Camus (1913-1960), who edited the Resistance newspaper Combat during World War II, traveled in North America on an official French state tour. Three years later he did the same in South America. His notebooks from those journeys were first published in French in 1978 and translated into English a decade later. They appear again in “Travels in the Americas,” newly translated by Ryan Bloom and edited by Alice Kaplan. Though not as stirring as the author’s novels and essays, the diaries offer an intimate glimpse into the psyche of a widely admired writer.
These visits, Ms. Kaplan writes in an introduction, “contributed to France’s urgent cultural mission in the postwar era: Erase the scourge of Vichy, promote French language and culture in North and South America, [and] in Latin America in particular, compete with the encroachment of English.” J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept tabs on Camus, whose 1942 novel “The Stranger” would soon appear in English.
“Here are the details that strike me,” an early New York entry reads. “The garbage collectors wear gloves, the traffic is orderly, without the need for officers at the intersections, etc., no one ever has any change in this country, and everyone looks as if they’ve just stepped off a low-budget film set.” Aside from the usual tourist fare—Camus surveys the city from atop the Empire State Building—he quips about his surroundings in bemused turns of phrase: “Impression of overflowing wealth. Inflation is on the way, an American tells me.”
Hosted in New York by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, then cultural counselor at the French Embassy, Camus hobnobs with the literati. The main event of this leg of his sojourn is an antifascist talk at Columbia University titled “The Crisis of Man.” A.J. Liebling of the New Yorker interviews Camus for the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” feature. The piece, written up by St. Clair McKelway, and included here in an appendix, notes that “he is often called an existentialist, like his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, but he says he is not. . . . He believes man’s relation to the universe is absurd because man must die. But he also believes that acceptance of this relation is the mark of maturity.”