When I Was Old Read online

  Afterwards, at Porquerolles, I typed my forty pages of popular novel each morning.

  I examine my memory in vain for traditional holidays.

  On board the Ginette, then the Ostrogoth, I never stopped in the crowded places and I worked almost every day.

  I spent one winter in a villa in Antibes. But I was working with Jean Tarride on the scenario of Chien Jaune, then with Jean Renoir on that of Nuit du Carrefour while writing several Maigrets, among them L’Ombre Chinoise.

  Again at Porquerolles, later, sometimes in summer, often in winter, and more novels.

  At Les Sables-d’Olonne, at the end of the war, I was in bed. Still not a vacation.

  At Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson in Canada in 1955 we went skiing, D. and I. But I was writing Three Rooms in Manhatten, Maigret à New York, etc.

  Same thing six months later on a beach in New Brunswick, where we never spent so much as an hour on the sand.

  Still the same in Florida, where I was writing Lettre à mon Juge among other things, then in Arizona, in California.

  Finally in Cannes, we still weren’t vacationing.

  It had to wait until we were living in Switzerland and the children wanted a change.

  And here we are, like the caricatures, following the schedule decreed by … By nobody, probably. We follow the crowd. And, in Venice, among thousands of tourists, we buy stacks of useless things that we’ll throw away when we get back.

  This creates a mild degradation. One loses all personality, all individuality.

  I was forgetting that two years ago we spent a month on the canals and lakes of Holland, also with the children. But it was aboard a boat we rented and we followed no rule.

  The preceding year, I believe, we spent two weeks at Villars-sur-Ollon. That was a holiday hotel. I only remember it because it rained without a let-up and because we spent the whole time playing bridge.

  Actually this is my first vacation, and I scarcely glance at the newspaper for which I have such a passion and the daily reading of which seems to me as necessary as my coffee.

  This won’t last more than ten days in all. But if it lasted a month? A year? Or more, as for the prisoners of war in the camps, or the regular prisoners in prison?

  What would be left of me? What desires? What reactions?

  Would I revolt after a certain length of time?

  I wonder. It frightens me a bit. It seems to prove that by carefully organizing men’s use of time, what happens is that …

  And I certainly have the same look of happy stupidity as the two or three hundred other people who are staying in this hotel.

  In the end would we begin to look alike?

  I wanted to write about something entirely different, about the sincerity or rather what I consider the impossibility of a total lack of sincerity even in those who pass for cynical. I’ve already talked about that here. But it plagues me. Perhaps I’ll come back to it. I think of the Congolese, of the Russians, of the Americans, statesmen or journalists. Is it possible that they act out of a complete, an absolute, I was about to write, out of pure bad faith? I can’t believe it. But then, to what extent our interest or our passions can falsify our judgement!

  To be compared, when I come back to it, with a simple argument between husband and wife. Perhaps that will give me an answer.

  Sunday, 31 July

  Four journalists, on the day of our arrival here. This comes back to my mind because I am thinking of the news (still the Congo, American elections, de Gaulle–Adenauer, etc.) and of public opinion, of the way it is formed. Or the reverse. I mean that political personalities one speaks of are perhaps locked into their legend, and because of that, obliged to … but that’s too long a story.

  The first journalist was a good all-round reporter (hotels, stations, airports, police stations, clinics, hospitals) with his photographer.

  Two or three questions, the most commonplace. Maigret on vacation. A child? Two here? Names. Ages. Thank you. And the others? Names. Ages. Thank you.

  He will get the names and ages mixed up. Not that it matters. He will caption it ‘Maigret in Venice’.

  ‘Are you writing at the moment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you expect to write a novel about Venice?’

  ‘No.’

  That socks them, in whatever country, in whatever city. So, in order not to hurt their feelings, I explain that I can only use settings where I’ve lived a long time. Several years as a resident, not as a tourist, which is true.

  As my daughter comes in at this moment, the reporter has her pose with me and the photographer asks her to hug me. Very natural!

  Second journalist. Important Milan paper. Fifty to sixty years old. Sophisticated man-of-the-world type. He asked me for an evening meeting. At the appointed hour, he takes a paper from his pocket with typed questions and blanks for answers, like the questionnaires papers send out at vacation time.

  This is no simple reporter. He observes me, with a malicious glint in his eyes.

  ‘Have you been in swimming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘A half hour.’

  ‘Do you always go swimming for half an hour?’

  What to say? I say Yes, and he writes Yes, gravely.

  He pauses a moment, slyer than ever.

  ‘Meat or fish?’

  This must mean: ‘Are you a fish or a meat eater?

  ‘Fish.’

  He gloats:

  ‘I was sure of it!’

  And to him it really seems important.

  ‘Work in the morning? At night?’

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Blood pressure?’

  ‘Medium. 12½–7½.’

  He notes it down, delighted with himself and with me.

  Two or three questions of the same kind which I’ve forgotten and he thanks me and leaves, his duty done.

