When I Was Old (31 page)

When was this process reversed? Today it is the community that demands doctors, teaches them, pays them.

Curiously, the number of doctors per patient is nearly the same, it would appear, as that of sorcerers in the primitive forest.

In the most highly developed countries, one doctor to eight hundred inhabitants. Wasn't there one sorcerer to a tribe and weren't those tribes made up of about that many individuals?

I am writing at Johnny's bedside. He's had the flu since Monday with a pretty high fever, while my wife is in the clinic where I go to see her, shuttling back and forth.

Human values change with circumstances. During the war of 1914, life, the survival of a unit, often depended on a jack-of-all-trades, a sort of tramp or ignorant woodsman who suddenly became more important than the officer or the specialized soldier to the comfort and morale of his comrades.

Suddenly the nurse has the same importance to the individual. To the point where men of a certain age who are rich enough to afford anything choose to marry theirs to assure themselves care.

I always hesitate to tell stories, above all about third parties. However, these two seem to me so significant that I shall try to tell them so that it won't be possible to guess the identities. They came to me first-hand and I know that all the details are correct.

More than twenty-five years ago, a gynaecologist then in fashion received a telephone call.

‘This is Mr So-and-So. I should like to have an appointment with the professor.'

‘The professor does not see men.'

A quarter of an hour later, another telephone call.

‘This is His Highness, Prince …'

An internationally known name. A colossal fortune. The professor received him. The prince, already an old man – dead today – explained that he had two children by former wives, that he had just met a beautiful lower class girl whom he would like to marry, but by whom he first wanted to have a child.

He was not sure that one of his sons was his own (he was wrong about that, since the son resembles him unmistakably), and this time he wanted to take all precautions.

What he wanted from the gynaecologist was this. The young woman was to enter the clinic during her fertile period. The prince would join her there and give semen for artificial insemination. The woman was to stay incommunicado for a month. No man was to go near her. So that …

And without waiting for an answer, the prince went to get the young woman in question from the waiting room.

‘Examine her first, to make sure she can give me a child.'

The doctor examined her from head to toe in an adjacent office and discovered she had an atrophied uterus
which ruled out all hope of maternity. The young woman pleaded, wept. Her future was at stake …

‘Please don't tell him, I beg you …'

Why give this information to an old man who, anyway, already had two male heirs?

The gynaecologist said nothing. The couple left, came back three weeks later, was shut into one of the rooms, the prince with a bottle which he was to fill.

An hour passed. Suddenly the alarm bell rang through the clinic. Nurses rushed in, found the man naked on the bed, the room in disorder. The woman also naked, neither of them understanding what all the excitement was about. The prince had simply pushed the wrong button. He wanted to see the doctor. The latter came, saw that the bottle was still empty.

‘I wanted to ask you if it matters if the sperm is mixed with saliva.'

The doctor shrugged. ‘Not at all.'

And the procedure continued. The bottle was returned. A little later, the insemination which could have no effect took place. Some time later, the prince telephoned from a foreign capital to complain of the lack of results.

‘Had you considered,' the doctor asked, ‘that you might be the one who was deficient?'

I forgot to say that in the course of the first conversation, the prince had suddenly lowered his trousers and showed his member to the doctor, who had said:

‘I examine women, not men.'

So he complained on the telephone:

‘But I showed you …'

‘I can't come to any conclusions by examining you. It will require an analysis …'

This was done. The results were not promising.

‘Your spermatozoa are barely active. Many of them have no tails, etc.'

All this is entirely authentic. The prince married the young woman, who is a princess today and received in every court that still exists. She did not have a child. She is one of the best-known women in the world and newspapers are continually publishing her picture.

The other story is also connected with gynaecology. It happened in another clinic, several years later. A couple introduced themselves. Also princely, belonging to one of the reigning families of Europe. This time too it was a matter of artificial insemination. But the husband, who was impotent, could not be the donor. The couple asked if the procedure was possible, and spoke of going to Rome to ask for the Pope's authorization.

‘You won't get it.'

‘You don't expect me to take a lover …'

The couple insisted. The doctor, to get rid of them, got out of it with a vague promise. Some time later, telephone call from the wife:

‘I'm coming tomorrow morning. Get everything ready.'

How to find a donor? The gardener? There wasn't time to make the necessary tests, Wassermann, etc. Some day the child might be called on to reign.

The next morning the doctor got out of it by injecting
some physiological serum, counting on hearing nothing more of the matter.

But six weeks later he received a telephone call from the couple to thank him and congratulate him. The wife was well and truly pregnant …

In other words, before coming to the clinic she had taken her precautions, had had relations with a lover, and the artificial insemination was only an alibi!

This is a very, very great lady, an old woman today, about whom there never has been the slightest gossip and who leads an exemplary life.

Aren't these stories rather extreme?

I hope that without being inaccurate I have shuffled the cards enough so that names cannot be attached to the people and that, anyway, the interested parties are or will all be dead when these pages are published, if they some day are.

The world closes its eyes and behaves ‘as if'. These things didn't happen today, to be sure, but doesn't the same thing happen today in another sense? Must it go on for ever?

This week, three hundred children died daily of starvation, in one small Congolese town. Aeroplanes are flying in dried fish for them.

Clinic. Came back to see the children. Accident on the road. Cyclist knocked down by a car. Saw another this morning at the same spot.

Difficulty in harmonizing the ‘pity for the masses' so peculiar to our times and our sense of responsibility, if not of guilt about them (a New York financier talks to his psychoanalyst about the starving people in India or China and makes a real neurosis of it), with the discoveries of biology.

