When I Was Old Read online

  I have just spent nearly a week with the photographer and editor from Match, then with an English journalist.

  The superiority of photographers to most journalists. I’ve often observed them when, at Cannes, for example, they descend in a bunch, almost in a swarm, on their victim. They seem hard, cynical, almost cruel. They often are – aren’t ‘raw’ shots demanded of them? They’re used to all kinds of dramas and, above all, to all sorts of truths. Actually they do have a good deal of contempt for their victims. A false smile, a studied pose, faked nonchalance, and phoney sincerity don’t deceive them. Perhaps that’s the reason why they can appreciate the truth better than anyone else. So they really seem grateful when you don’t try to fool them, to give them a chance not to be tough.

  The Match photographer, who lived four or five days in the bosom of my family, had not known me before he came but left as an old friend. The writer, theoretically more ‘cultured’, but who managed to ask hundreds of impertinent questions, came to do his work, no more, and add an article, a victim, to his collection.

  Why do we receive them and give them our precious time when we might be relaxing? Not for reasons of publicity, for these always inaccurate articles risk wearing the reader out and even, little by little, turning him against an author.

  Still less out of vanity. I don’t mind explaining myself to a man who is trying to understand, and whose opinion means something to me. But that isn’t the case with ninety-nine per cent of those journalists, especially magazine editors.

  If it’s a beginner, or a freelance writer for whom this article could be important, I’m sure to remember my own beginnings and give him his chance.

  But what about the others, so thoroughly smug, who think they know it all, that they are judges of everything, can solve all questions? They arrive at an author’s house having read only a few of his books, some time ago, or even having read only one, on the train or the plane.

  Each time, however, I have hope. A hope of finally correcting legends, destroying exasperating myths, getting rid of continuing untruths.

  There is none. I always answer the same questions. And I end up feeling sickened.

  ‘How does the idea for a novel come to you? … Then what do you do? … What time do you begin writing? … On the typewriter or by hand? … How many hours a day? … How many days? …’

  And now I, in turn, must ask myself a very disagreeable question. For thirty years now, since the beginning of the Maigrets, I have given the same answers. For they have to be the same. If I were suddenly to declare (which would be untrue) that I begin to write at midnight, or that I dictate, my old answers would be printed just the same.

  … Names from the telephone book … Index cards … Outline on a yellow envelope … the coffee I make in the kitchen …

  I follow this whole routine because I believe it is necessary if I’m to set off the mechanism, so much so that it has become a superstition …

  And if, like the readers of magazines, I too am a victim of legend? If I have begun to believe in it by the sheer force of seeing it in print?

  What stops me from writing at eight o’clock in the morning instead of at six or six thirty? From not writing a whole chapter at a sitting?

  The proof that it’s possible is that at Cannes, when I was convalescent and unable to follow my routine, I wrote Le Fils entirely by hand, several pages in the morning, several pages in the afternoon, without worrying about the length of the chapters and without making myself recopy them on the typewriter afterwards to give my sentences a sterner rhythm. It wasn’t I but my wife who typed Le Fils, and this novel is no worse than the rest. It isn’t even different from them.

  Then why did I go back to my routine right afterwards?

  Because of saying over and over that …

  This bothers me. I’m tempted to escape the rules I have imposed on myself. Isn’t it stupid not to dare?

  The ritual I’ve adopted is as strict as the mass, I don’t know why, and I’ve tried to explain it because I’ve been asked to do so.

  I’ve succeeded so well at it, I’ve proved so many times that it was necessary to me that now each move has its logic which I finally believe in myself. In spite of the precedent of Le Fils …

  And this will go on until I begin to write anyhow, anywhere, and on any paper – in ink, in pencil, or on the typewriter, without thinking that for this reason the fire won’t ignite.

  Then I’ll have to explain to the journalists …

  Why, Lord? What has this to do with them or with those who read them? And above all, why should I concern myself with it?

  In three days, just the same, I will repeat the same story – always a true story – to an English journalist who will ask me the everlasting questions for eight or ten days because he has to write thirty columns. It’s more exhausting to me than a novel. It gives me no satisfaction. Nothing but irritation when, later, I read the outcome of these interviews.

  Why not have the courage to say no, to close the door? Charles Chaplin does it more often than not. Once or twice a year he receives journalists for a very studied photograph, a family group, posed like a royal portrait.

  I’ve wondered if really he is so indifferent to what the public thinks of him. I’ve envied him. And now he is busy writing his memoirs, in several volumes, without any interference from a journalist.

  So it’s the opposite of indifference. He wishes to set down his truth or his legend, just like Gide and so many others.

  Which reminds me of one of the first questions Gide asked, if not the very first, when, at his suggestion, we met for the first time.

  ‘Tell me, Simenon, at what period did you choose your character?’

  Now I’m not sure if he said ‘choose’ or ‘fix’. I didn’t understand him immediately.

  ‘My character?’

  For a moment I wondered if he weren’t speaking of Maigret, and I almost answered that he was not my character, that Maigret was only an accident to whom I attached little importance.