  The third is from a big Rome daily where, he tells me at once, he only writes for the literary page. An intellectual. A real one. He speaks only Italian and is accompanied by a blonde Viennese of twenty, a painter, who is to act as interpreter. She repeats the question to me in French first, but since I feel that this French is very laboured and approximate, she moves to English.

  I understand enough Italian to realize that she translates only a third of the questions and a quarter of the answers and we, the journalist and I, end by speaking to each other directly in a mixture of three languages.

  He isn’t interested in Maigret. Durrell, Faulkner, Hemingway, Sartre, the younger generation …

  Above all this younger generation which worries him, they suddenly are arriving too fast, like a train that is going to knock down the station.

  He tells me about his concern. He hasn’t come to listen to me, but to have his worries confirmed.

  ‘You are a pessimist, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m a born optimist.’

  ‘Even with things going the way they are?’

  ‘How are they going?’

  ‘Atomic war, crime, population explosion, girls …’

  I play at being contrary, to prove to him that juvenile crime has not increased in the last hundred years, that at fifteen, his ancestors, if they were nobles (they must have been), already had at least one death on their record, since a young man had to prove himself by fighting in a duel.

  He held that the world was in turmoil; he desperately wanted me to paint it black and my optimism only reinforced his feelings, of course.

  ‘But you’re interested in men!’

  ‘In man. And if one looks at his history not just in terms of a few centuries, but since the beginning of time …’

  I improvise. I’m not entirely serious. He sinks deeper into depression.

  ‘A history that will end in an atomic cataclysm.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Suddenly I tell him a story, very intense.

  ‘Take staphylococci aurei instead. They lived in peace an
d prospered, because we hadn’t found a defence against them. You see! Suddenly a gentleman invents penicillin and generations of staphylococci are exterminated … Those that escape mutate, God knows how, and penicillin no longer destroys them …’

  Next a new antibiotic, streptomycin or the like. A new extermination. A new mutation.

  Aureomycin … I go on …

  ‘Twenty times … twenty-eight times, I think … And now these devils of staphylococci aurei anticipate future attacks, prepare for them so well that the new strains are often impervious to the new antibiotics. They confound science!

  ‘And with all this,’ I say, ‘do you despair of man, who is so much further evolved than the staphylococcus aureus?’

  He left deeply disturbed, I’d swear. Because of noise too.

  This ‘modern plague’ of noise, this bustle that no longer allows man …

  I remind him that in seventeenth-century memoirs, for instance, Parisians were already complaining of the noise, of the traffic, of the vehicles that scraped against the walls, of the cracking of whips, the cries of street vendors, etc.

  Imagine a post station relay …

  I know. Parisian doctors have just demanded larger apartments in public housing, attributing a great number of nervous ailments to lack of privacy. Three rooms for a household with two or three children …

  The peasants of earlier times had one room for themselves and their nineteen or twenty children. And often it opened on the stable! I cite the narrow streets of Naples, of Rome, even of Venice, the houses there where there was a whole family to a room, too.

  The truth is that in those times one didn’t worry about the common people.

  And Versailles? What a beehive! Every cell was occupied and there wasn’t a square yard of free space, so to speak.

  Papers only print ready-made ideas. Psychologists, sociologists, seem never to have read any history outside their manuals.

  What will this journalist’s article be like? It probably won’t contain a word of what I’ve said. Perhaps, in our three-language dialogue, neither of us has understood the thoughts of the other.

  I’m waiting for the fourth, who will be here for two weeks; he has already interviewed me once in Cannes. A first-rate man. We met on the beach where he was with his children, I with mine, and we postponed a serious interview until later.

  Serious? About what? Why? I have nothing to tell him he doesn’t already know.

  But he is a journalist, I am a novelist. So, an interview.

  He must wonder, as he stares at the sea, what new question to ask me.

  What happens to all my words that people print?

  Previously I used to answer:

  ‘Nothing.’

  And I would say whatever came into my mind.

  Later I saw that all those words thrown out like confetti did not disappear. They finally were formed into a whole that became a legend, and this legend in turn took on a character of its own.

  Hitler must have spoken of the Jews as I spoke Tuesday of the staphylococci aurei because someone asked him to speak and this appeared to him as a good subject. I’m beginning to believe that he didn’t know that he would be forced to return to it and finally to kill I don’t know how many millions of Israelites.

  De Gaulle spoke of the greatness of France because the Frenchman loves to hear his greatness talked about. Where will this lead him? He doesn’t know himself. Now it is his legend that takes over and rules him.

  I’m not interested in politics. But still I’m intrigued by a problem posed by politics: that of sincerity and insincerity.

  That of politicians as well as that of the crowd which follows or attacks them.

  If all of them are irresponsible? If …

  That’s enough for today. I’ve mixed everything up. As I do when I’m falling asleep. Just as last night when I was trying to sleep and all this – and many other things which I have fortunately forgotten – passed through my head.

  Then I took an Imménoctal.

  Monday, 1 August

  I would be curious to leaf through an anthology (which may exist, for someone must have thought of it before me): a collection of all the national songs of the world, present and, preferably, past.

