Robert Dessaix, André Gide and the Poor Boys of Algeria

Robert Dessaix and I just missed bumping into each other in Biskra, by about thirty years. I came by bus from Oran. Dessaix’s twenty-first-century journey to Algeria began in Sydney in 1958. Aged fourteen, he had a Christmas holidays job in a city bookshop. Dusting the wooden shelves he found the recently published, and expurgated, Penguin edition of André Gide’s If It Die with its tantalising front cover blurb: “An uninhibited autobiography recording experiences of and reflections on French life from Gide’s childhood to the eve of his marriage.” The words “uninhibited” and “French life” struck the boy with an erotic charge. It’s why older generations of readers first opened the French author—we were in search of sex. Though Dessaix thinks Gide is a forgotten writer, French and English editions of his novels and journals are in print and easily available, and he still interests biographers.

Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives (Picador, 2008) is not a straightforward biography of the homosexual French writer but a series of “reveries” by Dessaix built around his discussion of Gide’s pederastic sex life and Dessaix’s own travels to places associated with Gide. Book chapters deal with locations in France, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, and it is the three chapters devoted to Algeria which interest me.

It’s rare to find an Australian author visiting and writing about modern Algeria. The civil war, which began in 1992, is supposedly over, though violence continues, and I’m curious to see what Dessaix (a noted writer, interviewer, translator and broadcaster) saw. The book presents Dessaix’s “own thoughts on religion, love, ageing and why we travel (he [Gide] was passionate about the same places I keep going back to)”.

It is a characteristic of Dessaix’s writing that its careful craftsmanship obscures the reality of what he is talking about: “He liked them,” says Dessaix, “at the age when a child is no longer a child, between puberty and going into the army.” There is no sense in those words that the desired boys were being treated as a disposable product of prostitution. The carefully crafted prose can be deliberately misleading:

he was a passionate traveller. As I am, although I am not sure that I only travel to places where there’s a chance of fornication, as he said he did. I would put it more delicately: I like to go to places where there are possibilities for eros. In short we both moved around the world with a strange kind of combative dreaminess, if that makes sense.

It does not make sense, because Dessaix has edited what Gide wrote about his choice of travel destinations: “a country does not please me unless multiple opportunities for fornication are present”. It’s worth remembering the “multiple” object of Gide’s sexual transactions with boys.

When Dessaix picked up If It Die in 1958, eager but embarrassed lunchtime browsers may have already bent back the pages to the part he quickly found—the Algiers sex scene where Oscar Wilde tempted Gide by offering him a young boy: “I came across the words I would never forget, translated into English: ‘Dear, would you like the little musician?’ And in a ‘choking voice’ Gide said ‘yes’.” This scene is the seed for Dessaix’s book and an influence on his own life:

At fourteen, just as you’re learning to conceal your own burgeoning double life, it’s thrilling to read about a young man ten years further down the track taking the first step towards laying his bare. Even at fourteen I knew a pivotal moment when I came across one.

Gide himself was absolutely clear: “it was now that I found my normal”. This is not a moment when an individual recognises and accepts his homosexuality. Led on by Oscar Wilde, his “normal” was pederasty, boy prostitution and sexual tourism.

The Penguin edition of If It Die Dessaix is still using was abridged. He discusses who was responsible for cutting the text and defends the translator, Dorothy Bussy, from charges of prudishness. The defence was unnecessary. Bussy had translated the full text, which had previously been published in Britain in a limited edition before the mass-market Penguin edition was published. Wealthy book buyers got the sex, fourteen-year-old Penguin browsers/buyers got a gap in the text and the word [Omission]. Gide’s pederasty was also for the wealthy.

Dessaix praises Gide for writing of an earlier sexual encounter in Tunisia “without shame”: “It was virile, not effete, frank, not veiled, open, not furtive. And nobody felt miserable. This is what is shocking.” It’s a warm-hearted, liberal response, though the argument seems very familiar—and carefully veils what Gide was describing. The life without shame was dependent on money and poverty: a wealthy adult man and poor boys. Without his unearned fortune André Gide would not have had a sex life that Dessaix would have wanted to read about. Arabesques is an elegantly stated excuse for Gide’s behaviour—involving pederasty, boy prostitution and sexual tourism.

