When I Was Old (37 page)

Gide used to say to me, speaking of my son, that I should be sure to teach him natural sciences, especially about plant life, the study of which had always delighted him.

Alas, I never studied botany, because in my time it was largely a science of nomenclature. I've studied very little zoology. Johnny isn't studying it at all in school – at least up to now.

I feel remorseful at having killed this bumblebee, which had only a few days or hours to live.

The same evening, on television,
Night and Fog
, a documentary on Nazi concentration camps, crematory furnaces and gas chambers, piles of naked corpses, etc.

Doesn't the one explain the other? The same fear, the same ignorance, the same disgust.

Yesterday, in a rage, Johnny called me a bastard. As I promised myself I would, I have taught him not to ‘respect' me as my mother insisted on my respecting her, on my respecting my uncles and aunts, grown-ups, institutions. An hour later, poor Johnny was very sad. I was too. I still am, a bit. However, for him the word means nothing. It is an outlet for righteous wrath. I had been fooled by his sister's air of innocence and had scolded him unfairly. Today we both wanted to ask each other's forgiveness.

A holiday. Going to Geneva, D. and I. Lunch alone together somewhere. Ouf!

Yesterday was a better day than I expected. Not only did D. and I enjoy it, but everything fell into place for us, everything went well, it was as if we were juggling life and dropping nothing.

Found the English desk I've been looking for for six months in an antique shop, even more perfect than I'd dreamed, also a unique armchair, and the English dining set that we'd given up on into the bargain.

Scarcely back at the house, two phone calls for D. both on business, both successful. A day that will figure in our intangible album of memories. And for me, another opportunity to appreciate, vividly and in depth, D.'s maternal quality, her amazing patience. In a single day, she was companion, businesswoman, buddy, mistress, mother, I don't know what not.

In the evening, alone with Johnny, tender and troubled.

‘Did I hurt your feelings yesterday?'

I admitted he had.

‘Mostly because I understood that you couldn't help it, and I was afraid for you …'

He understood. It was the ‘bastard' that most perturbed him. Like his mother, he needs to explain, not to leave anything in the dark.

‘You know in school we don't mean anything by that, it's a word we use all the time. It's not even as strong as “idiot” or “imbecile” …'

Dear Johnny, who forgets that in all of his rages he calls me an idiot or an imbecile!

As for Pierre, here he is in his turn, in love with his mother, unwilling to let go of her in the evenings, inventing pretexts as cleverly as Marie-Jo. He doesn't go to sleep before nine thirty, after exhausting all the resources of his imagination.

I'm already beginning to feel the itch to write a new novel. A party at the school in the course of which Johnny is to play the part of a Chinese and be carried on a shield by his schoolmates.

D.'s birthday the 14th. The 23rd or 24th – I never remember my children's birthdays – Pierre's second birthday. Life is lovely and good.

All right – let's try to talk about this damned question of money. Each time I begin to write in this notebook my dream is to do it lazily, sometimes elaborating a detail, following the course of my thoughts without haste. I never manage it. I always ‘work small'.

I don't think it's laziness, although I can't stand sitting too long at my desk. It's more a sort of reticence that keeps me from giving too much importance to a reflection, a detail. It's the same for my books, whose brevity is the despair of my English and American publishers (they often have to publish two novels in one volume). I
condense in spite of myself and I am reinforced in it by my apprenticeship in the popular novel, in which there must always be movement, where it is forbidden to leave the slightest space for boredom.

The question of money has occupied, and occupies, very little place in my life, although it had such a great one in Balzac's or Dostoevsky's, to whom I should never think of comparing myself.

From the beginning, I've wanted it, so as to be free of certain worries, and especially not to have to count it. To buy without asking the price. To live without knowing what life costs. It was already a dream in my childhood, in a house where calculations went on from morning to night.

But I don't keep it. I don't hoard it. I have always said that money is only stored-up man, since a given sum represents so many hours of labour, thus so many hours, so many days, so many months, of human lives.

From there to keeping these symbols of life in a safe … It horrifies me. To such a point that I have often made enough crazy purchases to find myself broke again and forced to work.

I have a horror of capitalism. It seems revolting to me that money should earn money.

That's all. It seems to me that I had a lot to say on this subject, and I see I've already exhausted it. For today, anyway.

I'm not afraid of going back to a way of life I knew in my childhood, of living in a small apartment or in a little house in the country and, if no one wants to read me any
more, of working at a publisher's, at no matter what, like so many former colleagues.

However, I should not like to have my children suddenly in straitened circumstances, having to account for francs and centimes.

‘No, Pierre, that's too expensive …'

Or: ‘We can't afford that.'

Which doesn't mean it couldn't happen, since life has rarely been so fluctuating and unpredictable as it is today.

I shall have done what I could.

Having a half-siesta just now on the drawing room sofa and allowing my thoughts to wander in the grey of a rainy day, I arrived not so much at ideas as at preoccupations that I don't like very much.

Did it begin with the question of Algeria? There is a lot of talk about specific mentalities, the mentality of the French colonials in Algeria, the ‘officer mentality', or the ‘unit mentality', etc. … and among so many people who don't understand each other there no doubt are a majority of men who honestly believe in their cause.

In the United States I knew the ‘McCarthy mentality' and the ‘egghead mentality' and now there is that of the new establishment as opposed to the old, the Pentagon, the CIA, and so forth.

In
Je me souviens
I tried to give an idea of the Brüll clan and the Simenon clan. Though I revolted against both, there is no doubt that I remain marked by them, that
I sometimes, as today, react as a function of my education.

In the same way I rebelled against the Christian Brothers whose pupil I was, less against the Jesuits, and this rebellion left its mark. I have often said that the cult of the Virgin changed the behaviour of men towards women.