  The comparison between them would be revealing, it seems to me.

  First, the changes in the course of time, which would give an indication, or rather illuminate the evolution of the sentiments of human groups.

  Villages, then provinces, then nations. Each village is persuaded that it is more intelligent and above all stronger than its neighbour.

  I believe that one would find almost the same thing in the national songs, the same words, the same phrases: we’re the strongest, the bravest. We are calm, peaceful, but our arms are ready, prepared to defend our rights, our liberties …

  At the discovery of America, it was found that each Indian tribe had its motto. The same for each black tribe in Africa. No doubt in Asia too.

  Peaceful and strong. Fearless. No one is afraid.

  Approximately the same attitude is found in children.

  Check also how many times the word ‘God’ recurs. Each tribe, each nation, is protected by its god, who is often, and increasingly so, the same as its neighbours’.

  I would like to compare all these songs, sentence by sentence, word by word.

  Huge scholarly volumes are written on the style of this or that writer, on his use of adverbs or commas, etc.

  Wouldn’t it be at least as interesting, if not more so … But, once more, no doubt it’s been done, just as the little ideas, the embryo ideas that I put in these notebooks must have been expressed many times more fully and knowledgeably. That’s why I only touch on them, out of a sort of modesty, sure I’m repeating myself, and continually tempted to put a final period to these notes which would make a laughing stock of me if they ever saw the light.

  What I just said about national songs is connected with what I was writing yesterday. The need of peoples to believe in something, in themselves. The need to create heroes for themselves. They believe that they decide and that they are free. But they are slaves.

  Who really decides for the masses? One often speaks of financiers, of great private interest groups, in copper, in oil, etc.

  And if they themselves are only pawns?

  Who decides? No one, I think. The cohesion of History is not apparent because it is visible (?) only after the fact.

  So there would not be any great men among those who seem to rule the people, and the others, scholars, artists, really capture only a moment in the evolution of the world, explain only the small truth of an instant. Rather, they are mediums, what were once called prophets. One out of a hundred thousand or out of a million sees aright, expresses a truth that is found to coincide with the truth of their period or of the next.

  They are all only human beings. And no one yet has given a definition of the human being.

  Isn’t it remarkable that we continue to seek one?

  Along the way, we find everything, gunpowder, the compass, the infinitely small, and the laws that rule the infinitely large, atomic and electronic energy.

  We do the best we can.

  Wednesday, 3 August

  This question of sincerity or of insincerity is only, after all, the question of good and evil. (I wrote only as if that simplified the problem.) But I’ve ceased to believe in evil. Only in illness. And that’s questionable, too.

  On the subject of the ‘menders of destinies’ whom I believe I’ve already mentioned, a detail comes back to me which I’d forgotten. When very young, I used to dream of being one, or, on the other hand, of benefiting from their advice.

  But now I’m sure of one thing: towards the age of twenty, when I was beginning to write popular novels and stories to earn a living, writing in the evening, for myself, pages that remained unpublished, it occurred to me to want to work in peace, without material ambition. I would have liked to be given so much a month for life, regulating
my time, taking care of my health, etc., and I would have written with no worry. I would have been ready, at that period, to give up my literary rights for such an arrangement. And I wouldn’t have asked for luxury. A decent life with a modicum of comfort in a modest neighbourhood. So I wasn’t materially ambitious. Did I become so later on? I suspect so. A house mouse and a field mouse at the same time.

  Same day, afternoon

  Still on the subject of cynicism. I think that a king believes, or rather used to believe, he was king by divine right, used to believe in his mission; in the necessity, in the name of his country or dynasty, to fight his enemies, indeed even members of his family. The Pope ends by believing himself Pope. The general believes in the necessity of sacrificing a hundred thousand men in a battle. Truman believed in his right to drop an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

  I once knew a gentleman farmer, a young thirty-year-old count, who owned a huge manor and several farms. He had just married a girl who was not an aristocrat but who brought him twenty-five or twenty-eight farms as dowry. He bought his clothes at bargain stores and they lived penuriously in a château crammed with treasures. I remember some details. Next to a telephone which might be used by the rare guests, there was a saucer and a sign: ‘Please deposit X francs for each call.’ This was during the war. One could not make long-distance calls. So a call was very cheap.

  One day we were talking about marrying for love, and he expressed himself frankly.

  ‘This is something forbidden to us. We have received a heritage from our ancestors. We are only trustees during our lifetime. We must pass it on intact, and if possible increased, to our heirs.’

  He was sincere; he ate little even when he was hungry. Though he was a young man, and this was not in the last century, but in 1942.

  He did the marketing himself; after having ordered fish for his wife and himself, he asked for fish that was less fresh for the servants.

  He saw no harm in it.

  We speak of conscience which alerts us to distinguish between good and evil. How can it vary from place to place and period to period?

  My count had an easy conscience. So did Truman. Also the cannibals whom I’ve met in equatorial forests. It’s only the sense of sin that creates the sin, the taboos of the place and the period.