When I Was Old (13 page)

‘My father was …'

No halo.

‘My father was like me.'

A little less good. I hope so.

And now for those hundred days, which had nothing Napoleonic about them. It was very hot in Tucson. Those hundred and some letters in a foreign language probably gave me more trouble than the hardest novel. Not to mention the pain of separation.

I'm coming to the lukewarm fruit dish, which no longer has any importance and which came back to my mind, I don't know why. That will be for tomorrow or another day. I'm getting lazy and above all I see no reason – today, anyway – to tell these tales with no beginning or end and giving the impression, wrongly, of attaching importance to them.

Recently one of the greatest French cancerologists died of cancer, and up to the end his colleagues managed to hide the nature of his illness from him. This doesn't seem extraordinary to me. I've seen other doctors in similar situations. And probably it's the same for everyone. We are lucid, sometimes perspicacious, even clairvoyant about what concerns others. But the nearer people are to us, the more our judgement is likely to be distorted. I don't think a healer has power over his own.

D., last evening, reread my first notebook. We talked about it this morning. I believe that I understand her
better, or rather that in the future it will happen less and less often that I misunderstand her for short periods. It's more difficult because she lives not outside but inside me. Thank you, D.

Paradoxical. I think that conventions, basically, if one traces them far enough, come from a need to be singular.

Example. My grandfather was named Christian. He was no more Catholic than any other person. Average. This name was given him because in Belgium it is unusual, and his parents must not have known that it meant Christian.
*
*

My father, through a kind of family piety, gave this name to his two boys, my brother and me.

In turn, I gave this same name, also three times, to my three male children, who will no doubt do the same thing with theirs.

Did my uncles do the same thing? I think so. So that one day there will be dozens, perhaps hundreds of Simenons with Christian as their given names.

Not by choice. By tradition. And if they are asked why, they will think that once upon a time it was a profession of faith.

Idem
. In my parents' house, each person's birthday was celebrated the day before the actual day. In order to avoid having friends, acquaintances, congratulate before the family did.

I've continued the custom. My children will adopt it in
turn. Then their grandchildren, but they will no longer know why.

Families invent traditions, transmit them. Nations too.

How can one not deceive oneself when, centuries later, one tries to explain them ‘logically'?

We create – create for others – obligations, which finally no one dares to break.

Or even obligations which in turn threaten to become a matter of morals. In any case, a form of slavery.

One man's singularity becomes, at a given moment, decades or hundreds of years later, an inexplicable rite. Or an affectation. Only a few wore Eton ties at first. It was a countersign. Then hundreds wore them, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

The fruit dish will come later. It seems too long to explain. I would like to note here only items of a few lines. And things as badly written as possible so as to stay away from literature. As I sometimes write to my friends; the style of my letters is in inverse proportion to my friendship. With strangers, I am careful. With acquaintances, a little less so. With those whom I really love, not at all. Watching one's language, whatever one may say, distorts thought. I prefer the approximate word, the ordinary, the first at hand to the precise word which has slowed down thought for even a few seconds and by that fact has robbed it of spontaneity.

I have some of the same feeling about my novels. That's why it is so laborious for me to correct them. One of the reasons. The principal reason being that once written they are alien to me.

I must get to it, just to be done with it, even though it now seems to me without interest. I ask myself even why I made a note here that I ought to talk about it.

I must have been a little over seventeen when I wrote two pages under the title ‘Le Compotier Tiède'. Not a story, nor altogether a prose poem. One of those things one writes at that age and gets published in little magazines. The ‘Compotier' was also published in a fairly important review in Brussels,
La Revue Sincère
, and I was recently surprised to see in Scharbaeck, I believe, a Rue Léon Debatty, named after its editor. So I too, against all I really thought I believed, I almost went the way of the little reviews.

It doesn't matter. This worthless piece of writing still ought to be (?) in my file. It would be easier just to insert it here but I hate the thought of digging up this sort of thing. What is important (in my eyes and actually more than it seemed a few days ago) is the theme, the sunny courtyard of our house on the Rue de l'Enseignement, in the morning, at around ten o'clock, with my mother, in the kitchen, making preserves. On the table, in a shaft of sunshine, a dish of tepid stewed prunes. The smell all over the house.

I knew I was leaving, that all these things, including my mother, were already part of my past. It was a sort of goodbye to my childhood. But my mother did not suspect it. She thought I would be there for a long time. Only I myself knew that the cords were cut.

To some extent that is the theme of all my novels. Reality which trembles on the brink of unreality, making way for new reality. Severed cords.

Now I would prefer to say severed umbilical cord. A feeling I have again with every new departure. Because there is no more substance to be drawn out. It has all been used up and one must look for new substance elsewhere.

In psychology, the boy who stays with his mother is treated as a neurotic. In a lifetime, is there only
one
umbilical cord to cut? To linger in a street, in a city, in a group, isn't that neurotic too, and a weakness?

Someone searched for the reasons for my perpetual departures in
Pedigree
: hatred of my background, neuroses, etc. It's so much more simple! Need of new nourishment, even if, at certain moments, I've appeared to hate, or I've believed that I hated, the environment I was leaving.

I begin to regret having written
Pedigree
, where everyone is always finding wrong reasons for my behaviour. Behaviour that they believe exceptional, even neurotic, when in my eyes it is quite natural.

Each time I have settled down, I have thought it would be for life. Fortunately, my instincts have been too strong for me.

In Marsilly, when I moved into a small country house called La Richardière, my first home after the Maigrets, I was so convinced that it was final that when I bought an enormous stone statue from an antique dealer in La Rochelle (three blocks on top of each other), an
eighteenth- or nineteenth-century virgin and child with the head missing; when I'd had it set up in the woods a hundred yards from my window, I decided it would be my tombstone.

