The first specific mention, in the Notebooks, of what was to become A Happy Death is a plan of "Part II" that could only have come after the trip to central Europe. The last sketches for the novel date from 1938. The name Mersault occurs as late as January 1939, but by then Camus was concerned with The Stranger. Thus A Happy Death was conceived and composed between 1936 and 1938. It is contemporary with the first version of L'Envers et l'endroit and the final one of Noces, and follows the first draft of Caligula.
To understand the composition of the novel, it is best to consider the final version first. A Happy Death is divided into two parts, each consisting of five chapters: "Natural Death," then "Conscious Death." But the first part consists of only 49 typed pages, scarcely more than a third of the entire 140.
The core of "Natural Death" is the murder of Ro-
land Zagreus. Mersault, the hero, kills him in the first chapter, takes his money, and falls ill on his return home. The subsequent chapters are flashbacks: to Mer-sault's ordinary life (Chapter 2), his relations with Marthe and his sexual jealousy (Chapter 3), his long conversation with Zagreus (Chapter 4), and finally the encounter with the barrelmaker Cardona, whose pathetic story is told in Chapter 5. To summarize: an ordinary office worker, Patrice Mersault, the neighbor of a barrelmaker whose life is even more wretched than his own and the lover of a girl whose first lover was the invalid Roland Zagreus, makes the latter's acquaintance through this girl, learns from a conversation with him how he made his fortune, and taking advantage of this confidence, murders him; he then leaves the country, his health uncertain but his wallet full.
The five chapters of "Conscious Death" present Mersault's stay in Prague (Chapter 1), the rest of his journey and his return, through Genoa, to Algiers (Chapter 2), his life in the House above the World (Chapter 3), his departure for the Chenoua, where he moves into a house overlooking the sea (Chapter 4), and finally his pleurisy and death (Chapter 5). To summarize: in Prague, Mersault feels happiness escaping him; he regains his sense of it as he returns to the sun. Back in Algiers, he makes two experiments in happiness: first, by living with three girls in the House above the World; then in an ascetic solitude in Chenoua, mitigated by visits from his wife Lucienne or from the three friends. He has conquered happiness, and retains it in death itself, evoking Zagreus.
This resume of the novel suggests its chief theme: how to die a happy man? In other words, how to live as one so that death itself is happy? The first part of the novel is the "wrong side"—I'envers—of this problem of a happy life and death, for the hero lacks money, time,
and emotional mastery; the second part of the novel, endowing him with financial independence, an organization of time, and peace of heart, is the "right side"— I'endroit. This, in summary, is the content and meaning of A Happy Death in its final version.
The division into two parts was a belated one. All the sketches for the book's composition until 1938 indicate three parts, and the revisions concern only the arrangement of the chapters. Thus it is not surprising to encounter the dissymmetry (49 pages against 91) which appears in the final plan. The three-part division, as one sketch called "rearrangement" testifies, was more balanced: each part would have had approximately the same number of pages.
The final version indicates a strong contrast, which does not occur in the earlier sketches. Yet contrast, alternation, seems from the start to be the aesthetic motif of the novel, as of Camus's philosophy. In a note proposing to tell "six stories":
story of the brilliant game. Luxury.
story of the workingmen's neighborhood. Death of
the mother, story of the House above the World, story of sexual jealousy, story of the man condemned to death, story of the pursuit of the sun.
Camus reveals, by the very order of his list, this concern with alternation. The six stories can be paired. Until August 1937, however, he tried to match the contrast of polarity with a contrast of tenses: certain chapters are written in the present, others in the past. He even tried, in a detailed plan of "Part I," to relate the tenses
according to a rigorous system, but later abandoned this formalism, which was not sustained by an internal necessity. Yet a vestige of it persists in the French text as published: the chapter devoted to the House above the World, an evocation of a pure and continuous happiness, is written in the present, as in the initial sketch.
These six stories form the raw material of what was gradually to become a novel. We can retrace the novel's genesis from them—from their metamorphosis and their arrangement.
