Albert Camus​ hated travelling. ‘Fear is the value of travel,’ he wrote in his journal of an unhappy trip through Central Europe in the summertime of 1935, where he found himself gripped by ‘an instinctive desire to regain the shelter of old habits’. For Camus, who had tuberculosis, travel abroad raised the prospect not only of psychic unease but of illness: ‘We’re feverish but porous. The slightest shock shakes us to the depths of our being … There isn’t a pleasure in travelling … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves … The journey, which is sort of a greater and graver science, brings us back again.’

This was definitely true of the trips Camus made to North and South America in 1946 and 1949. Within the diaries he kept – collected in a chic latest translation by Ryan Bloom – Camus seems unusually vulnerable, as if he’d forgotten to strike considered one of his customary poses. (Camus had acted within the theatre in Algiers and was no stranger to vanity.) His admirers will look in vain for the Resistance hero and romantic rebel in a trenchcoat, or the philosopher of absurdity and opponent of totalitarianism, or the anguished pied noir, torn between his anti-colonial convictions and his fierce attachment to France. Apart from the occasional aphorism in progress (‘the thought of messianism is at the foundation of all fanaticism’), there’s little trace of the moralist who, as Sartre remarked, all the time carried ‘a conveyable pedestal’ with him. As an alternative, we discover a grouchy creator on tour, bedevilled by ‘fevers’ (as he referred to his condition), oppressed by the demands of fans and sycophants, and faced with a Recent World which seems to him one way or the other menacing.

The absence of philosophical preening is a relief. Although novels of ideas similar to L’Étranger and La Peste brought Camus international renown, their success led him, and others, to misjudge his gifts. Ideas – his ticket to Left Bank mental circles – were never really his strong suit. He was a Mediterranean author whose flair lay in his rapturous, often elegiac descriptions of place and climate: Algerian cities and Roman ruins, desert, sky, sun and, above all, the ocean, the ‘call of life and an invite to death’. As Susan Sontag wrote in a 1963 essay, he ‘is at his best when he disburdens himself of the bags of existential culture … and speaks in his own person.’ In Travels within the Americas, he does so with unusual intimacy.

Camus made his first and only trip to america in March 1946, to mark the publication in English of L’Étranger. At 33, he was nearly as well referred to as his friend Sartre, who had visited Recent York a 12 months earlier. (That his name all the time appeared after Sartre’s in discussions of existentialism grated on him, and helps to elucidate why he was so keen to disavow his ties to the movement.) He was an editor at Gallimard and the leader author for Combat, the newspaper of the Resistance, which he’d joined in 1944 under the nom de guerre Albert Mathé. Together with his heroic wartime record, attractiveness (Camus relished being in comparison with Bogart) and exotic North African origins, he attracted no little attention from women, and he often reciprocated.

Gallimard had given him a sabbatical in order that he could finish La Peste, his allegorical novel a couple of plague within the Algerian coastal city of Oran, however it wasn’t going well and Camus was struggling, as he often did, with punishing self-doubt. His wife, Francine Faure, who had spent the war in Algiers, had rejoined him in Paris and given birth to twins, but their reunion had cost him his biggest love, the Spanish actress María Casares. He and Casares, the daughter of left-wing Spanish exiles, had been inseparable since they’d met in March 1944 at a reading of Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue, at the house of Michel Leiris.

He was also mourning the clarities of the Resistance. France had been liberated from Nazi Germany, but there have been ferocious arguments amongst former comrades over the purges of collaborators (which Camus supported) and the execution of fascist sympathisers similar to the author Robert Brasillach (which he opposed). With the beginning of the Cold War, the all the time precarious alliance between the communist and non-communist left was starting to crumble. Camus was fretting, too, about his native Algeria, ‘pacified’ by the military after a nationalist rebellion within the eastern cities of Sétif and Guelma, at the associated fee of hundreds of Algerian lives.

