The division into two parts was a belated one. All the sketches for the book’s composition until 1938
indicate three parts, and the revisions concern only the arrangement of the chapters. Thus it is not
surprising to encounter the dissymmetry (49 pages against 91) which appears in the final plan. The three-
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part division, as one sketch called “rearrangement” testifies, was more balanced: each part would have had approximately the same number of pages.
The final version indicates a strong contrast, which does not occur in the earlier sketches. Yet contrast,
alternation, seems from the start to be the aesthetic motif of the novel, as of Camus’s philosophy. In a note proposing to tell “six stories”:
story of the brilliant game. Luxury.
story of the workingmen’s neighborhood. Death of
the mother, story of the House above the World, story of sexual jealousy, story of the man condemned to
death, story of the pursuit of the sun.
Camus reveals, by the very order of his list, this concern with alternation. The six stories can be paired.
Until August 1937, however, he tried to match the contrast of polarity with a contrast of tenses: certain
chapters are written in the present, others in the past. He even tried, in a detailed plan of “Part I,” to relate the tenses
according to a rigorous system, but later abandoned this formalism, which was not sustained by an
internal necessity. Yet a vestige of it persists in the French text as published: the chapter devoted to the
House above the World, an evocation of a pure and continuous happiness, is written in the present, as in
the initial sketch.
These six stories form the raw material of what was gradually to become a novel. We can retrace the
novel’s genesis from them—from their metamorphosis and their arrangement.
The first sketches stress the story of the House above the World, which occupies, with that of jealousy,
“Part II.” Here is the first plan in the Notebooks:
Part II:
A. present tense
B. past tense
Chapter A1 The House above the World. Description.
Chapter B1 Recollections. Liaison with Lucienne.
Chapter A2 House above the World. His youth.
Chapter B2 Lucienne describes her infidelities.
Chapter A3 House above the World. Invitation.
Chapter B4 Sexual jealousy. Salzburg. Prague.
Chapter A4 House above the World. Sun.
Chapter B5 Getaway (letter). Algiers. Catches cold, falls sick.
Chapter A5 Starry night. Catherine.
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Thus the first part is devoted, as can be seen by a plan sketched after August 1937, to the brilliant game-workingmen’s neighborhood pairing: what the “brilliant game” is will be shown, later on, by The Myth of Sisyphus in the trinity Don Juanism, pretense, conquest; this game is contrasted with the vicissitudes of life in the “workingmen’s neighborhood.” Then appears a
double antagonism indicated by a sketch dated August 1937:
Part I. His life hitherto. Part II. Flight.
Part III. Abandonment of compromises and truth in nature.
“Life hitherto” signifies poverty, eight hours of work a day, banality of social relations—in other words, a false mode of being. “The game,” about which the Notebooks are extremely laconic, must designate a kind of dandyism, an advance on an impoverished life, a delight in personal pleasure, but still false. This
antagonism, in the final version of A Happy Death, loses its importance, diluted in dialogues and
summarized in Mersault’s advancement. On the other hand, the conquest of authenticity, by an impulse of
flight into solitude and nature, appears in the first sketches and remains the novel’s end in every sense.
But A Happy Death does not appear to end, in the first sketches, with the hero’s death: “craving for death and the sun” we read in one outline; this is only a craving. In another, death is confronted (?), but located at the end of the first part: “Last chapter: pursuit of the sun and death (suicide-natural death).” One notable feature: death and the sun are related. Once a sun, a sensuous image, is replaced by happiness, a
moral myth, a decisive step will have been taken toward the final conception. We can date this step
August 1937 with the note: “Novel: the man who has realized that in order to live he must be rich, who
gives himself up to this conquest of money, succeeds, lives and dies a happy man.” For the first time, in the Notebooks, we encounter a virtual summary of A Happy Death, and it is here that we first find the word “novel.”
The main thread of this novel is henceforth clear: it will be an inverted illustration of the proverb: Money
does not make happiness. Happiness, through money, becomes the chief theme, as clearly appears at the
beginning of the note of November 17, 1937:
Will to happiness.
Part III. Achievement of happiness.
But at this moment the character of Zagreus, who is as yet only the “invalid,” supervenes, in order to enlighten Mersault as to the problem of the relationships between money and time and to show him the
truth of another proverbial statement—Time is money, equally true, in the reverse: Money is time—
which will form a fundamental principle in his art of living, as is testified in the last paragraph of the
November 17 note:
“For a man who is ‘well born,’ to be happy is to partake of the common lot not with the will to
renunciation, but with the will to happiness. In order to be happy, time is necessary—a great deal of time.
Happiness too is a long patience. And time is the need for money which robs us of it. Time can be bought.
Everything can be bought. To be rich is to have time to be happy when one is worthy of being so.”
Thus the various materials of the novel are regrouped according to the pairing time lost and time won.
Time lost is that of poverty, work, everyday life: the chapter devoted to Mersault’s life is entitled “Killing Time,” a title which would also suit the affair with Marthe and the trip in central Europe; the murder of Zagreus will end this wretched odyssey of time lost. Time won will be the time spent in the House above
the World and in flight into nature. At this point, on a
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manuscript page, appears an outline in three parts whose initial chapter, each time, is devoted to time. The first part consists of seven chapters, from “Killing Time,” which include Mersault’s life from the Algerian adventures to the return from Praqua (i.e., pages 1-75 of the final version): “First from ‘killing time,’ ”
Camus writes, “to ‘he felt he was made for happiness.’ ” This last phrase occurs in virtually the same form on page 75 of the final version: “he understood at last that he was made for happiness.”
The first chapter of the second part is then entitled “Gaining Time”—it concerns the House above the World—and the first chapter of the third part, “Time.” If we think of Proust, we see the novel proceeding from time lost, that of work, to time gained or won, that of idleness in the “budding grove” of the House above the World, to time regained, which is harmony with nature in solitude and death, summarized by a
succinct note on the manuscript of the last page: “Time.” “First does a lot of things and then abandons everything. Does nothing at all. Follows time and above all the seasons (diary!).” Time, having become
the standard of happiness, the principal theme, gives the novel its frame and its rhythm. The present/past
alternation of the first sketches was not inductive. Now, from the pulverized time of the first part to the
atemporal process of the third, the current is to pass through and connect the atonal descriptions to the
lyrical accents.
Thus we come to the novel’s final form, its contraction into two parts, which can be explained by two
reasons: first, Camus’s embarrassment regarding the erotic or emotional episodes. He had to restrict them.
In the outline mentioned above, the second part, after “Gaining Time,” announced “Encounter with Lucienne,” then “Catherine’s departure.” Camus either could not or would not organize enough material under these
headings. Subsequently the Zagreus episode became important enough to form the core of a system. The
flight into central Europe, which was originally linked to sexual jealousy, was transferred to this system.
But Camus clung to his three-part division. Whence still another outline, the last before the final
contraction:
Part I. 1: The workingmen’s neighborhood; 2: Patrice Mersault; 3: Patrice and Marthe; 4: (erased) P. and
his friends (?); 5: Patrice and Zagreus.
Part II. 1: Murder of Zagreus; 2: flight into anxiety; 3: return to happiness.
Part III. 1: The women and the sun; 2: secret and ardent happiness at Tipasa; 3: the happy death.
The definitive title has been found, but applied to the last chapter. The Zagreus episode has not yet found
its proper place. It remains to transfer the murder first to the end and then to the beginning of the first