National Post (National Edition)
Was Camus the victim of a Soviet conspiracy?
NEW BOOK EXPLORES THEORY THAT KGB WAS BEHIND DEATH OF POPULAR WRITER IN CRASH
Did the Soviets kill Albert Camus? Debate has been raging recently over whether Camus' death in a car crash in 1960 was something more sinister than an accident. In his book The Death of Camus, shortly to be published in English for the first time, the Italian poet and historian Giovanni Catelli argues that Camus, author of the existential masterpiece The Stranger, was murdered by the Soviet security agency.
It is a timely moment for the book to appear, as COVID-19 has given Camus a popularity boost: since the start of the crisis, Penguin Books has been struggling to meet demand for copies of The Plague, his classic novel of an epidemic wreaking havoc in Forties' Algeria.
Camus made his name in France as a writer and thinker during one of the few periods of history in which philosophers have been at the apex of celebrity culture, and he was perhaps the most widely admired — and probably the handsomest — of the lot. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 at the ludicrously young age of 44, and his death on Jan. 4, 1960 shocked the world.
Camus and his family had spent the new year holiday at their house in Provence, along with his publisher Michel Gallimard, and his wife and daughter. Although Camus' wife and children returned to their main home in Paris by train, Camus decided not to use his ticket and opted to travel by car with the Gallimard family.
Camus hoped to get to Paris some hours before the ETA he had given his wife, as he wanted to meet a friend — perhaps a woman — and Gallimard's wife Janine recalled him saying during the journey that “he felt he had made all of his women happy, even the ones he loved simultaneously.”
Not long afterwards, the car was passing through Villeblevin, a hamlet some 100 kilometres from Paris, when it veered into one of the trees lining the road.
Camus, in the front passenger seat, was killed instantly; Michel Gallimard, the driver, died in hospital a few days later; Janine Gallimard and her daughter Anne were virtually unharmed. Floc, the Gallimards' dog, ran off, never to be seen again. The attending gendarmes later retrieved from the roadside mud the black leather briefcase containing the unfinished manuscript of Le Premier Homme — the novel, based on his Algerian childhood, that Camus had predicted would be his masterpiece.
One of the car's tires had reportedly blown, and the press immediately united in attacks against Gallimard for his careless driving and shoddy maintenance of his vehicle. Only recently has the suggestion of KGB sabotage begun to gain traction.
Catelli first came across the KGB theory when he picked up the posthumously published memoirs of the Czech writer Jan Zabrana in a Prague bookshop. Zabrana claimed that “a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources” had told him “the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organized by Soviet spies. They damaged a tire on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.”
The assassination, Zabrana wrote, was ordered by Dmitri Shepilov, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs. This was in response to an article Camus published in March 1957, denouncing Shepilov's role in the brutal crushing of the Hungarian
Revolution. Not the quickest of responses, one might think, since the best part of three years passed before Camus died; but Catelli argues that this indicates the thoroughness with which the KGB laid its plans.
As the writer Benjamin Ivry recently pointed out, however, Shepilov had already been demoted by the time Camus' article appeared, and by June 1957 he was in disgrace after taking part in a failed plot to oust Nikita Khrushchev. Already, Zabrana's claim that Camus died because of a personal grudge looks more than a little shaky.
Luckily, Catelli has slipped an alternative theory into his book's appendix. According to a lawyer he met who had an acquaintance with contacts in the intelligence world, the KGB killed Camus with the collusion of the French intelligence services, to stop him spoiling Khrushchev's forthcoming tour of France by denouncing his crimes against humanity. The Soviets were desperate during this period to secure good relations with the French and to stop them growing closer to the Americans, and Catelli argues that neither the Soviets nor French intelligence — allegedly riddled at that time with Soviet agents — wanted Camus to rock the boat.
In this scenario, the philosopher's murder was not years in the planning, but a matter of urgency. Khrushchev's tour went ahead, very successfully, three months after Camus' death.
Well, it could be true. The KGB certainly carried out frequent kidnappings and at least a few murders outside the USSR during this period. Camus was certainly a thorn in their side: a left-wing writer but one who, unlike that old humbug Sartre and so many others, refused to gloss over Soviet totalitarianism. And, hard though it may be to imagine today, writers and intellectuals really did sway public opinion in those days. The CIA even thought it worthwhile to print special lightweight editions of Animal Farm and send them into Eastern Europe by balloon.
Catelli argues that Camus' adventurous love life may have proved his undoing. He wrote to at least three of his mistresses with details of his travel plans, and Soviet spies could have got hold of the information.
Although not much survives in the way of forensic evidence, Catelli has seen film footage of the accident site, and notes that “the front left tire... is severely damaged on its inner rim — an area that generally does not suffer from wear and tear or punctures.” Evidence of sabotage? Catelli does not find room in his book, though, for the claim made by other biographers that the car twice previously had rear-wheel bearing failures and that a garage worker had told Gallimard: “This car is a tomb.”
At one point, Catelli's book gets very cloak-anddagger as he starts to receive vaguely threatening anonymous phone calls (“history has already been written — I hope you don't plan on trying to rewrite it”) and finds himself being kept under surveillance. But if there are shadowy figures trying to suppress the truth about Camus' death, they can take comfort in the fact that Catelli has found little hard evidence to back up his theories.
The great irony is that Camus, in his writings on absurdism, insisted that the universe was meaningless, irrational and chaotic, and that we should embrace that fact.
Camus' death, if it was accidental, was undoubtedly absurd with a capital A.