Like Elizabeth Bishop and Tennessee Williams, Wilbur was for many years a “Conch,” that is, an inhabitant of Key West. (Strictly speaking you have to have been born in Key West to be a Conch, but it is an honorific that can be stretched—as it usually is for Hemingway, for example, and dozens of others, including me.) One of his best-known poems, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” was probably written there; and it is lovely. Oh, it’s not easy to read, but so what? Here are several lines:
Oh, let there be nothing on Earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam … Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves, Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone …
Another Key West Poem, “Trolling for Blues,” isn’t just about fishing, although it starts out that way. The fish assumes a great historic role that, if I tried to describe it would spoil it for you. Try to find this poem and you will see what a marvelous poet Richard Wilbur is.
ALBERT CAMUS
1913–1960
The Stranger
The Plague
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and brought up in circumstances of dire poverty—his father was killed in World War I, and the family was left penniless. He, his mother, and his elder brother, together with his grandmother and a crippled uncle, lived for fifteen years in a two-room apartment in Algiers, while his mother worked as a charwoman to support them.
Camus enjoyed success in school, and several teachers recognized his genius early and helped him. He was twenty-seven when World War II began. He had suffered for years from tuberculosis, so he did not fight in the field; instead he became the editor of one of the most influential French resistance newspapers, Combat. He continued as its editor after the war but was soon disillusioned by the bickering among the members of the Left: his dreams of a better world as a result of the war were shattered as left-wing Communists fought right-wing Communists and both fought the Socialists.
He threw himself into literary work. His novels—especially The Stranger and The Plague—his philosophical essays, his journalistic writings, and his work in and for the French theater, all combined to make him seem the most exciting new talent writing in French during the postwar period. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, at the relatively young age of forty-four. He died less than three years later in an automobile accident.
The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is short—hardly more than a long story—and spare. The book tells of a year in the life of a young Algerian who first loses his mother and then in a senseless rage shoots and kills an Arab with whom a casual friend is having a dispute. Meursault, the stranger/protagonist, is tried, convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to be guillotined.
It need not have happened, none of it. Meursault is unable to express his feelings—about his mother’s death, about the girl who wants to marry him, about his act. He cannot, or will not, explain himself. He is articulate and well educated; it appears to be mainly a matter of his simply refusing to explain or justify himself to the world. At the end he looks forward to his execution with a kind of pleasure: “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
The book is extremely unpleasant; I don’t think anyone has ever enjoyed reading it. Camus is no more willing to explain himself to the reader than Meursault is to his judges, and the book as a consequence leaves many questions unanswered. But at the same time it has a strange, twisted power. Perhaps everyone is able, more or less, to empathize with the stranger, the exile, whose abortive, unimportant life is the subject of the book.
The Stranger and other writings of Camus helped to exemplify the philosophical position known as “Existentialism,” which flourished during and after World War II. The Existentialist feels himself alone in the world and senses that he must justify his existence by his own actions, without dependence on others or on any human institutions. Meursault is unable to do so; his story is, therefore, a kind of Existentialist tragedy.
The leading character and the narrator of The Plague, Dr. Rieux, is more successful in his attempt to make his life meaningful to himself. But the circumstances that allow this to happen and force him to commit himself are dreadful. The Plague, published in 1947, tells the story of an outbreak of plague that occurred in Oran, Algeria, during World War II, but not as it really happened. The attack of this dread disease upon the populace of Oran is exaggerated, until the city is finally walled off from the world, quarantined because of the loathsome illness within. Those who remain either to fight or to suffer the plague are left alone with their consciences to consider, in all its glory, reality, and cruelty, the meaning of human life.
The message of The Plague is difficult both to understand and to accept. As Tarrou says to his friend Rieux, all men have plague and it is only a question of recognizing this and fighting against it. But how should that fight be conducted? Is there any absolutely right thing to do? Is there such a thing as virtue, or courage? What do human beings owe to love?
Rambert, the journalist who has been trapped by accident in Oran and now, because of the quarantine, cannot leave, struggles to free himself to rejoin his beloved in Paris, far away. Only when he finally sees himself as able to leave—by bribing the soldiers who guard the gates—does he decide to remain, to fight along with Rieux. Rieux does not entirely approve the decision; perhaps Rambert should have broken every human law for the sake of love. Rieux knows that he himself could never leave, even though his wife, too, is far away and cannot return because of the quarantine.
Rieux says he does not believe in God; his creed is “comprehension.” At the end of the book he reveals what he has learned from the effort to combat the plague, which has now abated in the town; the quarantine is lifted and the populace is celebrating.
Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.