A Happy Death by Albert Camus
Translated by Richard Howard
Style is the centerpiece of this novel, Albert Camus’s first and one that remained unpublished until after his death. A Happy Death (La mort heureuse), written between 1936 and 1938, prefigures The Stranger (L’étranger), Camus’s most well-known novel. In English and even more so in French, The Stranger is quite simply revelatory, the existential story of a soulless man moving through a natural world of such astonishing vibrance that it seems impossible he is not rehabilitated by it. A Happy Death introduces an earlier incarnation of the main character, Patrice Mersault (spelled Meursault in The Stranger), whose “will to happiness” outweighs concerns such as filial piety, marriage, or morality.
In his notebooks outlining the structure of A Happy Death, Camus described the novel’s final section as “story of the pursuit of the sun.” Mersault, however, is no exalted Icarus, seeking to fly high and meet the sun, rather he is a stone, hard, accepting, devoted to what he calls “impersonality.” When Mersault and his friend Roland Zagreus talk about the nature of happiness, Mersault says “Everything else that would happen to me would be like rain on a stone. The stone cools off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always thought that’s exactly what happiness would be.” Happiness to Zagreus meant one thing when he was whole, but now as a cripple who lost his legs in the Great War, he finds happiness in the knowledge that he is not a burden to his caretakers. Zagreus is, in fact, a rich man, keeping a strongbox in the house that is filled with a fortune in cash. But he fears that his life has been “consummated” without him and that he’s lived marginally.
In spite of his inertia, Mersault rouses himself sufficiently to perpetrate a particularly low deed. Actually, he is handed the perfect crime. Zagreus lives alone and his door never locked. His strongbox is kept in plain sight and he has shown Mersault where he keeps the key. Zagreus has even thoughtfully provided a suicide note: “I am doing away with only half a man. It need cause no problem—there is more than enough here to pay off those who have taken care of me till now. Please use what is left over to improve conditions of the men in death row. But I know it’s asking a lot.” Mersault enters Zagreus’s room, shoots the man, and places the revolver in the cripple’s hand. He cleans out the strongbox, puts the money in a suitcase, and returns home to take a nap.
In a sense, Zagreus’s money does go to a man on death row. Although he is not convicted of a crime, Mersault choses his own form of “conscious death.” Instead of finding death at the end of old age, however, he will die young of tuberculosis. But not before he leaves his job at the docks, travels to Europe, and returns to Algeria and buys a house. He has a number of love affairs and even takes a wife, though they do not live together. Mersault may live in society, but he does not participate in it. All that intrudes on his consciousness is the sea, the sun, a cigarette, and the need to get through the hours of the day. A century before with Flaubert, this would have been called detachment, but with Camus it is unequivocal alienation.
When Mersault is on his deathbed, receiving the sun’s “offering” like a bursting citrus fruit with the “glistening sea irradiated with the smiles of his gods,” it is not a golden, comforting end that he finds but suffocation. His disease ascends like a stone from the pit of his stomach. The stone that Mersault saw as the metaphor for his existence is instead an implacable life force, one that spends itself and returns him “in the joy of his heart to the truth of the motionless worlds.”
A life like Mersault’s is breathtaking in its hollowness and lack of focus. It is Camus’s genius to concentrate the reader’s attention on this fact by surrounding Mersault with the vivid materiality and beauty of the world around him. It is difficult to imagine anyone better than Camus at rendering sea and sun in words. “Summer crammed the harbor with noise and sunlight. It was eleven-thirty. The day split open down the middle, crushing the docks under the burden of its heat.”
In another passage, Camus contrasts Mersault the modern man with rustic Algerian herders. “Early in the morning, the fog lights of Mersault’s car were gleaming along the coast road. Leaving Algiers, he passed milk carts, and the warm smell of the horses made him even more aware of the morning’s freshness. It was still dark. A last star dissolved slowly in the sky, and on the pale road he could hear only the motor’s contented purr and occasionally, in the distance, the sound of hooves, the clatter of milk cans, until, out of the dark, his lights flashed on the shining iron of the horseshoes. Then everything vanished in the sound of speed. He was driving faster now, and the night swiftly veered to day.”
Mersault in his car drives fast into the promise of the day. He flirts with death by taking a high curving road at top speed, indifferent to how easy it would be to miscalculate the handling of his machine. Again, Mersault is surrounded by the physical world, but hardly engaged with it. Eating and drinking give no satisfaction, they are just ways to pass the time. Even the house he lives in is virtually empty. He is like a lizard basking in the sun, functioning merely as a foil for the natural world vividly alive all around him.
A Happy Death was published as part of the Cahiers Albert Camus, a response to scholars who wish to study all of an author’s works, even youthful, imperfect efforts. Richard Howard’s 1972 translation is supple and self-effacing, but A Happy Death has its flaws. Cahiers editor Roger Quilliot described it as “‘both clumsily composed and remarkably written.’” Undoubtedly, this is true, but the book still shows that Camus had the confidence of his authorial voice even at a young age. It is a voice of assurance even though it leaves one enervated by its nihilism.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved. Photography: Camus in sunlight; cover of the 1995 Vintage International paperback edition
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