When I Was Old (28 page)

D. herself is getting well all by herself, as I secretly hoped she would before our visit to Dr Pathé. Good girl!

It's difficult not to become a ‘man of letters' (the word has always sounded a little like ‘general houseworker' to me: ‘all-round man of letters') and I understand my colleagues who adopt it. We are continually asked for everything: interviews, lectures, articles on everything under the sun, to preside over juries, etc., and people, sometimes the government, are annoyed if we say no.

This time I have been asked to do something that
tempts me: a play for Eurovision planned to be produced the same evening, at the same time, in different languages, in Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, etc. Television has fascinated me for nearly twelve years.

On the other hand, it's not my trade. I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of the days or weeks of anxiety it would cause me. I'm wavering. Will I allow myself to be persuaded? Or, more honestly, will I give in to the temptation of trying a medium that is new to me? I was promising myself a novel at the end of February or the beginning of March. I am going to think about it for a week while I revise the last Maigret and then be on my way to Cannes. If a subject comes to me …

The same thing happened when the
Illustrated London News
asked me for a long novella for its Christmas issue. I answered:

‘If I find a subject in two days, yes. If not, no.'

I wrote
Sept Petites Croix dans un Carnet
.

We'll see if something will materialize this time or if, more wisely, I'll stick to the novel.

D. is better and better. I was counting on three more or less difficult months of convalescence. She's coming back to herself with surprising speed. In the last analysis, with her, one shouldn't try to interfere. Let her go along according to her own logic, which is after all only instinct.

Revision finished on the 2nd. Refused the television play. Last evening, Raoul Levy telephoned from Los Angeles. Purchase of movie rights of
Three Rooms in Manhattan
. That is a film I would like to see made, and at the same time it makes me more apprehensive than the others. It would give me an odd feeling to see Jeanne Moreau in the part of Kay.

Leaving for Cannes soon. As I don't want to take this notebook along (for fear of losing it, I admit) I'll take a new one, Notebook III, so that this one stops here, even though there are several blank pages left.

End of Second Notebook

‘My beautiful new notebook', as I used to say when I was still in school. (I just came back from a walk with Pierre in the sharp cold and my hands are still stiff. The logs are just beginning to burn. Eleven thirty in the morning. Marie-Jo has come back from her music lesson and Johnny will be back at noon. D. is in her boudoir.)

That's all, really, I just wrote all I have to say this morning between the parentheses. I wanted to begin Notebook III as soon as we were back from Cannes (yesterday afternoon, but the Nielsens were here waiting for us) and most of all to begin it in a peaceful and joyful atmosphere.

Wrote nothing in Cannes. Did nothing. Good news about D.'s health and mine (which wasn't bothering me). Like certain animals in spring, we both felt a sudden rush of health, of cleanliness of body, and next week we will probably go to the clinic for two or three days for a small correction D. needs after her last childbirth. A stitch broke.

Finally saw P. after all the other doctors. Some day I must write all I can on this subject, which I'm beginning to understand.

So, back at the house, our own bed, my study, clear cool weather, and we're going to a wedding this afternoon.

Is it because of the mimosa, the orange trees, the flowering almonds in the Midi? For me, whatever the weather is tomorrow, spring has already begun.

Officially I am fifty-eight years old. In reality I won't be until tomorrow.

So, yesterday we went to the wedding. Mostly doctors, most of them university professors, the bride being the daughter of a professor. Among them a man of sixty-five, known around the world as much for his writings as for his international practice.

Two or three years ago, I think it was, he abandoned his chair, his clinic and his practice, because he became addicted to drugs (morphine, according to what I was told). I expected to find him physically and mentally diminished. I spent more than two hours in conversation with him. Of all those present, he was the most lucid, the most human.

Did he notice that I wasn't drinking anything but water? I'm sure of it. Whenever he was offered a whisky, he would hesitate and refuse most of the time. During those two hours he must not have had more than three drinks. And I felt a sort of question in his eyes.

For the past year he has been living by himself most of the time (he has a wife and a child), in a country house, to write a work which will deal largely, he told me, with instinct and intuition. He asked my permission – as if he had to! – to show me his manuscript.

This is a subject that has fascinated me for a long time and which I've found worth researching in works of all kinds, including those on primates, for example, and on the training of wild animals.

