part. Then the second part, reduced to the journey and the return, is too thin—it is integrated into the last part, and a common title, “Conscious Death,” sanctions the fusion, evoking a parallel title: “Natural Death.” On the other hand, the chapters that were given titles—”The House above the World,” then “The Women and the Sun”— now follow without them, in the unusual use of the present indicative following
the return from Prague. Thus was rewritten (“rewrite Novel,” Camus enjoined himself in June 1938),
completed, or at least reworked, A Happy Death.
Why wasn’t it published? We shall hold to only the purely literary reasons here. According to M. Castex’s
study of The Stranger, the latter supplanted A Happy Death in Camus’s intentions, and we can see, during August 1937—the critical period of that novel’s gestation—the surreptitious appearance of the theme of
The Stranger. M. Castex quotes this text:
A man who has looked for life where it is ordinarily found (marriage, job, etc.) and who suddenly
realizes, reading a fashion magazine, how alien he has been to life (life as it is considered in fashion
magazines) . . .
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which gives the first formulation of the theme, although it refers to A Happy Death.
This hypothesis is correct. We may confirm it by examining the novelistic value of A Happy Death.
Apparently Camus felt, as he was creating it, the latent defect of his first novel and another fictional
possibility.
A work “both clumsily composed and remarkably written,” Roger Quilliot notes. It cannot be better put.
The stylistic virtues are astonishing, but not those of a novelist. Camus vainly tries to organize and unify
his disparate materials. What relation is there between the fictional murder of Zagreus and the chronicle
of the actual trip to Prague? Between the portrait of the wretched Cardona and the evocation of the House
above the World? The disparity in tone aggravates that of the episodes, without our being able to excuse it
by a deliberate recourse to contrast: the pathetic, the playful, the vulgar, the curtly descriptive, the warmly sensual, the sun-drenched lyrical alternate without any accommodation to one another. The episodes are
too numerous and on occasion overlap. Thus, after Mer-sault’s mother’s death, we are made to suffer that
of Cardona’s mother. The women’s parts, especially, are badly handled: the trio of “grinds” is unbalanced by
Catherine, who originally—according to the first sketches—had an affair with Mersault, but Lucienne
could have availed herself of the same advantage. The outlines call for an affair sometimes with one,
sometimes with the other. We also encounter the name of a certain Lucile. Marthe, as seen from a
correction, will replace her and assume a part of the roles of both Lucienne and Catherine. She will be the
link of time lost, Catherine that of time regained. Certainly Camus is not comfortable with his women!
They obstruct the nym-phosis of his novel and afford a literary illustration of the proverb: “Grasp all, lose all.” In the final version, we feel Camus’s effort to establish their respective attributes, to follow their wake or to prepare their entrance. The result is mediocre.
Had he worked still harder, might he have succeeded better? A Happy Death, as a novel, is doomed in its principle. “The quality of a novel,” as M. Coulet has recently remarked on the genre, “depends on the tension in which are united exact observation and the correction or investigation of the real by the
imaginary.” No novel escapes this rule. But in A Happy Death the elements of observation, i.e., the fragments of autobiography, remain disjointed: memories of the working-men’s neighborhood, of the
sanatorium, of the House above the World, of the trip to central Europe, of the female figures are not, in
the chemical sense, treated in order to unite in “a whole, a closed and unified world” like Proust’s, which The Rebel exemplifies. They would form a whole only if reworked by the creative imagination. And the creative imagination, in A Happy Death, functions only on the level of style. The invention of episodes or characters is impoverished indeed: neither the murder of Zagreus, inspired by Man’s Fate or Crime and Punishment, nor the character himself attains fictional authenticity. In this impossible novel,
only the autobiographical scenes are valid, which are analogous to the vein of “L’Envers et 1’Endroit”
(“The Wrong Side and The Right Side”) and not formally distinct from “L’Ironie” (“Irony”) or “La Mort dans l’ame” (“Death in the Soul”) or the lyrical evocations related to those of Noces (Nuptials). The best elements in the novel are not novelistic.
Did Camus feel this so clearly? He never says as much. But it is more than likely that his artistic
subconscious at least warned him of the danger and attracted him, without his realizing it, in a more
profitable direction. To borrow from Gide a suggestive comparison from the naturalist’s domain, within
the chrysalis of A Happy Death was forming the larva of The Stranger. A Happy Death accomplished its deceptive nymphosis, its author took pains to rewrite it, to rework all its parts, but The Stranger, like a kind of inspired parasite, derived all the benefit of this labor, which, ultimately, instead of a false novel, was to produce a true recit.
We may conclude by a brief parallel between A Happy Death and The Stranger. (In any exhaustive study, the parallel with Caligula would be inescapable.) Roger Quillit has shown that “Mersault is … the younger brother of Mersault”; he has pointed out that certain episodes and secondary characters are
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common to both texts, but he is particularly sensitive to the differences, and can write: “The two plots have no relation . . . , ” or: “A Happy Death is in no way the matrix of The Stranger: it is an altogether different book . . .”
However, despite the obvious differences in plot, structure, and intention, we may see in A Happy Death a prefiguration of The Stranger and even, setting aside the biological sense of the term, its matrix. To be convinced of this, we need merely compare the structure of
the two works: A Happy Death in its final version is reduced to two parts. The transition from ternary to binary division signifies for Camus the abandonment of a classical articulation, in which the synthesis of
contraries is effected, for the sake of a more personal dialectic in which the contraries are short-circuited.
From this point of view, The Stranger is merely a tracing of A Happy Death: it is also in two parts, and has virtually the same number of chapters (6 and 5 instead of 5 and 5). The scheme of the first part, in
both books, is noticeably the same: scenes of everyday life, then conversation with the man with the dog
(Salamano or Car-dona), then a murder (of Zagreus, moved to the beginning, by artifice, in extremis, or of the Arab). This murder transfers the hero from the realm of the factitious to that of truth. Apparently the
respective second parts have nothing in common. Certainly the trip to Prague or the House above the
World, elements unassimilable to a symbolic recit, have vanished from The Stranger. But if we consider Mersault in his isolation in the Chenoua and Mersault in his Algerian prison, we shall discover, in the
rhythm of the visits which distract them, of the seasons which stir them, of the imponderable time which
conducts them to their final hour, a correspondence. And if their fate seems quite dissimilar because one
has committed a perfect crime from which he benefits while the other, a clumsy murderer, becomes the
victim of his judges, we must not forget that their shared problem is that of the happy death—”The
Stranger or a Happy Man” is the subtitle of one manuscript—and that both men solve it victoriously, in
harmony with the world and released from humanity.
This is merely the sketch of a comparison which a close study, attached less to the substance than to the
style of these two works, could establish in depth. The superiority of The Stranger would be merely
emphasized. But may we not merely say, finally, that A Happy Death, not published by Camus, is a
document rather than a work, and that it is enough in the long run that there figure in this document, to be
accounted for in the dossier of his genius, certain positive elements? We leave the reader the pleasure of
discovering them for himself.
The files in the possession of Mme Camus contain two versions of A Happy Death typed by Camus. The
first is amplified by manuscript additions and corrections that are typed in the second, along with several
variants. In May and June of 1961, Mme Camus had three copies of a new typescript prepared,
representing the first typescript on which the variants of the second are registered in ink. The present
edition reproduces this typescript, following the correction of certain errors of transcription. The variants of the second typescript, though not in Camus’s hand, were doubtless made with his consent and have