When I Was Old (3 page)

And if it were necessary, for the man of tomorrow, how many other cross-breedings …

This gives me or permits me a somewhat caustic serenity.

I had to glance at the last sentences written, otherwise I'd have gone on about the same subject. I was no longer sure of whether I'd spoken of it here or to one of the journalists whom I saw afterwards. I'm surprised to realize how small is the number of more or less original ideas – or ideas we believe to be original – that we carry with us through the years and which are sometimes enough to furnish a whole lifetime.

We shouldn't even discuss them for we get nothing in return but a certain ridicule. The mandarins have raised barriers between different domains of the mind which it's
better not to cross because the response is only shrugged shoulders. Doctors, for example, are the most susceptible to this. If there is anyone who tries everything, it is they. They paint (annual salon of doctor-painters in Paris) or are art critics, often very poor ones. They discuss the theatre, literature, music. In a single year I've received four or five novels from doctors, novels whose themes have nothing to do with medicine. The suggestion that literature is at least as complicated as medicine would be poorly received by them. But just dare to put forth an idea on a medical subject … In the Anglo-Saxon countries they have invented, or rather adopted, the word ‘layman', previously used by priests, if I'm not mistaken.

However, the history of medicine is easier to study than that of literature. Most of them don't know it very well. Many of them don't keep up with their colleagues' work, and French doctors, for example, almost purposefully ignore American discoveries except for those that have reached a point of general and universal acceptance.

Isn't it the same with all specialists?

But why the devil don't they admit that a novel, a sonata, a picture, are also the work of specialists who have given years to research as arduous as the research of the laboratory?

If a Faulkner, a Picasso, a Buffet, a Prokofiev judged a new serum, a biological theory, with a phrase, condemned a certain tendency in psychiatry with a word, how ridiculous!

Any small-town doctor, anyone at all, in fact, can judge a work of art
ex cathedra.

And I shouldn't go outside my speciality either. Each time I allow myself to express an opinion – and I can't resist – no matter how timidly, with how much humility I do so, I still feel I have diminished myself and that I invite sarcasm.

And if I promise myself not to talk about myself!

But whom should I talk about, for God's sake?

And why not have the good sense to be quiet?

A man doing his work all his life without saying anything about it, without anyone knowing anything about him. There must have been some. I only need to open a few works that are not five feet away from me to assure myself of that, but I haven't the courage. And I'm afraid it would humiliate me.

Two friends in the drawing room, whom I'm separated from only by an open door. Sat them down in front of the television;
Hamlet
at Carcassonne. Am tired of talking, a little sickened. I find pamphlets on the Algerian war in the last mail.

In the television news, three stories, three massacres: Cuba, the Congo, and the plane shot down in Russian waters.

I have a horror of violence in any form, of brute force. I want to be indignant. I am indignant. Yesterday I saw young Belgians, in their twenties, who sang as they climbed into the plane taking them to the Congo. Proud to have guns. Proud of going to fight. And basically, I
know, they aren't really soldiers, these are little boys who are making noise so as not to feel frightened.

Horror of political discussions, articles, newspapers that speak of greatness (meaning force, always), horror of politics.

Then I wonder if I'm not wrong, if all this isn't normal, if it isn't the biological law of natural selection. I sometimes reach the point of wondering if it isn't out of a sort of cowardice that I condemn all show of power in my innermost soul, and I hesitate to talk as openly with my sons about it as I've been doing here.

I am certainly bringing them up like young anarchists. Johnny already hates uniforms, war.

Am I right? Am I wrong? An idea came to me just now that should be developed at length and better than I could do it, and this idea reassures me.

Not altogether. Not too much. It is too tempting to believe what suits one's temperament and mind.

The history of the entire world, what is written, sculptured, painted, digested in encyclopaedias, could actually be concentrated in a few hundred men (who could be further reduced to a few dozen), philosophers, scholars, artists, who are the landmarks of our evolution and who are enough to give us a little pride in our humanity, a little hope.

Power has always been against them, whether it was serving religious ideas, political, or patriotic. Almost all those to whom we have erected statues were to some extent, at some period of their lives, victims of force, of brutality, and the ideas which incite these.

So why should it be otherwise today? For three years I have refused, even in more or less official ceremonies, to wear decorations. Don't these indicate that the powers consider you a good servant? A good servant of force?

Trite, of course. But behind these clumsy sentences I feel something that I haven't managed to express. Nor is it in any of my novels. I avoid even alluding to it there, touching on any idea of this kind. Not for fear of displeasing, but out of modesty, for fear, too, of seeming committed. In fact I'm not, neither on one side nor on the other.

The committed man, whatever he is, makes me afraid, makes me bristle. I wonder if he is sincere. And, if he appears to me to be so, I wonder if he is intelligent.

I only speak of this to my ten-year-old son. It doesn't interest my eldest. So much the better? Maybe.

I love man. His history, above all his first stammerings, moves me more than all the dramas about passion. I love to see him in search of himself, century after century, failing each time, forcing himself to go on again.

How heartbreaking it is to watch him, no longer alone, but in a crowd, and to hear those who call themselves his leaders and who are so because they have been chosen.

These notebooks are definitely not destined for publication, and I believe, if I go on, that I will ask my heirs to destroy them after having read them.

They only serve to rid me of what gnaws at my brain. When I have to answer an important letter, I do it at once so as not to have it nag me for days. I do the same thing here, I bury what is bothering me so as not to think about it any more.

