THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 71, No. 4, March 1998 Printed in U.S.A.

NOTES

Camus on Kafka and Melville: An Unpublished Letter

by James F. Jones, Jr.

To the memory of Liselotte Dieckmann

I came by the original letter from Albert Camus quite unexpectedly. One day in

February of 1990, our departmental secretary at Washington University's Depart- ment of Romance Languages and Literatures brought the morning's mail into my of- fice. On the top of the pile was a folded letter of not a little age with a handwritten note attached. "Professor Dieckmann has more faith in the U.S. Postal System than anyone I know," our secretary quipped. I began with the note: "I found the en- closed-a genuine letter by Camus. If you collect such things, keep it. Or else throw it away. As ever, Liselotte. PS You can also show it to [Washington University profes- sor and noted specialist in twentieth-century French literature Michel] Rybalka." Liselotte Dieckmann had folded Camus's letter from yesteryear, had appended her note with the typically humorous "Or else throw it away" added to arouse my suspi- cions as to the letter's contents, had put the Camus original into an ordinary business envelope, and had blithely entrusted the treasure to her neighborhood postman. When I called on her the next day, she told me that at her age (then eighty-eight), she felt that it was clearly time for her to clean out her files.

Herbert and Liselotte Dieckmann had fled the ominous Nazi movement in Ger- many and had arrived in the United States in 1938, along with several other stellar, predominantly Jewish, luminaries who were fortunate enough to escape the ensu- ing terror.' Having made their tortuous way across Switzerland, Italy, and Yugoslavia with hardly more than the clothes they were wearing, they had lived for three uneasy years (1934-1937) in Istanbul in the same apartment house with Erich Auerbach. Liselotte explained to me in the mid-seventies that the reason Mi- mesis has no secondary sources and no bibliography was simply that Auerbach had access to nothing but the amazing sweep of primary texts while writing one of the masterpieces of Western literary criticism. After they had somehow managed to obtain the necessary visas to the United States, Washington University offered the Dieckmanns sanctuary, and there they remained for some years before Herbert left for a position at Harvard where he later served as the Smith Professor of French and Spanish before accepting the Avalon Foundation Professorship at Cornell. He is remembered today primarily for his inventorying the Fonds Vandeul, for his work on other Diderot manuscripts, and on the French Enlightenment.

Liselotte spent most of her adult life teaching German and comparative litera-

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ture in Saint Louis. She was an eminently read, remarkable human being, always ready to help the newest tyro in the humanities faculty and always prepared to discuss anything literary. She touched many lives, as any number of us can attest, and was the model humanist in the spirit of Ernst Robert Curtius (Herbert's the- sis advisor in Bonn in the late twenties), Leonardo Olschki, Eric Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and their few peers. Why she bestowed the Camus letter upon me has been a mystery since that winter day in 1990. She asked me to wait several years after her death to publish the letter. I have tried to remain faithful to her wishes, although I have shown the letter to several individuals both in the United States and in France, and now feel that I can make the exceptional document public. Liselotte Dieckmann died in October 1994 at the age of ninety-two.

She had obviously written a letter to Albert Camus, whom she had not met per- sonally. She believed that her letter to him had been written in the early fall of 1951 because at the time, Camus's rise to international prominence being widely in the proverbial intellectual winds, she had been pondering the Camus-Kafka relationship, and one of her graduate students had been considering an aspect of the topic for a dissertation. The letter is herewith reproduced exactly as the origi- nal reads:

LIBRAIRIE NRF GALLIMARD 5, rue Sebastien-Bottin Paris (VII)

Madame Herbert Dieckmann 425 Marion ave. Webster Groves, 19 MO. U/S/A

Paris, le 3 D&cembre 1951

Madame, Je vous remercie de votre lettre et je me permettrai d'y repondre sans autres for-

malites. 1) J'ai lu Kafka a 25 ans (1938) et je l'ai lu en francais. LE PROCES m'a frappe,

l'ceuvre complete m'a donn6 l'idee d'un 6crivain extremement limit6. Pour vous donner un exemple clair, je considere que Melville s'est propos6 la meme entre- prise que Kafka mais y a reussi parce qu'il l'a inscrite a la fois dans l'ombre et le soleil; Kafka ne sort pas de la nuit.