Camus had been a communist in Algiers as a young man, but turned against it in 1939, when he wrote that the Soviet Union ‘will be classed among the many countries that prey on others’. Nonetheless, he fell under the suspicion of the State Department months before his arrival in Recent York for ‘filing inaccurate reports that are unfavourable to the general public interests of this country’. In his visa application, Camus falsely stated that he’d never been a communist, but he was already under FBI scrutiny, and when he arrived in Recent York in March 1946 on the SS Oregon, he was detained by immigration officials acting on the orders of J. Edgar Hoover. Released shortly after, he was whisked to the offices of his host, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French embassy’s cultural attaché. The FBI continued to observe him throughout his three-month stay.

‘I hate travelling and explorers’ was the famous opening line of Lévi-Strauss’s memoir Tristes Tropiques, but except for this, he and Camus had little in common. Lévi-Strauss found Camus insufferably pious (‘conformist in his left-wing virtues’), while Camus dismissed Lévi-Strauss as a smug academic, unconvincingly disguised as a diplomat. When Lévi-Strauss organised a press conference for him with a gaggle of American journalists, Camus made no effort to ingratiate himself. American literary techniques, he warned, threatened the long run of the novel. He neglected to say that he had availed himself of a few of those techniques in L’Étranger, whose deadpan style owed much to James Cain’s noir The Postman All the time Rings Twice. Coming from a rustic where rationing was still in effect, he was unnerved by America’s enormous wealth, but much more unnerved by what struck him as its blissful amnesia: ‘This great country, calm and slow,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘You get the sensation it’s completely unaware of the war.’

In actual fact, Recent York’s mental community was very much aware of the war, and keen to listen to from considered one of its most influential witnesses. On 28 March, every week before Knopf published L’Étranger under the title The Stranger, greater than 1500 people turned out for Camus’s lecture at Columbia University. Within the audience were the Resistance leaders Vercors (Jean Bruller) and Thimerais (Léon Motchane), anti-fascist exiles including the publisher Jacques Schiffrin and the author Nicola Chiaromonte, and US army veterans brandishing copies of Combat that they’d picked up in France. The title of his talk – later published in Vogue – was ‘The Crisis of Man’. Camus had been asked to talk in regards to the current state of French literature and philosophy, but said that it could be more interesting to debate the struggles of French railway staff and miners. Ultimately he selected to reflect on the experiences of his generation, French residents of their thirties ‘whose intelligence and hearts were formed throughout the terrible years when, together with their country, they fed off shame and lived off rise up.’ Confronted by an ‘absurd world’, and by the ‘monstrous hypocrisy’ of their elders, that they had embraced an ‘ethics of freedom and sincerity’, and ‘said no’ to ‘the world of murder’. He recounted gruesome stories of torture, one involving a Gestapo interrogator who had made a show of his compassion for a person – a friend of Camus’s – whose ears he had just mutilated. ‘The person who’s able to showing friendly concern for ears he has previously torn,’ Camus said, ‘is a mathematician whom nothing can stop or persuade.’ Hitler was dead, he concluded, but ‘the poison has not disappeared’, and ‘white civilisation … is as answerable for its perversions as for its successes.’

Camus used his North American tour to audition ideas he would later develop in L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), a critique of revolutionary violence published in 1951. Speaking at Brooklyn College a month after his lecture at Columbia, he declared that ‘there may be a crisis because there may be terror.’ And terror existed, he said, because people within the West had surrendered either to fascist nihilism or to Marxism’s ideology of historical determinism. Fascists and communists, who trafficked in ‘abstraction’ and due to this fact in terror, had successfully claimed the mantle of ‘realism’, whereas ‘what we would like, precisely, isn’t again to justify force, never again to bow down before the facility of arms or money.’

Camus’s reports on the Old World were majestically sombre, but their grimness was offset by a stoic idealism, and Recent York’s journalists found him irresistible. (Sometimes literally: Eleanor Norman of the Recent York Post sent him flowers and tried to seduce him.) He sat for a portrait by Cecil Beaton, by which he looked upwards, his face illuminated as if he were an angel. Five days after his arrival, A.J. Liebling interviewed him at his hotel on West seventieth. In his profile for the Recent Yorker, Liebling suggested that Camus’s idea for a ‘critical newspaper’, correcting the ‘probable element of trash’ in other publications, ‘would take a whole lot of the fun out of newspapering’. But he was charmed by Camus, and surprised at how ‘cheerful’ he seemed for a person who in The Myth of Sisyphus had written so frankly in regards to the temptation of suicide. ‘Simply because you may have pessimistic thoughts,’ Camus replied, ‘you don’t must act pessimistic … One has to pass the time one way or the other. Take a look at Don Juan.’

