When I Was Old Read online

  22 July 1960

  The other day I spoke of evenings spent in dance halls and cabarets, then of nights on the Place des Vosges. This was my first contact with a world other than the one that was open to me in Liège. At that time I did not really know either the country or the sea. The country only by having gone three or four years for several weeks at a time to Embourg, where one arrived by trolley, and which is now a suburb. The sea by having seen it twice from the Belgian coast. I was a real city boy then, used to pavements, houses touching one another, small gardens separated by walls.

  I think it was in 1924 that I went to Bénouville, then to Etretat, and that I spent three or four months there. In 1925, at Porquerolles, I discovered the life of the sea, of fish, of crabs, of algae, and I remember that it made me dizzy and frightened me. It was a little like wine that was too strong. Above all, what I discovered was the incessant struggle for life, how fish were always on the defensive or on the offensive; innate, indispensable cruelty.

  The next year, I wanted to discover France, and I didn’t do it by highways or railroads. I wanted, as I’ve since tried to do in all things, to look behind the scenes. It wasn’t as a sporting event (it wasn’t one at that period) that I chose to follow rivers and canals from the North to the South and from the East to the West.

  A little town, a village, are not the same seen from the river or from the canal as they are seen from the road. One sees their true face, their most ancient one, this way.

  My first boat was the Ginette.

  A year later, I had my second boat built at Fécamp, the Ostrogoth. I brought it first to Paris, where I had it christened (on a whim) by the priest of Notre Dame when we were anchored at the Vert-Galant.* Then Belgium, Holland, Germany.

  At Delfzijl, on the bank of the River Ems, I wrote my first Maigret; there and at some other places, among them Stavoren, where I spent the winter on board, two or three other novels in the same series were written.

  But I didn’t intend to tell here about my life at that period, at least not today. Again I only meant to put down a few sentences.

  After my return to Paris, there followed a succession of trips almost right up to the war. Norway and Lapland in winter, then a long tour of Europe, Africa, in particular a route from East to West, at the time a very difficult and complicated undertaking, the United States, Panama, the equator, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, India, etc. Also Russia, Turkey, Egypt …

  Now I’m at the point I was aiming at. I was not in search of the picturesque. There’s little of that in my novels. You can count on your fingers my novels which I would call exotic: Les Clients d’Avrenos set in Turkey, Quartier Nègre in Panama, Coup de Lune in Gabon, Quarante-Cinq Degrés à l’Ombre covering the route from Matadi to Bordeaux, L’Aîné des Ferchaux in the Congo, Le Cercle de la Soif in the Galápagos. I may have forgotten some but not many. Touriste de Bananes in Tahiti, Long Cours a little bit of everywhere. Still the exotic element did not play any great part.

  I maintain that when one lives in a place, a tree is a tree, whether it’s called a kapok tree, a flame tree, or an oak.

  Local colour exists only for people who are passing through. And I hate being a tourist.

  I’m not seeking the sense of being abroad. On the contrary. I am looking for what is similar everywhere in man, for the constant, as a scientist would say.

  Above all I’m trying to see from afar, from a different point of view, the little world where I live, to acquire points of comparison, of distance.

  I travelled at my own expense. But since I knew several newspaper or magazine editors, before I left I proposed to one of them a series of six, eight, or twelve articles to be written under contract, which would cover my expenses. I did the same when I travelled for nearly a year in the Mediterranean, on my third boat, the Araldo.

  Since, in the past week, the Congo has figured so large in the news (what style!) – it still does – I felt a curiosity, which I’ve never had before, to read over the articles I wrote. I was surprised at first to see that my style then was so full of sparkle, much more brilliant than my style of today; and that fascinated me, because for years my chief effort has been to simplify, to suppress, to make my style as neutral as possible in order to make it fit as closely as possible the thoughts of my characters.

  What struck me most was that these hastily written articles, with no philosophical or political intent, foresaw everything that has since happened in Africa. The very title could be used today: ‘The Hour of the Negro’.

  And the conclusion: a film at that time was called Africa Speaks. I took this title and added: ‘It Tells You: Shit!’

  On Sunday, my publisher Nielsen and I debated whether to republish these articles, which would no doubt help people to understand the African situation today. Sven had decided for it. Finally, I said no.

  I am a novelist and want to be only a novelist. Above all I don’t want to give prominence to manuscripts I’ve dug out of a drawer. The title of another series, on Eastern Europe, in 1933, is no less curious to read today: ‘Hungry People’. Then it was audacious, almost a taboo subject.

  Another series, ‘Europe 33’, was a panoramic view of Europe during a moment of its history.

  ‘Mare Nostrum’, a consideration of Latin–Anglo-Saxon antagonism. Even then I was sometimes pulled to one side, and again to the other, which explains how I was able to feel myself American during ten years in the United States and return to being more or less Latin in Europe.

  Eventually, in these articles and in others, I rid myself, in advance, of what I didn’t want to put in my novels, the picturesque, and also of some more or less philosophical or political cogitations.

