Brave Genius Read online

  September 15, 1948, issue of Combat featuring Jacques Monod’s critique of Soviet biologist T. D. Lysenko and Soviet science. (Archives of the Pasteur Institute)

  Monod drew his conclusions as to what Lysenko’s triumph signified: “What emerges most clearly from this lamentable affair, it is the mortal decay into which Socialist thought has fallen in the Soviet Union. It is so obvious that nothing like this would have happened if the most elementary notions of common sense, of rational thinking, of objective truth were not corrupted by the leaders of the regime. There seems no possible alternative to this conclusion, painful as it may be to anyone who has long set all his hopes on the emergence of socialism in Russia as the first stage of its triumph throughout the world.”

  The headline over Monod’s article read LYSENKO’S VICTORY HAS NO SCIENTIFIC CHARACTER WHATSOEVER.

  It was a devastating blow. Monod’s article was far more than an indictment of some esoteric branch of Soviet biology; it was a condemnation of the entire Soviet system of thinking and of its leadership.

  The PCF continued to defend Lysenko and to publish pro-Lysenko propaganda. In October, the Europe review published a special issue that included a translation of Lysenko’s entire report. Poet Louis Aragon, a devoted Communist, tried to deflect Monod’s criticisms in a twenty-eight-page-long introduction. The “debate” raged on for months. Communist scientists praised Lysenko at public meetings that attracted overflow audiences, as well as at scientific forums. While some accused Monod of partiality, no one could undermine his credibility as a scientist and a geneticist. The damage had been done, both to the prestige of Soviet science and to the credibility of French Communists who supported Lysenko and Party ideology.

  For Monod, the Lysenko debate was both surreal and pivotal: surreal because he saw that there was no scientific basis to Lysenko’s ascent, that it was “a purely theological affair”; pivotal because it started him on the path of thinking about the origin of such ideology, and trying to understand how such an “insane phenomenon” could arise. To begin to find out, he went around to various meetings that were held to discuss Lysenko—just listening at some, and speaking at others. For a time, he spent one Thursday every month at the meeting of the Michurin-Lysenko Society at the Sorbonne, “debating” the facts of genetics.

  Not surprisingly, Monod’s front-page attack in Combat and his prominence in the debate would estrange him permanently from the hard-liners of the PCF, including former comrades in the Resistance. But his visibility also brought great dividends that he could not have possibly foreseen, for he met many new people because of it, several of whom would influence his life in profound ways.

  Monod also attended the meetings of organizations such as the newly formed Groupes de Liaison Internationale. The Paris group was the counterpart of a small American circle that was founded to aid European intellectuals with both spiritual and material support. Cofounded by Camus, the organization was to provide the sort of “universalism” and contact between people of different nations that Camus had advocated in his “Human Crisis” speech and his “Neither Victims nor Executioners” articles. Jean Bloch-Michel, Camus’s friend and former colleague at Combat, was another cofounder. Bloch-Michel was also a friend of Monod’s from the days of La Cantate in the late 1930s. He brought the scientist to a meeting and introduced him to the writer.

  Camus had co-written the manifesto for the Paris group:

  We are a group of men who, in liaison with friends of America, Italy, Africa, and other countries, have decided to unite our efforts and our thoughts in order to preserve some of our reasons for living.

  These reasons are menaced today by many monstrous idols, but most of all by totalitarian techniques. Those who are prejudiced by blind reason, served by techniques that have gone mad, have led straight to cruel ideologies of domination … and, by technical and psychological repression, put the individual at the mercy of the State.

  These reasons are especially menaced by Stalinist ideology.

  He and Monod had a lot to talk about.

  CHAPTER 20

  ON THE SAME PATH

  A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Circles”

  MONOD AND CAMUS HIT IT OFF RIGHT AWAY. CAMUS WANTED TO hear about Monod’s experiences as a Communist during the war and what Monod had learned about Lysenko. Monod in turn learned that Camus had been devoting a great deal of study to the situation in the Soviet Union. The two former resistants discovered an immediate bond in their respective condemnation of Stalin’s regime. Their friendship was cemented over drinks and conversation at La Closerie des Lilas and other Left Bank watering holes.

