the initial reactions of the American public to the apology in translation when the SS Oregon docked in the New York Harbor on March 24 1946 kamu was the only passenger held for questioning by immigration officials he refused to answer any of their questions which surely included what was then the standard for Cold War America are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party and indeed he had for two short years in Algeria he was silent for several hours until a staff member from French cultural services intervened and vouched for the writer word of the incident reached J Edgar Hoover always on the lookout for the communist menace Hoover ordered FBI surveillance and a report Freedom of Information is this the report the FBI's major source of information with a light-hearted article published by or rent in the left-wing magazine the nation a month before camis arrival in Manhattan in the French existentialist and have that come on here there we go in French existentialism Hannah Arendt claimed that France had become a place where books so difficult as to require actual thinking fell like detective stories the French existentialist were having more fun than any other intellectuals in the post-war world and the two main representatives of this new existentialist movement were soccer and Canon after quoting a rent at length the FBI report de-escalated the threat pointing out that with the liberation even the Communists in France had turned to nationalist concerns and to the reconstruction of their country in the end special agent Tierney concluded there was really nothing to worry about the unknown agent tyranny is a hero of the story for another agent might have given in to the reigning Cold War paranoia here's what he wrote investigation fails to develop any subversive or political activity on subjects part informants state they believe subject is striving in his lectures to establish a closer relationship between the cultural views of the US and France and to explain the philosophy of the absurd this philosophy he continues recommends living lucidly with the absurd enjoying life all the more fully because it had no meaning and taking advantage of the most complete liberty on earth once eternal liberty is suppressed where is agent attorney when we need him today waiting patiently at Pier 88 to greet kami that spring day was Nicola CaroMont a an Italian friend who had sought refuge with kami and his family in Algiers and oh ho in 1941 he de companied camarón bike trips to the beach that inspired the stranger he'd lived with chemists in-laws in downtown Hall camera Monta had found safe passage to New York through Algeria Morocco and Portugal with chemins health and it was time to return him and hospitality the Italian refugee was now a prominent New York intellectual publishing in the best small magazines there would be no quiet walks on the beach for chemin and Carole Monte but instead many loud parties and evenings and honky-tonk bars and fancy New York apartments Blanche and Alfred can opt through a Swank party to launch the stranger on the rooftop garden of the Astor Hotel in Times Square but cami didn't even mention it in his New York diary despite what the existentialist ad said the novel he had conceived in 1939 and perfected in the depths of the occupation no longer correspond to his thinking or his mood the specialist of the flat first-person narrative the creator of the alienated and solitary Mirko had earned the right and privileged to step onto the lecture stage and speak as we representing the aspirations of liberated France four days after his arrival Camus lectured at Columbia University the event was a panel on post-war France conceived and organized by the great anthropologist Claude lévi-strauss Libby Strauss in 1946 was the cultural attache in the New York offices of the French Embassy hammer was joined by two writers published by the legendary underground press the EDC on Domini their car author of a little novella some of you must know silence of the scene scene all stood a mare and a mathematician SAS named Tamara the event at Columbia was the talk of the town cami was hosted by professor Justin O'Brien the 20th century French literature specialist in the Columbia French Department who had only recently traded in his uniform for a professor's tweed coat and who had written the famous existentialist ad for Blanche Knopf O'Brien announced in the New York Herald Tribune that cami was the boldest writer in France today the Columbia spectator the student newspaper prepared the student body for chemists talk quote Camus however appears to live happily within this absurd and not to sacrifice his lucidity and contentedness at the altar of metaphysical revelation it was a kind of reassuring take on the myth of sisyphus why be bogged down in the absurd when life is so much fun the day before the event O'Brien called uncommon and the other speakers at the Embassy a Maffeo tell at 70th in Broadway quote the moment we were in his room and the athletic young man had stretched out on the bed with a few notes in front of him he easily dominated the group chem is charisma made of equal parts of physical presence ease and authority worked it's magic on men and women alike O'Brien's impression of chemi is athletic may have been fanciful and certainly belied Cummings tenuous health the young writer had survived the occupation but he was suffering from the effects of a relapse of his adolescent tuberculosis that had struck him hard in 1942 that he hadn't been able to shake try then to imagine the scene a huge audience gathered in Columbia's Macmillan's theater more than the university had ever seen for an event in French 1200 people crowded into a space designed for 600 some of them carrying copies of khumba cami was editor-in-chief of this newspaper which had begun underground as part of a resistance movement and now represented the