First Flood of Light

By Martha Duffy

A HAPPY DEATH

by ALBERT CAMUS 192 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

In 1938 when he was 25, Albert Camus scrapped this novel and began writing The Stranger, one of the half-dozen most celebrated first novels of the century. Last year, a decade after he was killed in an automobile crash, his widow allowed this forerunner to be published in France, and it has now been admirably translated into English by Richard Howard.

With open trunks of manuscripts yawning around the publishing world, what widows do with material that writers originally considered unpublishable is an increasingly controversial matter. In this case Mme. Camus was obviously right. The dogged clumsiness of the construction and some superfluous scenes show a beginner hard at work. But the ability to describe the world as it might have been seen by an angel on his first visit shows that Camus was in some respects already near the height of his powers.

The book has several elements that recur in The Stranger: the sun-drenched Algerian setting, a restless clerk named Mersault whose mother dies, a restaurant keeper named Celeste. This Mersault, more open and spontaneous than in The Stranger, sees himself as a Sisyphus whose particular boulder is office work--"those eight hours a day other people can stand." He pours out his frustration to a rich man named Zagreus who has no legs. Zagreus tells him, "I'd accept even worse -- blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly that dark fire that is me, me alive." Mer sault is unappeased and unabashed.

"When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears," he cries. "It would be different if I was free. To have money is to have time."

Shortly afterward he robs and kills the immobile Zagreus.

For the rest of the book Mersault pursues freedom fitfully. He goes alone to Prague but finds life unbearable away from the sun. Returning to North Africa he moves in with three docile young girls in a hilltop "house above the world." After a while he goes on to Lucienne, who is even more tractable and whose "mindless beauty" seems to him "divine."

Female characters were never Camus's strong point, but at this early stage his writing about them is embarrassing.

One shudders to think how the book would be greeted by feminists if it were published unheralded today. The women in it have no qualities whatever beyond the suppleness of their bodies and the pasta-like pliancy of their minds.

Furthermore, the author's attempts to comment on the sexes would make Hemingway blush. "A man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do," Mersault muses. "What is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face?"

At any rate Mersault concludes -- like that other overweening youth Stephen Dedalus -- that he was not made for love but "for the innocent and terrible dark god he would henceforth serve. To lick his life like barley sugar, to shape it, sharpen it -- that was his whole passion." Instead he dies rather romantically of tuberculosis.

A Happy Death may be read as a preamble to The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, though it lacks their intellectual power and control. No matter. The book offers, like a gift from the grave, passages of radiant writing.

Unstudied, unquoted, undissected, they are like the primal hours he loved, when "the morning rejoiced over the cold, golden earth. A great, icy joy, the birds' shrill, tentative outcry, the flood of piti less light gave the day an aspect of in nocence and truth."

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