Recent events have dictated my current reading choices, but I suppose on some level all reading choices are based directly or indirectly on the internal and external factors in one’s life. But my decision to re-read Albert Camus’s 1948 novel, The Plague has been a little more obvious than usual. I probably read the book 25 or 30 years ago. My Knopf hardback copy was printed in 1958 and there are markings and underlines throughout the book, which is a practice I have long discontinued, but thankful in this instance because it is easier to locate some of my favorite quotes, which I still remember in part. As this blog is my witness, I’ve been a Camus reader ever since*.
Born in Algeria in 1913, Camus was raised by a deaf mother and a grandmother**. His father died in 1914 in World War I at the Battle of the Marne and his childhood is described in detail in Camus’s autobiography The First Man which was published posthumously in 1995, thirty-five years after the author’s death in an automobile accident. The Nobel Prize winning Camus spent much of his adult life in France but traveled back to Algeria for extended periods of time.
Set in the Algerian port city of Oran in the 1940s, the plot of The Plague is simple. It begins with one of the main characters Dr. Rieux, a local physician stepping on a dead rat in his building stairwell. Within a matter of days, rats start to die by the thousands in the streets and alleyways from an infestation of bubonic plague that is transmitted by fleas. As the rats die, the fleas move to human hosts. The authorities are reluctant to refer to it as the plague at first (sound familiar), but soon all travel in and out of Oran is blocked and the 200,000 residents are on their own. Medical facilities and treatments are quickly overwhelmed. An exhausted Dr. Rieux carries on relying on indifference to survive. Camus enlists other characters who interact with Dr. Rieux to tell the story: Grand, a city clerk-statistician and an over-meticulous writer (“Evenings, whole weeks, spent on one word, just think! Sometimes on a mere conjunction.”), Rambert a journalist who is separated in Oran away from his wife in Paris, and the saintly Tarrou who arrives in Oran before the plague and becomes a dedicated relief worker doing whatever he can out of a sense of duty.
Is This the Kind of Book I Really Should Be Rereading Now?
Despite its despairing themes, the book has a few comforting aspects. Camus gives almost poetic accounts of the shifting mind sets of the city and its inhabitants. One example is one of the quotes I remember from decades ago comes from the opportunist Cottard, who early in the novel is prevented from killing himself but later finds temporary peace of mind in the chaos. “Well, let’s put it like this, “says Cottard, "I’ve been feeling much more at ease here since the plague settled in.”
Perhaps an odd thing to admit, but even today outside on my busy street, traffic has slowed considerably. It’s rather pleasant. My partner Denise and I are practicing social distancing – we wisely postponed a trip to Arizona and the West Coast earlier this month. She is working on some new sewing creations and I have been catching up on my gardening and writing lengthy blog posts. This slower than usual pace is a change – even for us retirees, but re-reading Camus gives me some direction. “Thus, each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky,” he writes.
Baseball Bedtime Stories
One of things I miss is baseball. Each winter, I read a lengthy baseball book and this off season I finished Volume 1 of Norman Macht’s biography of Connie Mack. Mack was the owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for a half a century – holding records for both the most games won and most games lost. Macht uses the prism of Mack’s life in baseball as an entry to the sport between the time periods of just before the turn of the century path through 1914. Macht gives accounts of key games and a host of Athletics players with fantastic names and the personalities to match:
Ralph Orlando “Socks” Seybold
John Phalen “Stuffy” McInnis (that’s the stuff kid)
Charles Allen “Chief” Bender (Hall of Famer)
George Edward “Rube” Waddell (Hall of Famer)
Osee Schrecongost (Waddell's personal catcher and fellow hellion) - nicknamed Schreck
In order to sleep and not get too overworked about current events and while quenching my longing for baseball, I have turned to re-reading stories from Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of the Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (1984), which is on most lists of best baseball books of all time. Here’s a humorous anecdote from Babe Herman who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s. Herman tells the story about his manager William Robinson who affectionally known as Uncle Robbie takes us out on a lighter note:
Oh before I forget, there's one more story I've got to tell you about Uncle Robbie. It's about the time he agreed to catch a baseball dropped from an airplane as a publicity stunt. See, Gabby Street had just caught a baseball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument. So they were going to try to top that in Florida, in spring training, by having someone catch a baseball dropped from an airplane flying over the ball park. With some reluctance, Robbie agreed to put on a mask and chest protector and be the hero of the hour. Heck, anything Gabby Street could do Robbie figured the catcher of the old Baltimore Orioles could do even better.
The first two times the plane flew over the ball park, Dan Comerford the clubhouse man, dropped a baseball and both times he completely missed the field. The ball didn't come with half a mile of the ball park. Unfortunately, Dan had taken only two baseballs up with him, so he either had to come back down and get more or forget the whole thing. However, while he was trying to decide what to do, he noticed a sack of Florida grapefruit in the plane. In the early days of Florida, everybody had a sack of grapefruit. So the pilot circled around and made another approach, only this time Dan dropped a grapefruit instead of a baseball!
Well, down in the ball park, out near second base, Robbie is also circling around, getting a bead on this thing as it falls. As far as he knows--as far as anybody besides Dan knows--it's a baseball that's falling, not a grapefruit, and Robbie is determined to catch it.
"Get away, get away," Robbie yells "I got it, I got it." And then squash, it smacks right into Robbie's mitt and literally explodes, juice and pulp splashing into Robbie's face and all over him. The force of the thing was so great that it knocked Robbie down, and all he knew was that he had all this liquid and stuff all over him.
"Help, help," he shouted, "I'm bleeding to death. Help me!"
Some players called him "Grapefruit" forever after. It was a nickname he never lost.
Footnotes
* Last year I wrote a long essay about Alastair Horne’s A Savage War for Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 for the Tropics of Meta which includes Albert Camus vain attempt the reconcile the warring factions in bloody war of Algerian independence.
A short shout for a paperback copy of Camus The Stranger in 2018.
A mention of the Henri Cartier-Bresson photography exhibit at the High Museum featuring photos of Camus in 2011.
As you can see Camus is no stranger to the blog.
** In Camus’s autobiography, The First Man (1995) he describes his childhood of poverty in which he was raised primarily by his grandmother. In one account Camus admits that he stole a nickel from his grandmother so he could attend a soccer match and when his grandmother confronted him about it, he lied that the nickel dropped into the family latrine. The family was so poor that his grandmother pulled up her sleeve and reached into toilet to search for the coin. I also recall how a schoolteacher of Camus’s, recognizing the boy’s talent, persuaded his grandmother that young Albert should continue his education instead of going to work – as was expected considering their dire economic condition. This teacher, this moment, changed the trajectory of Camus’s life.