A number of days before the Recent Yorker profile appeared, he met Patricia Blake, a 20-year-old intern at Vogue. He didn’t think much of her passion for Proust, and even less of her interest in Marx and Lenin. Yet they began a relationship, and she or he took care of him as he fought off frequent and ghastly episodes of tuberculosis. Travels within the Americas has no shortage of descriptions – invariably physical, often slightly catty – of the ladies Camus encountered: the ‘elegant Parisienne’ who can’t stop crying because she’s left her twin sister back home, the ‘long, brunette girl’ who ‘says whatever pops into her head’. Oddly, Blake isn’t mentioned.

A month into his stay, Camus took her on a visit to the Adirondacks and Recent England, however the landscape left him unmoved. ‘Recent England and Maine. Lands of lakes and red houses. Montreal and the 2 hills. A Sunday. Boredom. Boredom. The one amusing thing: the trams that look, of their shape and gilding, like carnival rides.’ It wasn’t until he visited Quebec, with its ‘spectacular landscape’, that he had a ‘real impression of beauty and true greatness … It seems I must have something to say about Quebec, about its past, about men coming here to struggle in solitude, driven by a force greater than themselves.’ That force, unnamed by Camus, was French settler colonialism, the identical force that had attracted his ancestors to Algeria within the 1840s.

You’d never know, reading Camus’s diaries, that Recent York in 1946 was the centre of bebop and Abstract Expressionism. As Anatole Broyard wrote in a memoir, Greenwich Village ‘was as close in 1946 as it could ever come to Paris within the Twenties’. The mental and inventive ferment of the Village and Harlem seems to have been almost entirely lost on Camus. He gravitated as an alternative to the working-class, immigrant neighbourhoods of the Lower East Side, perhaps because they reminded him of the Old World. He was touched by the spectacle of Romanians dancing within the Bowery, looking as in the event that they’d been ‘transported to the sting of an exalted land’. Wandering through Chinatown, where he saw a Chinese opera and ate Chinese food with Chiaromonte and Lionel Abel, he was thrilled to seek out ‘real life … teeming and regular, just as I prefer it’.

In her introduction​ to Travels within the Americas, Alice Kaplan writes that, due to the dispatches of Sartre and other French writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say in regards to the ‘Negro Query’, aside from that a Martinican worker of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just discovered that ‘he wasn’t of the identical race’ as his French colleagues. Camus then adds, hopefully: ‘An statement on the contrary: a mean American sitting in front of me on the bus stood to provide his seat to an older Negro lady.’ After attending a concert by a Black nightclub pianist called Maurice Rocco, he registers his ‘impression that only Negroes give life, passion and nostalgia to this country that they colonise in their very own way’.

Colonise in their very own way. The phrase leaves a nasty taste within the mouth, and it’s not helped by the praise of life-giving Blacks that precedes it. ‘In their very own way’ suggests the reverse colonisation that will later be evoked by theorists of the Great Alternative, similar to Renaud Camus (no relation). Camus’s relationship to race combined openness and private integrity, on the one hand, and an unthinking racism and existential fear typical of European Algerians, on the opposite. In 1939, he published a scathing series of articles exposing poverty and malnutrition among the many Berbers of Kabylia. Certainly one of the few Europeans to denounce the massacres in Sétif and Guelma, Camus was friendly with militants within the nationalist Algerian People’s Party. Algerian writers similar to Mouloud Feraoun and Jean Amrouche considered him an ally, unusually freed from ethnocentrism, and reliably against colonial injustice. Yet Camus, who grew up in poverty in a working-class quarter of Algiers, was also conscious about being a member of the European minority in Algeria, loath to confess that he was the beneficiary of colonial privilege, and wedded to the thought of Algérie française, in some form. The depth of his opposition to colonial rule had yet to be tested – one other eight years would pass before the FLN launched its armed struggle – but within the journals it’s hard to miss the intensity of Camus’s race consciousness, or his eager for silver linings. He would proceed to position inordinate hope in symbolic acts of recognition, as if racism were a misunderstanding that could possibly be overcome by gestures of fine will.

