When I Was Old (27 page)

In the United States I learned shame. For they are ashamed. Everyone is ashamed. I was ashamed like the rest. Which contributes to that sensation of solitude, of isolation, to a certain withdrawing into oneself and at the same time to that solidarity with all other men. A solidarity which is almost universal there.

Utterly overwhelmed. I discover once more, with D., that everything you know, everything you have learned, counts for nothing, that the truth is always different. But I wasn't far off. And God knows if my love ought to have helped me in what I dare not call my diagnosis. Impossible to talk about it here, because the form is too specific. I would need a novel, a transposition, which would be nearer to reality than what I could say here.

This morning I almost wrote: is she perhaps right in spite of and in the face of everybody else? I didn't because I feared her reaction to this question when she read it.

Yesterday I had my best (I hope our best) evening in the last two years. Dinner tête à tête, slowly, quietly, at the Grappe d'Or and, as happens to me rarely, I was in no hurry to leave the table. Because of this, the Grappe d'Or, where we scarcely ever go except when we have to take
out friends who are passing through, has almost taken on, in my eyes, the aspect of our dear Brussels in New York, where we saw each other for the first time and where we go back so often on a pilgrimage.

I am happy, I am thinking about my novel, and we will be able to escape for a few days, D. and I. It seems to me that this will be our first real holiday in a long, long time. We've earned one.

Last evening received and read the book that Bernard de Fallois devotes to me. It seems to me the best of those written about me (including the less important studies). He speaks less of me than of my work, which is a relief. However, I always feel the same embarrassment reading studies of this kind. Of course I believe in the importance of what I do, or I wouldn't have been writing for forty years. But from my believing in it to hearing someone else speaking of this importance, seriously discussing this or that passage in a book …

Strange as it may seem, it's unpleasant.

From another point of view, it's equally unpleasant to me when my work is treated cavalierly.

An hour later, D. is reading the Fallois manuscript and is overwhelmed by it. I wouldn't want the above note to be misunderstood. I, too, was happy to see the importance of my books to a fellow I'm very fond of.

Certainly, D. is capable of protecting my books, on my
behalf, not only from the material but from the literary and moral point of view. In my successive wills I've designated the Société des Auteurs my executors, as a last resort, and for want of a better. (I have a horror of the Gens de Lettres.) I must correct my will and write in de Fallois's name instead.

The ‘embarrassment' I mentioned earlier is not aimed at him. It's what seems to me the natural reaction of any creative person to an analysis of his work. One is divided between pleasure and pain. Difficult to explain.

It appears the three books will come out at the same time. This one, then Dr R.'s, and finally the one by S., which I haven't read.

I hope it will be de Fallois's book that will receive the attention of critics and readers.

What I'm most grateful for is that he doesn't speak of me as of a ‘phenomenon', hasn't tried to analyse the ‘creative mechanism', hasn't looked for ‘sources', but has tried to understand a certain number of novels – and has understood them. When I say a certain number, I mean all my novels, for he read them all scrupulously, some of them two or three times.

Later, perhaps, I will be able to read this kind of work without being thrown into a panic.

I mustn't form an idea of myself yet, much less of what I write.

In the middle of a novel:
Maigret et le Voleur Paresseux
. Today,
page 100
. I want to get rid of an idea that came to me suddenly last night. I think that my work will have much less importance later than certain people would like to think. I am speaking very sincerely.

If that came suddenly to mind, it is because I had the impression, I don't know why, that I was mistaken in thinking that I was at the beginning of a period, that I had in some way found a certain way of feeling, of penetrating man, of giving importance to his surroundings and even to the objects, etc., as well as to a certain rhythm in my novels. So I would have been at the beginning of a period:

1930–1960 ……………………….

and that would have given a certain weight to my writing. But if the opposite is true?

1930 ………………………. 1960

Well, too bad, I'll never know. All the same, it bothers me a little and I mustn't work with any less faith in what I do. Above all, now.

There now! Another novel finished. Feeling of relief first, as each time, because I got to the end, that I'm no longer at the mercy of any touch of flu, any headache, any moment of discouragement.

And also, because once more I've done my job. Then, almost at once, a wavering, a dull worry: readjustment to everyday life. Not disagreeable at all, though, rather the opposite.

Tomorrow morning I shall be surprised not to be wakened at six o'clock, not to have to build my fire, make my coffee, not to follow the routine of work days. And I will plunge joyfully into the life of the house.

169th, 170th novel? I no longer know. So many figures are published. It is enough for me to ask D., who keeps the count up-to-date. The number doesn't matter.

Whatever it is, it suddenly seems to me ridiculous. Less than two hundred times, this impression that I've just described … It isn't much when you think that I've been working at my trade for about forty years. How many times does one make love in a lifetime? How many times does one get off a boat, a train, a plane, does one make contact with a different world?

I envy painters. They do many more canvases than we do novels. Yet pictures are works that are just as complete, as finished. Why?

I don't yet know what I shall think of my last Maigret when I revise it. It's a fairly disorganized sketch, by design, two stories that intertwine, I don't quite know
why. Some passages will make the reader laugh. I purposely put in a lot of light touches. And I wonder if I could have treated the same subject in one of my harder novels, if then it wouldn't have been unbearable, at any rate to many people.

That's one thing that de Fallois, who is coming tomorrow, understands very well – the first person who has, except D., of course – that in Maigret I often take up subjects that are more serious than those in my other books. But in a playful manner or, at least, with the poise of my police chief as a counterbalance.

The next week a holiday at last. D. and I will fly to Cannes, where we will spend several days together. Ouf!

