When I Was Old (36 page)

Now, on the pretext of these days in Algiers (the third or fourth time, if you count the one that put him in power, with the same men acting
for
him this time), now, I repeat, that he has complete authority, he has no intention of giving it up and announces that freedom cannot be defended in a modern country … except by the restriction of freedom.

This is not what horrifies me most. It is the man himself, his attitude, his insolent pride, his contempt for man and man's efforts, for everything that man has done over the centuries that he isn't ashamed of or that makes him think there may be some hope for the future of the species.

The
Grandeur
which he talks about so much is the narrowest nationalism, the most inflated and the most aggressive, it is the pomp, the costumes, the uniforms, the parades, the stage sets, and a protocol that totally amazes me: unknown in the most royalist countries, it should make the world laugh.

He backs and fills. He makes the country wait until the day when he solemnly decides to pronounce an oracle. And the words change meaning each time.

Deep contempt for all men, including those who surround him. It is true that he chooses these from among the least interesting.

Yet he is held up as an example. A whole generation hears of his glory, his intelligence, his force of character, his historic consciousness.

He has done none of what he said he would. He has disappointed all expectations and no one calls him to account for it.

There he is, a living anachronism, pretending to know everything and manage everything himself, according to his own lights.

He refuses to receive professors, unions, but he surrounds himself with bank presidents and presidents of big companies, who have never had it so good.

He speaks ‘to the French' but the French he speaks to are not the people, whom he looks down on from a great height: they are the representatives of great private interests, the religious orders, the young people who have been behind every thrust of extreme nationalism from the days of Balzac and ever since … why not say for ever?

La Frrrance
… which the world needs, which, with its forty million inhabitants, is once more going to restore order to a mad world …

La Frrrance
… which is to say de Gaulle, who tosses off advice to other nations, and sometimes deigns to receive heads of states with two or three hundred million souls from the top of the staircase of the Elysée Palace.

He lies, he contradicts himself, he beats about the bush, he glowers or blesses with the face of a sad clown,
and there is no one who dares burst out laughing or write a
J'accuse
.

How long will this go on? I don't know. I think of the real men, the ones who work in silence and who do not believe themselves infallible, who doubt, who go forward one step at a time and help mankind advance in every area of knowledge.

His presence is an insult to them.

Surely I am not the only one who thinks so. I wonder if, in the light of recent events, of which we are given only a distorted and rather mysterious version, we shall not see popular uprisings as they have happened time and again in the course of History.

I am not hoping for trouble. I am a man of peace. For the sake of man's dignity, however, I would welcome a popular movement that would put both this madman with his arms raised in a V and the little band of ambitious idiots who surround him and are trying to drag us back a century, back in their proper places.

Smile if you like, children. You will see that in every man there is an ancient spring of idealism – even political idealism – which sometimes breaks through his calm.

But I am a man of serenity. And I have rarely felt so much a man of the people as I do today.

Henry Miller spent the day at my house. He's in Lausanne looking for a home, a ‘place to live'. He vacillated between Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, the Bahamas, etc.
He had to take into account, as I do, schools for his children and those of his companion. That reminds me of when D. and I were undecided in the same way.

Miller is seventy years old. I hope that when I'm his age I'll still want to move, with the same problems and the same pleasure as ever.

Sent
Je me souviens
off to the publisher. Tomorrow, photographer. Some other obligations in the next few days, then go somewhere, doesn't matter where, with D. Maybe to Berne?

We needn't go far. On occasion we've quite happily gone to spend no more than forty-eight hours alone together … in Lausanne.

The sun is shining. The grass in the garden is being cut; the last rains have made it as tufted as Johnny's mop, which I love to tousle. Pierre is learning new words every day. He juggles with life. He tries everything. Why do we lose this faculty? When there is always something new to learn, to feel? There must be a reason, which isn't ageing, and which we haven't yet found.

A rather intriguing idea of Teilhard de Chardin's, which I condense and simplify: humanity is only just beginning its youth.

Ageing is slowing of the rhythm of life, of activity, shrinking …

But humanity is multiplying at an accelerated rhythm,
same for discoveries. So humanity is still emerging from childhood.

Even stranger that, though man grows old and dies, humanity should follow the opposite course.

I think I understand, however, another idea of Teilhard de Chardin's which attracts me less: the real function of man is not to be an individual, but little by little to become integrated into a new field of action, a great body into which each would melt and which would itself have its own personality.

What astonishes me is that today one reads discussions of this kind not just in specialized reviews, but in the big-circulation weeklies, the same ones that now deal mainly with literature, painting, music, or avant-garde cinema, as if there were no general public any more, only intellectuals.

In my youth I had a certain number of friends who became ‘intellectualized' this way. Without exception, all of them were failures later. As if this ‘intellectualization' were an incapacity to adapt to life.

They thought about life instead of living it.

Among stripteasers there are a fair number, not only of women with bachelor's degrees, but of women who have gone on to postgraduate study. Are they most themselves at their studies (for their pleasure, so called) or when they undress in public?

Many books are published currently, especially in Italy, which consist largely of photographs. The Bible in particular. The fashion began in France. But it was one of my books, published about 1931, that was used for the
first experiment. The idea wasn't mine but that of a young man named Jacques Haumont who, I think, invested his inheritance in the venture.

The series was called
Phototext
. The first and only volume was a long novella of mine,
La Folle d'Itteville
, and the photographs by Germaine Krull were as important as my words.