If Dessaix’s arguments are accepted, then let’s encourage mass sex tourism from rich countries to poor—or legalise what is already happening. On an industrial package holiday scale it could solve problems of worldwide poverty. A letter from Oscar Wilde suggests a new economic approach to solving Third World poverty. He referred to “fauns” in the Algerian Kabylie area and beggars who “have profiles, so the problem of poverty is quickly solved”. Instead of government travel warnings we could look forward to a quite different listing of international hot spots. A new policy of replacing our foreign aid to undeveloped nations with sex tourism could make for an interesting Senate hearing.

Dessaix’s defence of Gide is familiar because the arguments are similar to those made by intelligent commentators in the 1950s and early 1960s against censorship and for sexual and political changes, made without understanding the forces they were about to unleash. In this instance Dessaix claims that “nobody felt miserable” from Gide’s pederasty.  He has no idea how those kids felt after being taken up and then dropped by a wealthy older man collecting multiple contacts, and Mrs André Gide definitely felt miserable. Gide saw his little Algiers musician, Mohammed, two years later: “his figure had kept its grace; but the languor of his eyes had gone; I felt something hard, anxious and degraded in them … He was still attractive; oh! More attractive than ever; but he was not so much lascivious now as shameless.”

Dessaix’s progressive defence of Gide’s multiple fornications is silent on the fact that boy prostitutes also need multiple sexual contacts to stay alive. Gide’s companion on this occasion had sex with Mohammed as Gide watched on: “As he bent over the little body [Mohammed] he was covering, he was like a huge vampire feasting on a corpse. I could have screamed with horror.” Arabesques was written a few years before the gay marriage debate became shrill, and while there is plenty of evidence of sexual adventures there is nothing on adult monogamous homosexual relationships. When this book was published in 2008 no one in the Australian literary world spoke out in favour of protecting kids.

Gide’s sex life can be seen at two different stages. At the beginning is If It Die with its account of his life up to his mid-twenties, at the further end there is a travel journal which records his sexual exploits aged seventy. In 1939, eight years before winning the Nobel Prize, Gide visited Egypt. His journal was published posthumously. It reveals a series of sexual activities with young boys in Luxor, interspersed with serious readings and conversations with erudite companions. The text is hallucinatory, and you could wonder if the different medications he mentions taking have made him confuse fantasy and reality: though he vouches for the authenticity of his account.

With his pockets full of piastres, the whole young male population of Luxor threw themselves at the old man. As he walked in the hotel garden a swarm of young gardeners competed for his attention by exposing themselves enticingly; a smiling headwaiter presents him with a thirteen-year-old boy; with a fourteen-year-old he has sex in the slums, in a rowing boat in the middle of the Nile, and on its banks; as he has sex with a young gardener under an orange tree the boy’s friends stand protectively around. It never occurs to Dessaix that the life of Gide may actually be evidence for a police investigation or a comic masterpiece, the raw material for a Tom Sharpe novel. On an excursion he writes, “the donkey was charming, but the donkey driver was old, ugly and stupid”. Gide himself was old, ugly, wealthy and predatory.

Almost fifty years after reading If It Die, Dessaix has followed Gide to Algeria. Arabesques begins in the Casbah, which disappointments him: “To be honest, I’d been hoping for something more alarming than cobblers and canaries. The days of the bagno (the vast slave barracks of Algiers) were, of course, long gone.” Standing where Dessaix is standing, but without his guide book, I looked about and saw the battle of Algiers—the film and the history. I wondered where Ali La Pointe died in his hideaway, blown up by the French paratroopers. It’s fortunate Dessaix didn’t get his wish: the Casbah is still a civil war fault line where Islamic violence could appear at any time. It is bizarre to be here talking of century-old pederasty with eyes tightly shut on what is happening all about. Later Dessaix meets an Algerian who keeps asking him why he is in Algeria. It’s a very good question.

Dessaix reflects on the moment which happened here in 1895 when Gide said “Oui” to Wilde. He suggests the younger man’s life was “reconfigured”. Impressed by his own thought he wonders, “Had this ever happened to the men in blue pants and singlets hanging their birdcages out in the sunny gap between the houses beside me?” The question perfectly captures the mindset of Australia’s dangerously self-absorbed, narcissistic intelligentsia. In this fundamentalist citadel those men in blue pants may have lived through the Algerian War, the postwar violence, the socialist dictatorship, the Berber Spring, the youth riots, Islamic violence and civil war. They may even be amnestied Muslim killers who have been reintegrated into society as “repenties”. Their lives may have been “reconfigured” more times than the Australian author has wowed the lady audiences at Writers’ Week. An aesthetic sightseer has sauntered into Buchenwald to admire Goethe’s oak, and not noticed that he is standing in a concentration camp.

