With
the slippers tied to his feet, the English boy followed his
school-friend across the lonely downs. It was a glorious summer night
after the gruelling heat of the day, and beyond the discomfort of gorse
and bramble occasionally scratching his ankles, he was enjoying the
adventure, not allowing himself to dwell on the fact that it was a
forbidden pleasure, and might lead to unpleasant penalties.
When
at length they reached the shelving limestone cliffs leading to a
sheltered cove where the school often came to bathe, he had forgotten
all his fears in the present delight of a midnight swim.
The waves were merely lapping on the shore, and the sea looked like smooth pewter under the light of the sickle moon.
‘It’s
a gorgeous idea of yours,’ he said as he flung off his dressing-gown
and pyjamas, ‘but I notice you didn’t bring bathing-togs.’
His
companion looked anxiously out over the waters. ‘There is more in this
than a mere swim, my friend,’ he said slowly as he undressed. ‘All is as
arranged, except your presence.’
The English boy scarcely heard his chum’s words; he was running down the beach, longing for the cooling water.
A
glorious quarter of an hour followed; the pair dived in and out of the
waves like porpoises, ducked one another under the water, had races
seaward, and acted as if they had no cares in the world.
Now and again, however, an anxious look would overcast his school-friend’s face when he peered out across the night waters.
And
just once, when a strand of seaweed whipped across his back, the boy
had qualms and wondered if he would be swished on his return to Cotmore
Monastic School. At length the English boy, who had been first in the
water, landed for a rub-down preparatory to dressing. A handkerchief was
his only towel, and as he stood there and glanced at his scanty clothes
waiting to be donned, he felt it must be all a dream and that no
respectable Cotmorian should be there on the beach at this midnight
hour.
Extract from The Midnight Flit from Cotmore Monastic School
by Sercombe Griffin
The Boy’s Own Paper October 1936
In reading this passage, discerning readers may experience a frisson
of recognition, noting the curious similarity in mood between Griffin’s
schoolboy yarn and that memorable account of a moonlit dip in Part 4 of
La Peste (The Plague, 1947, Albert Camus’ existential classic),
for in each case a bond of male friendship is overshadowed by an
unspoken menace yet the bathers are consumed by ’a strange happiness’ (plein d'un étrange bonheur) and forget all their ‘fears in the present delight of a midnight swim.’
Devant
eux, la nuit était sans limites. Rieux . . . était plein d'un étrange
bonheur . . . Ils se déshabillèrent. Rieux plongea le premier. Froides
d'abord, les eaux lui parurent tièdes quand il remonta. Au bout de
quelques brasses, il savait que la mer, ce soir-là, était tiède, de la
tiédeur des mers d'automne qui reprennent à la terre la chaleur
emmagasinée pendant de longs mois.
Before
them, the night was boundless. Rieux . . . was full of a strange
happiness . . . They [Rieux and Tarrou] undressed. Rieux dived in first.
The water at first was cold then seemed warm to him when he resurfaced.
After a few strokes, he knew the sea that evening was warm, with the
warmth of autumn seas that repossess from the land the heat stored up
for long summer months.
A phantom archetype?
The ‘present delight’ of existence can be, of course, an unsought benison granted by momentary immersion in that which is wholly phenomenological, and le bain de l’amitié in La Peste
is an episode demonstrably in high contrast with the novel’s stark
exploration of free-will tested by an humanitarian tragedy in thrall to a
tyranny beyond the control of the two idealists of Camus’ novel – Bernard Rieux and Jean
Tarrou – under harrowing conditions interpreted by some literary
critics to be analogous to the terror of the Nazi Occupation of France.
But critics may rightly question how a French novel, conceived in the early 1940s, could take as its precursor an English schoolboy adventure serialised in The Boy’s Own Paper of 1936? Too preposterous? Too improbable?
Well,
readers might care to consider the fact that in 1936 (the year of the
schoolboy yarn’s publication) Camus toured Austria, the Czech Republic
and Silesia in the company of a close friend, high school English teacher Yves Bourgeois
and his wife. It is known that Camus could read English though spoke it
with less facility so the possibility remains that a copy of the Boy’s Own Paper could well have been instructive to this professeur d’Anglais, since subscriptions to Anglophone readers were worldwide. Indeed, Sercombe Griffin had his own regular subscription to the B.O.P. when he was posted to Burma in the 1900s. Later on he would write stories for the paper himself.
