Camus on Kafka and Melville: An Unpublished Letter

Author(s): James F. Jones, Jr.

Source: The French Review, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Mar., 1998), pp. 645-650
Published by: American Association of Teachers of French
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/398858
Accessed: 08/12/2010 22:17

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=french.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

American Association of Teachers of French is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The French Review.

http://www.jstor.org
THE FRENCHREVIEW,Vol. 71, No. 4, March 1998 Printed in U.S.A.

NOTES

Camus on Kafka and Melville:

An Unpublished Letter

byJamesF.Jones,Jr.
Tothememoryof LiselotteDieckmann

I came by the original letter from Albert Camus quite unexpectedly. One day in
February of 1990, our departmental secretary at Washington University's Depart-
ment of Romance Languages and Literaturesbrought the morning's mail into my of-
fice. On the top of the pile was a folded letter of not a little age with a handwritten
note attached. "Professor Dieckmann has more faith in the U.S. Postal System than
anyone I know," our secretary quipped. I began with the note: "I found the en-
closed-a genuine letter by Camus. If you collect such things, keep it. Or else throw it
away. As ever, Liselotte. PS You can also show it to [Washington University profes-
sor and noted specialist in twentieth-century French literature Michel] Rybalka."
Liselotte Dieckmann had folded Camus's letter from yesteryear, had appended her
note with the typically humorous "Orelse throw it away" added to arouse my suspi-
cions as to the letter's contents, had put the Camus original into an ordinary business
envelope, and had blithely entrusted the treasure to her neighborhood postman.
When I called on her the next day, she told me that at her age (then eighty-eight), she
felt that it was clearly time for her to clean out her files.
Herbert and Liselotte Dieckmann had fled the ominous Nazi movement in Ger-
many and had arrived in the United States in 1938, along with several other stellar,
predominantly Jewish, luminaries who were fortunate enough to escape the ensu-
ing terror.' Having made their tortuous way across Switzerland, Italy, and
Yugoslavia with hardly more than the clothes they were wearing, they had lived
for three uneasy years (1934-1937) in Istanbul in the same apartment house with
Erich Auerbach. Liselotte explained to me in the mid-seventies that the reason Mi-
mesis has no secondary sources and no bibliography was simply that Auerbach had
access to nothing but the amazing sweep of primary texts while writing one of the
masterpieces of Western literary criticism. After they had somehow managed to
obtain the necessary visas to the United States, Washington University offered the
Dieckmanns sanctuary, and there they remained for some years before Herbert left
for a position at Harvard where he later served as the Smith Professor of French
and Spanish before accepting the Avalon Foundation Professorship at Cornell. He
is remembered today primarily for his inventorying the Fonds Vandeul, for his
work on other Diderot manuscripts, and on the French Enlightenment.
Liselotte spent most of her adult life teaching German and comparative litera-
645
646 FRENCHREVIEW
ture in Saint Louis. She was an eminently read, remarkable human being, always
ready to help the newest tyro in the humanities faculty and always prepared to
discuss anything literary. She touched many lives, as any number of us can attest,
and was the model humanist in the spirit of Ernst Robert Curtius (Herbert's the-
sis advisor in Bonn in the late twenties), Leonardo Olschki, Eric Auerbach, Leo
Spitzer, and their few peers. Why she bestowed the Camus letter upon me has
been a mystery since that winter day in 1990. She asked me to wait several years
after her death to publish the letter. I have tried to remain faithful to her wishes,
although I have shown the letter to several individuals both in the United States
and in France, and now feel that I can make the exceptional document public.
Liselotte Dieckmann died in October 1994 at the age of ninety-two.
She had obviously written a letter to Albert Camus, whom she had not met per-
sonally. She believed that her letter to him had been written in the early fall of
1951 because at the time, Camus's rise to international prominence being widely
in the proverbial intellectual winds, she had been pondering the Camus-Kafka
relationship, and one of her graduate students had been considering an aspect of
the topic for a dissertation. The letter is herewith reproduced exactly as the origi-
nal reads:

LIBRAIRIENRF GALLIMARD
5, rue Sebastien-BottinParis (VII)

Madame Herbert Dieckmann

425 Marion ave.
Webster Groves, 19
MO.
U/S/A
Paris, le 3 D&cembre1951

Madame,
Je vous remercie de votre lettre et je me permettrai d'y repondre sans autres for-
malites.
1) J'ai lu Kafkaa 25 ans (1938) et je l'ai lu en francais.LE PROCESm'a frappe,
l'ceuvre complete m'a donn6 l'idee d'un 6crivain extremement limit6. Pour vous
donner un exemple clair, je considere que Melville s'est propos6 la meme entre-
prise que Kafkamais y a reussi parce qu'il l'a inscrite a la fois dans l'ombre et le
soleil; Kafkane sort pas de la nuit.
2) L'histoire du MALENTENDUa ete lu reellement dans un journal.Je l'ai intro-
duit dans L'ETRANGERparce j'avais l'intention, en effet, d'en faire une pi&ce.De
meme que vous avez remarquea juste titre qu'il est question de L'ETRANGER
dans LA PESTE.I1s'agit la, non d'une petite mystification, mais une maniere
d'indiquer a de tres rares lecteurs attentifs que, dans mon esprit au moins, mes
livres ne doivent pas etre juges un a un, mais dans leur ensemble et dans leur
deroulement.
J'espere que ces precisions vous satisferont, ainsi que votre 6tudiant a qui je vous
prie de presenter mes compliments bien cordiaux. Pour vous, Madame, en vous
exprimant ma gratitude pour votre lettre, je vous prie de croire mes a sentiments
bien respectueux,