Commissioner Llob is a local policeman who beats suspects, and has even been known to execute his own justice, in a sort of way. He is a creation of the civil war. This polar (French thriller) writing policeman appears in polars by Yasmina Khadra. Khadra has an international reputation for novels like The Swallows of Kabul and The Attack—and “her” name is the pen-name of Mohammed Moulessehoul. The Llob novels were written by a serving army officer fighting Islamic terrorists. They are a different style from Khadra’s mainstream novels and very much in the French thriller tradition—impossible language for a non-French reader but still brilliant reading. Khadra captures the corruption and danger on both sides of the civil war and Llob lives in continual fear, and with reason. When a body is found it’s almost invariably booby-trapped. Cars have to be checked for bombs. Overtaking cars in traffic can hold killers. Days and nights are punctured by explosions—one pro-Islamist character nonchalantly counts off the explosions happening outside while attending a worldly soirée. Llob spends nights peering from his window watching the street. Perhaps as a relief to what was happening about him, there is also humour.

This is the world of the shadowy people Dessaix hardly notices beside him. This is a country where mutual trust has completely died. Here a threat to cut someone into pieces is meant literally. This is a country whose young think only of escaping to a foreign country. When French president Jacques Chirac visited in 2003 he was met in Oran by twelve- and thirteen-year-old children calling out “Vive l’Algérie française” and waving tricolour flags. These are the descendants of Gide’s little musician. The sex life of a dead author, or this live one, don’t seem very important.

Since he arrived in Algiers from Tunis, Dessaix has been moving through a landscape where the spilled blood has not dried. At the airport, where arriving passengers don’t always know whether they will catch the bus into the city or go into a prison cell, he walked where a deadly bomb exploded in 1992, at the very beginning of the civil war. On the way to his expensive hotel he passed Les Eucalyptus, a suburb of Algiers with typically ugly multistorey apartments and a surrounding bidonville of rubbish-built shelters without sanitation or regular supplies of water or electricity. Algeria has a huge unemployment problem, huge social problems, and receives a huge annual income from the sale of petroleum and natural gas.

Almost naturally, Les Eucalyptus is an Islamic stronghold. The passenger-murdering men who hijacked an Air France airbus in 1994 came from here—they intended crashing it into the Eiffel Tower. When a young boy was circumcised, following Islamic ritual, the family gathered their friends. An uninvited group of local fundamentalists also came. Very politely they asked to enter and congratulated the parents. They asked to see the child. He was brought in; they cut his throat. Before leaving they reminded the family and friends that celebrations were banned during the holy war. No doubt his mother was very “reconfigured”.

The present is also the time of “Madame Courage”—barbiturates used by both sides during the civil war, which are now blamed for savage attacks and killings carried out by youth gangs. The drug is a commercial treatment for Parkinson’s disease. It turns the kids into killers acting out brutal crimes that they can’t remember the next day. If Dessaix was in Algiers on a Wednesday, he could have joined the mothers in the city centre begging for information about the thousands of the “missing”—family members who have vanished after being picked up by the police or secret police.

The “seasoned traveller” is staying at the four-star El Dzaïr, ex-Saint-Georges. Its old ghosts include Eisenhower, Churchill, crowned heads, Edith Piaf, Che and the Panthers in exile, Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. In its café he pens a “reverie”: “Cafes for me are the quintessence of travel …” Listening to Dessaix in this oasis of palms, foreign businessmen and tinkling fountains is like taking coffee and cream cakes beside an open grave. Though homosexuality runs through his book, Dessaix is completely incurious about the treatment of gays in an Islamic country or even to consider what the growth of a Muslim population in Australia might mean for practitioners of a modern Gidean lifestyle, and the future of Mardi Gras City. Dessaix’s book, with its frank homosexual allusions and commentary, could bring him two years imprisonment in Algeria, and Gide would be locked away for multiple three-year terms for his under-age sex partners.