What Camus found most objectionable on his visit to Recent York was the vulgarity of its culture and built environment. ‘A hideous, inhuman city’, a ‘desert of iron and cement’, was his first impression of Manhattan, and it didn’t evolve much. Everyone he saw looked like a personality in a ‘low-budget film set’. ‘A lot bad taste seems hardly possible,’ he remarked after visiting a tie shop. He was bewildered by the ‘circus of vibrant lights’ within the streets, the ‘screaming mechanical phonograph’ at a bistro downtown, the skyscrapers that resembled ‘stone monsters’. One night Camus’s friend Jacques Schoeller, a French journalist with a taste for Recent York nightlife, took him roller-skating (spelled ‘rolley skating’ within the diaries) on West 52nd Street. Surrounded by sailors and young women in jumpsuits inside ‘an enormous velodrome covered in red velvet and dirt’, he felt assaulted by an ‘infernal racket of metal wheels and pipe organs’.

Camus appears to have succumbed to a malaise that Sartre described as ‘a Recent York sickness, akin to sea sickness, air sickness or altitude sickness’. As Sartre identified, European visitors who made the error of ‘on the lookout for a European city’ all too often found themselves lost amid the ‘red and green lights and obscure buildings’, ‘the numerical anonymity of streets and avenues’. Camus suffered from an especially severe case of Recent York sickness. Searching on town from the highest of the Plaza Hotel at night, he imagined a ‘gigantic blaze burning itself out, leaving hundreds of immense, black carcasses along the horizon’. Riding in a taxi in a rainstorm, he felt ‘trapped on this city’, terrified that he could ‘run for hours without finding anything aside from latest cement prisons, without the hope of a hill, an actual tree, or a face overcome with emotion’. The one faces he describes are the ‘rosy cheeks and glittering smiles’ of the ladies in Salvation Army advertisements, garish symbols of the American cult of happiness. In a rustic ‘where the whole lot is put towards proving life isn’t tragic’, he writes, Americans ‘feel as if something is missing. This great effort is moving, but we now have to reject the tragic after having looked it within the face, not before.’

The query is how many individuals Camus spoke to – much less looked within the face – during his time on the East Coast. Apart from Patricia Blake, his companions appear to have been mostly European exiles like Chiaromonte and Schiffrin. For all his praise of the ‘hospitality and cordiality’ of Americans, Camus at one point declares that ‘my curiosity about this country has suddenly ended’ – an absence of interest in other folks that, he admits, his wife ‘reproaches me for’. In his essay ‘The Rains of Recent York’, which borrows extensively from his diaries, Camus confessed that he knew ‘nothing about Recent York, whether one moves about amongst madmen here or amongst probably the most reasonable people on the earth’. If Recent York had left an imprint on him, it had also mystified him, ‘like certain women, who annoy you, overwhelm you, and lay bare your soul’.

On 10 June, Camus boarded the Fort-Royal, after sending a care package to his wife containing eighty kilos of coffee, flour, rice, baby food, sugar, canned meat and soap. He passed the time composing odes to the ‘peaceful immensity’ of the ocean, later reworked into his 1953 essay ‘The Sea Close By’, and watching a love affair develop between ‘two young and delightful people’ who reminded him of the ‘tumultuous desire’ he’d felt in his twenties. On 24 June, the day after he arrived back in Paris, he wrote to Blake that each one his sunbathing had left him with ‘a face like a Negro’s’. He remembered a walk they’d taken on eighth Avenue: ‘the red sky above the ugly houses, the large indifferent crowd, and your face turned towards mine to remind me that beauty was stronger than a complete city.’ But her beauty was not enough to tempt him back. In August, he went to the Vendée to finish La Peste, which he’d begun five years earlier.