  Camus had reached a conclusion similar to Monod’s about the “mortal decay” of Socialist thought in the Soviet Union, but his verdict was based on different evidence. One catalyst for Camus’s decisive turn against Soviet-style Communism was his meeting the ex-Communist writer Arthur Koestler. Born in Hungary, Koestler lived in Vienna, Berlin, Palestine, and Paris between the wars. A Communist activist for several years, Koestler quit the Party in 1938 over what he described as its “moral degeneration,” which was marked by Stalin’s purges of loyal Party members and Moscow show trials. From 1936 to 1938, hundreds of thousands of Russians were executed and millions were sent to labor camps. Even former revolutionary leaders were tried and forced to confess to absurd, fabricated charges. Koestler knew some of the defendants. His disgust and disillusionment gave birth to his novel Darkness at Noon, in which the lead character, Rubashov, eventually confesses to false charges and is executed. The book was a sensation in France after the war, selling more than 300,000 copies in less than two years.

  Koestler visited Paris in October 1946, and met Camus simply by walking into his office at Gallimard and introducing himself. Koestler tracked down Sartre the next day. He was welcomed immediately into the Camus–Sartre–de Beauvoir social circle. At the time, Camus was in the process of writing “Neither Victims nor Executioners” for Combat. Camus paid close attention to what Koestler had to say, especially when he chided Camus for having been too lenient on the Soviet Union. Koestler’s break from his Communist past was complete. At a meeting with Sartre and others at André Malraux’s home, Camus carefully noted what was said among his famous friends. Koestler said that he hated the Stalin regime as much as he hated the Hitler regime, and for the same reasons. He had once lied for Stalin, he admitted, but now he was certain there was no hope for the regime. Koestler added, “It must be said that as writers we are guilty in the eyes of history if we do not denounce what deserves to be denounced. The conspiracy of silence is our condemnation in the eyes of those who come after us.”

  Camus would not be silent. His encounter with Koestler hardened his conviction that Communism and Stalinism were the greatest immediate threats to peace in Europe—they were the new plague. In Camus’s view, Stalin was indeed akin to Hitler. The terror that he had unleashed on his own people was proof. His government was a dictatorship, not a Socialist state. With his “Neither Victims nor Executioners” articles, Camus had taken an openly critical stance toward Communists, the Soviet Union, and their “ends justifies the means” mentality concerning violence.

  And, like Monod, Camus had drawn the ire of Communists. By coincidence, they knew each other’s most prominent critics from the Resistance: Camus had met Louis Aragon in Lyon in 1943 in the course of making contact with various Resistance writers, and Camus’s critic Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie attended the same summit of Resistance groups in Switzerland with Monod in late 1943. Aragon and d’Astier would each receive the International Lenin Prize from the USSR in 1957.

  In 1948, d’Astier was the director of the newspaper Libération and a Communist deputy in the French National Assembly. He and Camus exchanged two rounds of mutual critiques following the reprinting of the “Neither Victims nor Executioners” series in Caliban magazine in November 1947. In two articles, the first in Caliban
and the second in the pro-Soviet newspaper Action, d’Astier pounced on Camus for myriad sins. He wrote that Camus was being unrealistic in promoting a “third option” other than USSR Communism and American capitalism, arguing that by rejecting the first, he was serving capitalism, which d’Astier linked to Fascism. He accused Camus of having abandoned politics and taken refuge in morality. He asked Camus to clarify what he meant by the justification of violence in totalitarian regimes, and even why, given his convictions, he had taken the side of the Resistance during the war.