  I didn’t do it on purpose. I instinctively adopted this hygienic practice which I’ve consciously discovered only today.

  There is another series that I must reread, in spite of my horror of rereading myself. It is called, I believe, ‘Police-Secours’, a study of crime in Paris, taken by districts and written for a daily with a large circulation.

  Now once more I find studies of the same kind in the very professional Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, published by the Northwestern University School of Law in the United States.

  I’m not foolish enough to take myself for a prophet or a phenomenon. What I note, with satisfaction, I admit, is that unconsciously I’ve steered my life in such a fashion that it has served my function as a novelist, little by little ridding myself, in the form of articles, of what could not serve me and which threatened to weigh me down.

  If I’ve just gone on at such length about it, it’s because it explains my need of these notebooks. I no longer write articles (nor stories, nor novellas). I’m incapable of it. I no longer think that my feeling on this or that subject has any value whatsoever. I would not dare make statements, as in ‘The Hour of the Negro’, and finally my style has been ‘neutralized’, ‘toned down’, to such an extent that outside of a novel it seems dull. I need to advance ‘step by step’, slowly, by little touches, with backward glances, regrets, to wed the simplest states of mind of my character with the simplest possible words. The story, the novella, demand plots, telescoping, and finally what is called ideas, things that have become foreign to me.

  With these notebooks I have found the means of releasing the overflow; in any case, that’s what I hope. Whether the formula works (the term ‘formula’ is not correct here, since I did it without conscious purpose and anyway all this is only a hypothesis), I will only know after I’ve written several novels.

  It’s taken me four pages to say such a simple thing!

  Saturday, 23 July

  I was right not to get too excited over the Congolese affair. Last night we learned that everything was settled, not so much by the offices of the UN as between the Congolese government and an international financial group that is largely American.

  For eight days now the papers – even those of the right – have been revealing financial combinations
influencing the attitudes of Belgium, of Katanga, etc. A few years ago, they would not have mentioned them. This backstage activity was then known only to some initiates. In France and in many other countries this sort of thing is still kept secret from the general public (in France, the affairs of the Sahara, Algeria, etc.; in England, ‘scandalous’ stories about the Court).

  With regard to the Congo, one might say that an ingenuous people suddenly refused to follow the rules of the game and spilled the beans. Naïveté or trickery, it makes little difference.

  Previously, only a few people in the know. Then, in what is called democracy, a few hundred.

  Suddenly the general public.

  This last has largely become uninterested in (or mistrustful of) religions. Now also of politics …

  I’m delighted. A little worried at the same time. Who will replace the Oracles?

  The same people who applauded the implausible de Gaulle were willing, for the space of three days, to risk a war in order to defend the poor white victims of the wicked blacks.

  That reminds me, I don’t know why, of a comment I made as I was reading medical reviews and medical works, French as well as American or English. There is no immediate connection between the two subjects. However, I think there is a hidden connection.

  Some physicians – the majority – and some professors use the most technical language possible, as if this were the only one that is scientific. To the point where a doctor who is not himself a specialist does not understand half of the communications from this or that specialist.

  I follow all this patiently, as best I can, because it fascinates me. And I have come to observe that it is the best, the most assured of the learned inquirers who use the simplest language.

  I do not speak here of journals or popularizations, or even semi-popularizations, but of texts addressed to professionals.

  Men who have made important discoveries, who have shown intuition, genius, have been able to express themselves in terms that their little brothers the pseudo scholars consider vulgar.

  Will we ever be through, or nearly through, with taboos, with ‘initiates’, with the phony mysteries and phoney science, the phoney good breeding an example of which was touted by the magazines of this week with their articles and photos of the marriage of one of the daughters of the ‘pretender to the crown of France’ with some Württemberger prince.

  I’ve always thought that what is needed in schools is a chair of ‘demystification’ or demythification (neither of these two words is in the dictionary but the second is in the process of becoming popular, which worries me) which would teach how to recognize accepted false values, ‘self-evident’ false truths, etc., the whole jumble of conventions in which pitiable humanity flounders.

  Last evening I find, in the Presse Médicale, the most staid and serious French medical review, the following caption: ‘World Hunger’. The article deals with the production of vegetables, fruits and vines throughout the world, and the needs of populations.

  It’s not just the pun which is a sign of the times.* In 1933 I wrote ‘Hungry People’ and not a specialist in Europe took my articles seriously.

  I wish I liked the work of my friends who write. I try to make myself. I try to pretend, for it’s rarely true. Perhaps that is why I have few writer friends. I have them only by chance. Then I like them as men, while regretting that I cannot admire them professionally.

  If I invented subtitles to go at the head of each of these notes, I see that it would make a sort of dictionary: childhood, blacks, travel, inspiration, doctors, friends … etc.

  And if I started at a to get to z, I’d be sure of forgetting nothing.

  I see too, with annoyance, that I use words here that I never use in my novels because I don’t trust them: abstract words, vague or overfamiliar words, fashionable words. Put another way, because I am trying to give voice to a few minor ideas, I adopt unintentionally the vocabulary of after-dinner talk.

