When I Was Old (32 page)

At a meeting of the ‘Belletriens' of Lausanne to which I was invited, one of the provincial luminaries to whom I remarked that I was doing certain things – receiving journalists, photographers, for example, though it meant being asked the same questions over and over again – to whom I said, then, that I did this so as not to hurt anyone's feelings, answered me with assurance:

‘That's where you make a mistake!'

But for an hour I had been listening to his quite tedious lecturing and I had tried to answer his questions. I was in a hurry to meet D. at the clinic, where I knew she would be worrying. What would this gentleman have said if I had not gone to that meeting, or if I had left him in the midst of his chatter?

In every book, in every work of art, I look for the man, and I don't think I'm alone in this. The fuller a man's life is, the more complete it is, the more it covers the gamut of human experience.

Perhaps that's why I hate the words ‘man of letters', ‘literature', ‘artist' …

‘I am a man and everything that that …'

An American university gave Frank O'Connor asylum, as the kings of other times named a poet or playwright gentleman of the bedchamber, or what have you, and as France now appoints them curator of a museum or a library, or travelling lecturer.

Among modern writers, none of those, to my knowledge, has given us an important work, while a Bernanos, for example, had his six or seven children trailing behind him.

Enough! What is the use of discussing these things as if pleading a case? Won't we always end by believing in what suits us best personally? It's for this reason that I can never convince myself that any man is wholly insincere, even a politician.

A curious phenomenon. For about a fortnight during which D. was either at the clinic or convalescing here – and so, when I was more or less missing her – I pondered the subject of a novel that only half attracted me, which I resigned myself to writing at the risk of stalling after the first chapter, which would no doubt have happened.

Yesterday, first day of reunion. We don't need many external elements. This morning, visit to the gynaecologist. A drink in a bar, not for the sake of the drink, but just to be together, to be close in the atmosphere of a charming little bar.

In the afternoon, walk on Place Saint-François and Rue de Bourg. Then, later, dinner alone together in a good restaurant, television at home with Johnny. That's all.

But it was a perfect day, what I called a day of perfect happiness when I was fifteen (then it was a matter of reading alone in my corner, eating and drinking coffee and smoking my pipe. It was during the war. To eat, drink and smoke were very important things).

Result: the novel in question dropped into darkness and another was born in my head and skin, full of warmth, of animal tenderness … Provided I am able to write it. It is a subject (like the other one) that I abandoned last year at almost the same time for technical reasons, and I seem to have suddenly struck on the solution, a perfectly simple one.

Man was not meant to live alone!

Just now, papers at the station, as every Sunday, with D. and the children. In the afternoon, the two final world championship hockey matches on television.

We're talking about cars. We are promising ourselves to be extravagant at the Auto Show – we've earned it, haven't we?

Still sunshine, the garden full of flowers, and I took a lot of photos of the children there yesterday. They will never know what a state of euphoria I was in when I took them.

My first contacts with psychoanalysis date from 1923 (?) when Gallimard published
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, and between 1927 and 1928 I must have bought
Journal Psychanalytique d'une Petite Fille
and then
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood
.

I was then twenty when I discovered Freud. Since that time I have read Adler, Jung, others, but I think I never allowed myself to be influenced by their theories when I was writing my novels as, for example, the American writers are today.

A psychoanalyst said to me recently that in his way he was a novelist, adding that the discipline of his profession is sometimes less scientific than that of the novelist.

It doesn't matter. If I speak of it, it's because it came up yesterday in a television broadcast in which they resorted, as usual, to the mother and father complexes.

I wonder if it isn't a matter of a certain distortion or, more precisely, if we haven't been fooled by a label.

The child who cannot break away from his mother – the one who revolts against his father, or, on the contrary, needs his exclusive protection, aren't they simply more afraid of life? I mean natural life.

I would like to propose a change of labels. The more I observe men and the more of their confidences I hear, the more the title of a bad novel my mother used to read comes back to me:
The Fear of Living
.

A different fear, like the Freudian complex. For some, fear of the artificial life of society, the need to stay
in the primitive cocoon, to return to passivity and the dream.

For others, on the contrary, fear of leaving the beaten path, of finding onself suddenly off the track, of losing the support and approval of society: and so, fear of instinct, of the primitive life we find within ourselves.

With a simple change of words, Freudianism and the theories that result from it lose, in my opinion, their somewhat simplistically systematic character.

I shall be told that the father and mother are only symbols.

All right! But even in these symbols the truth seems to me simpler, more human. At fifty-eight, I am frightened by the number of people who are afraid of facing life squarely. This relates to similar thoughts I noted a few days ago.

It's a little as if we were taught everything from childhood – except how to live! Where would we find teachers?

Science has taken centuries to evolve rational nourishment (?) for us, for the nursing child, and for the adult. Nutrition has become an entirely new branch of medicine – like the art of ageing. But what have those other doctors who are psychologists, moralists, and philosophers evolved to satisfy our other needs? I've known a few of them, three or four, and they were afraid of the man in the street.

As my psychoanalyst concluded the other day:

‘We teach our patients nothing. It is they who teach us.'

The ones on television yesterday, however, seemed rather smug. Of course they were aware of families, friends and acquaintances watching them on the little screen.

It's odd how certain tastes persist for long years, even most of one's life, and how one finds them again passed on to one's children in one form or another.

Johnny loves to trace maps for his geography class, to write the names on them, in careful lettering. He has just finished a notebook on Brazil for school which he worked on with positive ecstasy. I have always loved cartography too.