  Camus was angry enough to take the time from his many projects (two plays and a book-length essay) to write two long ripostes. In his rebuttals, he pointed out that most of d’Astier’s criticisms were directed at him personally, as though he were a dangerous threat, and were secondary to the real issues of neither legitimizing violence nor endorsing a revolution that would lead to a third world war. As for violence in totalitarian regimes, Camus reminded d’Astier, “The camps were part of the apparatus of the State in Germany. They are part of the apparatus in Soviet Russia, as you cannot help but know … No reason in the world … can induce me to accept the existence of the concentration camps.” He also took exception to those Communist critics who had so often labeled him as the “son of the bourgeoisie” when in fact he was the son of a worker, raised in poverty. Camus hit back: “The majority among you communist intellectuals have no experience whatsoever in the proletariat’s condition, and you are in a poor position to treat us as dreamers ignorant of realities.”

  Camus was fully aware that he was taking a largely solitary stand, one in which he rejected any legitimization of violence in the name of revolution or future progress. Concluding his rebuttal to d’Astier, he defined his purpose as indeed that of an artist and moralist, and not that of a politician: “My role is not to transform the world, nor man … But it is, perhaps, to serve in my way the several values without which a world, even transformed, is not worth living.”

  Camus’s increasingly firm and public stance against the Soviet Union put a strain on his friendships. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the political editor of Les Temps Modernes and a longtime friend of Sartre’s, published an article critical of Koestler and Darkness at Noon. Upon encountering Merleau-Ponty at a party of the Sartre-de Beauvoir circle, Camus accused him of making excuses for the Moscow trials and Communist violence. Sartre sided with Merleau-Ponty. Camus stomped out, slamming the door behind him. More than two years later, Camus still refused to share a podium with Merleau-Ponty.

  While Camus and Sartre continued to see each other socially, the political distance between them continued to widen. In early 1950, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre coauthored an article in Les Temps Modernes in which they were critical of the prevalence of labor camps in the USSR, but they asserted nevertheless: “Whatever the nature of the present Soviet society may be, the USSR is on the whole situated, in the balance of powers, on the side of those who are struggling against the forms of exploitation known to us.”

  While some friendships were fraying over politics, Camus and Monod were seeing eye to eye. With respect to the Lysenko matter, Camus had no independent grasp of the science in question. But with the benefit of Monod’s analysis, he hardly needed a degree in genetics to understand that Lysenko’s ascent was a symptom of the same disease that had led to the purges and trials. Camus, who so treasured the sense of solidarity that existed among the Resistance, had in Monod a new comrade who shared both the deep bond of that wartime experience and an unqualified opposition to a new common enemy. Moreover, it was a friendship that could not be complicated by literary egos or competition. For Monod, who admired Camus’s talent and work long before the two met, the relationship was both intimate and intellectual.

  As their friendship grew, Monod invited the famous author of The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague, and Combat editorials to dinner with his family at their home. The other guests who enjoyed the lobster feast were Melvin Cohn, an American scientist conducting his postdoctoral work in Monod’s lab, and the great blind organist André Marchal. Camus took a keen interest in the thangkas that Odette had collected in Tibet. The twins, now adolescents, were expected to hold their own in conversation with the very worldly adults around the dinner table.

  Camus took Monod into his confidence. Shortly before the Lysenko matter broke, and while he was working on his play L’État de siège (The State of Siege), Camus had reconciled with Maria Casarès. In December 1949, Camus sent a note to Monod, asking him for his advice in finding medical help for Maria’s father, Santiago Casares y Quiroga, a former minister in the Spanish Republic, who was seriously ill. He wrote:

  My dear Monod,

  On reflection, I am writing to you right away about what I would like to ask of you. Even if you cannot inform me directly, you could perhaps ask around. It concerns Maria Casarès’s father, former president of the council of the Spanish Republic. And, what is best after all, a man of quality. Sixty years old, for many years he has been bedridden, an invalid (his condition is worsening). He is suffering from pulmonary fibrosis. Now, it seems that Bogomoletz serum may be indicated in his case. His physician wrote to Doctor Berdach[?], at the Pasteur Institute, and pointed out to him that the case is complicated by a right cardiac insufficiency and asked him for advice and help. This letter remains unanswered.

