Alexandre Alajbegovic, a thirty-two-year-old Frenchman, strolled through the campus of Columbia University the other day, freshly arrived from Lourmarin, a small town the color of a sunset, concealed in the hills above the Côte d’Azur, where Albert Camus is buried, and where Alajbegovic helps manage the writer’s estate. Camus made a similar voyage to New York when he was thirty-two, in 1946, on his only visit to the U.S. The war had ended, and Camus watched with relief, from the deck of the S.S. Oregon, as the “very edge of a wounded earth” receded and gave way, several weeks later, to the “orgy of violent lights” of Manhattan. He complained that he was the only passenger to be detained at immigration—the F.B.I. had heard that he ran a Paris newspaper with the motto “From Resistance to Revolution”—and he found New York, at first, to be a “hideous, inhuman city.” But the city liked him—A. J. Liebling described him as “unduly cheerful”—and his American host noticed that in the elevator of his hotel, on West Seventieth Street, an attractive girl glanced longingly at him.
Alajbegovic was at Columbia to meet the actor Viggo Mortensen, who, that evening, was to reënact a lecture that Camus had given at the university during his trip, on no less a topic than “The Crisis of Humankind.” Camus’s daughter, Catherine, who also lives in Lourmarin, had sensed something in Mortensen’s pensive performance in a film adaptation of her father’s short story “The Guest.” Alajbegovic had reached out to Mortensen—“I just threw my bottle at Viggo’s sea,” he said—and a week later had a response in the affirmative.
The Danish-American actor appeared in a black suit over a tight-fitting navy T-shirt, an American Spirit dangling, Camus-like, from the corner of his mouth. Mortensen, who speaks Quebecois French, Argentine Spanish, and a bit of Algerian Arabic, and can get by in the Russophone underbelly of London, had helped transform the text into an English version that he considered faithful to the author. “I’m so delighted that you tinkered with the translation!” Shanny Peer, the director of Columbia’s Maison Française, told him when he arrived at the Miller Theatre. Mortensen shrugged.
He did a sound check on the stage, in the same place where, exactly seventy years earlier, Camus had stood.
“We received an e-mail from a student who was at Brooklyn College when Camus was here,” Alajbegovic said. “The students went and saw him at his hotel, and she remembers how gentle and simple he was.”
“The students went to his hotel room?” Madeleine Dobie, a French professor at Columbia, said. “Can you imagine if Camus came today?”
“He would have to have an obligatory sort of sex-ed workshop,” Alice Kaplan, the chair of the French department at Yale, said.
The academics agreed that Camus is enjoying a comeback. “He is facing and answering the questions that torment us today,” Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the chair of Columbia’s French department, said. Camus had initially declined the university’s invitation to speak—“I’m not old enough to give lectures,” he wrote—but had nonetheless delivered a sprawling treatise on his generation, which came of age in a world of terror, ruled by a political machine that had erased the individual.
“What he was saying is that politics as we know it needs to take a secondary position,” Mortensen said. He added that he admired the writer’s independence in standing up to both the left and the right: “He was fearless.” Camus felt that an absence of values had led Europe to disaster, that societies had decided that a leader was right merely because he’d succeeded. Mortensen said, “All of these things Camus is saying about politicians, buffoonery—it’s like this respect for Trump. He’s winning, he’s the strongest, so that makes it good.”
After the talk, which he delivered before an enchanted crowd, Mortensen suddenly realized he had to get going. As part of his attire for the evening, he’d left off an article of clothing that he holds dear—his Bernie Sanders watch. ♦