Theirs was an unusual, perhaps unlikely, friendship. One donned a white coat and worked in a lab, probing the secrets of cell growth, helping to pave the way for advanced genetic technologies. The other was a leading man of letters, novelist and habitué of Left Bank cafes whose famed works continue to provoke debate and reflection. The writer was Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957, and the scientist was Jacques Monod, who himself won a Nobel for his scientific work in 1965.
These dashing Frenchmen – both had movie star looks – forged a strong bond during the Cold War years. The sciences and the humanities are often said to be at loggerheads, in pursuit of different ends, but the bond between Camus and Monod is a stirring reminder of common ground that can be forged between these different endeavors. So dazzled was Camus by his scientist friend that he said: “I have known only one true genius – Jacques Monod.”
In Brave Genius, the scientist Sean Carroll, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin and a science columnist for The New York Times, tells the intertwined stories of Camus and Monod. Though they did not meet until 1948, both were active in the French Resistance during the Second World War, Camus as a writer for the resistance newspaper, Combat, and Monod as an organiser and top-level operative for the French Forces of the Interior.
After the war, Camus and Monod both found themselves embroiled in the hothouse politics of post-war France and the fractious battles between communists and their critics. Each earned their share of enemies for taking controversial positions – Camus famously fell out with his former friend John Paul Sartre after the publication of The Rebel (1951), Camus’ pained reflection on revolution, revolt and totalitarian violence. Monod, taking his turn as intellectual polemicist, took on the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko on questions of evolution, genetics and scientific objectivity.
Though Camus died in 1960 in a car wreck – it was a shocking loss to French letters – his existentialist writings, his grappling with the profound questions about meaning and doubt in such works as The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), pushed Monod in his own biological enquiries. Writes Carroll: “Camus had a profound influence on Monod and the philosophical ideas the biologist pursued in later years. After receiving his Nobel Prize, Monod turned to consider the implications of the discoveries of modern biology – how the question ‘what is life?’ bore on the question of the meaning of life. He explained the impulse in Camusian terms: ‘The urge, the anguish to understand the meaning of his own existence, the demand to rationalise and justify it within some consistent framework has been, and still is, one of the most powerful motivations of the human mind.”
Monod’s thoughts culminated in his 1970 work (an unexpected bestseller) Chance and Necessity, which took its epigraph from Camus’ famed tract, The Myth of Sisyphus. Carroll writes with enthusiastic goodwill about his subjects – in his eyes, they are nothing less than heroic figures who stood for all that is right and good. Yet the author’s love can be smothering. The two don’t actually meet until we’re well into the book, and the reader has to contend with pages and pages of explication and contextual detail. The politics of occupied France and post-war French life are frighteningly complex – Carroll dives deep into the war in France, so deep that his protagonists wander off from view for long stretches.
Still, any reader with a taste for mid-century French thought and history will find plenty of excitement and drama on Carroll’s pages. His account of this pair’s exploits – Monod’s in particular – in wartime Paris unfold like an old black and white thriller. By outward appearance, Monod was a young researcher, plying his trade at the Sorbonne. But he was also undertaking dangerous work for the resistance. Colleagues were constantly being arrested; Monod’s double life took its toll as the Gestapo cracked down. His lab work suffered as he went underground into clandestine life, taking on the name “Malivert”. As the Allies prepared for the invasion of France in 1944, Monod plotted sabotage missions against rail lines to disrupt the Nazis.
When the war was over, Camus and Monod went about their respective vocations. But peace brought its own intellectual trials. With the world dividing itself into communist and anti-communist camps, Camus struggled to find a position outside the two poles. It was agonising work. He was certainly not of the right, but his vocal criticisms of the Soviet Union brought him into conflict with fellow travellers and communist sympathisers. Carroll is an earnest explainer of the febrile arguments and debates that swirled around Camus. He pushed strongly for the abolition of the death penalty. He called for a “civilisation based on dialogue”. In a 1946 article for Combat, he wrote movingly that “there will only be one honourable choice: to wager everything on the belief that in the end words will prove stronger than bullets”.
Monod, too, plunged into debates, and found himself at the centre of one of the most peculiar episodes of the post-war scientific world. Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist, tried to overthrow the foundations of modern genetics, hoping to bring science into line with the dictates of Soviet ideology. Monod was appalled, and then went after Lysenko in the pages of Combat in a September 1948 article: “Truth is the official truth guaranteed by the state.” Monod wrote “that everything that deviates from it is irrevocably outlawed from Soviet science and that opponents who defend science, progress and the interest of the nation against him are expelled, pilloried as ‘slaves of bourgeois science’, and practically accused of treason. All of this is senseless, monstrous, unbelievable. Yet it is true. What has happened?”
The friendship of Monod and Camus actually takes up relatively little room in Brave Genius. The two were united in their battles against the intellectual perversions wrought by communism. In the 1950s, Camus was deeply troubled by Algeria, land of his birth, which was wracked with anti-colonial violence. Monod continued his work researching protein synthesis and enzymes, which led to his Nobel Prize in 1965. The condition of scientists in Eastern Europe concerned him; the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary troubled both men deeply. (Monod resorted to more derring-do in 1959, organising a risky escape for a Hungarian colleague, who hid out in a camper as it crossed from Hungary to Austria.) Camus’ death in 1960 was a bitter blow, but his thought touched Monod deeply – Carroll cleverly dubs the latter “Camus in a lab coat”. Indeed, Chance and Necessity can be seen as a kind of tribute to the writer. Though Monod grounded his arguments in empirical observations, he, like Camus, grappled with the very meanings of existence, only at its minute, molecular levels.
The advances in the study of DNA had confirmed that “man was the product of an incalculable number of fortuitous events”, Monod mused in the late 1960s.
The universe was colossally indifferent: “The unfathomable cosmos around us could not have cared less,” the scientist added. Yet this was hardly an invitation to hopelessness.
“Molecular biology,” Carroll writes, “had brought Monod full circle to Camus’ territory of the absurd – that contradiction between the human longing for meaning and the universe’s silence. Monod asked what man should do in the face of his fortuitous existence: ‘Should he despair? Or reject the science that imposes such conceptions upon us? The despair of the man convinced of being absurd and refusing to be that: the theme that has nourished many of the greatest contemporary works.’” Inspired by his late friend, Monod harmonised the sciences with the humanities.
Matthew Price’s writing has been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and the Financial Times.