The first sketches stress the story of the House above the World, which occupies, with that of jealousy, "Part II." Here is the first plan in the Notebooks:
Part II:
A. present tense
B. past tense
Chapter A1 The House above the World. Description.
Chapter B1 Recollections. Liaison with Lucienne.
Chapter A2 House above the World. His youth.
Chapter B2 Lucienne describes her infidelities.
Chapter A3 House above the World. Invitation.
Chapter B4 Sexual jealousy. Salzburg. Prague.
Chapter A4 House above the World. Sun.
Chapter B5 Getaway (letter). Algiers. Catches cold, falls sick.
Chapter A5 Starry night. Catherine.
Thus the first part is devoted, as can be seen by a plan sketched after August 1937, to the brilliant game-workingmen's neighborhood pairing: what the "brilliant game" is will be shown, later on, by The Myth of Sisyphus in the trinity Don Juanism, pretense, conquest; this game is contrasted with the vicissitudes of life in the "workingmen's neighborhood." Then appears a
double antagonism indicated by a sketch dated August 1937:
Part I. His life hitherto. Part II. Flight.
Part III. Abandonment of compromises and truth in nature.
"Life hitherto" signifies poverty, eight hours of work a day, banality of social relations—in other words, a false mode of being. "The game," about which the Notebooks are extremely laconic, must designate a kind of dandyism, an advance on an impoverished life, a delight in personal pleasure, but still false. This antagonism, in the final version of A Happy Death, loses its importance, diluted in dialogues and summarized in Mersault's advancement. On the other hand, the conquest of authenticity, by an impulse of flight into solitude and nature, appears in the first sketches and remains the novel's end in every sense.
But A Happy Death does not appear to end, in the first sketches, with the hero's death: "craving for death and the sun" we read in one outline; this is only a craving. In another, death is confronted (?), but located at the end of the first part: "Last chapter: pursuit of the sun and death (suicide-natural death)." One notable feature: death and the sun are related. Once a sun, a sensuous image, is replaced by happiness, a moral myth, a decisive step will have been taken toward the final conception. We can date this step August 1937 with the note: "Novel: the man who has realized that in order to live he must be rich, who gives himself up to this conquest of money, succeeds, lives and dies a happy man." For the first time, in the Notebooks, we encounter a virtual summary of A Happy Death, and it is here that we first find the word "novel."
The main thread of this novel is henceforth clear: it will be an inverted illustration of the proverb: Money does not make happiness. Happiness, through money, becomes the chief theme, as clearly appears at the beginning of the note of November 17, 1937:
Will to happiness.
Part III. Achievement of happiness.
But at this moment the character of Zagreus, who is as yet only the "invalid," supervenes, in order to enlighten Mersault as to the problem of the relationships between money and time and to show him the truth of another proverbial statement—Time is money, equally true, in the reverse: Money is time—which will form a fundamental principle in his art of living, as is testified in the last paragraph of the November 17 note:
"For a man who is 'well born,' to be happy is to partake of
the common lot not with the will to renunciation, but with the will to happiness. In order to be happy, time is necessary—a great deal of time. Happiness too is a long patience. And time is the need for money which robs us of it. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be rich is to have time to be happy when one is worthy of being so."
Thus the various materials of the novel are regrouped according to the pairing time lost and time won. Time lost is that of poverty, work, everyday life: the chapter devoted to Mersault's life is entitled "Killing Time," a title which would also suit the affair with Marthe and the trip in central Europe; the murder of Zagreus will end this wretched odyssey of time lost. Time won will be the time spent in the House above the World and in flight into nature. At this point, on a
manuscript page, appears an outline in three parts whose initial chapter, each time, is devoted to time. The first part consists of seven chapters, from "Killing Time," which include Mersault's life from the Algerian adventures to the return from Praqua (i.e., pages 1-75 of the final version): "First from 'killing time,' " Camus writes, "to 'he felt he was made for happiness.' " This last phrase occurs in virtually the same form on page 75 of the final version: "he understood at last that he was made for happiness."
