When I Was Old (26 page)

She no more believes what I say than she does the doctors. I'm sorry not to have recorded the telephone conversation she just had with one of our medical men, a professor of the Lausanne Faculty. I am sure that if we played back the tape in a few weeks we would both find it high comedy.

It's tragic not to be able to help, not to be able to transmit my trust, my certainty.

How approximate all this is! Speaking of my novels, I have said that I would like to write with a burin on copper, like an engraver. In this case, it would take a scalpel to get to the truth.

Day before yesterday, or yesterday, it doesn't matter, I thought of alcohol. I wasn't able to write what I had in mind at the time and I'm doing it today – exactly as I thought of it day before yesterday.

There will be legends about this too. Certain people have seen me working on red wine, others on cider, or
muscatel, on whisky, on grog, I don't know what else, and for each it is an eternal verity. Those who have seen me drunk will always see me as drunk, and the contrary is also true.

That, precisely, is a question that has preoccupied me because, of all the dangers I have run, some of which I have cited, this is undoubtedly the most serious. It preoccupied me so much that I have studied the question as only some specialists in Europe and in the United States have done, in medical works as well as in reviews, and in the domain of criminology too. I could fill a notebook with statistics.

Why? Perhaps because I just missed becoming an alcoholic – and the worst kind, the worst for me, I mean.

When I was a child there was neither wine nor liquor in the house, and when someone came to visit I had to run down to the corner store to buy a decilitre (retail) of Cusenier. (?) My father never drank, occasionally a bock, less than a pint of light beer, on Sunday mornings, when he went to play cards in the Café de la Renaissance. For a long time I went with him.

The words ‘He drinks' were uttered in our house with consternation. For the strongest of reasons, my mother had a horror of alcohol. Her father was ruined by drunkenness, her eldest brother, Léopold, became a sort of bum (an occasional house painter, after university studies) of whom the family was ashamed. One sister, an alcoholic, died very young in an insane asylum and another, my Aunt Maria, made such ‘Novenas' that she had to be shut up in her room, from which she managed to escape sometimes.

Nothing of this on my father's side. But hadn't he something to be afraid of ? Drink spoiled my father's life too and one could say that indirectly he died of it, but that is another story.

My first introduction to alcohol took place during the war. We were hungry. Food was very inadequate. All this I've already mentioned. In ‘the sideboard' there was a small decanter containing eau-de-vie meant to impregnate the circles of waxed paper with which jars of jam were covered.

One day, at about the age of fourteen, alone in the house, I drank a swallow, out of curiosity. Then, as it gave me a feeling of well-being, I tried it again the next week, being careful to replace what I had drunk with water, so that soon there was nothing but water in the decanter. For a long time it was believed in the house that the alcohol content had evaporated.

I don't think this incident has anything to do with drunkenness, with the taste for alcohol, but that it was both the attraction of forbidden fruit and the need for a certain comfort in my empty stomach.

As a reporter, I eschewed drinking for a long time, until a friend who worked in the front office of the paper took me for a glass of ale to the Café de la Bourse at five o'clock. It was strong beer, pale ale, served, as is the custom in Belgium, in silver goblets, and I think that it was the goblet, with its rich metal and its reflections, along with the cosy atmosphere of the café, that seduced me more than the beer. In any case we got into the habit of going there at the end of each afternoon and having a glass or two of pale ale.

Next, at seventeen, I met the little group of painters and ‘poets' of Liège and we formed a sort of club, ‘The Keg', which I've had occasion to describe (particularly in
Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien
) and where, at least once a week, we got drunk deliberately.

Nevertheless, I felt no need to drink, and never did I go into a café alone, preferring to spend my money on cherries, in season, or on pastry; preferring, when I had to go into a public establishment, a
café-filtre
dear to the people of Liège (with the filter in silver, again!).

It was in Paris that I began to see on my table at the ‘Dîners de Paris' (3.50 francs for the meal, including wine, Passage Jouffroy) a small bottle of red wine whose contents couldn't have exceeded a quarter of a litre.