Not a difficulty of personal morality but of a way of life, of behaviour which will harmonize with ‘biological law'.

On the one hand our evolution moves in the direction of the individual, and our duties towards him.

On the other, science moves in the opposite direction and might arrive at a point of absolving Hitler.

Sentimentality? Instinct?

And our reason, which might impel us to wipe out millions of beings to preserve the species?

I write novels which I feel. I tell about men whom I try to understand, and at the same time I wonder if this isn't a kind of new romanticism, this time a romanticism of the masses, which would be worse than romanticizing the individual, and which could lead …

Tea, now, with D., in our sunny room.

Shit on abstract ideas!

Another real Sunday, though at the clinic, with even a Saint-Honoré with whipped cream for dessert, reminding me of my childhood.

At home this morning, Pierre pulled me into a corner of the room where I was changing and was annoyed because I couldn't understand what he wanted. Finally he took me by the hand and gave me the telephone receiver, saying: ‘Mamma!'

He wanted me to call his mother so that he could talk to her and more especially hear her, and he got his wish.

He does not go into his brother Johnny's room (Johnny has the flu) but stands in the doorway. This morning, however, he purposely dropped some small object a foot or two inside the door, then hesitated, jumped in to snatch it, the way you see kids jump into the river just at the edge.

Marie-Jo, who envies her brother for being in bed, constantly touches him, hugs him surreptitiously, in the hope of catching the flu.

I have watched the awakening of intelligence in each of my four children. It is so quick, so impressive, that one wonders how such a progression can end … in what we are.

Why, when, how this halts, if not actual regression? We should all become geniuses!

At home since Monday. More and more often a terrible temptation comes over me not to write any more. I'm speaking of my novels, not these notebooks. And yet! Why not stop entirely?

I comfort myself by saying to myself that in the two or three years that this has been happening to me I've written novels like
Le Président
,
Le Veuf
,
La Vieille
,
Betty
… What discourages me is that each time I decide to get to work, obstacles arise. But before? Wasn't it the same? Isn't this the way it is for everyone? Isn't it an excuse, an alibi?

We shall see.

To write with joy, what rubbish!

All right, then, I won't begin my novel on Monday as I planned (why?) and it will probably not be – or may not be – the novel I was trying to write around 20 March. The idea had already been rattling around my head for some time. At the clinic, in particular, and since I've been thinking of it in spite of myself and that's always bad.

I've noticed that nothing is gained, quite the contrary, by ‘worrying' an idea. We'll see. It doesn't really matter. My biggest mistake is announcing in advance when I'll get to work, as if I were ashamed of doing nothing.

It also serves as a kind of alibi. It's a way of getting out of invitations, of putting off demands for interviews and appointments until later. And when the moment comes, I'm ashamed to back out.

This must have begun during the period when I was working on assignment because I had to. For a long time I signed an annual contract with Gallimard every year
for six novels, because in terms of income that corresponded to my style of life. The novels had to be done well within the year. I had to turn them in on fixed dates. So I knew, in a less pressing way, the difficulties that weighed so heavily on Balzac.

You could say that now that these difficulties no longer exist, when writing no longer has anything to do with my material needs, I have instinctively kept the habit. I made it my trademark then to get the manuscripts in before the deadlines, never a late one.

Today, it's funny, I force myself to write them on the date I have fixed for myself or that I have happened to mention to someone else just to get rid of him.

It's quite unexpected. I have to take myself in hand when a delay upsets me. And if I become less prolific anyway? Anyway, it doesn't signify that I'm losing interest in people, quite the contrary.

Is it because I no longer have as much confidence in my little discoveries, or because I judge people more severely, that I reject some as uninteresting which I formerly would have delighted in?

In short, here I am on vacation again for ten days and I can only hope that during that time, at some moment or other, the spark will come.

So I'm still a wage earner. I revolted early against my parents' servitude and that of the people in my neighbourhood. I ran away from them to be free of it. But I have ended up in a voluntary servitude. It doesn't change anything to call it discipline and, all things considered, it isn't accurate. It is almost a conditioned reflex.

Next week I shall give myself a little pleasure that I've been promising myself for some time: go to the automobile dealer in Geneva to buy a new car for D., who gave hers to Marc.

A drive and a walk in Morges with Johnny. First walk in the garden with D.

I read an interview in
Newsweek
with one of my Irish colleagues, Frank O'Connor, best known for his short stories, whom I met ‘once upon a time' while at Harvard for several days for a seminar on novel-writing.

‘The writer,' he said, ‘has to have a good streak of solid selfishness to get his own work done. He should throw his wife out and make his children go out and work to support themselves at a really early age so he will be able to concentrate on his own writing.'

If I write down that sentence it is because it sums up the attitude of many writers, of artists in general, who pretend to have a right to a life different from that of common mortals, and who demand material aid, whether of their families, or rich patrons, or governments, etc.

This coincides with Gide's opinion, of which I believe I spoke, that the life of a couple and the obligations created by a family, thus paternity, are incompatible with the profession of writer.

This contention has always irritated me, first because I think that the artist is basically a man like any other, without special rights (he is often a dangerous element to established society, but to my mind this is not a bad thing, rather the contrary, though it explains the harsh
measures of this society against him, as for instance under almost all dictatorships), and then because the novelist, at least – I freely exempt the pure poet – needs as total a knowledge of man as possible.

Is that why I'm incapable of reading certain books, highly praised by critics? From the beginning I feel in them what I shall call an incomplete man, a man who does not accept his responsibilities and who, I'm sure, has chosen art – whether it is literature, painting, the theatre, or the cinema – only to escape daily realities.