The first chapter of the second part is then entitled "Gaining Time"—it concerns the House above the World—and the first chapter of the third part, "Time." If we think of Proust, we see the novel proceeding from time lost, that of work, to time gained or won, that of idleness in the "budding grove" of the House above the World, to time regained, which is harmony with nature in solitude and death, summarized by a succinct note on the manuscript of the last page: "Time." "First does a lot of things and then abandons everything. Does nothing at all. Follows time and above all the seasons (diary!)." Time, having become the standard of happiness, the principal theme, gives the novel its frame and its rhythm. The present/past alternation of the first sketches was not inductive. Now, from the pulverized time of the first part to the atemporal process of the third, the current is to pass through and connect the atonal descriptions to the lyrical accents.
Thus we come to the novel's final form, its contraction into two parts, which can be explained by two reasons: first, Camus's embarrassment regarding the erotic or emotional episodes. He had to restrict them. In the outline mentioned above, the second part, after "Gaining Time," announced "Encounter with Lucienne," then "Catherine's departure." Camus either could not or would not organize enough material under these
headings. Subsequently the Zagreus episode became important enough to form the core of a system. The flight into central Europe, which was originally linked to sexual jealousy, was transferred to this system.
But Camus clung to his three-part division. Whence still another outline, the last before the final contraction:
Part I. 1: The workingmen's neighborhood; 2: Patrice Mersault; 3: Patrice and Marthe; 4: (erased) P. and his friends (?); 5: Patrice and Zagreus.
Part II. 1: Murder of Zagreus; 2: flight into anxiety; 3: return to happiness.
Part III. 1: The women and the sun; 2: secret and ardent happiness at Tipasa; 3: the happy death.
The definitive title has been found, but applied to the last chapter. The Zagreus episode has not yet found its proper place. It remains to transfer the murder first to the end and then to the beginning of the first part. Then the second part, reduced to the journey and the return, is too thin—it is integrated into the last part, and a common title, "Conscious Death," sanctions the fusion, evoking a parallel title: "Natural Death." On the other hand, the chapters that were given titles—"The House above the World," then "The Women and the Sun"— now follow without them, in the unusual use of the present indicative following the return from Prague. Thus was rewritten ("rewrite Novel," Camus enjoined himself in June 1938), completed, or at least reworked, A Happy Death.
Why wasn't it published? We shall hold to only the purely literary reasons here. According to M. Castex's
study of The Stranger, the latter supplanted A Happy Death in Camus's intentions, and we can see, during August 1937—the critical period of that novel's gestation—the surreptitious appearance of the theme of The Stranger. M. Castex quotes this text:
A man who has looked for life where it is ordinarily found (marriage, job, etc.) and who suddenly realizes, reading a fashion magazine, how alien he has been to life (life as it is considered in fashion magazines) . . .
which gives the first formulation of the theme, although it refers to A Happy Death.
This hypothesis is correct. We may confirm it by examining the novelistic value of A Happy Death. Apparently Camus felt, as he was creating it, the latent defect of his first novel and another fictional possibility.
A work "both clumsily composed and remarkably written," Roger Quilliot notes. It cannot be better put. The stylistic virtues are astonishing, but not those of a novelist. Camus vainly tries to organize and unify his disparate materials. What relation is there between the fictional murder of Zagreus and the chronicle of the actual trip to Prague? Between the portrait of the wretched Cardona and the evocation of the House above the World? The disparity in tone aggravates that of the episodes, without our being able to excuse it by a deliberate recourse to contrast: the pathetic, the playful, the vulgar, the curtly descriptive, the warmly sensual, the sun-drenched lyrical alternate without any accommodation to one another. The episodes are too numerous and on occasion overlap. Thus, after Mer-sault's mother's death, we are made to suffer that of Cardona's mother. The women's parts, especially, are badly handled: the trio of "grinds" is unbalanced by
Catherine, who originally—according to the first sketches—had an affair with Mersault, but Lucienne could have availed herself of the same advantage. The outlines call for an affair sometimes with one, sometimes with the other. We also encounter the name of a certain Lucile. Marthe, as seen from a correction, will replace her and assume a part of the roles of both Lucienne and Catherine. She will be the link of time lost, Catherine that of time regained. Certainly Camus is not comfortable with his women! They obstruct the nym-phosis of his novel and afford a literary illustration of the proverb: "Grasp all, lose all." In the final version, we feel Camus's effort to establish their respective attributes, to follow their wake or to prepare their entrance. The result is mediocre.
