When I Was Old (17 page)

The mayor and the chief of police come to meet him, drive him to the Plaza.

The same evening, when the crowd is looking for him, he takes a walk in the streets without being recognized.

‘Everyone knew me,' he says, ‘and I knew no one. I had no one to talk to!'

The crowd frightened him. He felt hunted. Solitude frightened him too. He was very young. I think that this marked him for life.

All this, he told us in a soft, intense voice. Oona wasn't listening:

‘I've heard it a hundred times!'

D. tried to listen while talking about children and labour pains.

The Chaplins, who had planned to leave at ten o'clock, left at midnight. Miller, very much moved, went back to the drawing room with us, and we talked about it.

D. spoke the truth, calmly. I don't remember her words. It is no less significant that we have just been present at an act, that there was a great deal of ‘showmanship' in what we had just seen of a life.

I was obliged, although I share her opinion, to contradict her, brusquely, for the truth would have hurt Miller. To him, it was one of the greatest evenings of his life.

And he too brings a good deal of ‘showmanship' to his life.

To say it to him would not only be to hurt him but to take from him a part of his self-confidence. To take from him a little of his faith. So that there I was, in spite of myself, for more than two hours (for this all ended at three in the morning) obliged to argue, against my convictions, against my wife, whom I agreed with.

I betrayed her in order not to hurt a man whom I admire, of whom I have become fond, but who is nothing to me.

Stupid, isn't it? If only I had been able to give her a sign, let her know I was lying, that I was arguing against my own convictions.

For Chaplin continues his ‘act'. A different ‘act', closer, very close to himself, but different from reality all the same.

All this is disconnected, on purpose.

Johnny understood. Wonderful Johnny!

I'll come back to it perhaps. I must go wake D., who finally agreed to lie down for an hour after sleeping three or four hours a night for several days.

Good morning again, D. Good morning, my old Kay, whom I never forget and who remains dear to me!

Without needing to reread it, I know that everything I wrote yesterday is almost true but not quite. I would have liked to make clear, through two lives, certain kinds of men who ‘take' without giving, quite naturally, because they have remained children. So cruel and egotistical, like children. That's what is called Bohemian.

And Ch. Ch. remains a Bohemian (in his soul) in spite of his seven children with Oona, not counting Sidney.

Amazing life. Up to the age of fifty-five, he felt no need to tie himself to anything or anyone. He meets a kid of seventeen, marries her, and here he is, at seventy-one, father of seven young children, the last of whom is six months old. He loves them. He loves Oona. He loves his present life. But …

Same for Miller. He is in love again. He is going to take her to Spain or somewhere else – he doesn't yet know – a young woman from Hamburg who has two children. His own? He sent them back, not to their mother, who no longer wants them, but to his third wife, who may not want them in six months either.

I don't judge him. Once again, they are sincere, both of them.

I feel I still haven't expressed my thoughts, my feelings. No doubt it isn't possible.

The 17th already! If I want to write a novel before Christmas, it's time. I hope to begin it the end of next week and I'll do my shopping first.

Yesterday I received a telegram from Georges Charensol, of
Nouvelles Littéraires
, asking me urgently for an article on the occasion of the
Prix National des Lettres
which my friend Blaise Cendrars ought to receive next Saturday or Monday unless there's some last-minute manoeuvre. I said Yes, of course. I've sent an open letter, since I haven't written any articles for a long time, and I am ninety-nine per cent sincere in it.

As with the
Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris
, this prize is not awarded until the winners are dying and it is almost always given to them on their deathbeds. Jean-Paul Fargue, Carco, were in that condition. Cendrars has been paralysed for more than two years and if I haven't gone to see him it is because, according to what I'm told, he feels humiliated in front of his friends.

In my open letter, I speak of Henry Miller and of Chaplin. Cendrars is a Bohemian too, a sort of perennial anarchist, and I would like to modify what I wrote day before yesterday on this subject.

All in all, these notebooks are like my novels. I take up a subject or a character in a novel. It continues to pursue me because I have the impression of not having gone to the end of my thought, of having left it unfinished, or inaccurate. After a certain time, I take the subject or the character up again in another form.

There are some I've taken up five or six times and I'm not yet satisfied. Some critics reproach me for it, or speak pretentiously of my ‘themes' as if it were a matter of obsessions. But this is accepted in painters, who paint a
Pietà
or a vase of flowers twenty times over.

I'm coming back to Miller, to Cendrars, to Chaplin. We certainly belong to more or less the same family. And now, not speaking of them directly any more, I come to Bohemians in general, to rebels, to marginal lives.

I've known many of them, in Montmartre, in Montparnasse, in the South, then in Tahiti, in Greenwich Village. It seems to me that they become more and more numerous as man becomes more and more uniform, more and more domesticated, and there are veritable colonies of them in Rome, for example, and now in San Francisco.

But I am both very near and very far from them. I share their anticonformism, most of their ideas, their resentments.

Why do they trouble me? Because apparently I live like a bourgeois? I don't think so. It goes further. I've spoken of their purity – an infantile purity – and I have suspected for a long time that they are not always the weak or the maladjusted nor yet rebels by nature.

Many of them have realized that weakness, apparent or real, is the best armour in a hard world. Apparently unarmed, they get all the sympathy, all the help, all the indulgence. They are the ones whom the patrons not only adopt but seek out. It's for them that governments create useless positions or scholarships.

What is asked of them is to be awkward, ingenious, uncompromising. They are that way with women, too, with their children, in the sense that they accept no responsibility, no rules.

At bottom, there is no doubt very often a real weakness, an authentic infantilism. Not always. And that quickly turns into a comfortable pose.