In this way I could go back to a number of themes which recur in my mind and, in spite of myself, rule my actions or my thought: ‘Laziness is the mother of …' ‘Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow …' ‘Only the bread one has earned tastes good …'

The words ‘idle hour' … as if there were anything more beautiful than an idle hour!

Thus we more or less submit to the imperatives of the clan, the race, the family, education, environment.

I was a jingoist in 1914–18, a pseudo-anarchist in the following years, though these were spent at the very Catholic
Gazette de Liège
. I took on the style of life of postwar Montparnasse (1921–30) and of the painters who peopled that section.

I saw life as a sailor when I lived aboard my boats, as a Parisian in Paris, a Southerner in the Midi.

In the United States I judged the political life and customs from the point of view of Americans, and I scarcely recognized France when I came back.

Just now, on my sofa, I began to smile at my cult of personality, of the individual. What individual, if a trifle can change him? ‘Conditioning' – Pavlov's, and that of the present-day Russians – is it as theoretical as we would like to believe?

I've seen my wife give birth ‘painlessly' thanks to conditioning, and today in Moscow major operations are performed without anaesthesia.

What individual? If what I do is the sum of my acquired reflexes, plus what has influenced me plus what has stuck to me and sometimes reappears unconsciously, what is left of me?

I observe my children. At the moment, they seem original to me. But when I see an old photo of them a few years back, they look to me still unformed, and I have the feeling that their personalities only came to them later.

What is left of me, of others?

Tonight we are dining at the house of some friends, medics, as usual. Monday, three days of holiday together. End of the month, end of various engagements, and, I hope, a novel.

Between the last one and the one to come I will have had three days of vacation alone with D.

Dined at our friends', yesterday, with a physicist (should I say atomicist?) professor at the CERN [European Council for Nuclear Research] in Geneva, world-famous, it seems, who wanted to meet me. I understood at once why. He is crazy about detective novels and … science fiction. He devours them. Very proud of having his friends call him Nero Wolfe, the hero of my colleague Rex Stout.

(He is only fifty-four but seemed to me older than I am. This now happens frequently. I meet people who appear heavier, more serious, more established, more mature, and I am surprised that they are younger. Is it possible that I'm mistaken and that they, from their point of view, have the same impression?)

He is from the Baltic region, like Keyserling, whom he reminded me of a little, like him speaks several languages perfectly, has lived in Germany, in the United States, in Paris, now for seven years in Geneva. Often goes to MIT. His wife, German, twenty years younger than he, has lived in Paris too, then was seven or eight years with the Mayo brothers in Minnesota. This kind of couple turns up more and more frequently.

He confirmed certain impressions I had which were based on nothing definite. Oppenheimer: he tended to play Mahatma Gandhi more and more; a scientific romantic. Braun: a scientist with a flair for publicity.

In scientific circles, he told me, each one knows his precise niche in the hierarchy. No argument possible, for this niche is decided by precisely measurable work. Art and medicine are debatable, have an area of impression.

He found my first book on a bench on the Champs-Elysées when he was fifteen, and since then has read all of them. I feel it was true. But I found no echo in his conversations as I do with doctors and psychiatrists. It is Maigret who mainly interests him.

He is the sort of man who speaks with apparent abandon, with a certain humour, and who is then suddenly
silent for a long moment, as if the conversation were no concern of his.

He wanted to have me meet other scientists in Geneva, where they are coming in growing numbers, either as residents or passing through. I don't yet know if these circles will interest me. I don't feel comfortable in them.

We talked about the mean age at which man gives the best of himself in art or sciences, and also in politics. According to statistics, this age is much later than one would think (reassuring!). I've already mentioned this. But, according to him, and he should know, this is not true for the sciences. It is considered the rule that a physicist or mathematician who hasn't made any discovery by thirty will never make any.

Which brings science closer to poetry.

‘In some respects we are poets,' he told me.

No interest in the influence of scientific discoveries on philosophy, on the history of human thought.

‘That doesn't concern us. Up to others to draw conclusions.'

Which must give a certain serenity.

This morning, a gay, clear sun.

Yesterday D.'s birthday. A perfect day for me and the children. About D., I'm not so sure. She is much more sensitive than I to the least shadow, to a trifle, which can
easily spoil her pleasure. Our three days in Berne were so good that I dream about them. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just being alone together, with no cares, without interruptions every moment. Walks in streets that can hardly be called picturesque; that was enough for us, as was a lazy visit to the museum of natural history. Yesterday delivery of the elegant English desk (late eighteenth century) that I finally found for my study, which is not complete and of uniform style. I am writing on it for the first time, a little intimidated by it. It faces two ways, has fifteen drawers, and, like a child, I'm putting off until tomorrow – or until this afternoon – the pleasure of stowing my things away in them.

New dining-room furniture too, in the same style.

Yesterday, ‘punishment day' as the Americans say. In bed until noon, headache. However, I hadn't overdone it much. Almost nothing is now too much for me. Was it in the United States that I learned the shame that weighs me down the day after? A painful day. Total discouragement. Not in front of the children!

Today I returned to my normal activities, I am busy with Friday's dinner, with Pierre's birthday; tried on two sports coats.

The papers have me being considered for the Nobel again. This is beginning to exasperate me. One year I'm called the favourite, another, an outside chance. And this
has gone on for more than six years. I've asked nothing. I don't ask for anything. Let them f … off and leave me in peace. The Nobel would have given me pleasure a few years ago. Now I'm not sure I would accept it.

Hope to write a novel in the first days of June but haven't the least idea of the subject, or even the tone. However, I'd better write it. I feel the need. We'll see if between now and then I'll have an inspiration. (That's the wrong word, of course. But what other can I use?)