  I even think I wrote ‘concept’ and ‘distinguished’ … and ‘important’ in speaking of a doctor … This morning I had in mind a dozen words that figure in these notes which I defy anyone to find in my novels. I’ve forgotten them. ‘Distinguished’, probably … and ‘exquisite!’ … tired words, which help give shape to hollow ideas. If that is the case – and I’m very much afraid it is – I’m wrong to play with keeping this notebook.

  Sunday noon

  I want to tell it simply, without comment. Yesterday, D. and I had an apéritif. We don’t do this often. For several weeks she has been on edge, because of the secretary, then because of one of the maids, etc. She is capable of enormous energy and she can keep going for a certain length of time with two or three hours of sleep a night.

  Yesterday was the last straw, on the eve, almost, of leaving for vacation.

  I suggested to her that we go out in the evening, which is even rarer for us than having an apéritif.

  ‘Go where?’

  There is only one night club in Lausanne.

  ‘No, I only go out to go to someone’s house.’

  But we never go to anyone’s house unless we have to. She named two names. They were hardly what one would call friends.

  And, for the first time, she said what I knew, or rather what I suspected:

  ‘I need to talk to someone besides you.’

  She explained:

  ‘You know everything I have to say before I can get my second sentence out. And you don’t talk to me about things that …’

  She needed to be with other people in order to reassure herself.

  With me, no matter what I do, she somehow has the impression of inferiority.

  Fifteen years of inferiority … She needs to be heard by others …

  She telephoned to the two families in question; both were out, as I had foreseen, on a Saturday evening.

  We stayed home.

  It was the children, finally, who made her relax, and we had an agreeable hour or two of talk together (at least from my point of view).

  I love her. D., you are touching. But happy is what I want you to be.

  Afternoon

  Last evening my wife told me something I didn’t know. My eldest son, Marc, was married last April, on his twenty-first birthday (with my consent). Johnny, who was then ten and a half years old, said to his mother:

  ‘I don’t understand why Marc is getting married and going to live in Paris when he still has the chance to live X years with Daddy …’

  I don’t know if he gave a number. If he did, D. didn’t tell me. In Johnny’s mind, it wasn’t so much the pleasure of living with me as the opportunity of knowing me and learning something from me.

  This explains to me why he dogs my footsteps, continually asks permission to come into my study, follows me to town when I do errands, finally, an almost sacred moment, sits beside me in the evening in front of the television. It has become an obsession and he is unhappy when, for one reason or another, one of these tête-à-têtes he has promised himself does not take place.

  He asks me questions about everything and I feel that he takes in the answers, that he attaches a great deal of importance to them. He has become a sort of disciple, which is disturbing. It’s a relation I’m not used to, and when I’m conscious of it it bothers me.

  Another X years …

  He brings to this a kind of eagerness to build my image little by little in his mind, against the time when I shall no longer be here.

  No doubt this image which is forming now will be more living in the end. It is through it that I shall live on. In turn, he will try to communicate it to his children.

  I didn’t think that a boy of less than eleven years could have this kind of idea. This explains to me certain secret glances, certain sudden outbursts. He sees me living, and he sees me already dead.

  I don’t like drinking – or the mornings after – because it makes me either sentimental or aggressive, two attitudes I hate. It humiliates me to an incredible degree.

&n
bsp; Saturday, 30 July

  I had to look at the date in a newspaper. We’re on vacation at the Lido, long familiar to me, but I feel more off the beaten track than I did in a hut in the Congo on my first trip to Africa.

  It’s not Venice that makes me feel so, nor even the tourists. It’s living the holiday life, everybody’s holiday. When I wrote stories for the bi-weeklies, shortly after my arrival in Paris (1924–1925), two or three months ahead we had to write on ‘seasonal’ subjects. In October, it was Christmas and New Year. Then winter sports, spring, Easter, summer vacation …

  Papers continue to do it and it always seems to consist of the same caricatures of households or families at the beach or in the mountains.

  But now, here, I feel like one of those ridiculous characters. I go through the same acts, at the same hours, with the same impatience and the same bad temper.

  In short, it’s the first time in fifty-seven years that I’ve taken the holiday train, that I’ve stayed, with my wife and two of my children, in a hotel catering to the holiday crowd.

  As a child I used to go to Embourg in the suburbs of Liège with my mother – I’ve already written about that – and sometimes she would leave us there alone in a boarding house, my brother and me. Not at a hotel. With a good woman who kept a tavern and where we were the only boarders.

  Never, either with my mother or father, or with one of the two, did I sleep in a hotel, or take a meal in a real restaurant. If we took a trip we took along our ‘snack’.

  The first year that I spent as secretary to the Marquis de Tracy, I accompanied him to Aix-Les-Bains in August. But I worked from morning to night. That wasn’t a vacation.

  The following summer at Bénouville, near Etretat, where I lived three or four months on a farm, I was writing several stories a day.