Todd delves deep into Camus' mind

Sunil K Poolani

Olivier Todd wants to bring his 25-year-old daughter to India, to show her the rich traditions of the country. She is a French citizen, but Todd's reasoning is that she should know India's legacy.

Why? Because his daughter is actually an Indian. She was born in Bangalore — Todd adopted her some 20 years ago.

"In her school in downtown Paris," an affectionate Todd recounts, "her teacher was once lecturing about the fineness of French culture and literature, and with a tinge of pride said that Indians are no match for the French. My daughter then wrote an essay on Indian culture and gave it to the teacher. It began: 'The people in France were either living in caves or on treetops when Indians were carving out exquisite architectural structures or penning fabulous classics and epics.' The teacher was impressed, and the essay was read out aloud to the class."

Todd is only too eager to show his daughter the country of her origin. But he has a worry. " I don't want to show her the poverty and the pathetic living standards. She will become disheartened, for she has a high opinion of and great regard for this country. Several friends of mine visited India with high spirits but returned with gloom in their hearts.

Who is Todd? For non-Francophiles, he is one of the foremost litterateurs in France today. His first novel, A Half Campaign — Soldiers in Moscow, was published in 1957. His biography of the celebrated French journalist, essayist, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus (1913-1960) is a fabulously probing account of the existentialist genius's creative oeuvre. Also famous are his reminiscences of the life of Jean-Paul Sartre. In all, Todd has written 16 books, each well received by both readers and connoisseurs.

Todd is unhappy with the English translation of his biography of Camus titled Albert Camus: A Life (the original sold a cool 700,000 copies and was translated into 11 languages. He says: "The book was not only poorly translated [by Benjamin Ivry] but cut into half. In fact, I never got justice from any of my translators: most of my novels — especially The Year of the Crab — translated into English fail to convey the charm of the original."

Elaine Showalter, who reviewed A Life for the venerable Times, London, however said Todd's book "surprises with the freshness, detail and balance of material. [Todd] gives an almost day-by-day account of what Camus thought, felt and did, drawing on a wide range of interviews and access to unpublished letters and family archives."

Todd considers The Year of the Crab his best work, his magnum opus. "It is the search of a man for his father's origins. His pursuit leads him to America where he traces his father's antecedents. The book is 90 per cent autobiographical."

Apart from novels and the Camus biography, Todd has penned several essays and political commentaries. His next book is about the probable political scene in the year 2010 and is titled Correct Me, I'm Wrong.

Todd has an interesting past. He was born to an English mother and an Austro-Hungarian father in an American hospital in Paris in 1929. "My birth in France was the only thing which made me French then. Now I think I'm 80 per cent a Frenchman. Moreover, all my wives — don't ask me how many I have had, I have lost count — were French, and obviously [so are] all my four children."

Todd went on to read English literature at Sorbonne University and later to Cambridge to learn moral science ("actually the course should have been called philosophy; there was nothing moral about that science"). After his studies, he worked in a Paris primary school as a teacher for seven years before becoming a journalist (from 1963 to 1981) for New Observante and Le Expresse.

Todd laughs: "If you can't make a good teacher, you become a journalist, and if you find even that difficult, you become a writer." He may be trying to be humble. The fact is that Todd was a successful teacher and a journalist before becoming a fulltime litterateur.

Curiously, Todd started writing in English (he was a regular writer for The Times Literary Supplement) before he became a master French writer. Two of Todd's children are also accomplished writers. His son, Immanuel, is a renowned socio-historian who has written several books. And his daughter Camille wrote a "sweet novel" which became an instant hit.

Todd was in India to collect material on the French writer and intellectual Andre Malraux, who shared a warm relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru ("actually, Nehru wanted his company and guidance more than Malraux needed your former prime minister's acquaintance"). Todd also visited places and friends, and delivered a lecture on 'Camus: The Man Behind the Work' at the Asiatic Society, Mumbai. The intense research that went into his biography of Camus has made Todd an authority on the French writer.

Though Camus, winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature, is widely regarded as a vociferous supporter of the existentialist movement, Todd believes that he has anything but an existentialist. "The word itself is absurd," asserts Todd. "Camus was a moralist, a man who revolted against what he thought absurd and unjust."

Other authorities on the subject, however, hold different views. The well-known British literary critic Bryan Appleyard says Sartre and Camus were once the great existentialist double act, the intellectual heroes of the black-clad, white-faced generation that became, later, the beatniks and hippies. "We should treasure Camus: he was the last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language," says Appleyard.

Camus, who was born in Algeria and went to France for the first time in 1939, wrote moving essays about his native North Africa and set much of his fiction there. Many consider him a pragmatist, almost English, in his rejection of ideology, and closer to George Orwell than to Karl Marx. But, contrary to the popular belief that Camus's writing transcends its setting because problems of universal importance, Todd says he was just a committed writer. "He never felt or acted as he wrote."

Camus once described himself as a writer concerned with the freedom and responsibility of the individual, the alienation of the individual from society, and the difficulty of facing life without the comfort of believing in god or absolute moral standards. "These descriptions, however, are just his way of illustrating things," says Todd. "It is a moral decision. Nothing more, nothing less. I admire him for his multiplicity of style and the stark, straight and crisp way of putting his thoughts into words."

Camus's themes appear in his novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1957), and in his play Caligula (1945). All his novels were not received by French connoisseurs, but were financial successes. According to Todd, The Fall is Camus's best novel. He says, "I may term it Camus's autobiography — not The Plague, which is not at all moving. His wide and varied experiences in Algeria, which were strange in the then contemporary society, form the base of all his literary works and thoughts.

Camus wrote a number of plays before he became a novelist, but his contribution wasn't really worthwhile. As Todd puts it, "except for his marvellous Caligula, considered to be a piece de resistance, his other plays are nothing but sheer bores."

In 1942, Camus joined the French Resistance against the Nazis and edited its underground newspaper Combat. He also wrote two widely discussed philosophical essays. In the Myth of Sisyphus (1942), he said: "There is one truly philosophical problem and this suicide." He argued that people hang on to life even though life has no meaning or purpose to justify it and is thus absurd.

Todd, however, believes that Camus never believed in this absurdity himself. "The suicide theory of his is unfounded, without any induction or cause."

Todd sums up his thoughts on Camus thus: "He deeply believed in morality. And unlike Sartre and structuralists and deconstructionists such as [Michel] Foucault and [Regis] Debray, Camus was against systems. He may have called himself existentialist, but it was a cliché. Albert Camus was not a philosopher. He was a political thinker."

What does Todd think of contemporary French literature? "It is not vibrant as it used to be in the first five decades of the 20th century. After Camus and Sartre, there were stalwarts like [Alain] Robbe-Grillet, [Claude] Simon, and [Marguerite] Duras. But now it is in a shambles. Most of today's writers are navel-looking… I mean self-centred. Before Anglo-Saxon and South American writers, the French writers of today look like dwarfs."

But Todd says two promising French writers are Revel, a philosopher and stylist, and Yves Bownefoy, a first-class writer of core. "The rest are imitators of the great masters. It is not only French literature, which has taken a beating, but even plastic arts. Today's artists imitate [George] Braque, [Pablo] Picasso, [Georges] Rouault, and [Fernand] Leger, and say that that is art. Sorry, I fail to understand the philosophy."

Finally, what does he think of India? "India is great. It has always amused me. I like Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata... but when I am in Mumbai, I don't know why, I have a feeling that there is electricity in the air. Why is it so?"

Poolani is a senior journalist and writer. He lives in Mumbai

RAHA/28/May/2003