Sipping cappuccinos (amazing to find them in Algeria) Dessaix meets a man he calls Yacoub. The meeting has been arranged by a common friend in France. Yacoub appears rather mysterious. He knows much, seems wealthy, and has some literary or journalistic connections. He drives Dessaix (and companion?) up to look over Algiers, though Dessaix isn’t really keen. The next day he drives him/them to the nearby city of Blida where Gide met up with Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas before travelling with Wilde to Algiers where his moment of truth arrived. They find and stay at the now rundown hotel where this meeting took place.

Dessaix wonders if Yacoub is a spy. He admits that he was in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Possibilities are that he has worked in the petroleum industry or that he was in the army and received training in the USSR or that he belonged to the Sécurité Militaire and received KGB training in the 1970s—he specifically says he was in Uzbekistan at that time. Whoever he is, he is a very interesting contact that the famed conversationalist does not seem to be able to connect with. Perhaps they could have talked about Chocolate.

Somewhere over on the left of the motorway on the drive to Blida is a small and unimportant neighbourhood called Bentalha, part of the ugly outer suburban sprawl of Algiers. In this area there are about seven residential blocks with single- and double-storey, conjoined breezeblock houses with small, high-fenced courtyards—typical Muslim Algerian. On one side the neighbourhood is bounded by an orange orchard and on the other a oued—a valley with a usually dry river bed running along the base. In the 1990s, both these locations were used by marauding Islamist bands. This is a time when women seriously discuss whether rubbing their throats with olive oil would make it easier for the knives and give them quicker and less painful deaths. At 11.30 p.m. on September 22, 1997, the killing started at Bentalha.

Chocolate was mentally handicapped—once he may have been treated as a local saint. His older brother had been murdered two years before. Access into the area was sealed off and gunshots were heard. As hidden and frightened neighbours watched, members of a group pulled a protesting, high-voiced Chocolate from his house to the roadway where they were working. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Chocolate swore and told them to stop killing and one of the men jokingly put his arm around him. A car was set on fire and some wanted to throw him inside. Another grabbed him and cut off one of his limbs, then another. He was left screaming. From his house they dragged his sister and father. The father was bound and made to watch as the girl was gang-raped. Both were then killed. As this was going on another group dragged a new victim into the street. He was beaten with rifle butts and forced into the burning car. When he tried to escape they fired at him. The night had just started and these were just four of more than 400 people massacred at Bentalha: just another night in the Algerian civil war. Killers have often been found to be neighbours of the people they tortured and killed. Since the amnesty, killers like these have been taken back into the community—with no penalty.

Nesroulah Yous survived, fled to France with his family, and with the assistance of a journalist wrote a book about his experiences. Without completely making the case, Qui à tué à Bentalha? (Who Killed at Bentalha?), suggests that the Algerian army was implicated. The idea that the government had infiltrated the Islamic groups and turned them on their own supporters or even that army sections had disguised themselves as Islamic terrorists and carried out atrocities has been hotly discussed inside and outside the country. It would have been interesting to get Yacoub’s point of view.

In Blida, Dessaix tries to tempt Yacoub into going for a drive further on to Médéa, but without success. The next morning he reads in the paper that Islamists had stopped a taxi there and cut the throats of all the passengers. Médéa is also where the heads of the monks kidnapped from Tibhirine were left on a road just outside the town. The car trip back to Algiers is silent and Dessaix notes that the journey is taking them through a “death-fraught” landscape, but doesn’t explain. Pity—it might have been a good time to talk about the religion of peace.

As Dessaix prepares to fly to Biskra, Yacoub leaves him for the eastern Algerian city of Constantine to visit family. At the time the region was experiencing violent protests and the mysterious Yacoub, if he really was with the security police, may have been professionally involved.

Dessaix arrived in Biskra in April 2006. For me it was socialist and puritan Algeria in 1976. In the state bookshop in Oran, I bought a volume of Gide’s novels in the fat, thin-papered, leather-bound Pléiade edition. There are holidays from English-teaching and I go to Biskra, a long bus journey to the edge of the desert. It’s December and it gets colder and colder the further south we go. The temperature drops even more when two young national service soldiers join us. Within five minutes they open their windows as wide as possible as they vomit uncontrollably—thoughtfully they try to aim as far from the side as possible. Along the route you still see cut-down power poles from the time of the Algerian War. There are also deserted French army fortifications on high points. Within years they will be used by the Algerian army in the civil war, and more poles and lives will be cut down.