Had he worked still harder, might he have succeeded better? A Happy Death, as a novel, is doomed in its principle. "The quality of a novel," as M. Coulet has recently remarked on the genre, "depends on the tension in which are united exact observation and the correction or investigation of the real by the imaginary." No novel escapes this rule. But in A Happy Death the elements of observation, i.e., the fragments of autobiography, remain disjointed: memories of the working-men's neighborhood, of the sanatorium, of the House above the World, of the trip to central Europe, of the female figures are not, in the chemical sense, treated in order to unite in "a whole, a closed and unified world" like Proust's, which The Rebel exemplifies. They would form a whole only if reworked by the creative imagination. And the creative imagination, in A Happy Death, functions only on the level of style. The invention of episodes or characters is impoverished indeed: neither the murder of Zagreus, inspired by Man's Fate or Crime and Punishment, nor the character himself attains fictional authenticity. In this impossible novel,
only the autobiographical scenes are valid, which are analogous to the vein of "L'Envers et 1'Endroit" ("The Wrong Side and The Right Side") and not formally distinct from "L'Ironie" ("Irony") or "La Mort dans l'ame" ("Death in the Soul") or the lyrical evocations related to those of Noces (Nuptials). The best elements in the novel are not novelistic.
Did Camus feel this so clearly? He never says as much. But it is more than likely that his artistic subconscious at least warned him of the danger and attracted him, without his realizing it, in a more profitable direction. To borrow from Gide a suggestive comparison from the naturalist's domain, within the chrysalis of A Happy Death was
forming the larva of The Stranger. A Happy Death accomplished its deceptive nymphosis, its author took pains to rewrite it, to rework all its parts, but The Stranger, like a kind of inspired parasite, derived all the benefit of this labor, which, ultimately, instead of a false novel, was to produce a true recit.
We may conclude by a brief parallel between A Happy Death and The Stranger. (In any exhaustive study, the parallel with Caligula would be inescapable.) Roger Quillit has shown that "Mersault is ... the younger brother of Mersault"; he has pointed out that certain episodes and secondary characters are common to both texts, but he is particularly sensitive to the differences, and can write: "The two plots have no relation . . . , " or: "A Happy Death is in no way the matrix of The Stranger: it is an altogether different book . . ."
However, despite the obvious differences in plot, structure, and intention, we may see in A Happy Death a prefiguration of The Stranger and even, setting aside the biological sense of the term, its matrix. To be convinced of this, we need merely compare the structure of
the two works: A Happy Death in its final version is reduced to two parts. The transition from ternary to binary division signifies for Camus the abandonment of a classical articulation, in which the synthesis of contraries is effected, for the sake of a more personal dialectic in which the contraries are short-circuited. From this point of view, The Stranger is merely a tracing of A Happy Death: it is also in two parts, and has virtually the same number of chapters (6 and 5 instead of 5 and 5). The scheme of the first part, in both books, is noticeably the same: scenes of everyday life, then conversation with the man with the dog (Salamano or Car-dona), then a murder (of Zagreus, moved to the beginning, by artifice, in extremis, or of the Arab). This murder transfers the hero from the realm of the factitious to that of truth. Apparently the respective second parts have nothing in common. Certainly the trip to Prague or the House above the World, elements unassimilable to a symbolic recit, have vanished from The Stranger. But if we consider Mersault in his isolation in the Chenoua and Mersault in his Algerian prison, we shall discover, in the rhythm of the visits which distract them, of the seasons which stir them, of the imponderable time which conducts them to their final hour, a correspondence. And if their fate seems quite dissimilar because one has committed a perfect crime from which he benefits while the other, a clumsy murderer, becomes the victim of his judges, we must not forget that their shared problem is that of the happy death—"The Stranger or a Happy Man" is the subtitle of one manuscript—and that both men solve it victoriously, in harmony with the world and released from humanity.