When I Was Old (24 page)

Certainly I have less and less – I never had any – memory for names or numbers. As it happens, this is not a matter of memory, I think. But, for example, doing errands in town I will say: ‘I must make a note of this.' Then, as I don't attach any importance to it, it will go out of my mind to return a month or six weeks later. At that moment, I wonder: ‘Haven't I written that already? Or did I only mean to?' The opposite can happen too.

Same thing for my novels. Often a subject comes to my mind, haunts me for two or three days, and all of a sudden, when it takes shape and outlines itself, I am aware that I have written the novel five, ten, or twenty years earlier, anyway that I have used the theme.

This morning, I don't know why, perhaps because R.'s visit reminded me of studies written on me which speak of my sexuality in the falsest and most fantastic way, I wanted to bring up this question, quite simply and frankly, for if I have a sense of modesty in certain areas, I have none in this one.

But haven't I already done this? I don't remember and I am not going to leaf back through these pages to see. In any case, I haven't the time now. Dr R. is about to arrive and I have spent a part of the morning, delightfully, walking to Morges with Johnny and Marie-Jo, buying dessert for lunch and flowers for the table.

It will come back to me. It isn't a matter of an account to settle with critics who are too naïvely Freudian, but a restatement of a question that seems to me natural.

In short, I consider myself a perfectly normal man in this area. Which may surprise certain people, in that I never mix sexuality, sentiment and love.

With one woman only, D., sex and love were merged, are still merged. With the others, no. And this is neither cynicism nor vice. I consider sexuality, all sexual acts, as natural and beautiful.

I have no need of more or less forced and artificial sentiment to stimulate myself.

I like to see the beautiful body of a woman and it matters little to me whether she has this or that mentality, whether she comes from this or that background. A professional often gives me more pleasure than anyone. Just because she does not force me to pretend.

I will add that I feel for all women, when I take them, some sort of tenderness, what I would call human tenderness. This is not sentimental. I do not ask myself questions about them. I don't feel compassionate about their lives.

It is a tenderness for the human being, for the species, for the living flesh, for a body which, for a brief duration, in my arms, represents all life. That I can produce in that body certain vibrations delights me more than my own enjoyment, although that enjoyment is more often necessary to me than I might wish for my own peace of mind.

During my first days in Paris, for example, I remember that I would leave the arms of one woman at eleven o'clock in the morning to go back to another only a few minutes later, and be obliged to accost a professional or
to go to a house of assignation to begin all over again twice the same afternoon.

Isn't this natural? It has been written that I was questing for the lost woman, the humiliated woman, the sinner, as for a kind of redemption.

Pure invention. If I slept more often with professionals or demi-professionals than with others it is, first, because I am revolted by the play-acting the others demand, by the wasted time, by what I call the height of pretence. Besides, the meddling jealousy of my wife scarcely permitted me affairs, or, most often, even what are called adventures.

Also, when I think with nostalgia of any one woman I've had, it is rarely to a woman whom I had to pay court to.

D. is not jealous. She gives me complete freedom. Less than ever, however, have I any desire for another relationship.

I make love simply, healthily, as often as necessary, but I'm not in the grip of any compulsion. I am not driven by any neurosis; only by a need.

Perhaps some day I will again take up this subject. For the moment it doesn't seem necessary, but God knows what they will yet find in writing about me and my novels.

R. is still here, off with my wife, chattering. I have the impression that everything I've written this morning is both true and untrue. The sexual need … the need of the act … and that sort of tenderness which I've spoken of … I wonder if this is not part of a need that
is more difficult to communicate, the need to penetrate humanity … This finally is reduced to an act that appears ridiculous but which is none the less symbolic …

This would explain why the personality of the partner (except in the case of love) makes little difference, that on the contrary this personality anecdotizes (?) the thing, that the more ordinary the woman is, the more she is never-mind-what woman, the more one can consider her as ‘woman' and the more the act takes on significance.

All this is in the unconscious, for I do not indulge in such reasoning when I am confronted with a naked body.

Even nudity has a meaning. Isn't it a kind of return to innocence? To undress a woman is also to rob her of the super-imposed, the artificial, of all the ‘contrived'.

It is in itself a sort of penetration, of communion, if one can call it that. An attempt, in any case. Always fruitless. Always a failure. That is why one must continually begin all over again. Can't a miracle be produced?

The proof is that for me it has been produced.

Why, having found it, do I continue? Perhaps because at twenty I clenched my fists at the thought that there were women in the world whom I would never possess.

To touch, to absorb the world. To possess it.

But all this is so approximate that it becomes almost as false as what the critics write. Why the devil aren't they content with what I've said in my novels without trying to explain. Anyway, if I haven't done it myself, there is no possible explanation.

Certain men have a mania for ‘stooping' to women to raise them to their level.

How much simpler it would be if everyone, once and for all, would feel equal to every other.

I can say that this is the case with me. I examine no one. Each necessarily has her own qualities, some of which are clear to me, others of which escape me.

I have never stooped to anyone, not even, to return to the preceding pages, to the last of the prostitutes (why the last?), and that, no doubt, is why we have always had a good time together, they and I, in giving each other, for better, for worse, to the best of our abilities, pleasure.

Ten o'clock in the evening. How things that seem important to us at one moment can be forgotten the next! In the course of a crossing from Australia to Europe between 1930 and 1940 (I won't be more definite since the person I'm speaking of is no doubt married and has children, and surely also a reputation) I almost jumped overboard for a sixteen-year-old Australian girl.