For several years that was all I required except when, with friends, we decided to have an orgy.

It was at Montparnasse that I began to drink more, because it was the fashion; all the painters of the period (except Vlaminck) were heavy drinkers, while the American novelists whom we were beginning to admire, Hemingway, Steinbeck, etc., were even more so.

Actually at that time I drank mostly to do as the others did, and when in 1925 or 1926 I took the second-floor apartment on the Place des Vosges (up to then I only had lodgings on the ground floor) I installed a superb American bar there, very ‘modern art', where I officiated almost daily as barkeeper. That was the period of complicated cocktails and I knew all the recipes. The biggest part of my income, obviously, went into liquor.

An anecdote, in passing. One morning, at about eleven
o'clock, a painter friend brought one of his clients to see me, a big wine merchant from Béziers. Of course I went behind the bar. I served. At the moment of leaving, I saw the merchant coughing, turning towards my friend, going through his pockets, murmuring in an aside to him. Scarcely out of the door, I found out afterwards, he said to my friend:

‘I think I did something stupid. I didn't dare pay …'

The poor man had thought I kept a commercial bar in my house!

On board the
Ginette
, during my tour of France along the canals and rivers, in the Midi, I used to fill a ten-litre demijohn at pumps that looked like gas pumps. I drank when I was thirsty, never to get drunk.

On board the
Ostrogoth
, in Holland, it was rarely wine, too expensive in that country (I had a barrel sent to me from France at Stavoren), but from time to time a glass of gin.

It was at about this time, and after my return, at Morsang, still on board the
Ostrogoth
, that while writing the first Maigrets I got the habit of working on wine. From six in the morning. And as I was writing morning and afternoon, that is to say three chapters a day …

At Morsang, there was a barrel in the fork of a tree next to the boat. The habit was formed. I went on like this until 1945. Wine, white at Concarneau (cider in the afternoon), red in Paris or elsewhere, grog when I had a cold, brandy and water at other times.

Once again, I was rarely drunk, but I needed, as early as the morning, especially to write, a pick-me-up. I was
persuaded in good faith that it was impossible to write otherwise. And, away from work, I drank anything, apéritif, cognac, calvados, marc, champagne …

I was not at all aware of being an alcoholic, but only a temperamental fellow, and the fact is that my days were long and full, that I was intensely active. I travelled a lot and while travelling I drank more.

My lowest consumption of wine, a little before and during the war, was about three bottles of Saint-Emilion, which I considered very modest, since the farmers of the region (Saint-Mesmin) drank their eight to ten litres of white wine.

In 1945 I left for the United States and I admit that I then began to drink American style, no longer wine with my meals, but before them, Manhattan after Manhattan, then dry Martini after dry Martini (with an onion, which is called a Gibson).

I began to have painful awakenings, hangovers, attacks of gas pains during which I thought I was dying of angina pectoris each time.

With D., we had two or three months of wild life, which I don't regret and of which I often think nostalgically, but she had the courage, from the beginning, to propose to me (which meant to force me) to work … on tea. The first novel written on tea is
Three Rooms in Manhattan
written in a log cabin on Lake Masson in the Laurentians in midwinter.

We got around on skis. We crossed the frozen lake in a car. Logs blazed in an immense fireplace. I was sure I would never come to the end of that book.

Trembling, D. waited behind the door of my study (neither she nor anyone else has ever seen me write a novel) listening to the rhythm of the typewriter, and ceaselessly bringing me hot tea. I left the door half open, stuck my hand out, and grabbed the cup without a word.

She had reason to tremble, for if the experiment had failed I would, in all probability, never have tried it again, and I would be dead at this moment.

We continued to drink pretty seriously from time to time. Then we cut the liquor, allowing ourselves only beer (very strong in Canada, also strong in the USA).

We had an occasional sherry or port, and finally, one fine day in Arizona, we decided to put ourselves on the wagon (complete abstinence).

