When I Was Old Read online

  I am certainly bringing them up like young anarchists. Johnny already hates uniforms, war.

  Am I right? Am I wrong? An idea came to me just now that should be developed at length and better than I could do it, and this idea reassures me.

  Not altogether. Not too much. It is too tempting to believe what suits one’s temperament and mind.

  The history of the entire world, what is written, sculptured, painted, digested in encyclopaedias, could actually be concentrated in a few hundred men (who could be further reduced to a few dozen), philosophers, scholars, artists, who are the landmarks of our evolution and who are enough to give us a little pride in our humanity, a little hope.

  Power has always been against them, whether it was serving religious ideas, political, or patriotic. Almost all those to whom we have erected statues were to some extent, at some period of their lives, victims of force, of brutality, and the ideas which incite these.

  So why should it be otherwise today? For three years I have refused, even in more or less official ceremonies, to wear decorations. Don’t these indicate that the powers consider you a good servant? A good servant of force?

  Trite, of course. But behind these clumsy sentences I feel something that I haven’t managed to express. Nor is it in any of my novels. I avoid even alluding to it there, touching on any idea of this kind. Not for fear of displeasing, but out of modesty, for fear, too, of seeming committed. In fact I’m not, neither on one side nor on the other.

  The committed man, whatever he is, makes me afraid, makes me bristle. I wonder if he is sincere. And, if he appears to me to be so, I wonder if he is intelligent.

  I only speak of this to my ten-year-old son. It doesn’t interest my eldest. So much the better? Maybe.

  I love man. His history, above all his first stammerings, moves me more than all the dramas about passion. I love to see him in search of himself, century after century, failing each time, forcing himself to go on again.

  How heartbreaking it is to watch him, no longer alone, but in a crowd, and to hear those who call themselves his leaders and who are so because they have been chosen.

  These notebooks are definitely not destined for publication, and I believe, if I go on, that I will ask my heirs to destroy them after having read them.

  They only serve to rid me of what gnaws at my brain. When I have to answer an important letter, I do it at once so as not to have it nag me for days. I do the same thing here, I bury what is bothering me so as not to think about it any more.

  This morning, as every day recently, I was feeling in top form physically. None of my usual and also, I suppose, unimportant little troubles. So my morale is excellent. (Trotsky, whom I met once in his exile at Prinkipo, wrote some astonishing and moving lines on man’s ageing. Fifty-five years old. I’m fifty-seven.) After luncheon, slight argument with my wife. Not even disagreement. Misunderstanding, for no reason. That was enough. A little afterwards, in town, vertigo, pain in my shoulder, etc. And, if I let myself go it would have been total collapse. Everything takes on another colour.

  The slightest touch is enough. The body follows.

  In spite of the work of psychotherapy, medicine is no less largely technique, occupying itself with the disease more than with the patient (except for a few old family doctors who most often don’t keep up with medical progress).

  And justice treats men as if they were constantly the same, whether fasting or well fed, at rest, euphoric, overworked, or after a conjugal dispute.

  Not only is each one a special case, but each should be studied at each hour, at each minute of each day.

  It’s impressive to think that one is only an instant in the history of the world, only a portion of that instant, and that this portion, which has no present, is imperceptible.

  Trite, to be sure. Not to be written down. But it passes the evening.

  Still, I had a bad afternoon because of a word ill understood, an intonation that changed my mood and, as a result, my physical equilibrium.

  Another word, perhaps, a look, a pressure of the hand, would restore my well-being.

  Is it wrong to be so involved in the inner man, to want to understand him, cure him, with such tenacity? Have we come to a sort of sentimentality and was health, on the contrary, rather in the untroubled brutality of what once was called the hero?

  Every day my paediatrician friends see the birth of infant idiots, of Mongoloids, of monsters of all sorts who will remain monsters and whom charitable institutions will pass back and forth from one to another.

  Others display prodigies of skill, of devotion, create a science almost, out of pure kindness to keep alive (?) impotent old men who are a burden for family and for society.

  Criminology, in its way …

  I believe in it. I’m one of those. I feel that I am of the family of those who devote their time to trying to better man’s life, no matter what man, no matter what human embryo, no matter what offal.

  Is this really a good? Doesn’t one risk creating an anxious, self-pitying humanity, incapable of facing realities?

  Will there be enough men to take care of others, to be responsible for them? Enough strong ones for all the weak?

  Will there be any strong ones left at all?

  All this, again, because of a small cloud in the conjugal sky! What would it be after a real argument?

  Actually, I know the answer, because at least once I took my pistol out of its case.

  Sunday, 17 July 1960

  Lots of people in the living room with the door open. This has gone on for three days. Good friends, however. Talk. Listen. Talk. My not drinking is no help; it goes to my head all the same. And later I’m ashamed of what I’ve said, of positions I’ve taken or seemed to take. I have had enough of talking … maybe also of listening. I would have liked to write at length this morning, about Brisson, about Gide, about sincerity, about small ideas of no importance that have plagued me since yesterday. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow. I hope so. Talk to myself, in fact. That way I have fewer complexes. A rotten word which I detest.

