We were the first to arrive and I can still picture Camus on the place de Jaude, exiting a car that had run out of gas, oil and water, its engine smoking. Daniel Lenief, another editor at the paper, remembers: “Each of us was supposed to get to Clermont-Ferrand in the car given to him, since the regular drivers had almost all been drafted. On June 10, after less than a week at the Madison, he was ordered with the reduced staff of P a ris- S oir to depart for Clermont-Ferrand and put in charge of driving one of the P a ris-Soir cars. Today, it’s been decided-barring any change of plan!-that I will remain in Paris.” But he didn’t stay in Paris for long. Everyday, I’m supposed to leave the next day. “Here the madness continues,” Camus wrote a friend in the army, “I’ve been living for three days between two closed suitcases because P a ris-Soir notified me that I had to leave for Nantes where part of the staff has already transferred to produce a newspaper for the provinces. The country would fall to the Germans later in June, after a disastrous six-week battle.įor the time being P a ris-Soir continued to function. For Camus and for France, everything was about to change. There, he could see out his window the thick ribbons of cars, carts, and bicycles heading down the boulevard Saint-Germain towards the Place de l’Odéon before making their way due south to the Porte d’Italie, endless lines of refugees with all they could carry. Soon after he finished that first draft, with his savings from the newspaper, he moved from Montmartre to a fancier hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the Madison. The work on the novel went so well, Camus had the strange sensation that the words he was writing were already traced within him. Every day he would return to his hotel room and take up the story where he had left off. He had left his home in Algeria and was working as a lowly layout editor for page four of Paris-Soir, a big circulation daily.
how close we came to living in a world where Meursault never even existed!Ĭamus finished a first draft of The Stranger in the dreary Hôtel Poirier in Montmartre, a few weeks before the German invasion.
A small change here or there, a different set of decisions. The political disasters of a country cut in two by an enemy occupation, a publishing world straining to find paper and appease the enemy, Camus’s own personal dramas-illness, a disparaging mentor, geographic isolation-all threatened the publication of the novel. Masterpieces are made, not born, and The Stranger’s path from manuscript to classic was an unusually rocky one.
0 kommentar(er)