Published in 1947, La Peste was a fair greater success than L’Étranger. But Camus’s circle was coming apart. Although he remained in touch with communist friends he’d made within the Resistance, he was alarmed by the Stalinist ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe – and by the failure of a few of his erstwhile comrades, including Sartre and Beauvoir, to sentence them. At a gathering of left-wing intellectuals in Paris in December 1948, he declared: ‘It is best to be incorrect by killing nobody slightly than to be right with mass graves.’ He immersed himself in Gandhi’s theory of non-violence, but decided that he lacked the ‘grandeur’ to be a Gandhian. He took up strange causes, similar to the case of Garry Davis, an American former war pilot who tore up his US passport on the Palais de Chaillot, the UN’s temporary headquarters in Paris, and proclaimed himself a ‘world citizen’.

Camus’s​ break with Sartre and Beauvoir wouldn’t turn into official until the publication of L’Homme révolté, but he was already coming under attack on the left as an anti-communist renegade, whilst he was denounced by the precise for refusing to embrace the capitalist West. When he told Roger Seydoux, the director of cultural relations on the Foreign Ministry, of his desire to flee the demoralising state of affairs on the Left Bank, Seydoux proposed one other trip: a lecture tour in South America. Camus welcomed the thought, but not without reservations. Brazil, Argentina and Chile all had repressive anti-communist governments that had driven the left-wing opposition into prison, hiding or exile; on the eve of his departure, the authorities in Buenos Aires banned a production of his play Le Malentendu as a piece of atheistic subversion. Camus, already stricken by thoughts of suicide, experienced unsettling premonitions; in keeping with his biographer Olivier Todd, he felt that ‘evil was floating within the air.’

An aura of disquiet, each political and psychological, runs through the South America diaries. But so does a way of engagement and connection. They’re more personal, richer intimately and concrete statement than the notes from america, and fewer quick to supply ponderous, oracular pronouncements. In the new, semi-feudal, underdeveloped countries of South America, Camus, a person from the colonies, felt more at home. Although his Spanish was no higher than his English, the sound of it felt pleasingly familiar to him. He had recently discovered that his maternal grandmother had been born in a village on Menorca, and he was writing a play set in Spain. His attachment to Hispanic culture, and to the reason behind democracy in Spain, had also been rekindled by the renewal of his relationship with Casares. They’d met by probability in June 1948, on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and would remain together until his death. (Francine Camus was distraught in regards to the relationship but resigned herself to it after her sister told her that she couldn’t expect her husband to ‘fight against tuberculosis and his passions’.) Camus wrote to Casares twice a day, and desperately awaited her replies. He doesn’t mention her by name within the diaries, but she’s a spectral presence: the reason behind his mounting anxiety, the inspiration behind his diligent note-taking. As he told her, the whole lot he wrote in his journals was ‘for you, directed to you and colored by you’.

Camus left from Marseille on 30 June 1949, in a first-class cabin on La Campana. ‘Twice, the considered suicide. The second time, still gazing at the ocean, a frightful burning rises in my temples. Now I feel I understand how an individual kills himself.’ A number of days later, his mood had improved: ‘Tanned, rested, with a full stomach and wearing light-coloured clothes, I even have all of the air of life in me. I could please someone, it seems – but whom?’ On 6 July, the boat docked in Dakar. One evening, observing a gaggle of ‘tall black men admirable in dignity and elegance of their long white boubous, black women in traditional, brightly colored dresses, the scent of peanuts and dung, dust and warmth’, Camus found himself intoxicated by ‘the scent of my Africa, the scent of poverty and dereliction, a virgin yet strong scent whose seduction I do know’.