  No! He was talking about me. He explained:

  ‘Each of us, at one age or another, creates his character, to which he remains more or less faithful …’

  This confused me a good deal. I only understood what he meant when I saw photographs of him at different periods. It was true. From the age of eighteen or twenty, there were the same poses, the same look as at sixty.

  Isn’t that frightening? I haven’t chosen any character. I’ve changed my attitudes a hundred times. But I wonder now if it isn’t, at least in part, because I’ve read in the papers that I work in such and such a way that I continue to do so.

  That depresses me. It seems to me that I am obliged to …

  One of these days I’ll have to give myself a shake, not do what is printed in the newspapers.

  In that case, it will be best to say nothing about it, so as not to become imprisoned in a new legend.

  In fact, I’ll have to cheat!

  Saturday, 9 July 1960

  Revision of my novel Maigret et les Vieillards finished.

  In five days. By working six or seven hours a day. Otherwise, say seven days at three hours a day, or twenty-one hours of writing. Add to that more than thirty hours to revise. The first Maigrets were revised in one day! I daren’t reread them.

  All of yesterday, an English journalist who is here for several days, and, during the afternoon and evening, often two of them at once, Roger Stéphane, who wants to write a book on me. I talked nonstop. I tried to explain, to convince, and I didn’t even convince myself. I should have the courage to refuse these interviews. From hearing the same questions asked, from hearing myself talk as if about a ‘case’, I end by not believing in myself.

  I always stress the role of intuition. In good faith. It’s what I believe in. But by talking about it periodically for hours or days, I run the risk of becoming too conscious of it, or losing that very intuition.

  On the other hand, should I, instead of answering them, let
them write all their nonsense which irritates me so?

  I would like to be able to be silent. I am, for months of each year, at least nine tenths of the time; then I allow myself to be tempted by contacts. I have nothing to gain by it. I have everything to lose.

  Although I drank nothing but water and Coca-Cola all day yesterday I find myself this morning with a hangover and a bad conscience, that sort of near-physical depression and anxiety of the drunkard.

  A moving letter from Miller in the mail. He believes in my stability. He envies me. He’s probably right. But, by continually furnishing reasons for this rather precarious balance, by analysing it, by dissecting oneself for the benefit of others, doesn’t one risk going completely off the track?

  To be silent, yes! But then one seems pretentious. And this silence would require a good bit of arrogance, like Montherlant’s, and I don’t have that.

  Quiet! I promised myself not to talk about these things any more. And here I am, after more than a week of interviews, and ten minutes before starting in again, with the need to explain myself in writing! …

  Explain what? There is nothing to explain.

  Sunday, 10 July 1960

  In a few minutes, as I do every Sunday morning, I’ll be going with the children to get the papers at the Lausanne station, and then for a few minutes’ walk on the shore of the lake at Ouchy. Tradition. The house is full of small traditions. I think I’m the one who unintentionally inculcates them in the children. Isn’t that a bit like a guardrail or the banisters on a stairway?

  It’s possible that I’m repeating myself – I hate to reread. Even, and above all, my novels. Revising them is torture. And when a film is made from one of my books, if producer or director wants my advice, I hardly can recognize the story he’s talking about. I have to ask my wife to reread the book for me and then to remind me of this or that detail.

  That’s not at all what I wanted to jot down before going out. It was only a sentence that struck me in my bath and which will probably come back to me at the last moment. Yesterday, three people to question me, each one following his own notion, which I’m unaware of. For example, the English journalist (a former lawyer) observed me and asked questions for two or three days and will continue for an indeterminate number of days without my being able to guess what she has in mind, the point of view she’s taking. It’s a little like stretching out on an operating table without knowing what operation the surgeon is going to perform. An unpleasant thought.

  S., himself a novelist, a biographer, has come with a definite idea, a character he has already decided on, and I sense that he is determined for me to be this character. He scales down reality to a point where it coincides with his point of view. He could just as well write his book or his essay (?) in Paris without having met me.

  Stranger still was the one sandwiched between these two sessions of questioning. A criminologist, a professor in the Law Faculty of Poitiers, a graphologist to boot, he came to interview me for … L’Echo de la Mode. Each time I say something he declares:

  ‘That’s not for our audience …’

  What is for his audience? A few picturesque touches, carefully arranged, a few anecdotes, also arranged.

  But he announces that he will be also writing for a law or criminology review.

  All this is a bit confused and reminds me of the Festival at Cannes, where from morning to night I shook hands, answered questions, without knowing any more who was who or what he was doing there.

  There are those, I know it from friends who have been in my position, whom this reassures, to whom this idea gives a sense of their importance. Not I. On the contrary. If I had complexes, and I can be sure I don’t, this would give me an inferiority complex.

  Good! I’m getting to my little idea from the bathtub. Last night, showing pictures to the Englishwoman (this gives me a subject, a connection, instead of talking in a void), I stumbled on a pile of photos I took in Africa, while passing through the Belgian Congo, from the Sudan to Brazzaville, around 1932 or 1933. Different races, different tribes, at different levels of evolution. At the time, I wrote several articles entitled ‘The Negro’s Hour’ (published in the magazine Voilà, which no longer exists).