Albert Camus.
CAMUS ON KAFKAAND MELVILLE 647
LIBRAIRIENRFGALIMARD

5, rue S6bastien-Bottin Paris (VII)

MadameHerbert Dieckmann
2sI Marion ave.
Webster Groves, 19
MO.
U/S/A

Paris, le 3 Dbcembre1951

Madame,
Je vous remercie de votre lettre et je me permettrai
d'y r6pondre sans autres formalitas.
1 ) J'ai lu Kafka & 25 ans ( 1938 ) et Je l'ai lu en
francais. LE PROCES m'a frapp6, l'oeuvre complbte m'a donna
l'id6e d'un 6crivain extremement limit4. Pour vous donner
un exemple clair, Je considbre que Melville s'est propos6 la
memeentreprise que Kafka mais y a r6ussi parce qu'il 1'a
inscrite A la fois dans l'ombre et le soleil; Kafka ne sort
pas de la nuit.
2 ) L'histoire du MALENTENDU a 6t6 lu r6ellement dans
un journal. Joe 'ai introduit dans L'ETRANGER parce J'avais
l'intention, en effet, d'en faire une piece. De memeque vous
avez remarqu6 &juste titre qu'il est question de L'ETRANGER
dans LA PESTE. Il s'agit 1A, non d'une petite mystification,
mais une manibre d'indiquer A de trbs rares lecteurs attentifs
que, dans mon esprit au moins, mes livres ne doivent pas
etre Jug6s un &un, mais dans leur ensemble et dans leur
d6roulement.

J'espbre que ces pricisions vous satisferont, ainsi que

votre 6tudiant A qui Je vous prie de pr6senter moescompliments
bien cordiaux. Pour vous, Madame,en vous exprimant ma
gratitude pour votre lettre, Je vous prie de croire & mes
sentiments bien respectuoux,

Albert Camus.
648 FRENCHREVIEW
I have often thought, upon reading the unsigned document over and again,
that Camus may well have typed it himself, for the missing accents, the gramma-
tical infelicities, the omitted que after parce, and the several fautes de frappe in the
original betoken that the letter was not dictated or written out longhand to be
prepared by a professional typist afterwards. There are still extant a few photo-
graphs of Camus working at the rue Sebastien-Bottin office of the then very spar-
tan, post-war NRF Gallimard in the early fifties that show him typing on a rather
worn typewriter resting on a small table. Perhaps one of the documents Camus
typed on that vintage typewriter was this one to Liselotte Dieckmann in Decem-
ber of 1951.
Although Andre Abbou could declare at a Cerisy conference on Camus in 1982
that "la relation avec l'oeuvre de Kafka, affirm&epar Jean Grenier et discut e par
Camus, n'est plus sujette a caution" (260-61), not all twentieth-century critics of
French literature would countenance such a sweeping generalization. Camus's let-
ter to Liselotte Dieckmann adds a considerable note of ambiguity to a more sim-
plistic representation of one author's supposed influence upon another. According
to Herbert Lottman, Camus's "L'Espoir et l'absurde dans Kafka" was probably
completed in February of 1939 ; the essay was to be part of a longer disquisition
entitled "Philosophie et roman," an "appendix to a still longer work on 'l'Ab-
surde,' which of course was the early title of LeMythe de Sisyphe"(193). Once Gas-
ton Gallimard had at last been given permission to reopen his publishing house
under the German occupation of France, "the chapter concerning the Czech Jew
Kafka had to be eliminated from the manuscript of LeMythe de Sisyphebefore Gal-
limard could publish it" (247). The banned essay on Kafka saw the light of the
printing day only in 1943 in Arbalete,which had already won luster by bringing
out Sartre's Huis clos (296). The letter from Camus to Liselotte Dieckmann thus
corroborates that Camus had read Kafka in French and adds an important preci-
sion as to the year and to his age at that time of his first acquaintance.
That Kafka may have exercised a considerable influence on Camus has been a
commonplace in literary circles for decades. David Ellison notes that many readers
of L'Etrangerthought soon after its publication that the Kafkaesque heroes wander-
ing "through the endless alienating maze of inhuman and distant bureaucracies"
(58-59) had supplied Camus with ideological and philosophical stereotypes. Rare,
however, have been those commentators who have foreseen what Camus ascribes
in his remarkable letter to Liselotte Dieckmann. The exception to this fact, perhaps
not surprisingly, is Henri Peyre who, in an article entitled "Presence of Camus"
published in 1988 notes presciently that Camus owed Kafka actually very little.
Adding Kierkegaard to his statement, Peyre finds that any "comparative study
linking [Camus with Kafka and Kierkegaard] would merely overstate a very frail
philosophical relationship"(24) before concluding that Melville was by a consider-
able degree the more lasting influence on the formative period in Camus's philo-
sophical evolution. Although it is not clear that Peyre realized it at the time of his
essay, Camus related in an interview with Dorothy Norman of the New YorkPost in
June of 1946 that he thought more highly of Melville and Henry James than he did
of any twentieth-century writer (Lottman 393).
While the relationship between Kafka and Camus might on the surface appear
more obvious, by Camus's own admission Melville plays a more significant role
in Camus's thinking, as his 1946 statement to Dorothy Norman underscores. La
Peste, which Camus finished in 1947, demonstrates that Moby Dick's power to
startle a French philosopher-writer shows clearly in the "allegory of man's fight
CAMUS ON KAFKAAND MELVILLE 649

