Free Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag Page B

happens in the great essay against capital punishment, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and in the casual writings, like the essay-portraits of Algiers, Oran, and other Mediterranean places.
    Neither art nor thought of the highest quality is to be found in Camus. What accounts for the extraordinary appeal of his work is beauty of another order, moral beauty, a quality unsought by most 20th century writers. Other writers have been more engaged, more moralistic. But none have appeared more beautiful, more convincing in their profession of moral interest. Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness. This happens with special frequency to the writer, like Camus, who appeals directly to a generation’s image of what is exemplary in a man in a given historical situation. Unless he possesses extraordinary reserves of artistic originality, his work is likely to seem suddenly denuded after his death. For a few, this decay overtook Camus within his own lifetime. Sartre, in the famous debate that ended their famous friendship, noted cruelly but truthfully that Camus carried about with him “a portable pedestal.” Then came that deadly honor, the Nobel Prize. And shortly before his death, one critic was predicting for Camus the same fate as that of Aristides: that we would tire of hearing him called “the Just.”
    Perhaps it is always dangerous for a writer to inspire gratitude in his readers, gratitude being one of the most vehement but also the shortest-lived of the sentiments. But one cannot dismiss such unkind remarks simply as the revenge of the grateful. If Camus’ moral earnestness at times ceased to enthrall and began to irritate, it is because there was a certain intellectual weakness in it. One sensed in Camus, as one senses in James Baldwin, the presence of an entirely genuine, and historically relevant, passion. But also, as with Baldwin, that passion seemed to transmute itself too readily into stately language, into an inexhaustible self-perpetuating oratory. The moral imperatives—love, moderation—offered to palliate intolerable historical or metaphysical dilemmas were too general, too abstract, too rhetorical.
    Camus is the writer who for a whole literate generation was the heroic figure of a man living in a state of permanent spiritual revolution. But he is also the man who advocated that paradox: a civilized nihilism, an absolute revolt that acknowledges limits—and converted the paradox into a recipe for good citizenship. What intricate goodness, after all! In Camus’ writing, goodness is forced to search simultaneously for its appropriate act and for its justifying reason. So is revolt. In 1939, in the midst of reflections on the war, which had just begun, the young Camus interrupted himself in his Notebooks to remark: “I am seeking reasons for my revolt which nothing has so far justified.” His radical stance preceded the reasons which justified it. More than a decade later, in 1951, Camus published The Rebel. The refutation of revolt in that book was, equally, a gesture of temperament, an act of self-persuasion.
    What is remarkable is that, given Camus’ refined temperament, it was possible for him to act, to make real historical choices, as wholeheartedly as he did. It should be remembered that Camus had to make no less than three model decisions in his brief lifetime—to participate personally in the French Resistance, to disassociate himself from the Communist Party, and to refuse to take sides in the Algerian revolt—and that he acquitted himself admirably, in my opinion, in two out of the three. Camus’ problem in the last years of his life was not that he became religious, or that he subsided into bourgeois humanitarian seriousness, or that he lost his socialist nerve. It was, rather, that he