aspirations for a new more just society in liberation France O'Brien remembered everyone was eager to hear French spoken again and to see in flesh and blood some survivors of the black years of the occupation there are the other two speakers so in his speech at Columbia called the human crisis cami mentioned neither the stranger nor the myth of sisyphus speaking in french he described his generation foreign during the first world war reaching adolescence during the Depression coming of age during the civil war in Spain Munich and the defeat and living through an enemy occupation he spoke with no regret of the fashion for the absurd that had captured writers such as himself before the war and of a literature that was in revolt against clarity narration and even the sentence this was no longer his world kami was preoccupied as were the characters in his novel and progress the plague with preventing the return of a deadly scourge like an epidemic brought under control Hitler's death ended one cycle of evil but it should not make them complacent kami called for the elimination of the death penalty for dialogue across borders for indulgence towards others and rigor towards oneself and he praised the Frenchman who's been willing to die for the truth he likened them to so many modern-day Socrates after the losses from two world wars he suggested would doubtless see history being made by other nations French writers and thinkers faced a daunting task they needed to emerge from the era of Nazism with pessimism about the world and optimism about mankind and if you're interested in this speech you can see on YouTube we had it reenacted in 2016 with Viggo Mortensen reading the Khemu text in an English translation same theatre same campus same date it was really a remarkable event but here's what interested me for our purposes today a writer for The New Yorker who visited Cameroon in his room at the Embassy Hotel found in studying the kunafa edition of his novel with a puzzled expression on his face Hammond didn't read English very well but he knew something was wrong there are too many quotations in it he told his visitor I am sure there weren't that many quotations in the original so you can see it best in this chart any chance he got Stuart Gilbert used quotation even a passing remark like I answered no became in Gilbert's version I answered no the change had huge consequences in tone and style in the readers relationship to muscle because while kami had had chosen to use indirect speech to distance the reader from his narrator to deprive us of direct dialogue Guildford rapport preferred to report speech directly did he think it made the story livelier it's impossible to know in any case his change created an entirely different mood like many talented translators faced with radical literary innovation Gilbert wanted to make the stranger I'm good in idiomatic English but he changed the style so drastically that anyone who knew the French and happened upon this version was appalled 30 years later a French professor named John gale who'd been asked to lecture on the novel to a group of students reading it in English was so taken aback by his first contact with Gilbert stranger that he wrote a manifesto called does America know the stranger and here are some of his damning example right so Gilbert translates a shouty way as I should get there and soon I hide my food as sorry sir but it's not my fault you know soon as a BA and the French becomes I can't be sure in English Murph oh isn't indifferent in this translation he just can't make up his mind Cammi right is a Palm Bay little bruiser Doozer as I leave I don't have to needy I'll take the bus at 2:00 and I'll ride in the afternoon and Gilbert translates with the two o'clock but I should get there well before nightfall Gilbert Gilbert substitutes complex sentence structures for Camus stripped-down sentences and he asserts causality that Camus worked so hard to avoid Gilbert sentences are no longer the island that's so fascinated South but in the original Gilbert also gives a novel bit of a cultural upgrade even vimal sanchez the pimp sounds British but I have this on a fly Eve knocked around the world a bit Santa says to mill so in Gilbert's translation where chemi reports the conversation indirectly he wanted to ask my advice since I was a man I knew life he belated Madame all day I call say commodities i nom troponin say kamu had landed in New York on March 25 1946 on April 11 a more hesitant classier and vaguely more British Murph so stepped gingerly onto the pavements of American literature in reviews from April to July 1946 there was a discrepancy between the political spokesman of 1946 and the solitary writer of the stranger existentialism from what American critics had read appeared to be a practical and hopeful philosophy designed to pull France and the rest of the world out of the wartime morass but the man and his novel didn't match Camus preoccupied with political change had moved beyond the absurd but the stranger couldn't it would forever be the fruit of coming solitude in AHA and Paris the book conceived before the fall of France the American press tried to make sense of the novel as a reflection of its author who in their minds represented the resistance at certain articles forced the connection view of stylish New York surrealist magazine published a disdainful review of the stranger by Nicholas Callas Callas understood more so as a pure collaborator who doesn't lose himself in action but abandoned hope and becomes a cynic Camus French Almonte reviewed Gilbert's translation in the New Republic for him there was a deep connection between Russo's refusal to lie and Kami's own honesty which gave the stranger in his mind and ethical force but differentiated it from any of the American novels to which it was compared his Moscow resisted the talk of the town column in The New Yorker published a sketch