Some day I hope to have that man here in my study and to talk with him at leisure. I did not say to him yesterday: if I had accepted a glass of that champagne or of that whisky continually passed under my nose (though I had a long wait for a glass of water, which was very difficult to get) I would have taken a second, then a third, I would have begun to talk volubly, and instead of leaving at nine o'clock I would have been one of the last to leave – at four o'clock in the morning, no doubt. And Sunday in bed, sweating out my alcohol, with palpitations.

That's the way it was during some twenty-four days of the Cannes Festival.

‘You aren't drinking anything?' people marvelled.

Oh no! Nor do I eat any of what is served at all those luncheons, dinners, and receptions. For years, however, I thought that gastronomy was an essential part of my life.

When he comes, shall I tell him that some day I may be tempted to write, uninitiate that I am, a book on medicine and doctors? I have been observing them since my mother's house was filled with them when I was barely six years old, first medical students, then doctors from the neighbourhood, from the countryside around, and finally the big guns of all kinds.

Is it accidental that more than eighty per cent of the
friends I've had, the people I've made companions of, belonged to the medical world? When it has been called to my attention, and when I've been asked the reason for my choice, I freely answer that doctors and novelists have almost the same interest in man, study him from the same angle.

But yesterday, watching those around me, I realized that this is untrue.

The closest to myself was the man who was no longer practising and who is going to write a book not on medicine or his speciality, in which he has made a number of discoveries, but on instinct.

Is it necessary or indispensable that a man touch bottom at least once in his life to become wholly a man?

Touch it himself
. Not just be present …

Seriously, if some day I no longer write novels, for lack of creative energy, it is possible that I might try to write a book on doctors. Hasn't one of them just written a book about me? And a psychiatrist like Delay an extensive work on André Gide in which there is no question of psychiatry?

We promised Johnny to be back at nine thirty and we got back at nine thirty sharp. He was as happy as I to know that his mother danced three wild Charlestons in succession, which exhausted her seventeen-year-old-partner!

Today the whole family went for the papers. The house is quiet. Soon we will take a ride around the village, D. and I.

We won't go to the clinic next week as I'd hoped, nor the following, because the doctor won't be free, so that
my next novel is postponed to about mid March. A novel on what? I haven't the least idea. I'm going to begin to empty myself, little by little, to feel myself out.

As almost always when I'm beginning, I promise myself an optimistic novel. I know what I mean. Not conventional optimism. A novel tasting of life. Then, when it is finished …

I'm thinking about a couple I've known for forty years. They have both struggled. She must have had virtues, since he used to love her and they were happy. At fifty, she became another woman. A caricature of herself, morally as well as physically. And at any slightest difficulty, she falls ill. But he goes along without a word, smiling … Do some people laugh at him, taking him for a fool or a simpleton? He surely knows it. He pays no attention … He is paying.

He had ‘the other one' for thirty years. He is used to her faults. Which is the real woman, the one today or the former one? Does he ask himself that question?

I don't think he submits silently just because it is the only way to have peace. I think it goes further than that, that he is aware that this deterioration, which must have come about imperceptibly, is part of a complex process, a sort of law …

There used to be vaudeville skits about this sort of thing, which made people laugh. Now we try to understand and don't laugh any more.

It is the same with all known and unknown laws in nature. Man always submitted to them whether he liked it or not, reconciled himself to them.

Today we no longer reconcile ourselves.

And I come back to medicine, which I hadn't meant to say any more on today: to heal or not to heal?

For the question is asked. I'm not talking about finding the remedy for this or that affliction. I'm talking about caring for and healing the individual, this individual, in these circumstances, with the consequences that this entails …

I just read a phrase of Littré's. Is it true or false?

‘Imagine how sad one must have been to have composed a dictionary.'

Is there a link between my different notes today? It doesn't matter. Yesterday, at the wedding, few young people. One, however, who asked me, he too, for permission to come to see me. He is the son of one of the most famous contemporary orchestra conductors.

He is twenty-five years old, paints, seems to be giddy, charming, and aggressive all at once. I wouldn't be surprised if he became a personage himself, but I foresee an eventful life, if not a tragic one, for him. At the moment he is engaged, in love, full of life. He behaves as if he needed someone to look after him, or cajole him.

At his age I was already saying (and I've often repeated it since) that a novelist must live to be an old man, as old as possible, in order to see mankind from every point of view, that of the adolescent, the old man. It is even truer than I thought. One must have led a certain number of lives, been present, from beginning to end if possible, at those experiences which make up human life.

Professor X said to me yesterday, on a parallel subject:
‘As a young man one can express ideas. It takes a lifetime to discover them.'