Not out of virtue. Only because we knew that we were, both of us, incapable of stopping in time.

I am not trying to write an edifying story and I don't pretend that I'm saved for good. Every two months, every three months, we get off the wagon for an evening or for two or three days, whether because of some occasion, a celebration, or simply, I would say, out of hygiene, so that this does not come to seem a deprivation, thus an obsession.

Wine or liquor, because of the fact that we are detoxified, and because we have lost the habit, has much more effect on us than it used to, and I have got drunk on two or three glasses.

The rest of the time there is no wine on the table, no beer, nothing – water – Coca-Cola for me the rest of the
day. And we have managed, for example, when I was presiding over the Film Festival of Brussels, then the one in Cannes, to get through a luncheon banquet, three or four official cocktail parties a day, without touching a drop of alcoholic beverage.

We started our abstinence in 1949, which makes about eleven years. This does not keep me from considering myself an alcoholic.

I may add that in my current life the odour of alcohol has become disagreeable to me and that I, who was a wine expert (I bottled my wine myself and I bought from the wine-growers in all the wine-growing regions of France), I have come to find the first glass unpleasant, to barely appreciate the second, and to drink the rest only out of habit.

Few of my French friends understand it. And I resent those who have made drink the indispensable complement to every friendly, worldly, or even official meeting.

In an hour D. and I are going to the radiologist for the last test. Radiology of the gall bladder. Then the doctor will pore over a file as thick as a criminal dossier. May they find something!

I should add a note to what I wrote yesterday on alcoholism. It is quite striking, I think, that I did not become truly alcoholic with an alcoholic consciousness except in
America; put another way, after having drunk for more than twenty years and often having drunk much more than I did there.

I'm speaking of a particular, almost permanent state, in which one is dominated by alcohol, whether during the hours one is drinking or during the hours when one is impatiently waiting to drink, almost as painfully as a drug addict waits for his injection or his fix.

If one has never known this experience, it is difficult to understand American life. Not that everyone drinks, in the sense in which my mother used this word, but because it is part of private and public life, of folklore, you might say, as is proved by the large, more or less untranslatable vocabulary, most often in slang, that relates to drink.

We knew that state, D. and I, only intermittently, and I admit that alcoholism for two, accompanied by love, by passion, by exacerbated sexuality, is not at all disagreeable, quite the contrary.

All of life is coloured by it. New York, for example, seems made to be seen in this state, and then it is an extraordinary New York and, strange as it may seem, comradely.

The crowds cease to be anonymous, the bars cease to be ordinary ill-lit places, the taxi drivers complaining or menacing people. It is the same for all the big American cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston … From one end of the country to the other there exists a freemasonry of alcoholics (like the one that exists for Alcoholics Anonymous) …

Then a couple lives folded in on itself. The hotel room becomes a home. The bed takes an unexpected, unforeseen importance, whether for sleeping, for making love, or for suffering. The hours of the day are different from what they are for most people, measured by successive drinks, a little as in a convent they are marked by religious rites.

I'm not exaggerating. It is another world in which certain preoccupations disappear, where the order of importance of things changes. For two, I repeat, it's marvellous. And, because it is marvellous, it is vital to leave it as soon as possible, for after a certain time, as with drugs, this exaltation and privacy become a hell. Intoxication begins.

We fled in time, D. and I. We went on the wagon (the wagon, that is to say the water cart from which at one time drinking water was sold in the streets).

Nevertheless, I have a nostalgia for certain nights, certain mornings on Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, for certain days at the Drake in New York … We tried at Cannes, soon after my return to Europe, to rediscover these sensations when the occasion presented itself. It wasn't the same thing.

Because we were in Europe? Because we had been detoxified too long and for that reason the mornings after were too painful?

Or, again, because we had acquired a sense of guilt? For that too is a part of the problem. For twenty odd years in France, until 1945, I drank without remorse, without seeing anything wrong with it, I was going to say: quite the contrary.