  Monday, 18 July 1960

  A short respite before my guests come up and the Nielsens arrive. The latter don’t tire me because with them I don’t have to make any effort at conversation. Yesterday, Pierre Benoit. That’s a different matter, for he is devilishly sly and at the same time very sensitive. I’m always afraid of hurting him, and I have the feeling of talking on tiptoe. In any case that has little to do with what I wanted to write.

  I wrote four pages that I crossed out because there were too many names, too many people who are still alive and whom I wouldn’t want to hurt.

  In spite of the discrepancy between their public and private lives, I still question myself on their sincerity.

  The question bothers me. Others, much younger than I and who have lived less, don’t have such scruples and readily talk about hypocrisy and cynicism.

  Put them in the presence of a human being and they flee him after a short contact.

  Not only have I scruples, but I don’t understand. For I don’t believe in force, physical or moral, nor in cynicism, nor in calculation, at least not in the sense intended by these people of whom I’ve been talking.

  I try to understand and I see that it’s very hard. Financiers? Celebrities from Paris or London? Stars of Europe or California? Fame, money, power, life …

  All this doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist in a state of nature. After all, they are only men, as vulnerable as the rest, if not more so.

  From this point of view I wonder how, why … How do they manage to write what they write, to believe, or seem to believe, in what they would have us believe … ?

  I would like to call them decent men. As decent as the average labourer, as the conventional and often generous white-collar worker.

  However, they react to the Congolese crisis only in terms of their shareholdings in Katanga, or the Cuban crisis in terms of their instinctive revulsion against Communism.

  They falsify
everything, the Algerian war and internal politics. Do they really see only what they want to see? Is it a strain for them, and have they moments of doubt, when they know that they shirk the truth?

  Don’t their interests force them into convictions which seem incompatible with everything they know to be true?

  They meet great doctors, biologists, lawyers who daily deal with men as they really are.

  How can they go on seeing man as he is not, seeing him as he ought to be in the interest of their interests, so that their own image may stay untarnished?

  It’s too easy to see these people as all of a piece. I know they are weak, riddled with complexes, that they are often afraid, ashamed, that they seek reassurance.

  But my intelligence, because once more I must use terms that everybody uses, furnishes me no satisfactory answer.

  For myself, the only possible approach is to write a novel, to become, for the time being, the character, to feel as he feels. I have the impression, perhaps the illusion, that this gives me more of the truth.

  I could have cited other names, other men whom I know as well or as slightly. It happens that these, here, have come in contact with me in one of the rare periods when I haven’t put up a fence around my life as a working novelist, and around our family life.

  The parade has gone on for two weeks. I have a hangover from it. It’s possible that I repeat myself – repeat myself often. Indeed I have always been astounded at the small number of ideas – and can one even call them ideas – that a man collects in fifty-seven years of life. I’m not speaking of ideas one can get from books, of course. I’m speaking of those that have been digested, of what is left, of what has finally become part of ourselves.

  Is there really anything left?

  A certain attitude, perhaps, with me a curiosity which is never satisfied, a desire to understand not explain, to feel the real man beneath men’s appearance.

  I often have the impression that it would only take a little extra effort to discover that I am like them, that they are like me, that it is only habits, attitudes, words in which we differ.

  Even if they upset and infuriate me, I love them, perhaps because I feel they are weak.

  But why the devil do these people censure, and why do others, in turn, censure them?

  Tuesday, 19 July 1960

  The last ones have left and I’m a little ashamed of the relief my wife and I feel. For I really like them, these people who came to share a moment in our life. Some of them are friends. I have a deep affection for Sven Nielsen because I believe I understand him. Even the journalists, when they’ve gone, leave me with a pleasant memory.

  Still, it is more and more disagreeable to see our house invaded, its rhythm broken, people sitting in my chair (the one in my living room where I watch television) and in my wife’s.

  The obligation to speak, to listen, becomes almost unbearable to me and perhaps it’s so I won’t have to listen that I talk so much.

  Is it age? Once I liked to be close to people, and the days without visitors seemed empty and dull to me. I would chase around, to Montparnasse, to the Coupole, or what have you. That was the great era of Montparnasse. I even had a bar in my own house on the Place des Vosges (1925 or 1926) where I officiated with professional flourish. No doubt I had a reason. No children. Just my wife.

  Perhaps there was another reason too. I was young, just arrived in Paris. I had everything to learn. I had discovered, or believed I had discovered, that men reveal more of themselves when they are having a good time than when they are at their work. I spent evenings and nights at dance halls, at cabarets, looking, listening. The later it grew, the more people who must have been impressive in their offices became accessible, often pitiable.

  In my bar on the Place des Vosges, I forced cocktails on my guests in order to produce more quickly the release that would permit me to see them naked.

  But the evenings when I drank myself ? Wasn’t it just an alibi then? And if, during the small hours of the morning, I arranged it so that several women were naked, was that just to study the behaviour of the other males, or for my own satisfaction?