entitled the absurd The Magazine brought the French literary star down to size by describing him as a cartoonish looking character whose skinny frame showed the effects of the occupation diet and whose suit was ten years out-of-date there are all these talk of the town a little nasty there Camus and his own Diaries complained about American bad taste the ugliest neckties he had ever seen he wrote to Janine and Misha Jeremiah's friends in Paris as the girls at Vogue were calling him the little Bogart and he figured he could probably get a film contract whenever he wanted one young journalist at Vogue named Patricia Blake became his American companion and she grew close enough to come to notice his sudden sweats and fevers without quite realizing that he was suffering from tuberculosis cami went on tour to several East Coast campuses like Simone de Beauvoir a year later but in a more ironic key he was amazed by American students especially the women at Vassar College on April 6 1946 he wrote quote an army of young starlets who recline on the lawns with their long legs crossed what they do for young people here is worth remembering he was only 32 but with the war and the underground struggle behind him not to mention his poor health Hamm who felt decades older than those students he wasn't the first European to complain about American optimism in this country he wrote everything is done to prove that life is not tragic and the young people feel as if something is missing and he added this effort is pathetic because you have to reject the tragic after looking at it but not before meanwhile the literary establishment continued to pronounce both on the stranger and on its author in the sunday New York Times John L Brown wrote from Paris he knew chemins literary circle very well and he explained that Kemmer was the person to whom the tormented uncertain often unbalanced but always courageous adolescents of post-liberation France come to discuss their problems with someone who they feel understands them better than anyone else his camera was an apostle the stranger didn't fare very well with Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker he found a novel sociologically inconsistent if what Repsol wants is to keep the Arab in their place and even that isn't sure he ought to be shown as himself being kicked or squeezed by some other social group in other words Wilson wanted a realist novel Charles poor also wrote about Algeria a journeyman critic for the New York Times who'd served with the Civil Affairs Division in North Africa and Italy he was the first u.s. critic to address the men who had landed on the coast of Algeria in 1942 and I have to remind my students who know d-day inside-out that the Allies liberated North Africa in November 1942 poor writes the scene of the stranger is Algiers not the elders full of allied miuna forms and armament and confusion and jeeps roaring up the Romish lay that so many Americans have known but a purely French and Arabelle jeers of some time before the war hit that steep town the frying wet heat of summer however is familiar a beautiful review Brown didn't make the darker connection between Rosa's crime and the Second World War the fact that millions of Americans whether they had fought in Normandy in North Africa or in the Pacific we're living with a memory of killing a nameless enemy to them the stranger held out a dark and grimly satisfying mirror as for the Arab in the story poor remark but only in parentheses incidentally the fate of the Arabs family is completely overlooked in the proceedings it would be several decades before American critics grappled with that aspect of the novel I'll leave you with a mystery despite the real problems of the Gilbert translation despite the tensions between chemist persona and his novel readers seem to grasp what was essential the novel took hold I can't explain it maybe it helped that Pantheon books published a french-language edition of late Andrei in New York in 1946 there were many Americans in those days who could read the original the Pantheon edition was the exact negative of one of Galle mouths traditional white covers an homage to Leto his birthright that dressed the book in post-war morning we know that 40 years after the first u.s. translation of the stranger Charles Poor's parenthetical remark about the Arab would become absolutely central the stranger marketed by Blanche cannot in 1946 as a philosophical expression of existentialism would morph into a much more political book and students and teachers would begin to debate as Cyril Connolly proposed in his introduction the meaning of a story where the Arab victim has no name and no language the life of a book goes on well beyond the life of its author it grows and changes expands and contracts with new generations of readers it's good health it's very survival is dependent upon the new questions we ask of it which brings me to conclude in 2013 Chaminda would an Algerian writer published a novel about the brother and mother of Moses victim called the mill so investigation he gives Moses era victim a name Musa and he gives him a surviving brother named Howie who tried with difficulty to find out what happened to the writer who killed his brother in a book he's created a fascinating mix of criticism and fiction both dependent on the plot of the stranger but ultimately flying free from its sources chemins bold repurposing is only one example in a 75 year old history of reinventions of the stranger the power of kemi's book to inspire strong responses in nazi-occupied France and post-war America in modern-day Algeria is proof of its strength as long as people keep reading novels the stranger will live on and that is more of a guarantee of an afterlife and any author and most books can hope for thank you thank you so much and now we turn to our question discussion period we have a few ground rules if you'd wait to