By ‘my Africa’, a phrase without delay evocative of home and colonial possession, he meant Algeria. In Brazil, Camus would often reach for Algerian analogies. The shops without storefronts in Madureira, a working-class neighbourhood of Rio, strike him as having an ‘Arab feel’. When he sees a gaggle of girls loading ‘their provisions into scrap metal containers that they carry on their heads’, he’s reminded of Kabyle women. Within the majority-Black, north-eastern state of Bahia, he feels as if he’s entered ‘an immense and bustling casbah’, while São Paulo resembles ‘an outsized Oran’. Of the colonial town of Iguape, south of São Paulo, he writes: ‘You breathe a really particular melancholy there, the melancholy of the far ends of the world.’ It’s hard to not be reminded of Janine, the heroine of Camus’s story ‘The Adulterous Woman’, who, observing a gaggle of North African nomads, ‘free lords of an odd kingdom’, is beset by ‘such a sweet, vast melancholy that it closed her eyes’. But unlike Janine, Camus fails to merge together with his surroundings. In North America, he searched for Europe and failed to seek out it; in South America, he searched for Algeria, and although he didn’t exactly find it, he discovered something each familiar and strange: a version of the chasm between self and environment that he defined as ‘the absurd’.

Within the speech he gave in Rio and other South American cities, ‘The Time of the Murderers’, Camus reprised the themes, and a number of the language, of ‘The Crisis of Man’. He evoked the bureaucratised horror of the concentration camps, where death was reduced to ‘a matter of statistics and administration’, and bemoaned the rise to power, in postwar governments, of ‘executioners’ – former collaborationists and Stalinists – who’ve ‘replaced the axe with the rubber stamp’. A speech filled with noble sentiments, ‘The Time of the Murderers’ has aged less well than Camus’s thickly described accounts of South American life – and, not least, of his own reactions. Camus styled himself as a combatant within the war for freedom within the West. But his writing is commonly more interesting today as a symptom of the crisis of the West in an age of decolonisation.

Camus’s stay in Brazil began with an ‘ordeal’: a gathering with an overbearing, obsequious local author. ‘Huge, indolent, squinty-eyed, mouth hanging open’, the poet and publisher Augusto Frederico Schmidt ‘talks about Bernanos, Mauriac, Brisson, Halévy’ and complains that in Brazil ‘they honour all of France’s enemies, but not him.’ At a restaurant ‘so brutally lit with neon we appear to be pale fish gliding through irreal waters,’ Schmidt exhausts him with praise – his visit is ‘a very powerful thing that’s happened here for a very long time’ – and begs for his patience. (‘Patience, well, that’s what Brazil requires,’ Camus thinks.) Directing Camus’s attention to a small, slender man in a fedora, who’s ‘carrying a revolver in a wonderful holster’, he proclaims: ‘I’ll show you a personality for considered one of your novels … Now this can be a man. A minister of the inside. But a person.’ The minister, he says, has ‘killed some forty men’, in a single case using the body of his victim as a shield while shooting one other. ‘Is he not the proper character for you?’ he asks Camus. ‘“Yes,”’ I say. But he’s incorrect – he’s the one who’s the character.’

Camus met many other writers in Brazil, amongst them the cultural critic Oswald de Andrade, creator of the ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, which celebrated the cultural ‘cannibalism’ practised by Brazilians as an act of emancipation from repressive European traditions. Andrade got here to listen to Camus speak, and told him afterwards that in a model penitentiary, prisoners would kill themselves by ‘smashing their heads against the partitions or by closing a drawer on their throat until they suffocate’. But Camus seems to have been less fascinated about debating ideas, or in wrestling with the ‘crisis of man’, than in absorbing South American life, especially the religious ceremonies and rituals of Afro-Brazilians. (He also endeared himself to his hosts by asking to be taken to football matches.)

Amongst his guides was Abdias do Nascimento, a Black actor and director who was staging Camus’s play Caligula with the Teatro Experimental do Negro. On 16 July, Nascimento took him to Caxias, outside Rio, for a macumba ceremony. They arrived within the fog, late at night, and were greeted by a young man of mixed race who offered Camus a bottle of aguardiente and cheekily asked him if he’d include Tarrou, considered one of the heroes in La Peste. After they reached the ceremony, held in a hut with a clay floor, they found a gaggle of forty dancers, tightly packed together yet scarcely breaking a sweat, in a ‘calm trance: hands on their lower back, standing straight, eyes blank and staring’. The young Black women, it appeared to Camus, ‘enter the deepest trances, their feet glued to the bottom, their entire body twitching with convulsions that grow increasingly violent as they rise towards the shoulders. Their heads jerked backwards and forwards, completely decapitated. Everyone whoops and screams.’ At two o’clock within the morning, Camus writes, ‘I stagger outside, delighted to finally be respiration fresh air. I just like the night and sky greater than the gods of man.’

