When I Was Old (12 page)

True!

But since there are a few pages left, I'm not copying them, only collecting them here in order that this monument to naïveté and pretension (even the word ‘monument'!) will to some extent be complete.

D. will read them.

‘A man's ambition for his children.

‘Need to make them climb a ladder …

‘Most of the time, however, it isn't in terms of money. Rarely the ambition to make a merchant, a financier, etc., of them (unless that is already the family profession – and even then!).

‘Nor ambition for power. A peasant will rarely say:

‘ “He will be a deputy, or a minister …”

‘Deeper.
Unconsciously
an ambition for usefulness, for
greatness.
'

‘The reproach critics most often make is that I choose my characters from people who are not civilized, and, as a result, they seem to say, incapable of resisting their instinct and passions. Aren't these critics the ones who think of themselves as civilized because they have digested a few historical dates, won some diplomas, also the ones who take our fleeting civilization for definitive and our youthful morals for humanism?

‘Don't biologists, for the most part, begin with the simplest forms for their study of life? And, today when the doctor and the psychologist have new ways of looking at man, don't they too study the most limited forms?

‘I have observed, besides knowing it by my own experience, that intellectuals, civilized or cultivated men, react to deep instincts and passions in the same way that others do. The only difference is that they feel it necessary to justify their attitudes.

‘Little difference between the behaviour of a
Napoleon and any ambitious small-town man. A matter of scale, of proportion. The fundamental elements are the same. Balzac behaved as naïvely in private life as the simplest, the most elementary of his characters.

‘Rages, resentments, ridiculous petty intrigues in a Hugo, even a Pasteur. I have seen the greatest doctors plotting shabbily to win a medal, a decoration, a chair at the Academy of Medicine.

‘No difference between basic behaviour, reactions to passions, among primitive and cultivated man except that the mechanism is complicated by more or less specious reasonings, by rationalizations (Memorial at Saint Helena) and by so-called problems of conscience.

‘Maurice acts exactly like his concierge or his wine merchant, with the single difference that he gets a book or an article out of what he considers his unworthiness.
Idem
for Graham Greene and the others. Freud in his private life is the prototype of those he describes. Same for Dostoevsky.

‘The Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and all the other playwrights have done nothing but take passions in their natural state – the passions of the man in the street – and for the purpose of highlighting, dramatizing, and amplifying them have attributed them to kings, emperors and other great personages.

‘If I have chosen the limited man (not always. See
Le Président
,
Le Fils
, and other novels) it is just to avoid theatrical explanations, artificial reactions created by education or culture.

‘Behaviour is less falsified, more visible, purer, in the simple.

‘Persistence in using words that no longer correspond to concepts or scientific theories of the moment – or to the beliefs of those who use them.

‘In particular, words borrowed from the religions – including the most ancient and the most foreign.

‘Haven't we kept mainly the words that express a curse, guilt, a prohibition, a punishment, etc.?

‘A whole heritage of terrors, from the most distant times, maintained by a hundred religions, which we preserve, which we transmit through words, to our children at the same time that – ironically – we try to give them the most rational and scientific idea of the world.

‘So we extend thousands of years of terror!'

There! I've finished my
collage
. Without rereading it. That's wiser.

D. is a courageous woman. Operation with slight anaesthesia: a bottle of champagne.

I don't want to end at the bottom of the page.

‘Have you nothing to add?'

What's the use?

‘No, Your Honour.'

All that's left is to open the window.

Adios
, notebook!

I promised myself there wouldn't be a second notebook. This morning writing in this one, without writing any number on the cover, I tell myself again that there won't be another perhaps, but perhaps I'm not entirely sincere.

To tell the truth, I missed it. And yet I've passed a part of the time since Venice first in a clinic for a simple operation for appendicitis, then in bed after I got home (a few hours later, when I thought I had recovered) because of some virus.

Then Bernard de Fallois, who has been working on his book on me, without asking me stupid questions.

But once back in my study, I missed writing. The study seemed more empty to me. This need to write here, no matter what, may only come during those hours of the day when I'm waiting for D. to finish working so that we can go out, or simply waiting to be with her. Will this be better next month when she will have two secretaries instead of one? Man is not made to live alone.

Anyway, I promise not to put down the slightest abstract idea. What I shall write – if I continue – I don't know at all. No abstract ideas, anyway. Otherwise, in the long run I would have to think before I write, which goes against my principles. (Have I principles? They are
attributed to me. People remind me of pronouncements I made twenty or thirty years ago.)

Today, I'm giving in, really, to a kind of anger, a certain resentment. I believe I've spoken of all the journalists and critics who have streamed through Echandens during the past months.

The first was a woman, L., a friend who is editor of a big magazine. She had telephoned asking permission to send one of her writers to interview D. immediately. This was three days before our departure for the Cannes Festival. We didn't want to refuse, and while we were getting ready for this departure, fittings, luggage, instructions to the household staff, children, etc., we had this charming woman and her photographer at our heels from morning to night.