be called on wait for the microphone to reach you use the microphone we're being recorded and if you don't use it posterity will not know your question and please identify yourself so who will start us off right up here you need a microphone in the front super Thanks one second that mic on it's not on what this one will be hi my name is Joey Abraham's I have no affiliation I wanted to know how your experience with your publishing companies and your experience with your critics influenced your study of caboose experiences with his publishers and his critics you mean my long-duration experience you know you as a writer as a writer so one of the things that allowed me to write this book was an experience of over 20 years in a writing workshop with novelist in North Carolina and when I left North Carolina in 2009 and moved to Yale I continued thanks to the magic of Skype I continued to attend this writing workshop these are novelists mostly doing southern fiction and they put up with me as a nonfiction writer and I've learned so much from them about writing for image and we read out loud so I listen I hear books being read out loud I see writers going through a very difficult process of getting their books published so it's given me a lot of insight into what it's like to try to get a first book published just what can a camu had to do in 1942 when he was an absolutely unknown guy in the boondocks in Algeria and I think that was probably the key the key to my being able to imagine cameras process and over here Jim banner microphone is coming eventually professor Kaplan um thank you very much I'm a great admirer of your book on mobile buzzshock which I read some years ago um I carried milk so with me in my mind and my heart and my pocket on the campus of Yale College in the 1950s when it was fused by the spirit of your predecessor only fair and my great teacher of history Frank Ballmer in the history department now then I was sent to France by the army and I started to read coming in French even translated a bit of him local co-op a teapot saw his wonderful essay and um I saw Lake fausse day at the Odeon rumours and so on he was he was all over the place in France in and of course he went quiet for her 57 to 58 in 60 and I was in veil down where I was stationed when the news came up his being killed in an auto accident and I remember talking with my provincial friends and then some more self-esteem ones in Paris of course about coming and they were very divided on their view of him and this is what I want to ask you about because what you've been talking about there is really in part about reputation um his work was certainly known but his reputation suffered for those years when he fell silent because of the Algerian war in which he was caught up on both sides River but my impression is tell me if I'm wrong that in recent years because of your book um existentialist cafe I'm Tony Judds work where he elevates memory above sort of far above Sartre Olivier toads biography and so on that amuse reputation is now recovering or is at its very height um can you tell us if I'm right what the reasons for that are and then and then stopping is gone for a minute predict where it might go in the decades ahead you with my crystal ball so how long how long do you have first of all all mesh to all repair did you take his course in the modern French novel I am now teaching the modern French novel was with maurice Samuelson we think about all he pair every day you know it's one of the most fascinating stories in all of literary history the fortunes of camera and how low they sunk at the height of post-colonial literature after Edward Sayyid published Orientalism and said that you know Kami's de coeur was just sort of a pretentious effort to cast european metaphysics in algeria and he was really so disdained in fact that Patrick McCarthy wrote a biography and said cameras work had absolutely no staying power that in fact he hadn't even been in the resistance really and it was so bad that the Cameron family sued so that that book I'm not sure if it appeared in France or not um he had gone to Algeria in 1956 to plead for a civilian truth and was booed by the ultras you know who called for his death and then he discovered that the people who had been in the truce movement with him had already joined the FLN so they had gone already gone over to a violent solution it was after that that he went silent but he didn't completely go silent because he was sending letters to the President of the Republic trying to say Algerian politico's from from the guillotine she didn't succeed there were many many death sentences in those years now what happened from this low point you're right I mean you've got the bibliography as a tip of your fingers I mean Judd really important a book by David Carroll called kami the Algerian trying to understand cameras commitment and so on but for me there's one event that restored kammo to our affections and that is the book he was writing when he died in the car crash that was discovered in his briefcase in the wreck of the car the first man the first man could not be published in 1960 the family just decided that in an atmosphere where Algeria was getting its independence the story of a little French boy in Algeria would just be booed so they kept it they kept the manuscript it was very difficult to establish the text because the handwriting was like that and then 34 years later this book came out it was like a message in a bottle and I remember being with the Algerian writer Isaiah Juba and right after it had come out and she said oh my god I have the feeling for the first time of being invited into the home of a portion wildboy it gave people the impression you know so many of chemist books are well not cheap as others early lyrical as is but some of the books are very controlled and even cool the fall is very bitter but here's this book that's