I left La Richardière three years later, without having lived there more than three or four months a year, for that was the period of my trips to Africa and around Europe.

Nevertheless I had electricity, running water, heating, etc., etc., put in, planted trees, including walnut trees which would take twenty years to produce their first crop.

There too I cut the cord. The umbilical cord.

What was it I wanted to say about the Place des Vosges, which was, before Marsilly, my first household? I've forgotten. There I had a bar built in. The furniture was ultra-modern, that is,
Exposition des Arts Décoratifs 1925
. What originality! … And every evening I used to go to Montparnasse as young people went to Saint-Germain-des-Prés later. I wore elephant-leg pants in
bois de rose
colour, as people later flaunted dirt and wore their hair long. No originality either then or now.

Like measles – or ‘mange' for dogs. It was nothing to be proud of. Should one be ashamed of it?

Mankind changes so little. And there is so little difference between one man and another, between an adolescent and an old man.

We are scarcely able to tell one Chinese from another. In the United States, they find it hard to distinguish the French from Italians or Germans. They are all Europeans.

And we are all men.

If only one could remember that each time one meets with another near-self.

Still at Versailles. Life together, pleasant and gentle. Hours in which nothing much happens, or nothing happens at all and which one remembers later nevertheless as one's happiest hours. You will see, D. You are still too young to know.

My dear Sigaux:

First because of your letters and also because of your considerate friendship, and also because of my trust in you, I have just decided to do something that I always find unpleasant. When it is a matter of a book, a study in a review, or a critical piece about myself, it is a bit like going to see a film taken from one of my novels. I've seen only five or six of these films, because it upsets me to see my characters changed by the director, the adapters, and the actors into beings who are strangers to me.

I react all the more so, nine times out of ten, when it concerns my own person, my intentions, the mechanics of creativity, etc. … Things that seem simple to me suddenly become complicated, and to tell the truth I hardly ever recognize myself. So I am a poor judge, as must be the case for every writer. Moreover, as I said to Dr R. when he came to see me for the first time, it is not my business. He very considerately asked my permission to
write the book. I stressed that my authorization was not needed, that anyone had the right to write such a book, with the single condition of not putting words in my mouth that I had not said. I also told him, at that time, that I would not read his manuscript. I have done so. I told you why. And it matters very little that I was somewhat hurt, this does not constitute a judgement on my part.

However, to you who know me well, who have written what I consider the best pages about me, I would like to give a few impressions. Please understand that I am not asking Dr R. to change anything in his text. I am going to give it back to Nielsen at lunch, without comment, leaving it up to him to decide if he wants to publish it or not. So the notes in the margin are only a commentary that has no other purpose than to give you some very personal impressions.

First, it appears that Dr R. has taken a conventional point of view, I mean morally conventional, throughout. This is apparent particularly when he speaks of good and evil, of sexuality, specifically of the wish or of the temptation to murder.

Nowhere do I feel any of the biological understanding I would have expected from a doctor. And he read ‘Roman de l'Homme', which does not appear to have enlightened him as to my intention, the intention which is the basis of all my writings. In fact, from the beginning, from childhood, I have never been revolted by poverty, by mediocrity, etc. … (or very little), but only by such morality, and if I have, from the beginning,
tended to show man totally naked, it has been just because of this feeling. Each stage is marked, it seems to me, by a greater detachment from this morality, a more direct approach to man as he is and not as he would like to be, or as he believes he is.

Beyond this, R. has confused religious (cosmic) sense with Catholicism, which is something quite different.

In my opinion, he has committed another basic error. Though he recognizes that I only trust instinct, and accordingly devotes his most important chapter to this, he gives an explanation that misconceives the place of instinct in my development. For example, he speaks of my Balzac period, in some way allowing it to be understood that in the
Testament Donadieu
I was trying to imitate Balzac. Actually, I was talking only about what I was discovering by living at La Rochelle, and by being the friend of the big shipowners of that city. As to the length of that novel, it was decided (not that I attach any importance to it) by the fact that this book was an assignment from the
Petit Parisien,
which requires very long novels.

Also, all the novels of that period are characterized not by my desire to create ‘suspense' but by the fact that they all were intended to be published as serials.

My Conrad period? That would seem intentional – entirely opposite to instinct. Not a single Conrad character, not a Conrad theme in my novels which he calls exotic. I was travelling a great deal at that period. And, quite simply, I told about what I was seeing as, in the first Maigrets, written on a boat, I talked about canals, about the North, about the ports, etc.

Do you understand my position? It is the direction of my development that is falsified by his commentary. There was nothing intentional about it, except to escape from literary and moral convention, and also to escape from the demands of newspapers and publishers.

I knew where I was going – from the very beginning – but I did not know how I would get there. And I did not know what I would discover when I was free from all that I had overcome without meaning to.

Where I expected R. to be most original – because of his profession – he went back to
Pedigree
, like P., and drew almost the same easy conclusions from this book. He also borrows a good deal from his predecessors, P., N., among others, and the best is from you.

I won't quarrel with his division into three periods. But he does not give their true meaning to these periods. Still less to my intentions. But perhaps that indicates that my novels do not clearly say what I wanted them to say.

He did not understand one of the most important in my eyes:
Lettre à Mon Juge
. Still less did he understand
Dimanche
, where, like a Catholic
petit-bourgeois
, he sees the praying mantis in the poor primitive child! Strictly speaking that is his right, but it makes me gnash my teeth. Have I made myself so little clear on this point?