I wrote four or five others at Morsang on board the
Ostrogoth
after I came back from Holland, while waiting for the publication of the first Maigrets. In one morning, I wrote the forty-five typed pages. Haumont came to lunch at noon. I read him the novella as I corrected it. No other revision.

Haumont went into bankruptcy and, with my consent, gave the unpublished novellas to Gallimard, who published them in a collection edited by Paul Morand,
Les Chefs-d'Oeuvre de la Nouvelle
.

No one gives credit to Haumont, who invented too soon a form that is flourishing today. As Balzac initiated the formula of
La Pléiade
and broke his back doing it.

I wouldn't dare reread those novellas I wrote in three hours on the deck of my boat and revised in haste while having an apéritif in the sun. How little awareness I must have had! Or how little faith in and respect for ‘Literature'?

Back with ‘the papers'. Stormy, unpleasant weather. Showers.

When we settled at Echandens, we did what we had done in Lakeville: had swings and gymnasium gear set up for the children at the back of the garden. All last summer, Pierre (he will be two years old in three weeks) would see his brothers, his sister, and their friends use them. But he used to circle them at a distance, he never came closer.

A month ago, at the beginning of spring, I had a swing with a back and a belt put up for him, but he only looked at it, shaking his head in refusal. For four weeks he looked at this apparatus distrustfully.

Not until day before yesterday did he decide to sit in it, though refusing to be swung. Yesterday, he could be gently pushed.

It was almost the same thing with his rocking horse. He loved it from the first day – wanted to have it in bed with him – but it took almost a month for him to get on it.

Since he has been eating things other than milk, he has had the habit of smelling each new food with the same distrust, of turning it over and over for a long time, examining it before putting it in his mouth.

This reminds me that my three other children were no different. Children are said to be reckless because they play with matches, touch electric outlets, etc. But these objects look passive and harmless.

On the contrary, if I can judge by my own, the child is as careful, as distrustful as an animal. I would even say fearful. His attachment to his parents has a good deal of fear in it, fear of being left by himself.

Why does he become reckless at a certain age? (Not always!) I think it is because he wants to impress other children, or grown-ups, or even himself. I should not be surprised if he became aggressive in proportion to his fear. I could swear, for example, that Marc was always afraid of his big motorcycle, as I always felt a bit afraid with automobiles.

Physical courage, when it isn't a matter of fighting for one's skin, may very well be an artificial sentiment that animals don't know, since they never run unnecessary risks.

All the same, isn't there another kind of courage, moral bravery? After the security furnished by its parents, doesn't the child or the adolescent seek the same thing in groups?

So without really wanting to I come back to a subject that I've sniffed around several times, and I don't like the conclusion I'm tempted to come to, because it is the negation of the individualism I care so much about.

Essentially, then, is man gregarious out of fear?

How many people live alone, are able to live alone, by inclination, by destiny? Isn't love most often a way of escaping solitude and its terrors?

Strong men, paratroopers, for instance, act as a group; one could even say a group that draws closer together as its members become more aggressive and more brutal.

The war hero is a group hero. And knowing this, the philosopher who moves against the current of his times or ahead of it, the avant-garde artist, almost always keeps in touch with several of his own kind.

The truly isolated man, the hermit by nature, is very rare, and psychiatrists consider him a pathological case.

If this is true, if man instinctively moves towards the herd, towards rule, towards obedience … These past days I've been irritated by propaganda, which begins pouring in on us in the morning and goes on all day in all forms. But the propaganda of the past in the form of daily masses, which even kings could not escape, the sermons, the
confessions
…

From this point of view, why such horror at the thought of the world of today and tomorrow in so many informed minds who panic at the thought of mass civilization, mechanization, standardization, which is actually hardly more advanced than it was in the life of the Middle Ages? Didn't serfs, peasants, take comfort from living more or less peacefully in the shadow of the castle, which offered them a refuge in time of danger?

If the child is naturally fearful …

Are there any real exceptions? Yet I see men who mouth the word ‘liberty' accepting posts, honours, ridiculous titles, gilded medals, cattle-show ribbons.

A Blaise Cendrars … A Henry Miller … Other people I know who have had the reputation of being real wild men, wholly pure, spend a good part of their lives seeking each other out for reassurance. Blaise Cendrars accepted a most belated medal on his deathbed. Miller wears the rosette of the American Academy on his sports jackets.

Isn't it pitiful how, beginning with nothing but a swing, a simple parental observation, in spite of myself I
come back to one of the three or four ideas I'm always circling around like a circus horse?

Aren't our little habits, our manias, also a way of reassuring ourselves?

We speak of man as if he existed in the individual state. What if there were only men, a mixture of men, much more like each other than they first seem to us, a sort of human caviar which …

Come on! I'm off again. And living, then? What do these ratiocinations have to do with life? And the papers I'm going to read? And the television I'll be watching tonight? And the rage that comes over me as I listen …

In ten minutes we'll sit down to our meal and Pierre will watch the door until every one of the family is in his place in the dining room.

For him, the unit now is the family, until it becomes the school, the regiment, the office, the political party, the country, Europe.

How I wish the unit were man!

Day before yesterday morning in my study, a bumblebee flew in clumsily, beating against the three windows, passing close to my head each time. I know they don't sting. But was it a hornet? Still, I know the difference. But I kept dreading some unpleasant contact and suddenly I decided to kill it. Because I wasn't sure. And because I wasn't used to it.

For similar reasons people have slaughtered snakes that are useful and harmless, other animals, screech owls, bats, etc., which are now greatly missed, according to zoologists.