2) L'histoire du MALENTENDU a ete lu reellement dans un journal. Je l'ai intro- duit dans L'ETRANGER parce j'avais l'intention, en effet, d'en faire une pi&ce. De meme que vous avez remarque a juste titre qu'il est question de L'ETRANGER dans LA PESTE. I1 s'agit la, non d'une petite mystification, mais une maniere d'indiquer a de tres rares lecteurs attentifs que, dans mon esprit au moins, mes livres ne doivent pas etre juges un a un, mais dans leur ensemble et dans leur deroulement.

J'espere que ces precisions vous satisferont, ainsi que votre 6tudiant a qui je vous prie de presenter mes compliments bien cordiaux. Pour vous, Madame, en vous exprimant ma gratitude pour votre lettre, je vous prie de croire a mes sentiments bien respectueux,

Albert Camus.

CAMUS ON KAFKA AND MELVILLE 647

LIBRAIRIE NRF GALIMARD

5, rue S6bastien-Bottin Paris (VII)

Madame Herbert Dieckmann 2sI Marion ave.

Webster Groves, 19 MO. U/S/A

Paris, le 3 Dbcembre 1951

Madame,

Je vous remercie de votre lettre et je me permettrai d'y r6pondre sans autres formalitas.

1 ) J'ai lu Kafka & 25 ans ( 1938 ) et Je l'ai lu en francais. LE PROCES m'a frapp6, l'oeuvre complbte m'a donna l'id6e d'un 6crivain extremement limit4. Pour vous donner un exemple clair, Je considbre que Melville s'est propos6 la meme entreprise que Kafka mais y a r6ussi parce qu'il 1'a inscrite A la fois dans l'ombre et le soleil; Kafka ne sort pas de la nuit.

2 ) L'histoire du MALENTENDU a 6t6 lu r6ellement dans un journal. Joe 'ai introduit dans L'ETRANGER parce J'avais l'intention, en effet, d'en faire une piece. De meme que vous avez remarqu6 & juste titre qu'il est question de L'ETRANGER dans LA PESTE. Il s'agit 1A, non d'une petite mystification, mais une manibre d'indiquer A de trbs rares lecteurs attentifs que, dans mon esprit au moins, mes livres ne doivent pas etre Jug6s un & un, mais dans leur ensemble et dans leur d6roulement.

J'espbre que ces pricisions vous satisferont, ainsi que votre 6tudiant A qui Je vous prie de pr6senter moes compliments bien cordiaux. Pour vous, Madame, en vous exprimant ma gratitude pour votre lettre, Je vous prie de croire & mes sentiments bien respectuoux,

Albert Camus.

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I have often thought, upon reading the unsigned document over and again, that Camus may well have typed it himself, for the missing accents, the gramma- tical infelicities, the omitted que after parce, and the several fautes de frappe in the original betoken that the letter was not dictated or written out longhand to be prepared by a professional typist afterwards. There are still extant a few photo- graphs of Camus working at the rue Sebastien-Bottin office of the then very spar- tan, post-war NRF Gallimard in the early fifties that show him typing on a rather worn typewriter resting on a small table. Perhaps one of the documents Camus typed on that vintage typewriter was this one to Liselotte Dieckmann in Decem- ber of 1951.

Although Andre Abbou could declare at a Cerisy conference on Camus in 1982 that "la relation avec l'oeuvre de Kafka, affirm&e par Jean Grenier et discut e par Camus, n'est plus sujette a caution" (260-61), not all twentieth-century critics of French literature would countenance such a sweeping generalization. Camus's let- ter to Liselotte Dieckmann adds a considerable note of ambiguity to a more sim- plistic representation of one author's supposed influence upon another. According to Herbert Lottman, Camus's "L'Espoir et l'absurde dans Kafka" was probably completed in February of 1939 ; the essay was to be part of a longer disquisition entitled "Philosophie et roman," an "appendix to a still longer work on 'l'Ab- surde,' which of course was the early title of Le Mythe de Sisyphe" (193). Once Gas- ton Gallimard had at last been given permission to reopen his publishing house under the German occupation of France, "the chapter concerning the Czech Jew Kafka had to be eliminated from the manuscript of Le Mythe de Sisyphe before Gal- limard could publish it" (247). The banned essay on Kafka saw the light of the printing day only in 1943 in Arbalete, which had already won luster by bringing out Sartre's Huis clos (296). The letter from Camus to Liselotte Dieckmann thus corroborates that Camus had read Kafka in French and adds an important preci- sion as to the year and to his age at that time of his first acquaintance.

