‘More in men to admire than to despise’
Geoff Dyer on his hero, Albert Camus.
I was drawn to Albert Camus because he looked so cool in his trenchcoat, because the Cure wrote a song inspired by one of his books (The Outsider), because he and his pug-ugly friend Sartre were existentialists (which seemed related, somehow, to the trenchcoat). Their falling-out could hardly have been more acrimonious but, as can happen, the rupture contained a measure of agreement: both accepted that Camus had never really been an existentialist. For him this was a matter less of intellect than of temperament, of the defining facts of his early life: being born (100 years ago this week) into a world of sunlight and poverty in Algiers.