really full of feeling and not all this he hasn't been able to work over the sentences so you feel like you're getting but you know it's an illusion of literature but you feel like you're really getting the real guy and this book turned around Cameron studies completely and suddenly from 94 on the situation changed southla went down the soapless stock went down the chemin stock went up you're asking me about my crystal ball and what's going to happen in the future I think I think soxhlet it's about time for a Saco revival because he's been really rejected for being only a political writer and it's just not true there's much more going on in salsa um but I imagine that Khemu will keep strong and he's so I just taught a freshman seminar on camera and he really speaks to young people thank you for your question right there in the back and welcome to the front hi John Garrity I I was caught by the date of the original publication 1942 in the depths of World War two yeah and why would the German occupation authorities allow something like this to be published or what were the basic rules of the censorship board yeah that's a really great question and I have a whole chapter of my book called Johnny Mouse war where I go into all the situation Gerhard Heller was the head of the Pokagon - Stoffels and he said it's hard to know whether he was saying this stuff after the war so he wouldn't you know get in trouble but he claimed he read it was sent to him by the publisher he read it and he was completely taken with it and what he wrote was this novels completely apolitical it's fine to publish it kind of I think really what it means was because there were no Jews in the novel because there were no Allies in the novel and because there were no attacks on Nazis it was fine I mean the censorship as I can see it the censorship was not highly intelligent it was just a few automatic so when come in wanted to publish right after you know a year after he wanted to publish the myth of sisyphus and it was a chapter in the myth of Sisyphus on Kafka and got email wrote to him and said you got to take out the Kafka chapter because this will never get through and that would have been censored so Camus had one of those ethical dilemmas that people love to debate about the occupation he removed the Kafka chapter he substituted a chapter on Dostoevsky and then he published the Kafka chapter in the free zone in a magazine called allow pilot so he didn't he didn't you know get rid of the the Kafka and then as soon as the war ended the Kafka was reintegrated into the myth of sisyphus but those were the kind of issues and some of the issues were just about paper supply me paper was really in short supply and got email managed to save itself by living on his back list it had it had never read any of its books and it had a lot of books and warehouses in it was able to publish those but I'm they're pretty fascinating books published about about how the censorship worked Thank You Benjamin to retired bureaucrats up could you tell us something your take on Susan Sontag takedown of Camus and also tell us where your workshop in North Carolina was yeah is is Chapel Hill Chapel Hill yeah led by a novelist named Laurel Goldman yeah I mean Susan Sontag reviewed Camus Diaries can we publish these work-in-progress Diaries that are very interesting they're not they're not confessional at all they're really work in progress Diaries and I I made extensive use of them and trying to reconstruct what he went through as he was writing The Stranger she's published and review for the New York Review of Books on one of the later volumes of the diaries and she you know she really liked being in the know and she was a Sartre rien I mean she had kind of she would absorbed sartruse disdain I mean one of the things I didn't say in my talk is that after being so close with CEM moussaka broke with chemin over a number of things including attitudes towards the Communist Party the Algerian war SATA was a real supporter of the quandary by China China's but the thing that amuses me the most in Susan Sontag takedown is she says there's some writers who are lovers and some writers who are husbands and Kami's like a husband he's sort of like well-meaning and earnest or maybe a little boring which is hysterical become it's the greatest you know lover extramarital lover of all of 20th century French literature so that was a kind of double put down I think all right so I'm going to ask a question you you just mentioned the break with SARS in part over the Communist Party but Camus from what 35 to 37 runs in pretty red circles remember Algeria Artie he's an he's an activist he he has political plays he speaks in theaters then he breaks you know he's he's actually ejected but if we didn't know that yeah reading the novel at least this reader wouldn't know that he had any exposure to much less immersion in that world and many an ex communist writer it seems quite visible in their writing that they're writing against the Communist Party but at least in my non-trained non literary critic eyes I don't see that here and so I would not have guessed had I not known from your book that earlier kind of biographical engagement with the party that had been part of his formative experience so am I miss reading this or have people discerned the influence of those political years on the writing of this text well it's really really asking me a question about how you read the politics of a novel I mean first I'd say he write he starts writing this in 39 he's been out of the Communist Party for a number of years the theater experiment he actually starts a new theater troupe if you want to understand that political camera of the Communist period there's some good essays in the volume lyrical and critical essays about for example he's trying to build the idea of a Mediterranean culture against this sort of right-wing Charles Maha's Mediterranean