He was seized by similar feelings of fascination and estrangement at a working-class dance hall: ‘Surprised by how slow they dance, with a sloshy form of rhythm. But then I consider the climate. The manic dancers in Harlem can be duller here, too.’ He finds himself having to ‘fight a form of reverse prejudice. I like Black people a priori and I’m tempted to seek out qualities in them that they don’t have. I wanted to seek out the people here beautiful but when I imagine their skin being white, what I find is more a reasonably collection of calicos and dyspeptic employees.’ He tried to bop a samba with a lady, only to grasp ‘I’m not into it. Taxi. I returned to the room.’

What seems to unsettle Camus even greater than the visual banality of those ‘dyspeptic employees’ is the claim they’ve on the world’s future. On a drive through the mountains around Rio with the historian Lucien Febvre, he marvels at Brazil’s vastness. ‘The faster the plane flies, the less importance France, Spain and Italy hold. They were nations, are provinces, and tomorrow will likely be the world’s villages. The longer term’s not on our side, and there’s nothing we will do about this irresistible trend.’

Camus hoped that South America might discover a option to mitigate the ‘mechanistic foolishness’ of European societies. But he was mostly appalled, and frightened, by what he saw. On 18 July, he writes of seeing a person hit by a bus while crossing the road, and ‘sent ten metres into the air, tossed like a tennis ball’. The bus flees the scene, and nobody comes to assist the victim. ‘Later, I learn a white sheet will likely be put over him, and it can grow soaked with blood, and candles will likely be lit around it, and the traffic will proceed around him, bypassing him until the authorities arrive to reconstruct the scene.’ Overpopulated, brutal and pitiless, Brazil is portrayed as a spot where ‘luxury and misery’ have never been ‘so insolently thrown together’. The road life prompts a Malthusian fever dream: ‘You may’t help but consider these ceaselessly increasing crowds that’ll find yourself covering the world’s surface and suffocating.’ Life in Brazil ‘is lived near the bottom and it could take years to turn into a component of it. Do I want to spend years in Brazil? No.’ With its ‘thin framework of modernity laid over this immense continent teeming with natural and primitive forces’, Brazil reminded him of ‘a constructing slowly chewed, bite by bite, by invisible termites. In the future this constructing will collapse and a small and teeming people, black, red and yellow, will opened up over the surface of the continent, masked and brandishing spears, ready for the victory dance.’

For all his anxieties, Camus was received with the warmest of welcomes, even in probably the most distant corners of the country. In Recife, at a Bumba meu-boi, a carnivalesque play featuring masked figures and totems, culminating within the killing of an ox, the performers broke right into a chant: ‘Long live Mr Camus and the Holy King of the East!’ Camus, who went back to his room ‘dazed by the flu’, seems to have been guiltily aware of his ingratitude. ‘Haunted,’ he wrote on 2 August, ‘by the considered the harm we do to others the moment we take a look at them. Causing suffering has long been a thing of indifference to me, I even have to confess … Now, I can now not bear it. In a way, it’s higher to kill than to cause suffering.’ Then: ‘What finally seemed clear to me yesterday is that I want to die.’

A number of days later, Camus left São Paolo for Iguape, with Oswald de Andrade and the French cultural attaché, a 180-mile journey that took ten hours. Their bus broke down after thirty miles on the road, and so they had to attend within the sun until a truck driver passed by with a monkey wrench. After an ‘interminable Brazilian meal’ at an area inn, they drove through thick forest along the Ribeira river, accompanied by the chatter of birds and cane toads. Arriving in Iguape at midnight, Camus was confronted by a ‘tall beanpole of a person’ who turned out to be a policeman, and who ordered him to point out his identification papers. Iguape’s leaders were so furious on the policeman’s impertinence that they detained him, and asked Camus which charges he’d prefer to press. (He implored them to set the person free, but they were ‘determined to do me this honour’.)

