When I Was Old (18 page)

I was thunderstruck. Such frankness! It goes on every week on the same programme, celebrities and non-celebrities who talk about themselves and their work in a way that amazes me.

Do I too … ? I can't believe that I am like them, that I write for the same reasons (except two or three of these colleagues whose words strike another note).

‘When will you start a new novel?'

‘Not for several weeks because that's the time I have to stay in Paris for the launching of my book.'

And that one has talent and will be in the Academy.

I don't believe in a priesthood. But still – !

Still … when I was starting out, at twenty-five, at thirty, didn't I answer in somewhat the same way, often out of modesty, which falsified my interviews of that period?

Come on! Let's be frank. I had a certain cynicism and I was capable of saying of a novel that I thought had come out badly:

‘It's good enough for the public anyway.'

It's now that I get stage fright, that I have scruples. Out of respect for what?

I believe in art, to be sure. It is the only human manifestation that seems to me to be worthy of some pride. But from there to believing that my own work, the words I set down, have importance …

Work well done? Certainly, I have a craftsman's conscience. This is not enough to make one impose on oneself the anguish that I go through.

To live with characters who …

I think I know the explanation. I am a happy man. Whatever one says and whatever I myself may have said in jest, I don't write to cure my complexes.

When I was very young, I dreamed of leading several lives at once. One of my first heroes in a popular novel, whom I called Jarry, had been a real peasant in the country, a real fisherman in Brittany, a man of the world in Paris, etc.

I too have done everything, as an avocation, been fisherman, farmer, horseman, sailor, etc. But it is in creating characters that I come closest to living a multiple life.

Each novel is an enrichment for me, an experience that I live. If a problem bothers me, it is through one of my characters that I find an answer.

I don't escape myself … I …

It's complicated. There is no real reason, however,
I should live eight days with all sorts of characters – I don't say artificial ones – created for a specified action.

The Train
started out with an idea. One of my characters was real and I was beginning to live inside his skin. The others, to move the action forward, had to be less real, or at least more schematic.

I preferred to give this one up, and today I'm glad of it, proud, though a bit lost to find myself free at the hours when I should have been working.

Once more I see that elderly innkeeper on television, so sure of herself, so self-satisfied … knit three, purl two … The difficult thing is to find the tone, she says … Once the tone comes … And the needles click …

There's a woman who's happy without knowing it. The young mechanic too.

‘What I came up with is, roughly speaking, to write on two levels, the present and the past … the story takes place in the present within twenty-four hours but is constantly interrupted by flashes of the past, several pasts …'

Yes, indeed!

I have a dream which I shall probably never realize. Still, I've been playing with it for more than thirty years, nearly forty years, it's come back to me over and over, particularly each time I've begun to see my next novel. It is to write a picaresque novel, a long story without head or tail, with stops, as in the course of a stroll, with characters
who rise up and disappear without reason, secondary stories which, in turn, introduce others.

I don't think I'm capable of it. In spite of myself, by instinct much more than by dogma or conviction, I tighten. I cut short. I restrict myself, each time, to a precise, limited universe. Is this related to my phobia regarding crowds, which frighten me, to an instinctive reaction against disorder?

I've also dreamed of a house where nothing would have its proper place, a changing house, changing according to my mood or the moods of my family. I have a sixteenth-century Dutch painting, nothing special, which shows the common room of a country house. The men wear lace on their doublets, plumes on their hats, which indicates that they are, as one used to say, ‘well-born'. However, near the baby's cradle and some children playing, next to the laid table, a pig goes its way, and hens and roosters. The bed is not far from the hearth where the meal is cooking. One feels that whoever wants to can come and go and won't disturb, that the house is open.

In my early days in Paris, I had a friend from Liège who got there a little before me, a painter, who had settled on the Rue de Mont-Cenis in a loft at the far end of a courtyard. There, too, there was only one room. My friend was married. He had a little girl. However, sometimes there would be ten or fifteen of us to feed (each one chipped in a few pennies to buy bread, cold cuts and red wine for everyone), to smoke, to drink, to argue until three or four o'clock in the morning, sitting on the floor or on the only bed …

You never knew beforehand whom you would find there, but you knew that you would find someone. It turned out badly. My friend died shortly after his daughter (dead at seven or eight years of age) of cirrhosis of the liver. And of all those I knew there in these three or four years I know few who stayed afloat. They came to sad ends.

Even then, observing them, I had the impression of being able to diagnose each one, to foresee his fate.

I am against every established order, against every imposed discipline.

But I cannot live without order and discipline and there is no object on my desk that is not in its place. I get up from my armchair to pick up a tiny piece of paper on the carpet.

Contradiction? I'm not sure. Protective instinct? It's possible, for I may have just missed becoming a Bohemian.

Can I risk another hypothesis without seeming arrogant?

I possess, I believe, a certain lucidity which makes me see causes and effects at the same time. I know what picturesque characters basically are and the fate that awaits them. In Montmartre and Montparnasse I met a good number of people about whom I could tell the funniest stories, all true, as Vlaminck used to.

Only, I also know the end of these stories, an end that is not funny at all. Vlaminck, sturdier than I, nearer to the truth, to a certain health, could adjust both to the funny and to the tragic.

For me, the fun was wiped out.

No doubt that is why I will never write a picaresque novel.

It would fail. One can write a book stuffed with dozens of characters. Not with dozens of destinies.

Or else I would have had to begin at twenty-five on a single work – a hundred or a hundred and fifty volumes long.

But isn't that just what I have done, more or less consciously?