On our return from Cannes, three weeks later, it was a certain C., from another important weekly. C. stayed four or five days – with his photographer. To both, I repeated that I refused to talk about money, that I would not answer – nor would my wife – any question on this subject.

Before leaving, C. read us his article, in which, in fact, there was nothing about money. I warned him against his editor, who, I know, loves to raise such questions. He made us every promise imaginable.

The two articles waited in type until the news (Brigitte Bardot, Vadim, Distel, Yves Montand …) left space for them and as it happened this week both periodicals published their interviews at the same time.

In one: ‘The man who pumps billions from his
inkwell.' In the other: ‘The man who sold the television rights to Maigret for a billion three hundred thousand francs.' And my wife handles millions (daily, according to them). A thirty-six-room château!

I don't want to get up to copy the exact dates. And in one, our love becomes the panting romance of a popular novel.

Result: begging letters begin to arrive. There will be more next week. It is as regular as clockwork. If an article appears in an English magazine, England ‘begs' for two weeks. Professionals. Sometimes, a year later, I get exactly the same letter from people who forget that they have already written. Then it's Sweden, Denmark, Italy …

Some readers are indignant at our boasting, sure that we are the ones who talked complacently about our income.

However, the figures are wrong. C. told me that they estimated the amount of our BBC contract, which no one knows, according to averages calculated as exactly as possible. But since this contract is a partnership contract, no one, not even ourselves, can foresee what it will yield.

What infuriates me is the rank prejudice shown by the owners of the big newspapers and magazines. It's a matter of policy, the same in every country. These people are almost all great captains of industry. They handle billions, not every year, but every week. They have five, six estates, country places, town houses, yachts.

For the most part they have inherited their fortunes, all they had to do was to increase them.

But each week they publicize the hugeness of the fees, or income, of this star, that painter, that writer.

It's a sort of alibi for them, an excuse. We act as lightning rods. No one speaks about them, about what they earn, what they spend, but everyone knows the falsely astronomical figures of artists' earnings.

I think that if I were to read the two articles about us with different names I would hate the people they were written about.

Is that the purpose? One begins to wonder. Upper-middle-class jealousy?

When Buffet, by a miracle, after starving – I've starved too, like Chaplin, like so many others, and I'm very glad of it – when Buffet, at thirty, sells his canvases for two million bad francs and buys a château that is in fact quite dilapidated – the papers positively organize campaigns against him.

Because he earns money, he can't be a real painter. His prices will go down. He's just about finished. His downfall is at hand.

The public reads all this and passes on! This week, in the eyes of thousands of people I pass for a lucky dog who piles up royalties – a good thing I didn't steal them – caring nothing for the distress of so many homes, for the ill-housed, ill-fed, the sick children and the old who are dying for want of care.

Not a word about forty years of efforts which were sometimes almost desperate. I am just a juggler. I've won in the literary lottery. I'm a clever fellow or, at best, I've known how to take advantage of human stupidity.

Raimu once spoke to me of his bitterness on this subject, and I wrote a short article about it.

It's not the first time it's happened to me. Probably it's not the last. Must I close my door to journalists? That would be useless. Three years ago, the representative of a big English daily said to me:

‘I've been particularly commissioned to ask you a question about your income. My editor insists. If you don't give me an answer, I'll invent one and you can always sue me.'

I answered him:

‘I'm so little involved in money matters that I would have a hard time telling you what I earn. I'm sorry for the people who are so concerned.'

Which he translated in his article into something like:

‘Simenon told us that money is coming in so fast that he can't keep track of it …'

Disgusting, isn't it? It is, however, what literary history is made up of, and we are judged by it.

An excellent lesson in humility, if I needed one, and which should be enough to remove all desire to set down opinions in these notebooks. I finally had a limited edition (two thousand copies, I think) printed of a pamphlet: ‘Le Roman de l'Homme' (lecture at the Brussels Exhibition). I sent it, as a token of friendship, to thirty friends and to those people who, I know, follow my writing assiduously. I didn't receive more than five acknowledgements.

My wife and I take pains to answer all letters. I go
through all the manuscripts and books that are sent me. Often I read them thoroughly. And I write personally to the author.

Nielsen did the publicity, less than usual, I suppose, because of the small number of copies printed and also because the edition was sold out. For my novels, I receive a great number of press clippings. For this little book, there was only one review, or rather a single mention, in
Paris-Presse.
And even that only quoted an anecdote about Charlie Chaplin. It is now going the rounds of papers, especially the English ones. About the rest of it, nothing. Yes:
Paris-Presse
says that this book, in spite of its small number of pages, is packed with intelligence. Thanks.

I was quite wrong in publishing it. I didn't want to do it. I gave in when people wrote me about it from all over.

Serves me right!

