When Tom was here a couple of weeks ago he noticed something I hadn’t. To the right of my door, resting against the intersecting corners of the courtyard wall, is a tree trunk. The trunk I’d noticed. What was written on it, I hadn’t.
It’s a poem; and in English the scrawled tippex reads as follows:
…The sea / is your mirror [illegible] / you contemplate / your soul / in / the / coming and going of the [illegible due to rot but almost certainly ‘waves’]
Admittedly it’s a pretty corny poem, but at the end of the day it isn’t wrong. The sea, like fire, is one of those elemental things whose draw none of us can escape. To look out at the immensity of the endless water and think is inevitable. You and everybody else.
I’ve since been wondering who wrote the poem. Was it Lucy, or her brother Théo? Or was it written by someone unrelated to the family I’m renting my flat from? Part of me thinks it was written by a teenager. It strikes me, even down to the structure—which follows the nature of the words, and admittedly I quite like—as something I might have written when I was 16. I don’t say that disparagingly, just deductively. Anyway, it looks like this:
… LA MER EST TON MIROIR [illegible] TU CONTEMPLES TON ÂME DANS LE D É R O U L E M E N T D E S [illegible due to rot but almost certainly 'vagues']
I’m currently flying over the English Channel. Everything’s grey. The water and the sky are one. The cloud is not thick but it’s there and only further blurs the offing. Sat in the middle seat I can only steal the occasional glance through the window, and when I do, I see next to nothing. The mirror’s fogged up. So be it. Too much contemplation makes you sick. It’s there, though. Beneath and beyond. Mare Brittanicus, that’s what the Romans called it. The British sea. Mare being the ancestor of mer.
This last week I’ve read Camus’ last and unfinished novel: Le premier homme [The First Man]. Last and unfinished due to his untimely death. The manuscript was found in the mud not far from the wrecked car his corpse lay mangled in. His unused train ticket for the same journey still in his pocket.
The last 50 pages of the book are made up of notes and plans. Mainly single sentences plotting out what he wanted to do, ideas for chapters, philosophical problems, etc. One of the notes reads: ‘The book must be unfinished. E.g. “And on the boat that took him back to France…”’
What a horrible way for something to come about.
The sea, in what part of the book we have, and in the book we could have had, plays and would have played a major role. As it does in almost all of Camus’ work. In a way completely unlike Hemingway or Melville, he is one of the great writers of the sea. The word la mer appears 81 times in his short collection of essays, Noces et L’été. It is at the beach that the murder happens in L’Étranger, and from his cell Meursault is taunted by his proximity to a sea in which he can no longer swim. While La Peste has one of the great passages on sea swimming. And in his published diaries about his trip to New York, the ship’s journey is the highlight.
Had he finished Le premier homme, I’m convinced it would have been a masterpiece, a meditation on boyhood, a genealogy, an examination of class and war, and far closer to one of Dostoevsky’s door-stoppers than anything anything else in 20th century French literature. From the notes alone you can tell the book had the potential to be considerably longer than anything he’d written before. But of course we’ll never know. He may have been able to condense it, but I can’t see how. From what he maps out it all but necessitates being 500+ pages. His vision seemed to be to follow in his hero’s footsteps and use the Russian novel as a means of telling an Algerian story.
Teenage loves on the beach, he writes in one of the notes, the night that falls over the sea, and the starry skies.
We’re in a patch of turbulence. The trolley’s been put away and the toilet locked. Outside, the grey has turned to black. The sea and the sky an undefinable mass of nothing. The woman to my left is watching something starring Tina Fey. The people behind me are talking about The Starlight Express. The plane is rattling and I am contemplating my death.