The bus arrives at night. I know nothing about Biskra and approach a waiting taxi driver asking to be taken to the only place I have heard of, the Hôtel de l’Oasis, where Gide once stayed. He bursts into laughter and goes off to spread the joke among the other drivers. It closed years before and he drops me off for the night in a formica-and-fluorescent-tube-lighting sort of place. The next day I go walking and find a room at the old-style Hôtel du Sahara. It’s Christmas Eve 1976. That day, in room 27, I read Gide’s L’Immoraliste—as probably many literary tourists to Biskra have done before me, and hopefully since. It’s not a very memorable book and it’s the local setting rather than the characters that interests me. When the sun goes behind clouds it’s freezing cold. There is no heating and to get warm I have to get into bed, though when the sun does appear it is very pleasant. At Biskra, a cock crowed eight times at six minutes past nine o’clock on Christmas Eve 1976: I thought you would like to know. Over the next week I’m alone and, apart from café and restaurant ordering, I don’t really speak to anyone. I walk and I look and I don’t know this but I’m observing people living on the very edge of disaster.

What did I see? I too tried to see the man who wasn’t there. After it rained and the streets turned to mud on Christmas Day I imagined men in white suits, their clothes and polished boots flecked with mud. I saw real people. The sun shines, for a while, and there are boys swimming in an irrigation channel. One rises from the water and two long stretches of snot stretch from his nostrils to his upper lip. Bicycles in the street. Broken street lights lying on the ground in the park. A single file patrol of military police rapidly snaking through the streets. An old man laying out mud-straw bricks to dry in the sun. Peas growing between date palms. A kid on the river bank singing. Two women in red robes crossing the now muddy riverbed on stepping stones. A blue modern diesel pulling dirty oily containers disappearing behind a hill dominated by an old broken mud fort. Soldiers playing in the public park. The person in the restaurant, who, without looking, I took to be a small boy selling ugly tourist knives is an elderly, much lined, dirty dwarf. A storyteller in the marketplace. Shoe-shine boys, an image from the colonial past I haven’t seen before. Some tourists. Schoolgirls with long blue uniforms and blue scarves. Go forward sixteen years to the outbreak of civil war and the children of these girls could be murdered for attending the same school. Between 1992 and 1998 Algerian Islamists murdered 142 teachers and destroyed 706 primary schools, 102 high schools and 297 colleges.

Another old hotel, the Transatlantique, is closed down. It is large and there are the remains of a garden. Not long ago, in November 1954 at the very beginning of the Algerian War, the journalist and writer Jean Brune was here. He drank in the bar where the black barman with an impeccable tie was serving army officers, journalists and several alcohol-drinking Muslim notables. Those last would surely have been murdered and mutilated by the FLN. No one talked of the war. He had dinner with officers and European women who had been recently helicoptered out of a now dangerous area. In the decorative dining room with its huge cut-crystal chandeliers and tall cedar doors, Brune repeated the Arab belief that the date-infused air of Biskra was an aphrodisiac. The years of throat-cutting during the war and socialist puritanism had well blown this away by the time I was there. They also talked that night of the famous local Ouled Naïl, dancers and prostitutes, and speculated that this was the reason for tourists coming to Biskra. Brune excepted one well-known visitor from an erotic interest in the young women, André Gide. He also told a version of the Oscar Wilde and André Gide meeting: his account had Gide racing around the country searching for the Englishman.

Dessaix also, and unusually, came to Biskra alone. He put up in the best hotel and sedately took his meals in the empty dining room: “Perhaps I’d arrived too early in the season. Perhaps there is no season.” I chose my café and for my meals alternated between two little restaurants. Habits quickly form in unfamiliar places. Simple things give pleasure. There was delight when after a while at the café coffee arrived unordered at my table and at lunch in a restaurant when there was no change, this is Algeria, I was told to pay next time.

Dessaix’s Biskra chapter is his most “Rousseauesque”—his description. Algerians have a natural reserve and this rather admirable trait didn’t please the Australian author: “There’s a wary, standoffish feel to Algerian towns today, even in the cafes, quite unlike the easy, almost playful friendliness—or relaxed insolence—you find in Tunisia.” After years of civil war, and a threatening uncertain future, these people need some breathing space. We saw some of the same things, the public gardens, the old church. Dessaix visited several nearby villages, which are now part of Biskra. What he sees, or doesn’t see, has a tendency to make him drift off to other times, other places. Yet his narrative does not reveal something that happened here which contradicts his account of carefree pederasts and happy boys.