against the radical evil of the universe," as John Cruickshank once wrote (16). At
much the same stage in their respective intellectual odysseys, Camus apparently
shared with Sartre this affinity for Melville, for Sartre wrote an essay on Melville
for the first issue of Comoediain 1941 that prefigures the one Camus began writ-
ing in 1952 ( Lottman 252, 502). Like her contemporary Henri Peyre, Germaine
Brae did recognize the links evidenced in the 1951 letter to Liselotte Dieckmann,
this decided preference now openly acknowledged for Melville over Kafka, who
in Camus's telling , and equally haunting, turn-of-phrase "ne sort pas de la nuit."
Br e observes: "Melville out-distances Kafka as a creator because in Kafka's work
the reality described is summoned by the symbol, the fact is a consequence of the
image, whereas, in Melville, the symbol is born of reality, the image of percep-
tion" (245). Thus the twentieth-century French existentialist finds a most kindred
spirit in the nineteenth-century American realist: odd bedfellows indeed but per-
haps no more so than the affection bordering on idolatry shown by many con-
temporary Latin American authors for Mark Twain.
By publishing the letter from Albert Camus to Liselotte Dieckmann from 1951,
sadly now that she no longer is with us to continue the dialogues she so enjoyed,
I can only trust that further dialogue on the intriguing Camus situation will be
forthcoming from students of twentieth-century French literature. Nothing would
have made Liselotte more proud.

KALAMAZOO COLLEGE

Note

'See among other pertinentstudies TheIntellectual

Migration,EuropeandAmerica,Donald
Fleming and BernardBailyn, eds. Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1969, for an overview of the
exodus fromNazi Europeto the United States.

Works Cited

Abbou,Andre. "LeQuotidienet le sacr&." AlbertCamus:euvrefermee,euvreouverte?Cahiers

AlbertCamus.Actesdu Colloquedu CentreCulturelInternational de Cerisy-la-Salle.
Cerisy-
la-Salle,juin1982.5, 234-35.
Bohn, Willard. "Trialsand Tribulationsof Josef K. and Meursault."OrbisLitterarum. 40.2
(1985):145-58.
Brae,Germaine.Camus.New Brunswick:RutgersUP, 1959.
Camus,Albert."L'Espoiret I'absurdedans Kafka."Essais.Paris:Gallimard,Bibliothequede
la Pl'iade, 1965.201-11.
nouvelles.Paris:Gallimard,Bibliothequede la
. "HermanMelville."Thidtre,ricits,
Pleiade, 1962.1907-11.
Crochet,Monique.LesMythesdansl'cvuvre de Camus.Paris:EditionsUniversitaires,1973.
Cruickshank,John.AlbertCamusandtheLiterature of Revolt.London:OxfordUP, 1959.
Ellison,David R. Understanding AlbertCamus.Columbia,S.C.:U of SouthCarolinaP, 1990.
Fleming, Donald, and BernardBailyn, eds. TheIntellectualMigration,Europeand America.
Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1969.
Lottman,HerbertR. AlbertCamus,a Biography.Garden City: Doubleday and Company,
1979.
650 FRENCH REVIEW

Peyre, Henri. "Presence of Camus." Critical Essays on Albert Camus. Ed. Bettina L. Knapp.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1988.
Politzer, Heinz. "Le Vrai Medecin-Kafka et Camus." Revue des Lettres Modernes 90-93
(1964): 151-74.
Roudiez, Leon. "Camus and Moby Dick." Symposium15 (1961): 30-40.
"Strangers in Melville and Camus." FrenchReview 31 (1958): 217-26.
Witt, Mary Ann. "Camus et Kafka." Revues des LettresModernes264-70 (1971): 71-86.