This morning, as every day recently, I was feeling in top form physically. None of my usual and also, I suppose, unimportant little troubles. So my morale is excellent. (Trotsky, whom I met once in his exile at Prinkipo, wrote some astonishing and moving lines on man's ageing. Fifty-five years old. I'm fifty-seven.) After luncheon, slight argument with my wife. Not even disagreement. Misunderstanding, for no reason. That was enough. A little afterwards, in town, vertigo, pain in my shoulder, etc. And, if I let myself go it would have been total collapse. Everything takes on another colour.

The slightest touch is enough. The body follows.

In spite of the work of psychotherapy, medicine is no less largely technique, occupying itself with the disease more than with the patient (except for a few old family doctors who most often don't keep up with medical progress).

And justice treats men as if they were constantly the same, whether fasting or well fed, at rest, euphoric, overworked, or after a conjugal dispute.

Not only is each one a special case, but each should be studied at each hour, at each minute of each day.

It's impressive to think that one is only an instant in the history of the world, only a portion of that instant, and that this portion, which has no present, is imperceptible.

Trite, to be sure. Not to be written down. But it passes the evening.

Still, I had a bad afternoon because of a word ill understood, an intonation that changed my mood and, as a result, my physical equilibrium.

Another word, perhaps, a look, a pressure of the hand, would restore my well-being.

Is it wrong to be so involved in the inner man, to want to understand him, cure him, with such tenacity? Have we come to a sort of sentimentality and was health, on the contrary, rather in the untroubled brutality of what once was called the hero?

Every day my paediatrician friends see the birth of infant idiots, of Mongoloids, of monsters of all sorts who will remain monsters and whom charitable institutions will pass back and forth from one to another.

Others display prodigies of skill, of devotion, create a science almost, out of pure kindness to keep alive (?) impotent old men who are a burden for family and for society.

Criminology, in its way …

I believe in it. I'm one of those. I feel that I am of the family of those who devote their time to trying to better man's life, no matter what man, no matter what human embryo, no matter what offal.

Is this really a good? Doesn't one risk creating an anxious, self-pitying humanity, incapable of facing realities?

Will there be enough men to take care of others, to be responsible for them? Enough strong ones for all the weak?

Will there be any strong ones left at all?

All this, again, because of a small cloud in the conjugal sky! What would it be after a real argument?

Actually, I know the answer, because at least once I took my pistol out of its case.

Lots of people in the living room with the door open. This has gone on for three days. Good friends, however. Talk. Listen. Talk. My not drinking is no help; it goes to my head all the same. And later I'm ashamed of what I've said, of positions I've taken or seemed to take. I have had enough of talking … maybe also of listening. I would have liked to write at length this morning, about Brisson, about Gide, about sincerity, about small ideas of no importance that have plagued me since yesterday. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow. I hope so. Talk to myself, in fact. That way I have fewer complexes. A rotten word which I detest.

A short respite before my guests come up and the Nielsens arrive. The latter don't tire me because with them I don't have to make any effort at conversation. Yesterday, Pierre Benoit. That's a different matter, for he is devilishly sly and at the same time very sensitive. I'm always afraid of hurting him, and I have the feeling of talking on tiptoe. In any case that has little to do with what I wanted to write.

I wrote four pages that I crossed out because there were too many names, too many people who are still alive and whom I wouldn't want to hurt.

In spite of the discrepancy between their public and private lives, I still question myself on their sincerity.

The question bothers me. Others, much younger than I and who have lived less, don't have such scruples and readily talk about hypocrisy and cynicism.

Put them in the presence of a human being and they flee him after a short contact.

Not only have I scruples, but I don't understand. For I don't believe in force, physical or moral, nor in cynicism, nor in calculation, at least not in the sense intended by these people of whom I've been talking.

I try to understand and I see that it's very hard. Financiers? Celebrities from Paris or London? Stars of Europe or California? Fame, money, power, life …

All this doesn't exist, doesn't exist in a state of nature. After all, they are only men, as vulnerable as the rest, if not more so.

From this point of view I wonder how, why … How do they manage to write what they write, to believe, or seem to believe, in what they would have us believe … ?

I would like to call them decent men. As decent as the average labourer, as the conventional and often generous white-collar worker.

However, they react to the Congolese crisis only in terms of their shareholdings in Katanga, or the Cuban crisis in terms of their instinctive revulsion against Communism.

They falsify everything, the Algerian war and internal politics. Do they really see only what they want to see? Is it a strain for them, and have they moments of doubt, when they know that they shirk the truth?

Don't their interests force them into convictions which
seem incompatible with everything they know to be true?

They meet great doctors, biologists, lawyers who daily deal with men as they really are.

How can they go on seeing man as he is not, seeing him as he ought to be in the interest of their interests, so that their own image may stay untarnished?

It's too easy to see these people as all of a piece. I know they are weak, riddled with complexes, that they are often afraid, ashamed, that they seek reassurance.

But my intelligence, because once more I must use terms that everybody uses, furnishes me no satisfactory answer.

For myself, the only possible approach is to write a novel, to become, for the time being, the character, to feel as he feels. I have the impression, perhaps the illusion, that this gives me more of the truth.

I could have cited other names, other men whom I know as well or as slightly. It happens that these, here, have come in contact with me in one of the rare periods when I haven't put up a fence around my life as a working novelist, and around our family life.

The parade has gone on for two weeks. I have a hangover from it. It's possible that I repeat myself – repeat myself often. Indeed I have always been astounded at the small number of ideas – and can one even call them ideas – that a man collects in fifty-seven years of life. I'm not speaking of ideas one can get from books, of course. I'm speaking of those that have been digested, of what is left, of what has finally become part of ourselves.