Gide’s visit to Biskra in February and March 1895 held another of those “pivotal” events that should interest Dessaix. It was a brutal moment, a revealing insight into the sexual tourism of the 1890s and the very liberal attitude of a fashionable hotel towards unconventional sexuality and violence when the dominant offender was a wealthy aristocrat. It also says much about Gide.

After playing out the Casbah sex scene, Oscar Wilde went on to Europe and Gide returned to Biskra. While he and Wilde had been in Algiers, Lord Alfred Douglas (Dessaix calls him Wilde’s “floppy-haired lover”) had been in Blida buying a boy—paying off his family and arranging to take him away to Biskra. Gide was at the railway station when Douglas and his play boy arrived. The effeminate young coffee shop boy had disappeared and been recreated as a Douglas fantasy: “it was a young prince who stepped out of the train, in brilliant garments, with silken sash and a golden turban. He was not sixteen but how stately his bearing, how proud his glance!” The play-acting didn’t last long, and gay marriage wasn’t contemplated. Ali was unfaithful to Douglas with a Ouled Naïl girl and the English milord went wild when he found the photo of his rival in Ali’s belongings. Gide was passive and cowardly: “It was tragic; Ali was soundly horse-whipped and his howls created a tumult among the people in the hotel. I heard this uproar, but considered it wiser not to intervene, and remained shut up in my room.” Ali was sent back on the next morning’s train, and Douglas departed soon after. It was surely a “pivotal” moment for Ali.

There is another Douglas anecdote that Dessaix does not mention. He and Gide talked about Wilde’s young sons. Douglas described one of them as being good-looking, Gide thought it was nine-year-old Cyril, and said, “He will be for me.”

Dessaix flew to Paris, I left by bus. Going to buy a return ticket to Oran the day before I wanted to travel, I found that the booking office would only begin selling them at midnight. At 3 a.m. I was at the bus station and on New Year’s Eve travelled back home. At the Biskra airport, Dessaix observed that no one was reading, not even a newspaper. They may have had other things on their mind. Even he caught the tension in the air: “The threat of something unpleasant happening hangs in the air at every airport, I admit, especially in Algeria.” Nothing in his book couldn’t have been written in Paris, or Hobart. Algeria had been a port of call, Dessaix an incurious traveller hopping off cruise ship Australia for a day trip around the sights.

A year later Dessaix is again in Paris and the mysterious Yacoub reappears. It is not easy for Algerians to travel and his visit would have necessitated a difficult-to-obtain French visa. The two men meet again for a dinner in the apartment of Zaïda, a mutual friend. Dessaix calls her a Berber princess and she has arranged his meeting in Algiers with Yacoub. If, as hinted, Yacoub is with the Algerian secret police why ever would a friend have thrown them together? But then do any of these people really exist or are they all mirrored reflections of the author?

The dinner conversation is book-chat clever until Zaïda makes a statement which no educated French speaker could possibly make. Its presence in the book and the way it has passed Dessaix’s agent and editor, interviewers and book reviewers, suggests how superficial our Australian literary culture has become. The error is repeated a second time on the following page with disastrous results for the literary integrity of the book.

The first occasion is when Zaïda and Dessaix are talking and she refers to Camus: “But he committed suicide.” Dessaix responds with an erudite quote, seemingly from memory, from Camus’s The Fall.

The second occurs on the following page when Yacoub again asks why Dessaix had been to Algeria. This reply is the essence of his book:

“No, it wasn’t for the scenery. But to tell you why I went to North Africa, I’d have to start by telling you why I travel.” I considered the moon [from inside a Paris apartment] whose light Gide had thought so drinkable. “When the absurdity of my life begins to nauseate me, I don’t commit suicide, you see, as Camus did, I travel.”

Camus travelled, but he didn’t commit suicide. His life journey was cut short on  January 4, 1960, when he was a passenger in the car driven by publisher Michel Gallimard. Their deaths made it the most famous car accident in French literary history.

Footnote: Two excellent books, in French, on Algeria and Islam. Frédéric Pons, Algérie le vrai état des lieux (Paris, 2013) for an overview of the present situation—devastating. Boualem Sansal, Gouverner au nom d’Allah (Paris, 2013) is a brave book by a brave man and distinguished writer. Sansal, all of whose books are worth finding, speaks freely and forcefully about Islam and warns of what is coming—a book that deserves translating and to be widely read in democratic countries with Muslim citizens.