  What I would like to know from you, or through you, is the following:

  1) Is the serum indicated in this case, given the cardiac insufficiency?

  2) If it is, how does one obtain some?

  Do nothing, of course, if all of this is outside of your “field.” But I assume that you can in this case advise me. I would not bother you without serious reasons. I have affection and respect for Mr. Casarès-Quiroga (that is the name of the patient). And his life is threatened. Regarding Maria Casarès, she lost her mother two years ago, she has no other family other than her father, and she loves him. If you knew her better, you would understand that one would want to spare her.

  Thank you in advance in any case and do not doubt my already faithful friendship.

  Albert Camus

  THE GREAT IRONY of Camus’s request and his hopes for Maria’s father was that they concerned a serum that was in fact yet another absurd and bogus claim of Soviet science, exactly like Lysenko’s boasts in agriculture. Oleksandr Bogomoletz was a Ukrainian scientist who had claimed during the war that he had developed a horse serum that was useful in treating scarlet fever, typhus, septicemia, hypertension, digestive diseases, lung abscesses, mental illness, and cancer, as well as promoting the healing of bone fractures and longevity (enabling humans to live as long as 125 years). Stalin named Bogomoletz a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1944. Bardach was a Pasteur scientist who followed up on these claims after the war and produced his own serum. The June 1949 issue of Paris Match carried an article heralding Bardach’s work, and the French press fanned further interest and hopes in a miracle serum.

  Monod could not help Camus; no miracle was forthcoming. Maria’s father died two months later.

  Throughout the first years of their friendship, Camus was working very hard on several projects. He completed a play, Les Justes (The Just Assassins), which opened in Paris just before Christmas 1949. Set in 1905 in Russia, and with Maria Casarès in the lead female role as a bomb-making revolutionary, the play explored the moral territory of murder, terrorism, and what revolutionaries were willing or unwilling to justify in the name of a cause. This was exactly the same ground he was immersed in with his greatest effort during the period, an essay on revolt entitled L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) that was already several years in the making.

  A third project was to assemble and edit a collection of his various essays and articles. Entitled Actuelles: Chroniques 1944–1948 (Chronicles), the volume included many pieces from his first four years of public life—Combat editorials, some interviews, as well as responses to critics, including d’Astier. It was published in 1950. On the frontispiece of Monod’s personal
copy, Camus inscribed:

  A Jacques Monod

  sur un même chemin,

  fraternellement

  Albert Camus

  [To Jacques Monod,

  on the same path.

  Fraternally,

  Albert Camus]

  CHAPTER 21

  A NEW BEGINNING

  From small beginnings come great things.

  —PROVERB

  IN THE FALL OF 1950, A NEW FACE JOINED THE ASSORTMENT OF French, European, and American characters toiling away with test tubes and microbes in Lwoff’s attic at the Pasteur Institute.

  Ever since the end of the war, François Jacob had been searching for his path, for a profession in which to settle. He spent the first months after liberation in the Val-de-Grâce military hospital enduring countless surgeries to remove just some of the bits of shrapnel that had torn into him. The injuries to his arm and hand eliminated any prospect of his becoming a surgeon. Once he was released, he tried various jobs—journalism, government administration, even acting—but nothing worked out. The only credentials he had were his war record: Jacob had been named a “Compagnon de la Libération”—an honor created by de Gaulle in 1940 and reserved for those who distinguished themselves in the liberation of France. It was awarded to just 1,036 individuals.

  Jacob eventually decided to return to medical school to finish his degree, even knowing that his injuries would prevent him from practicing medicine. He crammed two years into one, and completed a required thesis by working at the National Penicillin Center trying to produce the antibiotic tyrothricin. After some initial failures in the laboratory, his preparations ultimately worked on patients’ infections. Jacob stayed on after medical school to work at the Center, spending his spare time reading books, including Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, and Camus’s novels. He courted and married a pianist, Lise Bloch.