And this morning, while shaving, I planned to give myself the pleasure of telling about my successive houses and of describing them, with a photograph of each pasted in the middle of the page.

It's childish, especially since I've never kept an album. I'll have no time before my novel – if I write it – but I shall do it some day. For the first stages, it may appear to duplicate
Pedigree
. In spite of what people think and what, out of laziness, I have let them think,
Pedigree
is not really accurate. I remember how in writing it I thought of a book of Goethe's which impressed me very much:
Dichtung und Wahrheit … Fiction and Truth
… Transposition of truth.

Here, by contrast, I intend to set down some precise information. For my amusement. Anyway, it entertains me today, which doesn't mean that it will still entertain me two weeks or a month from now.

I realize, as I may already have noted, that if I have lived in many houses, I have never, outside of here, spent
time in my study except for the hours strictly necessary to write my novels, and before D., to get through the mail as quickly as possible.

I don't think it's just a question of age, of a lessening of my curiosity. Never mind. This morning I'm going to do the last clean-up on the manuscript of
Maigret et le Voleur Paresseux
, which for me is in the nature of homework to be done in place of an anticipated pleasure.

Tomorrow, Auto Show. Easter soon, already, which doesn't give me much time before starting my novel. Either I begin on Monday, or once more I must postpone it.

Novel finished. Ouf! Promised myself to finish it before the holidays. It's done. I suffered. I failed with the same subject last year. It seemed easy and at the same time awkward. Perhaps, in the end, it will be understood. Euphoria? No! Exhaustion, like my character's. I am happy to have succeeded. In my own terms.

It annoys me to see the best-intentioned people – above all the best-intentioned – look for parts of myself in my novels.

They don't realize the harm they do me because they make me conscious of a certain chemistry that I shouldn't
become aware of, and sometimes keep me from writing as I please. How, out of what, a novel is made, is nobody's business, and especially its author shouldn't know.

Back to the mail. Played with the children. I find the above notes 1 and 2, which are typical, alas, and furnish an example of the effect of alcohol on me. 1 was written after one whisky, an hour after finishing my novel, and 2 after several other drinks.

It's plain why I no longer have any right to drink. I came near to self-pity – and now, the next day, I cringe, most of all because it is those who are dear to me who invariably get the blame. Without meaning to I have set down two fairly eloquent specimens, on which I needn't elaborate.

This morning I am full of tenderness, but because I had to be with the children – Johnny with his skates bought yesterday, Marie-Jo with her scooter, Pierre, who has a substitute nurse – I shall not be able to go on the wagon until tomorrow.

Give myself a good cleaning!

As foreseen, with my novel finished, I had two days of euphoria. Then the corresponding let-down. I've already spoken of it. It never fails. I ought to be used to it and not be bothered by it. For three or four days, great fatigue and a kind of depression. When I had promised myself such joy! Of course it's physical and now I'm back to my normal state.

The Rolls delivered day before yesterday. I think I've wanted it for a long time and was looking for good or bad reasons not to buy it. Because of the snobbism attached to it. So much so that I drove it cautiously at first, almost fearfully, as if it were some unknown monster. An hour later, we understood each other perfectly.

Yesterday D.'s car came – almost a work of art.

Children on vacation, my mother here in the house. Each day I wait for D. to be free to go driving with me.

Next week, as usual, I'll begin the revision of
Le Train
. Invariably also the same slight anxiety before a revision. The novel always seems bad to me. I change it. I cross out. Then, little by little, I get into the spirit of it again. I hope it will be that way this time too.

Theoretically, I don't believe in the importance of anything except love. In fact, however, I panic – over a novel, of all things, which is only words on paper, dusty copies of which someone, some day, may find in an attic, shrugging his shoulders.

Easter morning family style. Johnny, the only one up, made a scene, and that reminded me of my dramatic first communion. It's hard to be eleven years old, to feel like both a child and a man at the same time. It passed very quickly, and now he is his delightful self, just a little sensitive in eyelids and heart, as one is after crying.

For the first time Pierre hunted coloured eggs in his mother's boudoir, because it rained in the night and the grass is still wet. Marie-Jo, who loves to give presents, bought everybody chocolate bunnies, ourselves included.

In a few minutes, in pale sunshine we leave in the car, all of us together, for the station – to get the papers, as we do every Sunday. Marc wished us a happy Easter by telegram.

Yesterday I happened on a sentence of Gide's that I recognized: ‘Family, I hate you!' The counterpart of Léon Blum's words: ‘Bourgeois, I hate you!'

Poor Gide, who, for fear of losing some small part of himself, had his daughter brought up to believe he was a stranger – who later suffered from his malice – and who ended his days with her, his son-in-law, and his grandchildren, having himself filmed as a doting grandpapa two or three months before his death!

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, assumed similar attitudes, out of pride, I think, maybe from laziness, and hadn't the luck to recoup their losses.

How good it is, and how it takes me back to real life, to
have a Johnny who makes a scene for us on Easter morning, a wife who understands, a little chick to offer chocolate bunnies knowing we won't eat them, and a Pierre to hunt eggs for the first time!

States have their compulsory military service. No one has ever thought to institute an obligatory family service – if only for a short term – so that all men would have to learn certain elementary truths, acquire a base, as in learning Latin.

Because it's Easter and the staff has the day off, I just took the dog out this evening, and was surprised to realize that it was the first time in a long while. The first time in a long while, too, that I've been out of the house walking in the evening – we usually stay in behind closed shutters after nightfall.