This pose, rightly, irritates D., and I understand her. Her almost pathological sense of justice makes her bristle before a certain tolerance which appears and which perhaps is undeserved.

What am I doing, I, in this brotherhood? It is simply that I have, basically, the same anticonformism, the same rebellions. I am a true anarchist, I too, but because I live in a society, because in spite of myself I profit by it, I consider it my duty to follow its rules. Without believing in them. Without teaching them to my children. I follow them the more scrupulously because I do not believe in them, because that is my way of ‘paying my share'.

All this is still not to the point, I feel. I love these Bohemians whom I would call planned. I am comfortable with them. There are almost fraternal bonds between us. At the same time they make me shudder as I must make them shudder. I remain conscious of the part they
play, almost sincerely, and this is almost what constitutes the whole problem. Like children, they are marvellous actors. And does one ever know where ‘acting' begins and ends with a child?

Apropos acting in my last little chapter, D. made me notice that I used the word wrong, that in any case it is too strong. She is right. I should have written: ‘X did his act.' And still this may be too strong. It is very difficult, above all with words, to place a boundary between a man's sincerity and insincerity, whether it is a matter of comedy, or tragedy, or of simple convention. I feel it. It triggers something inside me. But as for saying at what moment the insincere has begun, and to what degree someone has left sincerity behind …

That's all for today, for this morning anyway, and I would like to be as empty as possible to leave room for my next novel.

Should I add a little paragraph? Last evening, S. spoke on television of his new novel. He knows my work. He is writing a book on me. He told me, here, that his novel is directly inspired by one of mine. The subject is the same. Same situation. Central character almost identical. He added, still
here
, that he was so aware of this that out of honesty he had put a sentence from my book on the title page. But now, on television, he spoke of this case as a personal psychological discovery. Desgraupes – unless it was Dumayet, I mix them up – who knows my work too, did not bring it up either.

Bitterness? Honestly, no. A slight deception, which is connected with what I wrote above. I am not weak enough.
I give the impression of being strong and it is possible that I am to a certain degree.

Basically, society avoids strong men. They are distrusted. They are envied. They are ignored. The weak man makes others feel good. The strong man makes them ashamed.

Sorry! I ought not to have spoken of that, but I know that this will interest Johnny, whom this question already bothers and who is learning to take his responsibilities bravely, the more bravely in that he believes in them no more than I do.

A little note just for myself. I am supposed to be a strong man, this is what they try to make me believe, what I appear to be, what I make myself believe I am, perhaps, while in fact I know that strong men don't exist. This week I was twice tempted to call for help. For nothing definite. For nothing serious. Only the person I could have called was the one who had failed me or whom I believed to have failed me. This ought to be deleted, I think. And besides it has no meaning except for me. ‘He who must be strong at any cost.' He who is condemned always to be strong! Let's say no more about it. And excuse this weakness.

All erased, as if by a wind. Two-hour ride in the car, slowly, smoothly, over the little roads and little byways in the country. D. asleep beside me three-quarters of the time, and Pierre, on her knees, sleeping, looking contented as a bear cub in his mother's fur. We didn't exchange ten sentences. It was enough. I know it. I always know it. And all the same, each time, I despair.

Everything begins anew and I am going to cleanse my body of the whisky (I haven't once overindulged) of this last day.

Then a novel. And our good life.

How easy and how difficult everything is at the same time! And how much simpler it would be if we were never tempted to judge.

To live.

Welcome, D., as they say in your country.

I find you again, old notebook friend, sooner than I would have believed and than I would have wished. I was hoping not to see you again until after the holidays, in 1961.

Yesterday, at about 3:45, I settled down in this same study, the ‘Do Not Disturb' on both doors, the coffee beside me, four dozen new pencils freshly sharpened, a new pad too, of yellowish paper, and the brownish envelope with the
names, ages, addresses of my characters – a pile of railway guides … Curtains drawn, typewriter and pipes cleaned … In short, my routine which finally has become superstition.

Eight to ten days of preparation, as usual, the most unpleasant, during which I'm in a bad temper. I try out subjects, characters, as one tries on garments in a store, or furnished apartments …

I wrote the title:
Le Train
. Then ten lines, without conviction. Then I stopped and thought. No panic, no anxiety, as on other occasions when I felt that it didn't go right. In fact I could have written this novel consciously as homework, an exercise. Perhaps it wouldn't have been bad? Perhaps the spark would have come?

I stopped because I realized that I was not writing this novel out of need, but in spite of something, to prove to myself that I was still capable of writing four novels a year. But I have written only three,
L'Ours en Peluche
,
Betty
, and
Maigret et les Vieillards
. Plus my Balzac broadcast, which took me more than a month.

I was writing out of fear. And the proof of it was that I had chosen an easy subject, with predetermined action, dialogue and characters. But not one substantial character who imposed himself on me.

Wasn't that cheating? I preferred to stop. The end of the year is always a pressured period, preparation for the holidays, etc. And a short stay on the Côte d'Azur planned for the 15th.

I put my material away without depression, glad I hadn't pushed on at any cost. I hope to write a novel in January, perhaps a Maigret in order to get my hand in again.

Certainly not a manufactured novel. (I will have to explain some day why I don't consider the Maigrets, which are minor works, to be manufactured.)

A little shame, I admit, at D., the children, the staff, seeing me coming out of my office before time.

‘No novel?'

But, the same evening, on television (‘Reading for Everybody') there was a lady of fifty who just won the
Prix Femina
– an innkeeper by occupation. Why do you write? What inspires you? Do you put yourself in your novels? Etc., etc.

Then a mechanic of thirty, Bohemian, attractive.

Both of them just happen to write … yes … because … It's hard, but it's fun … they will go on …