A Happy Death     by Albert Camus, Translated by Richard Howard Original title: La Mort heureuse Original language: French Published by Random House, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1973 Format: Paperback, 192 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.57 x 8.02 x 5.20 ISBN: 0679764003 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $12.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.60 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1984 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 135 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering

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Camus’ first (subsequently abandoned) novel on the wonderful subject of what makes a good life is mostly set in his beloved hometown of Algiers and shot through with the sunny North African light he worshipped. Like D.H.Lawrence or George Orwell, Camus was a sick, hyper-intelligent man who discovered and celebrated the simple but profound joy of being alive under the sun.


Although unfinished A Happy Death is a fascinating book; for one thing the personal philosophy of one of the major figures of existentialism is presented in a very direct way here. Later works tend to present these ideas in a more veiled albeit more subtle manner.


Elements of this book went on to re-emerge in the acclaimed Outsider published four years after A Happy Death was abandoned. As in that book there is a central character called ‘Meursault’, a bored, frustrated clerk, but here he seems more like the man that Camus might have been if he hadn’t escaped the destiny of a bright boy from a poor background — humble white-collar work.


There is something fascinating here too in reading the Camus who had yet to witness the horrors of W.W.II, a young man still tenderly sensitive to strong feelings of love and loneliness as he describes the trip he made to Prague, a city he finds sunk in a damp baroque gloom as he wanders around on his own. In Prague he remembers Algiers and writes ‘an intense and secret fervour swelled within him and it was a nostalgia for cities filled with sunlight and women, with the green evenings that close all wounds’.


The young Camus, chasing happiness and trying to discover the key to it, as one does at 25, announces towards the end of the book ‘What matters — all that matters, really — is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest — women, art, success — is nothing but excuses.’


After Prague Meursault stays in a series of places, of ideal locales, including a laid-back student house with three charming young women and a view over the Bay of Algiers but finally he finds a little angle of paradise in the Chenoua region where he sets up home. In the tradition of the Greek philosopher Epicurus he seeks spiritual freedom by finding himself a beautiful and quiet place to live meditatively and contemplate nature. This pocket utopia he creates is the place where he will remain conscious; defying the power of the world to distract him; ‘it was enough to make a few essential gestures — to rest one’s hand on a tree trunk, to take a run on the beach — in order to keep himself intact and conscious.’ Far more than a fragment of juvenalia if less than a finished product, A Happy Death should be read by anyone who appreciates the greatness of its author.

‘To lick his life like barley-sugar, to shape it, sharpen it, love it at last — that was his whole passion. This presence of himself to himself — henceforth his effort would be to maintain it in the face of everything in his life, even at the cost of a solitude he knew now was so difficult to endure.’ p62