I had noted on a bit of paper:

Nothing important. Memories. It will come back, no doubt. For the moment, we've finished packing. D. and I
are going to take a rest in Versailles for six days. She's the one who needs it most. As for me, after the operation, and especially after the antibiotics, I would like to get back in shape for work. In a hurry to plunge into a novel. Now, all I can do is hope. We'll be back around the 10th. End of the month, the 29th, is Johnny's birthday and I can't be working on a book then. Will I have time between the 10th and the 26th or 27th? It's unlikely.

We have the best-organized house there is. But the better organized we are, the less leisure we have because we become slaves to routine. We have to eat at an exact hour (give or take five minutes) as in an army camp. The least slip-up, the least whim, spoils everybody's schedule.

But to write a novel I need almost a month of peace without any disturbances (seven to eight days of writing, it is true, but to get into the mood and identify with my characters it takes me longer and longer. I don't believe it is age, weakness, drying up, but that it has more to do with my becoming harder and harder to please. There was a time – twenty-five years ago! – when I used to say to myself: ‘It's good enough for the public.' Now, it's no longer the public I'm preoccupied with. Perhaps I'm wrong).

So, we'll just hope. No journalists, friends, obligations. And not even world events must trouble me!

Each time I think I am ready, something makes me put it off three days, then eight, and I end up letting my characters evaporate.

D. struggles with the mail, the house, organizes,
smooths out difficulties. She exhausts herself so that nothing may bother me, and seeing her struggle this way distresses me.

Besides, I am more and more the paterfamilias. I'm not sorry. On the contrary. I would like – like D. – to be with the children all the time. And it's the nurse and the staff who see the most of them!

Well then! Plane at three o'clock. Versailles at about five thirty. Bringing a maid so that both of us will be free of cares. D. is bringing her typewriter.

This shouldn't be taken for bitterness. I was feeling low when I thought I was writing less because I was beginning to be impotent. This must be the thing that haunts all creative people. (I don't like the word ‘artist', which, like the word ‘poet', seems pretentious, quaint to me, and the term ‘creative person' even more so. How to put it? How designate a profession which basically doesn't exist?)

Summing up, I've decided, after a good deal of worry, that it's my external life, more complicated all the time, that keeps me from writing as much as I used to do. And maybe the fact that my books are both shorter and simpler.

Pierre is playing under my windows. I just went to look at him.

I want to go down to be with him. D. is in her boudoir and I want to go up to see her. Then to look for Marie-Jo, whom I've barely seen today, then to go get Johnny from school. So I feel guilty about spending a few minutes on these lines which have no interest, no importance, except, perhaps, later for the children.

And this gets me to my note ‘The hundred days in Tucson'. But this morning, that would take me too far afield. Maybe at Versailles, where we'll be on holiday? Holiday? In any case, we'll both be there and I'll be able to talk to D. at any hour of the day without someone – other than the telephone – interrupting, which rarely happens here. To have a ten-minute conversation we have to take the car and drive somewhere!

In Versailles since Wednesday for a conventional rest in a conventional hotel where, as in Venice, I find people doing exactly the same thing I am.

I'm amazed to observe again what has struck me so often. The lack of cleanliness, of real comfort in what are called luxury hotels. How can so many people be satisfied with this? Some spend virtually their entire lives in such places. Served by strangers who come and go in your privacy by relays, appear and disappear without your knowing their names. Is this a personnel crisis, as the management claims? It's possible.

For a number of years already, in France, in England, in the United States and elsewhere, I have been appalled at certain specimens of fauna in these places: valets, floor waiters, chambermaids, especially the ones on night duty. Where do they come from? One guesses at dreadful secrets. They answer you with surly or scornful indifference.

What is there under these uniforms of questionable
cleanliness, questionable as the armchairs, the draperies, the pantries on each floor where our coffee or tea is prepared, among the brooms and God knows what?

The public dreams of this luxury life, which few housewives would find acceptable in their own homes, with the negligence, the lick-and-a-promise cleanliness.

I looked back at entries. They don't seem interesting any more. I'll explain the last. When we were in Tucson waiting for Johnny's birth, we had to be separated from Marc for the first time, who went ahead to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. Marc was ten years old. He didn't read French. My English was still poor. And he would have had trouble making out my handwriting.

During the hundred and some days of this separation I wrote him a letter in English every morning on the typewriter, racking my brains to interest him, each time trying to think of a ‘joke'. Although I was sure he never read these letters to the end. Did he even open them?

I wonder if these notebooks will have the same fate. I'm probably wrong, since Johnny seems curious about everything I do and write. Perhaps in the end they all will be interested in my chatter?

Why do I want them to be? It won't teach them anything, except that I am much pettier than they may have imagined.

In fact, that's just what I'd like to happen. To be known in my natural stature, not as a father, not as a writer, but as a man with all that the word implies. Isn't that the best way to help them if they need help some day?