Urban legend

Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of 19th-century London's working poor, collected the following tale in the course of an interview with a lively street "patterer" who specialized in hawking printed broadsides containing accounts of notorious murders:

Then there's the Liverpool Tragedy - that's very attractive. It's a mother murdering her own son, through gold. He had come from the East Indies, and married a rich planter's daughter. He came back to England to see his parents after an absence of thirty years. They kept a lodging-house in Liverpool for sailors; the son went there to lodge, and meant to tell his parents who he was in the morning. His mother saw the gold he had got in his boxes, and cut his throat - severed his head from his body; the old man, upwards of seventy years of age holding the candle. They had put a washing-tub under the bed to catch his blood. The morning after the murder the old man's daughter calls and inquires for a young man. The old man denies that they have had any such person in the house. She says he had a mole on his arm in the shape of a strawberry. The old couple go upstairs to examine the corpse, and find they have murdered their own son, and then they both put an end to their existence.

I recognized the outlines of the tale immediately: it's more or less the plot of Albert Camus's 1943 drama Le malentendu, usually translated as The Misunderstanding. Camus shifts the action to Czechoslovakia, replaces the homicidal father with a sister, and changes the machinery of the eventual revelation scene, but it's clearly the same basic story.

Camus had come across the incident in an article published by the Hearst Universal Service, which described it as having taken place in Yugoslavia; he included a brief reference to it in The Stranger before developing it into the play. But it was a shopworn tale even in Mayhew's day. Folklorist Veronique Campion-Vincent, in a 1998 article in the Nordic Yearbook of Folklore (PDF here) traces it back to several versions dating from 1618; within three years versions of the tale had variously located the supposed events in London, Languedoc, Ulm (in what is now Germany), and Poland. Clearly it was too good a yarn not to pass on. (Elements of it — the failure to recognize a long-lost family member — arguably date back to Oedipus Tyrannus and the Odyssey.)

Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, incidentally, is a revelation in itself. A contemporary and acquaintance of Dickens, he combined statistical analysis (mostly omitted in the abridged Oxford University Press edition shown above) with oral history to provide a kind of non-fiction counterpart to the work of the great novelist. He keeps the moralizing to a minimum and allows individuals who would have been long forgotten by now to speak in their own voices. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst aptly calls his four-volume work "the greatest Victorian novel never written."

Streetcars (Albert Camus)

The Plague:

During all the late summer and throughout the autumn there could daily be seen moving along the road skirting the cliffs above the sea a strange procession of passengerless streetcars swaying against the skyline. The residents in this area soon learned what was going on. And though the cliffs were patrolled day and night, little groups of people contrived to thread their way unseen between the rocks and would toss flowers into the open trailers as the cars went by. And in the warm darkness of the summer nights the cars could be heard clanking on their way, laden with flowers and corpses.

(Translation by Stuart Gilbert)

The hardest part of The Plague to read at the moment is the chapter in which the narrator recounts the increasingly desperate measures the authorities in Oran resort to in order to dispose of the mounting number of victims. Individual graveside ceremonies — simplified a bit, to be sure, as a concession to public hygiene — give way in time to furtive disposal in a common pit. Thus far it hasn't gotten that bad here, but the very image gnaws away at our complacency. Few notions horrify us more.

Re-reading Camus

I found revisiting The Plague as La peste considerably more difficult than re-reading The Counterfeiters as Les faux-monnayeurs. I sailed through the first seventy pages or so, then bogged down, though more so in the philosophical passages, some of which are quite long, than in the narrative and dialogue sections. When I referred to Stuart Gilbert's translation, which I kept at hand as a crib (though I mostly relied, heavily, on a dictionary), I was surprised to find that, although it reads well as the English-language novel I first encountered it as some thirty-five years ago, it diverges rather radically from the terse style of the original, even more so than Dorothy Bussy's dated but generally faithful rendition of Gide.

It's hard to read La peste today without very quickly noticing the curious fact that although the novel is set in a predominately Arab country (Algeria), there are virtually no Arabs in it. There are also very few women, and the few that do appear are either kept largely offstage (Rieux's wife) or reduced to entirely passive roles (Rieux's mother, who when not doing housework mostly sits silently with her hands folded, and who is probably based on the author's mother). The half-dozen characters of any consequence — Rieux, Tarrou, Rambert, Grand, Cottard, and Paneloux — are thus all males of European descent. To some extent these omissions are understandable, given what Camus set out to do, which was to write not a social novel but a moral and philosophical one in which the introduction of a social dimension might have been a distraction, although it still might be regarded as peculiar that Camus thought that he could only investigate moral and philosophical matters as they were refracted through one kind of lens.

In the end, however, even though Camus was in fact raised in Algeria and the lyrical passages in the book exude the particular ambience of the city of Oran, the novel is no more about Oran than Kafka's "The Great Wall of China" is about China. That La peste is, at least in part, an allegory about the German occupation of France during World War II has been widely noted, but one could be ignorant of that connection, or even ignorant of World War II, and still grasp the author's essential purpose, which was to consider how one might act in the face of a universe that is not made by us and does not operate for our benefit, but which accords us, or at least some of us, the freedom to make moral choices about how we will respond to that indifference.