genius idea I think the thing that was the most enabling for him in writing the stranger and I don't know if this is political or not but we could probably take it that way is his reading James M Cain The Postman Always Rings Twice and getting this idea of a very flat narrator who speaks in the first person but doesn't let you in the other place I would go to do a more political reading would be his representation of working-class working-class Algiers I mean it's set in on the street where he grew up through the neon where there's a huge parade of people and you see Marceau looking out the window out the balcony and you see the various people coming through I mean it really has a sense of what that world that very poor world was like and you know he could have written if he had been less political I think he could have written what people were writing all the time in those days a sort of a folklore version of gin wild life and he wrote a pretty a pretty down in dirty representation of those people I mean the room of Laemmle centers the stuff he's got on his wall like one bottle of wine for each guy and the Buddha to me that's very much the work of a man who wanted to represent reality without rose-colored glasses Phillipa strum from the Wilson Center thank you so much for the presentation as a non literature expert I would like to ask the literature expert about something you talked about different generations reading can move differently and then the question of how although the future look at him and I wonder is it not true of all the literature that we think of as great and that remains that it's reinterpreted by succeeding generations that what the author does in terms of the relationship of human beings with each other and to the world somehow resonates differently with successive generations I was trying to think of anything that I would think of as a great work of literature that hasn't been reinterpreted that way is that off the wall or is that your feeling no no I think that's absolutely one of the reasons I wanted to write a biography of the novel as opposed to a biunder whose camera is that the author dies and the author's intentions die with fur or him but the book lives on and the book has it is a book lives on and changes quite a bit with every generation but I have never seen a case where interpretation is so vastly different where there's a high and there's a low and cameras with God and then is the devil and it's really really dramatic I suppose you know you could do similar work on the Odyssey you can do every time you have a translation of a book you've got a whole new interpretation so I'm sure you could compare a Victorian translation of the Odyssey with Fitzgerald's translation of the Odyssey and you would have completely different works it's a little bit like you know when you go to a museum and you see period rooms you can sort of tell if you're looking at colonial America in a period room done in the 1950s it looks like colonial America of the 1950s you know and that's what's so fascinating about studying literary interpretation because you've got these layers that's what I really really love about it right here thank you I had in Kennedy fascinating talk and a fascinating book which I read with great interest and pleasure but as I was reading it and I should say that I'm an historian of British colonialism so I was reading it from that perspective and I kept waiting tonight why is there no discussion of sort of the colonial experience a colonial encounter which seems so obvious from someone from my perspective reading reading the novel which of course you do address in the last chapter and you're afterward and do it very well but having done that it's still striking to me that that it isn't a topic of discussion France in France among any of these people right um and and and you know partly I want you to sort of address that that fact and also I'm trying to think of it perhaps in another context that maybe that that it's my error to think of it in the colonial context and rather to think of it perhaps in the context of say the American racial experience the American South and the way in which that becomes sort of obscured for for white white people in America for a very long time I don't know but in any case I always like to think of the other guy as being having bigger blinders on the right right and so we have our own blinders I don't know if that would be a an appropriate analogy but there are really great ways in I mean I was shocked - well not so shocked that here's cyril connelly in 1946 totally attuned to the colonial issue is very much politicized by what's going on in England and of course in 1946 in France well what's happened in Algeria is a huge massacre of of Muslim veterans in cities in the eastern part of the country scandalous horrible massacre and none of the French press are reporting on it except Cameron he's aware of it the country is completely preoccupied with reconstruction I mean if you could see you know the number of buildings destroyed of that everything had to be rebuilt it was a national obsession was with restoring the infrastructure of France so the idea that they weren't yet thinking about what was going to happen to them with the Wars of decolonization in the late 50s and 60s I mean that I really understand but it means they were behind they were behind the British they were in a way behind the Americans because you know people like Richard Wright and James Baldwin went to France were friends with Kevin and they were very much aware of the racial other ring and that's why they went to France in the first place so that black American experience became a metaphor for a lot of French people like chakra and Beauvoir for understanding and sometimes they'd rather look at that than at their own situations yeah it took me a long time to really figure it out for a while I thought before I had