  I must speak of this sexual question, for others have spoken of it (like P. in the book he dedicated to me), and in my opinion they have been completely mistaken.

  I don’t intend to write a confession on this subject but to express certain very simple truths.

  For the moment, what concerns me (not much, really, but enough to get it off my chest) is this sort of instinctive withdrawal, more into myself than into my family, into my house, into certain rooms of that house; my irritation when my routine is interrupted. If it is age, too bad. But I’m not sure that’s it. I was greedy for contacts up until … until I met D. in New York in 1945. And I’ve become more and more miserly with our intimacy. The children enlarged the circle. Echandens* is arranged around us, according to the functions of each and all of us. I feel comfortable here. I establish habits here. Going into my study in the morning (not to work there, I’m not speaking of the times of the novels), my eyes seek a certain reflection on a piece of furniture, and a pencil out of place bothers me. I am with the children, in thought, in the house. I know where each one is, what he’s doing.

  Don’t strangers have anything to teach me any more? Have I no more curiosity? I have no idea, but isn’t it odd that I feel disturbed even by the children (and by the staff) if they burst in when I’m alone with my wife, if for instance they come into my room when we’re having coffee after lunch?

  D. and I aren’t even talking; we’re looking through the papers. We pass them back and forth and it’s a half hour of what at fifteen I called perfect happiness. At that time too it went with coffee and reading and additionally the eating of a wartime pudding that I had concocted myself, since rationing kept us hungry.

  I continue to love people, to be curious about them, to become passionately involved in their behaviour, in their ‘motives’, but at the same time I have a passion for our little family universe.

  The respite will be short. The nurse has left for a few days of vacation. One of the maids has had an operation. My wife is without a secretary until August. This means that I will not see her except on the run, busy with her different functions. At the weekend she will begin to pack, since we have promised Johnny and Marie-Jo to take them to Venice for ten days.

  This trip will no doubt be pleasant. I’m looking forward to it as they are. Nevertheless I feel a certain uneasiness about leaving the house.

  I’ve spent my life travelling, moving, changing my ambience, my habits (except the ones that are connected with my work). But now I hesitate to leave my shell. It was the same way in Lakeville, in Carmel, in Tucson, in Florida.

  I make my nest. I settle down with my family and I hate to leave until one day, without knowing why, I don’t feel at home any more and I take my little world elsewhere to start all over again.

  I wonder if when I take off that way it isn’t because of people, neighbours, intimates, all those whom you are forced to become acquainted with when you live somewhere. You spend a certain amount of time meeting them. When I know them all, when I can no longer step outside without being spoken to, I leave.

  Is that the real reason? Are there others? The fact that reality doesn’t last long, for example? I mean the time during which one regards as real, as important, as personal, certain walls, certain furniture, the colour of the curtains, the road to town …

  There must be something to that, because each time I move I get rid of my furniture and most of the objects so as to start again almost new, from scratch.

  To start one’s life over each time from scratch!

  That’s almost the same miracle that each child brings us: reliving the first years with him.

  There, perhaps (Pierre is thirteen months old), lies the explanation I seek at random.

  People who come steal a moment of life from me, leave a hole.

  Wednesday, 20 July 1960

  I’ve thought for
a long time, in fact since I began to observe people, that I learn more about them when I talk than when I listen. If they speak, they generally repeat dicta which are always the same and which reflect the truth as they wish it were. When I speak to them, when I try out different ideas on them, their reactions are much more revealing.

  I just took this notebook to write that single paragraph, which had been more pithy when I first thought of it and which I wished to turn better. Now, there is sun in my study this morning, for the first time in ten days. This delights me. I am also delighted by rain, and I delight in a spring that is unlike any I have known since 1940.

  I could swear that for the two months of the invasion it didn’t rain once. As I wrote in my last novel, it was the kind of spring one remembers from childhood. May and June of that year were tragic. The invasion, the defeat, the retreat, fear, and, no doubt, also a certain shame (why?), refugees on the roads, air raids, the uncertainty of tomorrow. Now, what remains the most vivid in my memory is the sun, the colour of the sky and the sea at La Rochelle, the smell of spring and of the terraces. I could swear, too, that I’m not the only one, that for thousands of soldiers and of refugees the tragic has been obliterated, leaving only this impression of radiant life.

  For example, lying in a field to escape strafing from a plane which passed so low that my eyes met those of the pilot (he didn’t fire), I discovered some wild plants that I had not seen during years of life in the country, plants that I used to see as a child when I went to play on the parade ground at Liège or on the bank of the canal, plantain for example, others I don’t know the name of which grew beside the railroad tracks, beside rivers and roads.

  For three months I have wanted to write a novel about this period, about a refugee from Jeaumont separated from his daughter and his pregnant wife by the bombardment of a train (it is cut in half, each half going its own way afterwards). Not concerning himself with his family but with a warm female lying near him in a cattle car. He is having an unexpected holiday, in fact.