Getting to Know the Stranger : An unfinished manuscript by Camus tells us much about the author we didn’t know : THE FIRST MAN, <i> By Albert Camus</i> . <i> Translated from the French by David Hapgood (Alfred A. Knopf: $23; 336 pp.)</i>

Albert Camus, the French writer and Nobel Prize winner, died in 1960 when the car he was driving went out of control at high speed and crashed. He was 47, but there were those who said that he was played out and past his best work: “The Stranger,” “The Plague,” “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “The Rebel.”

The original stranger, Camus was the son of a poor Algiers settler and educated hopelessly outside the network of Paris lycees and Grandes Ecoles that are licensed to hatch France’s intellectuals. He had won a glorious place among them, but was beginning to become an outsider once more. His early anti-Stalinism and emphasis on the individual conscience irritated the left, including the circle of his former ally, Jean-Paul Sartre; and his complex position on Algerian independence angered both the Left and his old enemies on the right.

In the wrecked car was a manuscript written in pencil. It was an uncorrected first draft with pages of notes for further work. It was the incomplete first part of what, clearly, was a much larger project, an autobiographical novel. Camus’ widow decided not to publish it: Lacking the carapace of a finished work, it would provide too many opportunities for too many people to carve up its dead author. France’s literary-political wars spilled real blood in those days. Anyway, she reasoned, Camus would certainly not have published it in that form.

True; and the sculptor of the Venus de Milo did not mean her to be shown without arms. But after the death of Mme. Camus in 1979, her son and daughter began to edit and release some of their father’s material. Last year they published the car manuscript, and it appears now in a lucid English translation by David Hapgood. Catherine Camus, the daughter, has written a modest and convincing prologue justifying the decision. It is amply justified. To read “The First Man” is to visit a tomb and find that a spring is bubbling from it.

The story is told in the third person. Camus writes of himself as Jacques Cormier, an author in his 40s who has won fame and an active role at the center of French literary life. (Besides his books, Camus was an active member of the Resistance and editor of the influential underground and postwar newspaper Combat.) Cormier has set out on an effort to reconcile this part of his life with his roots in an illiterate family that struggled with poverty in the Algerian countryside and later in the capital.

One of the themes is a search for the father who was killed in World War I a few months after Camus was born; another is a rending, brilliant evocation of the long-submerged claims that Algeria’s harsh landscape and history exert on him. A third is a joyfully vivid re-creation of a childhood in the teeming port of Algiers in the 1930s, a childhood constrained by poverty but wonderfully free in exploration and sensuous discovery.

We know Camus’ work largely as austerely voiced allegory and reflection upon the condition of modern man. Like Kafka’s, these apparently abstract writings suggest much more than abstraction, as if a rich and complex human presence were drawing breath in the next room. In “The First Man,” Camus yanks open the door and stands there in an unmediated poetic blaze.

The different sections of the book are not formally integrated. Footnotes and endnotes suggest alternative placements, and themes and characters to be developed. Names sometimes change; Jacques’ mother begins as Lucie, for instance, and goes on to be Catherine. But she is the same unforgettably sketched character; and the whole of “The First Man” has an overwhelming emotional integrity.

Jacques finds very little of his father, but the few findings are indelible. Right at the start there is a description of Henri Cormier arriving at night, by wagon, at the vineyard he is to manage deep in the interior. His wife, about to give birth, is in pain. We see the long ordeal, nightfall and strangeness, the empty, cold house, the warm response of neighbors and the doctor, the age-old courtesy of the Arab driver saluting the news that the child is a boy. “You are a chief,” he tells Henri.

An orphan, Henri came from one of thousands of French families brought to work in Algeria in the 19th Century. It was brutally hard, many died, none had much real choice. Nor, a few months after he was promoted to the vineyard, did Henri have any choice but to return to die in, and for, a country he had never seen. At the Marne, the Algerian recruits were thrown into the muddy trenches in their red and blue Zouave uniforms and straw hats. “They melted under fire like multicolored wax dolls, and each day hundreds of new orphans, Arab and French, awakened in every corner of Algeria,” Camus writes.

His mother and her two children returned to Algiers to live in poverty under the absolutist rule of her Minorcan mother. She wore black, adopted colors for a few months when a friend of her brother’s began to come round, and resumed black after the brother beat him up. Jacques, who returns to see her in her old age, finds her as loving, gentle and unmarked as ever. Camus explains what he means by “unmarked”: “The long days of labor adding up one by one to a life that, by dint of being deprived of hope, had become a life devoid of any sort of resentment.”

But she can tell him almost nothing about his father. “Poor people’s memory is less nourished than that of the rich,” Camus writes. “It has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are gray and featureless. Of course there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labor, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces along the path to death.”

Memory, choice: It is the great disparity that Camus confronts. As a privileged intellectual he possessed such richness of both; his people possessed neither. Camus defended Algerian independence but he grieves for the French farmers who spent a century struggling in an alien land only to be driven out and their story canceled. He writes of one old settler who, ordered by the French army to evacuate, worked for days digging up his vineyards (he stopped at noon for his sandwich) and spilling the wine in his casks. To a captain who remonstrated, he replied: “Young man, since what we made here is a crime, it has to be wiped out.”

Camus tells of his child’s freedom, even under the constraint of poverty and his grandmother’s severe rule. He roamed the streets with his friends, chaffed the shopkeepers, warned stray dogs of the approach of the dogcatcher wagon, spent afternoons at the beach, shared among four or five the single paper cone of french fries they could afford. He tells of the voracity for learning that an extraordinary primary school teacher, M. Bernard, aroused in him.

M. Bernard’s insistence that he take the scholarship exam to the Algiers lycee changed the boy’s life. When he passed it, he felt “as if he knew in advance that success would tear him away from the warm and innocent world of the poor--a world closed in on itself like an island in the society, where poverty took the place of family and community.”

In almost any other writer that would sound pious or suspect. It has a first-draft sappiness, perhaps, but the theme that underlies it--the betrayal of the roots by the tree--is authentic to Camus’ life, his difficult choices and his writings, not least this raw, painful and beautiful beginning of a memoir.