spent a lot of time working on Algeria I had thought that it was an apartheid situation in Algeria but it really wasn't it's much more complicated than than that in second crack which which is the best translation into English of this book near view I teach the Mathieu word translation he was a student a young student of Richard Howard who's probably the most eminent translation of literary modernism in the US is now a man in his late 80s and Matthew Ward did an absolutely beautiful job and he has a preface where he could skewer Stuart Gilbert but doesn't and explains some of it he really I really think that if Stuart Gilbert had Red Sox's essay on camera his famous 1943 essay called explanation of the stranger Gilbert couldn't have done what he did Sandra Smith has translated for viking in 2013 but her translation isn't available in the US you'd have to go to Amazon UK and change your settings to get it but I think Matthew Ward is quite beautiful I have a few quibbles with a few lines just a quick question might I suggest a quick coal area we want to know go Anna Bryn Yolo is my name thank you I'm always curious about the ego of individuals and somehow it seems when translators and when you read their notes that they are countering an earlier translation so it's just I mean it's the profession I guess they're happy to have every new translation because then they have a new query to keep investigating and to rebuttal because we all different we interpret differently so I mean there's no end to it it's just it's something part of our nature our DNA I think in human beings so it's an endless conversation we have forever I mean one of the mysteries people say that a great work of art never grows old but translations are dated within 20 years that to me is very is something very mysterious and worth looking into but I also do believe the translations are better than used to be there is now there people take translation much more seriously a translator would never just cut a couple paragraphs or you know go into a lot of paraphrase to explain something there is respect for the text so I do believe in some progress I'm not quite as much a relativist as you are yeah well I reject a de Beauvoir interpret a or a session at the National Museum of women in the arts and I was so proud of the translators he said we wished to follow her intend yeah and I why wouldn't we why wouldn't someone I mean it's driven by some other chemistry if you followed the all the debates over the read translation of the second sex it's pretty fascinating because people complain that the first translation was really ignorant of existentialist philosophy and then they claim as the second translation was too faithful and that it lost all its a law and panache and so yeah you just throw your hands on friends woman question wait microphones oh hi I'm Claudine Schreber from University of Maryland University College this is a sidebar the Financial Times which you can see I'm addicted to just had a series in their book section about new awards for translators just with your time MF but the Booker Prize has just instituted this whole new category for translators obviously a foreign languages so it when you were talking about that I thought I'd give you that one anyway and the recognition yeah driving there's a prize right now being decided you know the French cultural services have opened a bookstore in their headquarters on Fifth Avenue called Albertine and they have a prize judged by the people judged by you can you can go online and vote yeah and and the choices are really really interesting my favorite book on the list is a book by May least account guys called okay pal Haley vivo it's trans it is the heart and it's a 20 takes place in 24 hours and it's a book about well I won't give it away but it involves heart surgery it's it sounds like nothing and it is absolutely gripping any other questions comes yes we'll do final comment done yeah I'm Susan Rappaport unaffiliated but I do arrange speakers at the audience all says here in Washington if any we want to come to listen to our talks but we hope to have Alice Kaplan I wanted to say that I'm friends of Connie board and Cheatham 11e I'm very close and who translated the Simone de Beauvoir for the second time and they really tried to make it more up to date and more readable than the retired zoology professor from Smith who did it who couldn't see who didn't speak French who didn't and I was also at the panel where they were a couple of weeks ago it was very interesting because they tried to keep the to the intent of the author and yet make it more remove it I don't think it's lost as they love I am good hard to read it straight through but again it's an amazing book this is over and I'm very very interested one other comment I wanted to say is that when people criticize come you for not leaving Paris I remember he said what I'm not leaving but during the war he was mostly in with combi in half sometimes she said it's harder to say yes and to say no thank you thank you well if that's our last question like to bring this session to a conclusion with a reminder about next week seminar by Greg Pierzynski and winning the third world sign American competitions are in the Cold War with thanks to all of you for joining us and with great thanks yes thank you with a great thanks to Alice Caplan for just thrilling afternoon session here I learned a lot and so thank you let's give her a round of applause you're invited to a small reception outside and books are for sale yes

Channel: American Historical Association

Views: 3,268

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: france, french, english, albert camus, national history center, ronald regan, dmv, washington dc, the stranger, woodrow wilson center, lestranger, alice kaplan, novel

Id: RGgvMLKA4hU

Length: 83min 27sec (5007 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017