On another evening, on the forward deck, I had a fist fight with a young man who had asked her to dance! She didn't speak a word of French. At that period, I hadn't a word of English. The ship was English. The mother and father were travelling with the girl, and occupied the cabin next to hers. But very early in the morning, very late at night, I found the way to join her, in pyjamas, in her cabin. We did not make love. I was a grown man, a man of almost thirty-five. However, with the aid of a little dictionary, I stammered out my idiocies and I had decided to marry her once we arrived in Europe.

This seems to me unthinkable. Not just my state of mind, but the risks I took in an ultra-puritanical setting.

I only wrote to her once when she was in London. She answered me once, too, poste restante. And I returned to my own life. She to hers. How near to tragedy I came in that business! It took, just now, a map on television which reminded me of Australia, for that memory to come back to me.

But it was probably an important time in my life, for, from that moment, I knew that one day or another, in one way or another, I would divorce my first wife. She was at the end of her tether. She knew this story. For the first time, I think, she felt dimly that I was a stranger to her, more exactly that she was a stranger to me.

Who knows? Without her constant jealousy perhaps I would have had more adventures in the usual sense of the term. Those that I did have were only of an evening's duration, a few hours, a few minutes, even with friends.

Perhaps this permitted me to discover the simple joy of loving with D.?

Another memory just came to me, very different, also the memory of a crossing, New York–Le Havre, or New York–Southampton, I don't know any more, with D., this time, a very gay, very happy crossing. The evening of the traditional party on board, I was joking with a pretty woman and asked her – without hope of her doing it – to come to my cabin.

I was with my wife, getting undressed, when she came in wearing an evening dress with several rows of
flounces, of which she opened the zipper, letting it fall at her feet, leaving her naked and pink.

An hour of pleasure enjoyed without afterthought, without complications. And then when she had taken her pleasure several times, as I was going to take mine, a little phrase inspired by champagne and love:

‘For her …'

To put it another way, she had understood that the essential was for my wife. D. will be able, of course, to suppress this passage. I don't think she will do it, though. And I am sure that, for her too, it is a pure and joyful memory.

I don't remember my partner any more at all, but I can visualize her movements …

Nearly twenty years between the two crossings. But, if I would like to relive the second, I have no desire to relive the first, and its very recollection troubles me.

This time, here is really a subject that I didn't want to tackle and I hope that tomorrow I won't want to retouch it. In searching for a truer truth one risks being carried away. That is why, in the last analysis, these notebooks are in danger of being less close to the truth, in spite of my care for exactitude, than my novels in which I force myself to include nothing of myself.

We took a walk in the snow, this afternoon, around the village, D. and I. Then, the children not being home yet, I went to meet them and found them with the nurse, noses and cheeks red, walking fast in the snowstorm, with Pierre watching me proudly.

We like, he and I, to meet that way, as if by chance, in the village or in the vicinity.

Does he know I'm looking for him? Is he looking for me too? When he sees me, he puts on an indifferent air but cannot suppress a sly smile.

A delightful game, in which Johnny and Marie-Jo join during the holidays.

What a fine book one could make out of the day of a man, an ordinary day! How much life! But how much more difficult than a novel full of turmoil and passion!

Yesterday, in bed, thought of many things that I want to write. But now I am going to the station to get the papers with D. and the children. I'll try later.

A marginal note, however. An explanation. I never try, in these notebooks, to get to the bottom of a subject, nor to tell a story completely. Out of laziness? Maybe a little. Above all because I force myself to follow the thread of the thought as faithfully as possible. I would like this to be a sort of shorthand, or transcription of thought, with everything that is capricious and incomplete about it. This is the only way to be sincere. I'm not concerned with style. On the contrary. If I can't think of the right word for a moment, I don't wait to find it, that would seem artificial to me.

Once, in
Je me souviens
, then in
Pedigree
, I proceeded differently and I've never dared reread these books (it is true that I never reread any of my books) for fear of finding them frightfully literary.
Pedigree
especially. It's a little as if I were watching myself write. Here, writing has no importance and I've even thought of a dictaphone. But then I would be afraid of starting to make speeches or to listen to myself!

It's odd that animals which we consider inferior, insects for example, possess more direct means of communication than we do. If thought, with all its haziness, its hesitations, its meanderings, could be projected! Speaking, and, even more, writing, make it necessary to be precise and, in doing so, to falsify.

I came to this subject without meaning to and I would not feel honest with myself if I evaded it. However, I wouldn't want this to take on the aspect of an examination of conscience, still less a confession. On the other hand, it is indispensable that I should be precise about the fact that when I speak of good or evil I never refer to my entirely personal morality, which also would be difficult, or too long and without interest, to define.

More than ever what I am going to write will be distorted by the fact that in a few paragraphs I can only outline the large elements of my thought, when to transcribe five minutes or an hour of this thought completely would take thick volumes.

Not only because five minutes of my thought today
involves years of experiences, certain of which are forgotten, plus other thoughts, events, facts, faces, words spoken or understood …

I was speaking yesterday of a novel to be written on a single day in the life of a man. It might also be possible to write one about five minutes in the life of his brain!

Enough! Often when I see a fault, a failing, a weakness, never mind the word, in one of my children, I keep myself from interfering by remembering that once I did the same thing. What reason could I give for asking them not to go through the same experience I have had, or to be more perfect than I?

I have always had a horror of the father image and mother image as they have a tendency to be created in families. I do not want my children to have a monolithic memory of me, or to attribute to me qualities that I do not have. On the contrary, I would like them to know the vulnerable man that I am, as vulnerable as they and perhaps more so.