To rediscover them, rather, even the simplest ones. To experiment with them, to
feel
them.

It was only last week that I suddenly understood that one of my good friends, also a doctor – another one! – could quite easily become the character in
L'Ours en Peluche
in spite of his apparent stability. And he too, like my other friend, is silent, silent with a wife who overflows with vitality. Smiling.

Always with a look of … I finally recognize these eyes, which others accept so easily as serene, but which, it comes to my mind, are the eyes Monsieur Monde had – when he came back. Didn't I have that look myself for years? It is neither tragic nor moving. It's worse!

I'm very glad I went to New York! If I hadn't gone, how long could I have continued to have anything to write about?
Monsieur Monde … Le Cercle des Mahé … Les Noces de Poitiers … Bilan Maletras
… And then? The balance of what?

So, fifty-eight years old. Sun. Lovely birthday, flowery, affectionate, leisurely, with an afternoon walk in Lausanne with D.

The thought I write here is yesterday evening's. Taking off on some idea one wants to get rid of, there it is again at the end of the line in a different form.

We often joke about old men – or middle-aged men – saying that whenever they get together they can't stop talking about the good old days, about what they've lived through and experienced. Now that I have been a middle-aged man for some time and many of my friends are really old men, I know the truth.

There's no doubt we sometimes recall old times with a kind of exuberance, but that's only superficial talk after a good dinner in good company.

What an old man wants to know when he meets another is whether the other has come to the same conclusions he has, the same results, though of course the question is not put so crudely. It isn't asked at all. It's the young men who ask questions or answer them.

They arrive by soundings, prudent, veiled. They are looking for the flaw. For they know that everyone has a flaw.

A few words, certain silences, looks, are enough to inform the questioner and he rarely goes further, because what remains to be said cannot easily be expressed in words. Or because words seem trivial or absurd.

So many years … So many experiences, hopes, joys, pains, springs, journeys, discoveries, doubts, successes …

And what were they looking for?

Shall I be foolish enough to tell, when I'm still only a half-oldster; won't they, the real ones, accuse me of betraying the brotherhood?

Like Diogenes, they were looking for a man. Because one would be enough! They have sought outside and inside themselves.

If one of them, at the end of his search, finally found one – even more if it were himself – I haven't met him yet.

That would change everything. On that, one could build … I don't know … not a morality, which I don't care for … build a world, perhaps, which would really be made to our measure?

Short of that, they speak in brief sentences that are noncommittal, that are like bait on a line, they watch, they smile, they open or close their mouths, and from time to time one is tempted to wink at the other.

Don't primitive peoples express all these things – and much better! – in their sculptures and masks?

Since last night a small machine weighing as little as a 4-CV (and which may make no more noise) has been on its way to Venus.

(Children, I wouldn't want you to imagine, because of yesterday's notes, for instance, that one day in February 1961 your father thought of himself as an old man, or even felt old. He doesn't at all, and I undoubtedly owe that to you, for by living with you I am plunged into youth once more. If I'm talking about old men, then, or middle-aged men, it's because I am at least halfway between them and you – more than halfway, alas! – and I'm beginning to understand them while still able to look at them from the outside. Finally, I should say that I am
surely at the ideal age to see both sides. How wonderful it would be to stop time!)

Still on the subject of old men, there are some left – not for long, though – who in my eyes belong to a particular species which I always observe with curiosity mixed with some envy. They are country people from the little villages, whom one sees congregating at the fairs or in the inns.

They are eighty or more. They all were babies at the same time, went to school, to all the burials, all the marriages, all the baptisms of the countryside together.

They remember their games together, their fights of other days. Their life has passed in an enclosed world, which must have been reassuring. And yet, looking at them closely, in spite of their simplicity, their lack of philosophical curiosity, it seems to me that I've found that same question in their eyes that I was talking about yesterday.

Also, I wrote a sentence that doesn't really make sense and I want to correct it. But I can't see how to do it. I spoke of building a world made to our own measure. This doesn't stand close examination. Build a world? Who? Us? How? Why? And what is
our
measure? Whose measure? The measure of what? How did I fall into such bad writing? And yet, behind these clumsy words, I feel that there is something.

Lumumba has been assassinated. I wonder if his death isn't going to speed up the end of a certain society which I despise. Somewhere in this notebook I was wondering if cynical people really exist, people strong enough to be cynical. Is this one of the proofs?