  I got them out of the files. But will I have the courage to reread them? At that period, Paris was covered with posters for a film, Africa Speaks. It was made by the French government to encourage enlistments in colonial troops.

  (Yesterday I observed to my Englishwoman that Kipling, on a literary level, is a victim of political evolution. The English are distressed when you mention him. It reminds them of their pride in the Victorian era, a state of mind for which they have both nostalgia and a sense of sin.)

  This morning the radio announces serious trouble in the Congo. The blacks are disarming white officers and throwing them in prison. The Belgians who live there are fleeing …

  Troubles in Cuba, also in Italy … Not to mention Algeria …

  I have a horror of wars, of cruelty in all forms … Horror of the use of force, of violence.

  But, listening to the radio this morning, I wondered if war really is the result of ambition, of nationalism, etc.

  Or if it was not quite simply a necessity, not just of biological selection, but, for man, for survival? If wars, since the earliest times, had not served, without man’s knowing it, to produce types who are capable of endurance?

  Certain American schools no longer begin teaching History with the Egyptians, nor with the Sumerians, but with palaeontology, if not amoebas. One’s perspective is changed by this. Our revolutions and our wars diminish, are only a little ripple.

  The white of today is only the result of many cross-breedings of races.

  And if it were necessary, for the man of tomorrow, how many other cross-breedings …

  This gives me or permits me a somewhat caustic serenity.

  Thursday, 14 July 1960

  I had to glance at the last sentences written, otherwise I’d have gone on about the same subject. I was no longer sure of whether I’d spoken of it here or to one of the journalists whom I saw afterwards. I’m surprised to realize how small is the number of more or less original ideas – or ideas we believe to be original – that we carry with us through the years and which are sometimes enough to furnish a whole lifetime.

  We shouldn’t even discuss them for we get nothing in return but a certain ridicule. The mandarins have raised barriers between different domains of the mind which it’s better not to cross because the response is only shrugged shoulders. Doctors, for example, are the most susceptible to this. If there is anyone who tries everything, it is they. They paint (annual salon of doctor-painters in Paris) or are art critics, often very poor ones. They discuss the theatre, literature, music. In a single year I’ve received four or five novels from doctors, novels whose themes have nothing to do with medicine. The suggestion that literature is at least as complicated as medicine would be poorly received by them. But just dare to put forth an idea on a medical subject … In the Anglo-Saxon countries they have invented, or rather adopted, the word ‘layman’, previously used by priests, if I’m not mistaken.

  However, the history of medicine is easier to study than that of literature. Most of them don’t know it very well. Many of them don’t keep up with their colleagues’ work, and French doctors, for example, almost purposefully ignore American discoveries except for those that have reached a point of general and universal acceptance.

  Isn’t it the same with all specialists?

  But why the devil don’t they admit that a novel, a sonata, a picture, are also the work of specialists who have given years to research as arduous as the research of the laboratory?

  If a Faulkner, a Picasso, a Buffet, a Prokofiev judged a new serum, a biological theory, with a phrase, condemned a certain tendency in psychiatry with a word, how ridiculous!

  Any small-town doctor, anyone at all, in fact, can judge a work of art ex cathedra.

  And I shouldn’t go outside my
speciality either. Each time I allow myself to express an opinion – and I can’t resist – no matter how timidly, with how much humility I do so, I still feel I have diminished myself and that I invite sarcasm.

  And if I promise myself not to talk about myself!

  But whom should I talk about, for God’s sake?

  And why not have the good sense to be quiet?

  A man doing his work all his life without saying anything about it, without anyone knowing anything about him. There must have been some. I only need to open a few works that are not five feet away from me to assure myself of that, but I haven’t the courage. And I’m afraid it would humiliate me.

  Same day, 10 o’clock in the evening

  Two friends in the drawing room, whom I’m separated from only by an open door. Sat them down in front of the television; Hamlet at Carcassonne. Am tired of talking, a little sickened. I find pamphlets on the Algerian war in the last mail.

  In the television news, three stories, three massacres: Cuba, the Congo, and the plane shot down in Russian waters.

  I have a horror of violence in any form, of brute force. I want to be indignant. I am indignant. Yesterday I saw young Belgians, in their twenties, who sang as they climbed into the plane taking them to the Congo. Proud to have guns. Proud of going to fight. And basically, I know, they aren’t really soldiers, these are little boys who are making noise so as not to feel frightened.

  Horror of political discussions, articles, newspapers that speak of greatness (meaning force, always), horror of politics.

  Then I wonder if I’m not wrong, if all this isn’t normal, if it isn’t the biological law of natural selection. I sometimes reach the point of wondering if it isn’t out of a sort of cowardice that I condemn all show of power in my innermost soul, and I hesitate to talk as openly with my sons about it as I’ve been doing here.