i think camus and lockridge were living in very different places with both a different recent history and a different long history. as a young man camus was influenced by the dadaist movement, nihilism and the theater of the absurd after the devastation of world war one, with its utter failure both of the social order and of its intellectual and moral structures, and lockridge, who was living isolated from most of its effects in middle america (an america which had always been and remained quite self-referential), was not. (america lost some men in 1916-18 but it was considered europe's problem and it was europe that was laid waste.) the literary and intellectual influence in america was still rooted in the transcendentalism of the nineteenth century, in emerson, thoreau and especially whitman. lockridge himself seems to have been an extremely confident unstoppable force of nature, with whitman as his model and, though more conventional than whitman, accepted most of the permissions that whitman had conferred upon himself.
in terms of personality lockridge was unashamedly grandiose and considered himself the appropriate archetype of the great american drama. camus was a skeptical intellectual who did not believe in heroes at all, at least in the beginning. that changed somewhat with The Plague, when he began to believe it made a difference what people did and did abandon the nihilism of his earlier work in favor of what has been termed by others, existentialism. but his approach to ideas and human behavior remained skeptical and critical.
if camus had been an american writer he might have been ignored but in france with its (sometimes problematic) intellectual tradition, his singular, original work found immediate favor with the intelligentsia which mediated french culture, unlike america where commercial interests and positivism dominated cultural expression from the beginning.
though whitman had been an outsider most of his life, by its end he was revered somewhat in america (more in europe). lockridge seems to have wanted to be both as famous as whitman but in addition, to be successful in commercial terms as well.
so, though contemporary, these are very different men in terms of life experience and personality. camus grew up dirt poor in algiers and achieved surprising results early on because he was singled out in school as very bright and given access to privilege he never would have been granted by his humble birth, either in algeria or france. lockridge had no such deficits to overcome, early on or later in his brief life. he was kept out of the second war by health concerns and continued uninterrupted by its effects on the country in his singular literary ambition.
when it comes to Raintree County and The Plague, the differences in personality, in focus, philosophy (if lockridge can be said to have had any coherent philosophy) are stark. camus' work is philosophical, intellectual, abstract, cool and skeptical. lockridge's work is hot, emotional, unquestioning, accepting and much more stereotypical. he describes characters grandly, visually, as though the look and speech of them told all, but there are elements of stereotype, albeit very colorful stereotypes. camus' characters are unique, their identities are in their depth not on their skin, and they represent philosophical ideas and conflicting world views; one is hard pressed to find stereotypical types in the piece.
though they are both good examples of their literary type, born of the same time, of the same western world and world view, these two works could not be more different in their purpose, construction, meaning, or as an experience for the reader. they both seem to me to contain much, and much that rewards the reader. in particular, lockridge and his opus i find slightly easier to admire for at least the scope of his ambition, than i did as a young man — camus i have always admired.
