JOIN USThis year marks the birth centenary of French philosopher and author Albert Camus. Giridhar Khasnis revisits one of the writer’s short stories, which traces the rise and fall of a painter.
“I cannot live without my art,” said Albert Camus (1913-1960), during his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm on December 10, 1957. “But I have never placed it above everything… And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realises that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.”
Exile and the Kingdom by Camus, published in 1957, was an anthology of six short stories: The Adulterous Woman; The Renegade or A Confused Spirit; The Silent Men; The Guest; Jonas or The Artist at Work; and The Growing Stone.
Story begins
In The Artist at Work, Camus presents the life of Gilbert Jonas, a painter who lives through the vagaries of the art world with characteristic humility and acceptance. Brought up by pampering parents, Jonas finishes his formal studies without any special effort before finding a job in his father’s publishing house. His father, we are told, holds that books, because of the very slump in culture, represented the future. “History shows,” he says, “that the less people read, the more books they buy.”
In his job, Jonas finds considerable leisure time; and that helps him make the acquaintance of painting, which soon becomes a passion. “For the first time he discovered in himself an unsuspected and tireless enthusiasm, soon devoted his days to painting, and still without effort, excelled in that exercise. Nothing else seemed to interest him, and he was barely able to get married at the suitable age, since painting consumed him wholly.”
It takes a motorcycle accident with his childhood friend Rateau to trigger Jonas’s interest in Louise Poulin, who is ‘small and dark in skin, hair, and eye, but well built and pretty in the face’. Rateau calls her ‘an insect’ but the tall and rugged Jonas is touched at the sight of the insect, especially as she is industrious, promptly falls in love with her, and marries her.
Louise follows Jonas in his interests; she dedicates herself first to literature (while Jonas remained in publishing), and then to visual arts when he becomes interested in painting. She visits museums and exhibitions, dragging Jonas to them though he would not quite understand what his contemporaries were painting and feels bothered in his own artistic simplicity.
Louise showers upon him every moment of her life and takes care of every chore in his daily life. She also produces, in rapid succession, two children, a boy and a girl. Her intention of going up to three is realised soon after Jonas leaves the publishing house to devote himself to painting.
Good fortune
When around his 35th year, Jonas’s talent is suddenly discovered. To his good fortune, a picture dealer offers him a monthly remittance that frees him from all care, and helps give up his job in the paternal publishing house.
Jonas’s success brings him a following; his expanding circle of friends and disciples almost all belong to the species of artists and critics. “Some had painted, others were about to paint, and the remainder were concerned with what had been, or would be, painted.”
In this milieu, Jonas’s life becomes very full. Each exhibit of his is eagerly awaited and extolled in advance. The more his name appears in the press, the more he is solicited. Inevitably, this also brings its own attendant problems. It becomes hard to paint the world and men and, at the same time, to live with them. Consequently, he starts working less, and has trouble painting, even in the moments of solitude. His reputation starts declining; the critical reviews of his work deeply distress him.
Following considerable falling-off in sales, the dealer reduces the remittance. Jonas takes to alcohol. He spends long hours sitting and dreaming in smoke-filled, noisy places. He flees the places and sections frequented by artists. He becomes more and more elusive and skittish. He has many encounters, and women help him. He talks to them, before or after the love making, and especially boasts a little, for they would understand him even if they weren’t convinced.
As time progresses, Jonas becomes a recluse even in his own home. He spends all his time in a dark loft. He loves his wife and children, but refuses to come down. He tells them that he is busy working. In reality, he is not painting, but meditating. “In the darkness and this half-silence of the desert or of the tomb, he listened to his own heart.”
Once, while looking at the stars with gratitude and expectations, Jonas accidentally falls from the loft. Fortunately, the doctor, after due examination, declares that all is well. While Louise is being reassured that Jonas would be on his feet again in a week, Rateau climbs up the ladder to look at the canvas on which the artist is supposedly working. To his utter surprise, he finds the canvas to be completely blank.
The story ends with Rateau looking at the canvas, “in the center of which Jonas had merely written in very small letters a word that could be made out, but without any certainty as to whether it should be read solitary or solidary.”
Written with a dose of dry humour, this short story too, like many of Camus’s works, raises questions of human existence, identity and condition. “The Artist at Work has as its theme the predicament of the artist who is successful in modern society,” explains poet and scholar, Wimal Dissanayake. “How artists are compelled to navigate between the preferred solitude and inescapable solidarity with others is vividly portrayed in this story. What Camus is seeking to emphasise in this story, it seems to me, is to call attention to the fact that an artist can best serve society and establish solidarity with others if he is only allowed to pursue his medium of expression in solitude.”
On his part, Camus, who tragically died in a car accident in 1960, aged 47, believed that men could never be happy if they continued to search for what happiness consisted of. “You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”