In Iguape, Camus was impressed by the ‘exquisite politeness’ of his Brazilian hosts, ‘so significantly better than the Europeans’ boorishness’, but ‘the gang lining the narrow street’ was unsettling: ‘really the strangest gathering you may find. Ages, races, clothing color, classes, disabilities, all mixed together in a swaying and vibrant mass.’ It was so far as possible from the clearly demarcated boundaries of French life – or the racial and spiritual hierarchies of colonial Algeria – and Camus’s sense of vertigo only intensified on the drive back: ‘I again gaze, for hours, on the monotonous nature and immense spaces … A rustic where the vegetation is so tangled as to turn into shapeless, where blood is mixed to the purpose that the soul has lost its limits.’ He took consolation within the proven fact that ‘the skyscraper hasn’t yet conquered the forest’s spirit’ – it might have been worse, it might have been Recent York – but by the point he arrived in Montevideo, on 9 August, he was ‘forced to confess to myself that, for the primary time in my life, I’m within the midst of a psychological meltdown.’

Camus’s crisis had a more intimate cause: Casares hadn’t been in contact. ‘It’s been fourteen days since I heard from you,’ he wrote to her, ‘and I don’t know if you happen to can imagine what meaning to me. I need to consider with all my strength that my mail’s been held up in Rio for reasons I don’t understand, but I can’t help imagining, sometimes, that perhaps you haven’t written to me, after which I sink right into a state it could be higher to not inform you about.’ The countries that Camus passed through after Brazil distracted him somewhat from Casares’s silence, though he was shadowed by political unrest, Cold War anxieties and his fevers. His host in Buenos Aires, Victoria Ocampo, the editor of Sur, an anti-Stalinist left-wing journal, played him Britten’s Rape of Lucretia and recordings of Baudelaire poems. But he was troubled by a visit from Ocampo’s friend Rafael Alberti Merello, an exiled Surrealist poet from Spain: ‘I do know he’s a communist. I find yourself explaining my viewpoint to him. He agrees with me. But some slander will eventually come to separate me from this man who’s and may remain a comrade. What’s to be done? We’re within the age of separation.’

On 14 August, at sunset, Camus flew to Chile: ‘Intense colors (marigolds the color of rust), the blossoming plum and almond trees etched against a white background of snowy peaks – an admirable country.’ Two days later he ate dinner in a ‘flood of boredom’ on the French embassy in Santiago, only to get up the following morning to violent protests, sparked by an increase in metro fares, and the declaration of a state of emergency.

On 19 August he passed through Montevideo again. He admired its palm trees, its ‘necklace of beaches’, and he was glad to satisfy the author José Bergamín, ‘a refined man with the worn, deeply lined face of a Spanish mental’, who refused to choose from Catholicism and communism: ‘my form of guy’. But by the point he returned to Rio just a few days later, still with no news from Casares, he was exhausted: ‘dragging about with my flu, to different places with different people, numb to all I see, concerned only with regaining my strength, amid individuals who, of their friendship or hysterics, notice nothing of the state I’m in and so make it that much worse’. He flew back in what he described as ‘a metal coffin, between a mad doctor and a diplomat, headed for Paris’.

Camus’s escape from the bile of Parisian mental life – and his isolation from Casares – left him afflicted with depression, eczema and insomnia, and fearful for his life. A health care provider in Paris ordered him to rest for several months. In keeping with Olivier Todd, Camus reflected on his grinding South American séjour during his recovery, and considered something Herman Melville had written on the age of 35: ‘I even have consented to annihilation.’ Yet Camus survived, and out of his Brazil experience emerged the story ‘The Growing Stone’, a couple of French engineer, D’Arrast, who travels to Iguape, where a drunken police chief hassles him about his papers. By the top of the story, D’Arrast is standing within the darkly lit home of a ‘mulatto’ cook he’s befriended, because the ‘murmur of the river’ fills him with ‘a tumultuous happiness’. It’s a glimpse, or a fantasy, of the reconciliation between Old and Recent Worlds, between European and non-European, that will for ever elude the story’s creator.