As I read Albert Camus’ The First Man, I am trying my hardest not to take a peek at the last page. I admit it is a bad habit, and something I am sometimes guilty of when I am reading novels, but then again I was the child that always went in search of Christmas presents before the big day (and, sadly, became very good at feigning surprise as I opened them – yes, I was a very naughty child)
But there is something so intriguing, moving, and indeed poignant about a novel that was not finished; a sense of sadness as one comes to the last page and realizes that the author never completed a story they wanted to tell. A story that has enticed you until the last page, but somehow you close the book feeling you will never really know the whole story, always to be kept wondering the true fate of the characters.
The last incomplete novel I read was the dramatic Suite Française by the Ukrainian/French author Irene Nemirovsky. The novel is meant to be five stories with reoccurring characters, alas only two were finished before her tragic deportation and subsequent death in 1942 at Auschwitz.
The two stories, Storm in June, and Dolce, rescued for later publication are captivating tales of people and families during the German occupation of France. They are beautifully crafted, with characters the reader can love or loathe, characters which were to reappear in the planned Captivity, and potentially named Battle and Peace (forever to be absent from literary shelves, such loss to readers)
The appendices and footnotes now torment us, as we can read what she may have had planned for the characters, but sadly we will never know how her five part story was meant to end. Nor we will never have the joy of turning the pages of Captivity, of being entranced by Nemirovsky’s skilful prose, or the pleasure of engaging with characters such as Lucile or Madame Pericand from Suite Française, who bring war time France alive with vivacity.
(What is more tragic are the accompanying hand notes and letters that appear at the end of Dolce, where she ominously writes of the fear that she may be captured and sent to concentration camp, and the letters her loving husband dispatched, desperately trying to secure her release, before his own capture by the Nazi’s. Like the diary of Anne Frank, such diary notes put the horrors into some perspective, if that is possible, for generations who have lived only in times of peace, never known persecution on grounds of race and religion)
Now, as I turn the pages of the ultimate and unfinished piece by Albert Camus, The First Man, I am intrigued by his notes, his additions and deletions on the story that was to be (and surely is) his masterpiece, as he tackles a man in search of his identity, torn between France and his childhood as a Pied Noir in Algeria.
Already the story is getting under my skin (I am only at page 45); a man in search of himself, Camus uses Jacques Cormery as his alter ego. I can feel the heat and dust of Colonial Algiers and feel the sweat of a hot and uncomfortable sea journey between France and Algeria as I soak up the words of Camus. And the realization that his father had been so young when he was laid to rest in the war graves of Northern France, that maybe Jacques own 40 years had been “foolish, courageous, cowardly, willful”, made me reflect on my own years too, wonder what use I had made of my time.
I am desperate to experience the story, becoming not just intrigued with the character Jacques Cormery, but with Camus himself. (The brooding Pied Noir, who wrote The Rebel, a philosophical essay on rebellion, what’s not to like?)
But as I read, I find I am distracted by the footnotes and appendices that explain his deletions and omissions he cruelly did not get to return to and elaborate on. (“Enlarge on war”, he writes to himself, or “from the beginning should show the alien in Jacques more” and “chapter to be written and deleted”). And I then I pause, cast the book aside for a couple of moments to ponder; how alien is Jacques meant to be. What more did Camus want to say on the war? Chapter to be written and deleted could surely have meant a shift in the existing story line. (Incidentally, it is chapter 3 earmarked for deletion and a rewrite, the chapter that describes with great affection his childhood mentor in Algiers)
We should be grateful that such books exist, that manuscripts were rescued by fortuitous thinkers in times of tragedy. In the case of The First Man, the manuscript was found in the mud at the accident scene in Villeblevin, where Camus perished tragically in Jan 1960. It was not published until almost 35 years after his death. The notebook containing Suite Française was kept by Nemirovsky’s daughters until 1998, when they decided it was time for publication. By allowing publication of these two novels, the children of both Camus and Nemirovsky gave a gift to the world of literature.
I am already wondering how abruptly the story of Jacques Cormery might end, how much of the story is missing, and how many hours will I lie awake pondering the real fate of the character and will I know which side of the Mediterranean he truly identifies with….but I don’t want to look at the back page…just yet
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