That Kafka may have exercised a considerable influence on Camus has been a commonplace in literary circles for decades. David Ellison notes that many readers of L'Etranger thought soon after its publication that the Kafkaesque heroes wander- ing "through the endless alienating maze of inhuman and distant bureaucracies" (58-59) had supplied Camus with ideological and philosophical stereotypes. Rare, however, have been those commentators who have foreseen what Camus ascribes in his remarkable letter to Liselotte Dieckmann. The exception to this fact, perhaps not surprisingly, is Henri Peyre who, in an article entitled "Presence of Camus" published in 1988 notes presciently that Camus owed Kafka actually very little. Adding Kierkegaard to his statement, Peyre finds that any "comparative study linking [Camus with Kafka and Kierkegaard] would merely overstate a very frail philosophical relationship"(24) before concluding that Melville was by a consider- able degree the more lasting influence on the formative period in Camus's philo- sophical evolution. Although it is not clear that Peyre realized it at the time of his essay, Camus related in an interview with Dorothy Norman of the New York Post in June of 1946 that he thought more highly of Melville and Henry James than he did of any twentieth-century writer (Lottman 393).

While the relationship between Kafka and Camus might on the surface appear more obvious, by Camus's own admission Melville plays a more significant role in Camus's thinking, as his 1946 statement to Dorothy Norman underscores. La Peste, which Camus finished in 1947, demonstrates that Moby Dick's power to startle a French philosopher-writer shows clearly in the "allegory of man's fight

CAMUS ON KAFKA AND MELVILLE 649

against the radical evil of the universe," as John Cruickshank once wrote (16). At much the same stage in their respective intellectual odysseys, Camus apparently shared with Sartre this affinity for Melville, for Sartre wrote an essay on Melville for the first issue of Comoedia in 1941 that prefigures the one Camus began writ- ing in 1952 ( Lottman 252, 502). Like her contemporary Henri Peyre, Germaine Brae did recognize the links evidenced in the 1951 letter to Liselotte Dieckmann, this decided preference now openly acknowledged for Melville over Kafka, who in Camus's telling , and equally haunting, turn-of-phrase "ne sort pas de la nuit." Br e observes: "Melville out-distances Kafka as a creator because in Kafka's work the reality described is summoned by the symbol, the fact is a consequence of the image, whereas, in Melville, the symbol is born of reality, the image of percep- tion" (245). Thus the twentieth-century French existentialist finds a most kindred spirit in the nineteenth-century American realist: odd bedfellows indeed but per- haps no more so than the affection bordering on idolatry shown by many con- temporary Latin American authors for Mark Twain.

By publishing the letter from Albert Camus to Liselotte Dieckmann from 1951, sadly now that she no longer is with us to continue the dialogues she so enjoyed, I can only trust that further dialogue on the intriguing Camus situation will be forthcoming from students of twentieth-century French literature. Nothing would have made Liselotte more proud.

KALAMAZOO COLLEGE

Note

'See among other pertinent studies The Intellectual Migration, Europe and America, Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969, for an overview of the exodus from Nazi Europe to the United States.

Works Cited

Abbou, Andre. "Le Quotidien et le sacr&." Albert Camus: euvre fermee, euvre ouverte? Cahiers Albert Camus. Actes du Colloque du Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle. Cerisy- la-Salle, juin 1982. 5, 234-35.

Bohn, Willard. "Trials and Tribulations of Josef K. and Meursault." Orbis Litterarum. 40.2 (1985): 145-58.

Brae, Germaine. Camus. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1959. Camus, Albert. "L'Espoir et I'absurde dans Kafka." Essais. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de

la Pl'iade, 1965. 201-11.

. "Herman Melville." Thidtre, ricits, nouvelles. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1962. 1907-11.

Crochet, Monique. Les Mythes dans l'cvuvre de Camus. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973. Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. London: Oxford UP, 1959. Ellison, David R. Understanding Albert Camus. Columbia, S.C.: U of South Carolina P, 1990. Fleming, Donald, and Bernard Bailyn, eds. The Intellectual Migration, Europe and America.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969. Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus, a Biography. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1979.

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Peyre, Henri. "Presence of Camus." Critical Essays on Albert Camus. Ed. Bettina L. Knapp. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988.

Politzer, Heinz. "Le Vrai Medecin-Kafka et Camus." Revue des Lettres Modernes 90-93 (1964): 151-74.

Roudiez, Leon. "Camus and Moby Dick." Symposium 15 (1961): 30-40.

"Strangers in Melville and Camus." French Review 31 (1958): 217-26. Witt, Mary Ann. "Camus et Kafka." Revues des Lettres Modernes 264-70 (1971): 71-86.