Camus and Dostoevsky on Filthy Lucre, Happiness, and Freedom
I am currently making my way through Albert Camus's notebooks. I had been dipping in and out of the notebook for years, when I suddenly decided to read the three-volume collection more systematically: all the way through, taking note of everything, from beginning to end. Who knows what mysterious forces conspire to make us decide that now is the time to pay close attention to a particular work! Be that as it may, I am nearing the end of the first volume (1935-1942), which includes the thoughts, reflections, and story ideas of a young Camus not yet known to the (literary) world.
I want to discuss one specific entry, fifty pages into the first notebook. Incidentally, all quotations are from the first volume of the Ivan R. Dee edition, as pictured above.[1] In August of 1937, Camus notes down the following idea for a novel:
"The man who realizes that one needs to be rich in order to live, who devotes himself completely to the acquisition of money, who succeeds, lives and dies happy."
What Camus describes here for the first time is part of the plot of La Mort Heureuse (A Happy Death), first published in 1971—eleven years after his untimely death. Camus wrote and rewrote the novel between 1936 and 1938 but ultimately decided not to publish it. In A Happy Death, the protagonist Patrice Mersault murders a wealthy invalid named Roland Zagreus. Why? The idea appears to be suggested to Mersault by Zagreus himself, as the latter tells him:
"You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time."[2]
I do not know whether Camus read Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1875 novel The Adolescent (also known as A Raw Youth), but there is a striking parallel with the theme of that underrated novel. In The Adolescent, the nineteen-year-old protagonist Arkady Dolgoruky—illegitimate son of a profligate provincial nobleman—chases his idea of becoming very rich and (thereby) powerful, as an act of rebellion against society. Arkady's psychology and the lure of being wealthy for him is revealed in a quintessentially Dostoevskian way:
"The secret awareness of power is unbearably more enjoyable than manifest domination. If I were worth a hundred million, I think I'd precisely enjoy going around in my old clothes, so as to be taken for the measliest of men, who all but begs for alms, and be pushed around and despised; for me, the consciousness alone would be enough."[3]
Freedom-as-independence and power (Dostoevsky) as well as happiness (Camus) is what wealth is supposed to bring. One would not, perhaps, expect to find a preoccupation with money in great works of literature. There is an expectation that philosophers and authors are supposed to be above petty questions about money and its acquisition. Concern with filthy lucre is a sign of crudity; even criticizing people whose aims are to amass vast amount of the stuff is aesthetically questionable, as if one might catch vulgarity second-hand. It is therefore surprising that both Camus and Dostoevsky—two of the greatest and most philosophically-oriented and psychologically acute writers—created characters for whom obtaining money is an explicit and significant goal. What is going on?
One might stop to think about Camus's and Dostoevsky's biographical circumstances—especially in the early years of their productive lives. Neither of them came from well-off families; each struggled to make money while pursuing a career as a writer. Not only that, but both writers were surrounded by others who were free or much freer from financial strain, people who had money—had always had money—and could therefore spend their time as they wished. Dostoevsky envied the sophisticated aristocrat Turgenev, who, as a member of the landed gentry, could travel and write as he pleased, never having to dirty his hands. Many of Camus's Parisian colleagues and writers whom he admired did not have the anchor of work dragging down their literary projects and ideals. Yet, these personal relations to money are only part of the explanation; there are deeper philosophical issues at stake.
As Camus puts it in a June 1938 entry: "There is dignity in work only when it is freely accepted." The problem is, of course, that most work is not freely accepted. How many of us would choose to do the work that we do—or any job—if we did not have to do it to sustain ourselves financially? To quote Camus again, a little earlier in the notebooks: "It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all. Six or eight hours a day so as not to die of starvation" (77).
Work that is not freely chosen thwarts people's potential to cultivate themselves and to actively choose happiness. This is what Zagreus impresses upon Mersault. People compromise, perhaps, and try to develop their character—justify their existence—through their jobs; but the awareness that one would never have entered into one's job without the need of a paycheck is a kind of existential worm that gnaws at us when we become aware of it. It is a role that we play in bad faith, as Jean-Paul Sartre would put it; it alienates us from ourselves, to put it in Marxian terms.
Camus characterizes the stakes plainly enough: "To be rich means having time to be happy when you are worthy of happiness" (77). The second part of this formulation is key, though, if we want to move beyond the overly simple and unrealistic idea that, by not having to work, everyone will simply flourish. We must be worthy of happiness: we have to find it in ourselves to create happiness for ourselves when we are liberated from the motivational and existential structure that work enforces upon our lives.
This notion already seems to be present in Dostoevsky's Adolescent: "First a lofty idea, and then money, but without a lofty idea along with money, society will collapse" (144). Money buys us freedom and time—it creates the conditions for happiness, in Camus's language—but money alone buys us nothing. We still have to be; we still have to act; we still have to create something out of our lives. Freedom from the obligation to work forces us to square up against ourselves and to find out who we are and who we want to become. This is why many of those who are born very rich risk going to pieces. They find themselves reflecting like Karl in Franz Kafka's novel America: "'Yes, I'm free,' said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom" (304).
Imposing structure on yourself and giving your life purpose from within—in the face of radical freedom—is a beautiful and terribly difficult thing.
[1] Camus, Albert. 1962/2010. Notebooks: 1932-1942. Translated by Philip Thody. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher.
[2] Camus, Albert. 1995. A Happy Death. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. p 43.
[3] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1875/2003 The Adolescent. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage Books. p. 42.