In short, then, are we content to know a phantom archetype of Camus’ strain of Phenomenological Existentialism existed in the decade preceding the writing of his modern myth?
If you haven’t the foggiest idea?
Certainly the contents of the Boy’s Own Paper
of 1936 point towards thoughtful guidance for the growing boy as to how
he must act to rediscover in the face of immanent nihility a hominid’s natural instinct towards order and meaning . . . in fact, a nursery primer of existential conduct for English schoolboys.
In the 1936 B.O.P. issue Camus could have read a short item, When You Get Lost, on page 13. It’s an austere unforgiving creed of self-reliance reminding the individual of the intensity of existence when under duress: ‘Of course, if you haven’t the foggiest idea where you want to go, you must expect to become a fog victim . . . When caught in a fog you tend to walk in circles; but this can be avoided if the direction is known. On a foggy day,
by placing the blade of a knife in an upright position on the
thumb-nail, a shadow is cast which indicated the position of the sun.
This is more easily detected by means of raising the blade of the knife
slightly up and down.’
Fog victim as precursor of the Outsider?
And, yes, apart from these English foreshadowers of Camus’ vision we can add another significant English rival to this Nobel-prize-winning writer, praised by the Swedish Academy for his ‘famous’ novel (L’Étranger
1942), who ‘represents also the philosophical movement called
Existentialism’ and whose ‘incessant affirmation of the absurdity of the
human condition is no sterile negativism.’
Published a year earlier in 1941, Hangover Square, by Sussex-born novelist and dramatist Patrick Hamilton,
decidedly qualifies him for candidature as the protean maker of our own
groundbreaking mid-20th Century English existential classic, with the
form of the genre corresponding to defining components identified by
literary theorists: Nothingness (check); Anomie (check); Sociopathy (check); Absurdity (check); Paranoia (check); Colourlessness (check); and more . . .
Hamilton’s sociopathic antihero and killer is George Henry Bone: ‘His mind was in a mist. He had to concentrate to think, to stand properly on his legs . . . in fact he could trace it back as far as his early boyhood . . . what
he called his “dead” moods, in which he could do nothing ordinarily,
think of nothing ordinarily, could not attend to his lessons.’
Camus’ sociopathic antihero and killer is Meursault: ‘J’ai
eu l’impression que tout devenait comme une incolore òu je trouvais le
vertige . . . J’ai souvent pensé alors que si l’on m’avait fait vivre
dans un tronc d’arbre sec, sans autre occupation que de regarder la
fleur du ciel au-dessus de ma tête, je m’y serais peu à peu habitué.’
(‘I felt as if everything was becoming colourless and I found myself dizzyingly unstable . . . I often thought then that if I had been made to live in a dead tree trunk, with no other occupation than to watch the heavenly blue above my head, I would have gradually become accustomed to it.’)
Anomic godlessness and bitter rivalry
What’s more, the comparisons that may be made between Camus and Hamilton are even more acute when you consider both were adherents of Communism as young men, so had flirted with ideologues espousing
the secularisation of society under the rigours of anomic godlessness,
which undoubtedly accounts for the polemical features of both these
works of fiction.
And, as a footnote to this perceived contest between claimants to the earliest prototypical novel of Phenomenological Existentialism that affirms ‘the absurdity of the human condition’, let us remind ourselves of the case of Georges Simenon who, on the announcement of Camus’ Nobel prize, was riven with bitter envy since his own novel of the same year (1942) La veuve Couderc (aka The Widow, and Ticket of Leave) was judged by many shrewd literary critics as a more profound work. The similarities are striking: an amoral antihero who kills without scruple, a drifter with nothing to lose, practically penniless, roaming aimlessly in a hostile world. A stylistic tour de force.
Simenon’s
rage and violent response to the Nobel Committee’s oversight, on the
evidence of his own superb novel, is entirely unsurprising and his
resentment is to be shared.
Can one attempt to say more to express the sting of these injustices?
Great Scott!’ exclaimed the English explorer when he was pipped at the post by Roald Amundsen in his race to the South Pole. For exponents of unadorned prose see
Nobel-prize-winners for literature here –
See also:
The Utility of Art as a Social Function according to Heinrich Böll