And already I am thinking of writing, as soon as possible, my second novel of the year, with another holiday in mind, in Paris, probably. I'd like that very much. Many books in order to have these brief moments alone together, no matter where.

If I took these holidays without having written first, I would have the feeling of not having earned them.

As I foresaw, I woke up at six o'clock and couldn't go back to sleep. By tradition, I went to the barber.

Last evening, happened to hear on television (heard, because the pictures broke down) Giono talking about our profession. I haven't read him. As with other contemporaries, I once skimmed through one or two of his
books, but, from what I know of him and his work, he is a writer whom I respect. (Not responsive to his lyricism, personally, which is perhaps a lack in me; I wonder if I wasn't a little jealous, before and during the war when he was one of the novelists most popular with the young. He isn't any more, but I'm not either. End of parenthesis.)

Giono said that he did not understand novelists to whom writing is a sort of agony. In his eyes, this is a hangover of romanticism. The creator, he says, is like any craftsman, like a shoemaker, and one cannot imagine a shoemaker suffering over making a shoe. (The shoemaker is his analogy.) He added that if writing were painful for him, he would have chosen another trade.

I envy him. The shoemaker, having finished his apprenticeship, is sure of being able to finish the shoe he has begun. There is a simple, known technique which he has learned. There also are norms. And everybody knows whether a shoe is successful or not.

But with a novel? With any work of art?

So Giono is sure of himself. He is sure, in beginning a book, that he will be able to get to the end and that he will succeed in saying what he means, of getting the right vibration, the right degree of emotion, of communicating it on the right page, of finding the words, the rhythm …

For me this is so miraculous that I never dare believe in it.

If it were a matter of a novelist working commercially according to proven formulas, this wouldn't bother me.
I didn't worry either when I was writing popular novels and adventure novels, and I used to go to work whistling.

So I find that not everybody suffers from stage fright. By contrast, Maurice Chevalier, on television the night before, admitted openly that for the past sixty-six years he has always felt his throat dry up and his knees weak when he went on stage.

One is not necessarily right and the other wrong. Just the same, it bothers me.

Yesterday went to have a film screened, the film of the Balzac television broadcast that I did about a year ago and which de Fallois (who left last evening) had missed at the time. Odd impression. Last year, seeing it on my own screen, I was preoccupied with knowing if it had been cut much, if it held up, if I hadn't stammered, etc. Yesterday, I realized that while I can't stand my photographs, even those taken by the best photographers, because I don't recognize myself in them, I recognize myself very well on the screen.

This had never struck me, although I'm used to seeing myself in the movies or on television. I think I understand. The still photo inevitably gives a false image. The moving image is much nearer to the truth.

The painting, the portrait, without showing the man in movement, does not freeze him at a precise –
hence artificial – instant, but gives an illusion of time passing.

Now, however, we have the moving pictures and voices of men.

Would we have the same idea of a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Churchill, a Stalin, etc., without those pictures and voices? Isn't our whole perspective on great men – or small – transformed by them?

This presents another problem that I have not yet seen raised, but which one day will call for supplementary texts in the Civil Code. Certain North Africans, for example, refuse to allow themselves to be photographed because they believe that in this way a part of their soul is taken from them.

Without going that far, there is, it seems to me, a question of property. I'm not speaking of money. As to political men, the pictures of their public life and their speeches pass into history. But how about all the others whom radio and television interview each day?

I'm lucky to own a print of this Balzac because I refused to be paid for my work and they kindly offered me a copy. That is very unusual.

So, here are a man's picture and voice which no longer belong to him. He has collaborated in a broadcast at a given moment. In two years, in ten, in fifty, in entirely different circumstances, in other perspectives, they can be used again without the least authorization from him or his heirs.

Radio and television networks thus possess a prodigious capital over which there are no controls.

I'll take a case. Day before yesterday, out of the year's literary broadcasts, a
single
sentence was taken from each writer, a single sequence, and these extracts were shown back to back, out of context, in a sort of symposium in which one or another of them ran the risk of being misrepresented.

The papers complain that some people attack photographers and break their cameras. But for an actress, for example, for an actor, for people from other professions, a
stolen
picture, taken extemporaneously, can really be prejudicial, even tragic.

Our picture is taken, our voice recorded, with or without our consent, and we subsequently lose all control over them.

There is something there contradictory to the very basis of the Civil Code, and this must finally be recognized. How can it be remedied? I don't know at all. If I had written the Balzac instead of speaking it, the text would belong to me and no one could use it without my permission. I could also destroy it if later it displeased me.

Because it went on television, and because it was recorded on film, I lose all my rights, moral and material.

In the crowds at a festival or an opening, someone sticks a microphone under my nose and asks me a question (sometimes after a banquet). I answer anything, quickly, without reflection, because it is almost impossible not to answer. This sentence that I speak is only valid in the circumstances, at a certain date, under certain conditions.

But now it can be shown again in other countries at other times, may perhaps be inserted in my obituary.

Are the North Africans so wrong? Don't they steal a little of our souls?

Certain television journalists pretend to catch their ‘subject' at the moment of truth with difficult questions.

I would not be surprised if one day this will come to seem incredible – and outrageous.

This is not the reason why I refused the close-ups they asked me for but, after having seen Balzac again, I'm glad I refused.

Johnny delights me more and more. As for Marie-Jo, she ‘tries' so hard, like her mother, that she touches me and I would like to rid her of her scruples. As for Pierre, he now occupies such a large place in the house that one wonders how we could ever have lived without him.