I had just finished the preceding note when it seemed false to me, as almost always. In a picaresque novel, what counts most is the picturesque, the differences between men, the warts, the crossed eyes, the stammers, the limps, the phenomena of every kind. Each thing that grafts itself onto man as certain little white shells onto the mussel shell.

It is the accidental. The fortuitous.

But, in spite of myself, I always come back, not to the differences, but to the resemblances.

I couldn't have written a hundred-volume work with a hundred characters. But perhaps a work in a hundred volumes with one character.

Which is still not accurate, of course, but which appears to me already more satisfactory.

As for what that story is doing here, I don't know. I suddenly thought of it when I was dreaming after lunch, and leafing through the papers, about writing the novel of a whole street, or of a large apartment building. It would almost certainly be reduced to three or four characters!

We are going to take Pierre for a ride in the car, D. and I, as in Carmel each afternoon we used to take Johnny, then, in Lakeville, Marie-Jo. The same actions. The same peace. The same deep well-being.

Schedule! I haven't forgotten. I had noted that rather as if to remind myself of a holiday assignment (though I never had to do holiday assignments) and, since I thought of it, I might as well get it off my mind. There are many minor subjects that I mention here in a few lines so as not to have to think of them any more, as if it were exorcism.

It's somewhat in the same spirit that in 1941 or 1942 I wrote
Pedigree
, to finish with my childhood reminiscences once and for all, my aunts, my uncles, etc., whom I'm always tempted to put in my novels. I'm not sure of it but I think this was successful insofar as
Pedigree
was concerned and that there is very little in the novels that followed (at least consciously – I mean used consciously) from before 1918.

Good! Schedule. It's almost for myself that I do it. Journalists, colleagues, friends ask me what I do when I'm not writing. And as I only write sixty days out of the year … I don't know what to answer them. It seems to me that I do nothing and all the same I'm always busy and often on the run.

Once, younger, I rode horseback, or else, at Porquerolles, for example, I went fishing in a boat. I used to
swim, I played volleyball. I travelled ceaselessly. I entertained a lot. I would go anywhere at the slightest provocation.

Now I feel I have become a stay-at-home, a stick-in-the-mud, still …

First the schedule of the year, which will be over in less than a month and which is pretty much an average year. What have I done,
grosso modo
?

First, in January, I think, a case of grippe that kept me in bed four or five days, then, for a week, I followed the debates of the Jaccoud affair,
*
*
which interested me less from a professional point of view than from a human one. I wanted to be sure that Jaccoud was indeed one of my characters.

Then, about a week of coming and going back and forth between Lausanne and Geneva, sometimes alone, sometimes with D. Afterwards, reading sixteen kilos of the dossier which I'd had here for a month, which took up another week or more. Indirectly, and I insist on this word, a novel came out of it which had nothing to do with the affair, a character who resembled Jaccoud in no way,
L'Ours en Peluche
. But let's follow the chronological order.

I had promised S. a television show on Balzac. Not on his work, which is not my business, but on the man. So I reread all his published correspondence, making notes on it, and also the works which told me about his … schedule.

A month? Six weeks? Almost. Then a sort of rough
draft of one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty pages which I used as background for my improvisation in front of the cameras. Six or seven days' more work. Finally, when the gentlemen came to film the broadcast, another five or six days of work, alone or with them.

In March, the novel
L'Ours en Peluche
. As usual – eight days to write it, several days of waiting, then a week to revise.

Now we come to April. In May I had to be at Cannes, where against my will I had agreed to be the President of the Jury of the Film Festival. Having accepted the presidency at Brussels, because I am Belgian, and because the government wanted it, I could not refuse Cannes.

Few days' trip to Paris for clothes and other things. Then the month of May, all or nearly all in Cannes, with several days at the Bernard Buffets' on the way back.

Second novel. After all this agitation, necessarily a Maigret. After abandoning another within the first day. I believe that I mentioned it elsewhere to emphasize that the Maigret, actually, repeated the same tonality. It was
Maigret et les Vieillards
.

We decided to spend ten days, end of July, with the children, except for Pierre, in Venice. This represented several days of coming and going between Echandens and Lausanne in order to buy them the necessary clothing.

Return at the beginning of August. Journalists. I wrote that. An Englishwoman for eight days.
*
*

My dizzy spells began to worry me. D. and I decided to go consult a specialist in Paris, more exactly to see the neurologist who took care of me four years ago at the time of my cochlea trouble.

We were both tired. Anyway, we wanted to be alone for a few days.

We stayed there ten days, during the end of the Olympic Games, most often in our apartment.

And, as for the Jaccoud affair and
L'Ours en Peluche
, out of a chance meeting came a novel that had nothing in common with that meeting, while indirectly it rose out of it.

Return to Echandens. Third novel:
Betty
.

Family life, but with more visits.

End of October, five days in Lyons, where I wanted to attend the First Criminology Congress.

Return. Decided to write another novel this year. First prevented by the visit of Henry Miller, who spent several days here.

Then abandonment of novel and of the idea of writing one before the holidays.

Christmas shopping. This week, the 8th of December, departure with D. for Cannes, to meet Dr Pathé at Grasse; he sees us there every year.

Then return … Christmas … New Year's …

So, only three novels. But how many really free, really empty days, in all that? Very few. If D. takes care of business matters, of virtually all the mail, I still write a number of letters by hand. I read. And a house where fifteen people live has its needs. To go to the city to buy
this, choose that. Dentist … Clothing … Tailor … Dressmaker … Furniture in our offices which I had replaced …

This ends by filling up a year, and what I most miss, because of so many obligations which always seem pressing, are the hours alone with D. We have to steal them. If she is in my study with me, somebody bothers us every ten minutes, sometimes one of the children, sometimes a secretary or a maid.