When I Was Old (4 page)

Is there really anything left?

A certain attitude, perhaps, with me a curiosity which is never satisfied, a desire to understand not explain, to feel the real man beneath men's appearance.

I often have the impression that it would only take a little extra effort to discover that I am like them, that they are like me, that it is only habits, attitudes, words in which we differ.

Even if they upset and infuriate me, I love them, perhaps because I feel they are weak.

But why the devil do these people censure, and why do others, in turn, censure them?

The last ones have left and I'm a little ashamed of the relief my wife and I feel. For I really like them, these people who came to share a moment in our life. Some of them are friends. I have a deep affection for Sven Nielsen because I believe I understand him. Even the journalists, when they've gone, leave me with a pleasant memory.

Still, it is more and more disagreeable to see our house invaded, its rhythm broken, people sitting in my chair (the one in my living room where I watch television) and in my wife's.

The obligation to speak, to listen, becomes almost unbearable to me and perhaps it's so I won't have to listen that I talk so much.

Is it age? Once I liked to be close to people, and the
days without visitors seemed empty and dull to me. I would chase around, to Montparnasse, to the Coupole, or what have you. That was the great era of Montparnasse. I even had a bar in my own house on the Place des Vosges (1925 or 1926) where I officiated with professional flourish. No doubt I had a reason. No children. Just my wife.

Perhaps there was another reason too. I was young, just arrived in Paris. I had everything to learn. I had discovered, or believed I had discovered, that men reveal more of themselves when they are having a good time than when they are at their work. I spent evenings and nights at dance halls, at cabarets, looking, listening. The later it grew, the more people who must have been impressive in their offices became accessible, often pitiable.

In my bar on the Place des Vosges, I forced cocktails on my guests in order to produce more quickly the release that would permit me to see them naked.

But the evenings when I drank myself ? Wasn't it just an alibi then? And if, during the small hours of the morning, I arranged it so that several women were naked, was that just to study the behaviour of the other males, or for my own satisfaction?

I must speak of this sexual question, for others have spoken of it (like P. in the book he dedicated to me), and in my opinion they have been completely mistaken.

I don't intend to write a confession on this subject but to express certain very simple truths.

For the moment, what concerns me (not much, really,
but enough to get it off my chest) is this sort of instinctive withdrawal, more into myself than into my family, into my house, into certain rooms of that house; my irritation when my routine is interrupted. If it is age, too bad. But I'm not sure that's it. I was greedy for contacts up until … until I met D. in New York in 1945. And I've become more and more miserly with our intimacy. The children enlarged the circle. Echandens
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is arranged around us, according to the functions of each and all of us. I feel comfortable here. I establish habits here. Going into my study in the morning (not to work there, I'm not speaking of the times of the novels), my eyes seek a certain reflection on a piece of furniture, and a pencil out of place bothers me. I am with the children, in thought, in the house. I know where each one is, what he's doing.

Don't strangers have anything to teach me any more? Have I no more curiosity? I have no idea, but isn't it odd that I feel disturbed even by the children (and by the staff) if they burst in when I'm alone with my wife, if for instance they come into my room when we're having coffee after lunch?

D. and I aren't even talking; we're looking through the papers. We pass them back and forth and it's a half hour of what at fifteen I called perfect happiness. At that time too it went with coffee and reading and additionally the eating of a wartime pudding that I had concocted myself, since rationing kept us hungry.

I continue to love people, to be curious about them, to become passionately involved in their behaviour, in their ‘motives', but at the same time I have a passion for our little family universe.

The respite will be short. The nurse has left for a few days of vacation. One of the maids has had an operation. My wife is without a secretary until August. This means that I will not see her except on the run, busy with her different functions. At the weekend she will begin to pack, since we have promised Johnny and Marie-Jo to take them to Venice for ten days.

This trip will no doubt be pleasant. I'm looking forward to it as they are. Nevertheless I feel a certain uneasiness about leaving the house.

I've spent my life travelling, moving, changing my ambience, my habits (except the ones that are connected with my work). But now I hesitate to leave my shell. It was the same way in Lakeville, in Carmel, in Tucson, in Florida.

I make my nest. I settle down with my family and I hate to leave until one day, without knowing why, I don't feel at home any more and I take my little world elsewhere to start all over again.

I wonder if when I take off that way it isn't because of people, neighbours, intimates, all those whom you are forced to become acquainted with when you live somewhere. You spend a certain amount of time meeting them. When I know them all, when I can no longer step outside without being spoken to, I leave.

Is that the real reason? Are there others? The fact that
reality doesn't last long, for example? I mean the time during which one regards as real, as important, as personal, certain walls, certain furniture, the colour of the curtains, the road to town …

There must be something to that, because each time I move I get rid of my furniture and most of the objects so as to start again almost new, from scratch.

To start one's life over each time from scratch!

That's almost the same miracle that each child brings us: reliving the first years with him.

There, perhaps (Pierre is thirteen months old), lies the explanation I seek at random.

People who come steal a moment of life from me, leave a hole.

I've thought for a long time, in fact since I began to observe people, that I learn more about them when I talk than when I listen. If they speak, they generally repeat dicta which are always the same and which reflect the truth as they wish it were. When I speak to them, when I try out different ideas on them, their reactions are much more revealing.

I just took this notebook to write that single paragraph, which had been more pithy when I first thought of it and which I wished to turn better. Now, there is sun in my study this morning, for the first time in ten days. This delights me. I am also delighted by rain, and
I delight in a spring that is unlike any I have known since 1940.

I could swear that for the two months of the invasion it didn't rain once. As I wrote in my last novel, it was the kind of spring one remembers from childhood. May and June of that year were tragic. The invasion, the defeat, the retreat, fear, and, no doubt, also a certain shame (why?), refugees on the roads, air raids, the uncertainty of tomorrow. Now, what remains the most vivid in my memory is the sun, the colour of the sky and the sea at La Rochelle, the smell of spring and of the terraces. I could swear, too, that I'm not the only one, that for thousands of soldiers and of refugees the tragic has been obliterated, leaving only this impression of radiant life.

For example, lying in a field to escape strafing from a plane which passed so low that my eyes met those of the pilot (he didn't fire), I discovered some wild plants that I had not seen during years of life in the country, plants that I used to see as a child when I went to play on the parade ground at Liège or on the bank of the canal, plantain for example, others I don't know the name of which grew beside the railroad tracks, beside rivers and roads.

For three months I have wanted to write a novel about this period, about a refugee from Jeaumont separated from his daughter and his pregnant wife by the bombardment of a train (it is cut in half, each half going its own way afterwards). Not concerning himself with his family but with a warm female lying near him
in a cattle car. He is having an unexpected holiday, in fact.

One might say that the collective is quickly forgotten to allow only the individual to survive. Which explains why history is necessarily false.

My son Pierre, at thirteen months, amazes me by his capacity for wonder. This would seem to confirm my theory of little joys which is no doubt infantile, though I have continued to maintain it since I discovered it at twelve or thirteen. A hundred times a day he points to a picture, a flower, a piece of furniture, the design in a carpet, a bedspread, and, as if in ecstasy, gives an ‘Oh … !' of delight. Everything is beautiful. Everything is a source of pleasure.

It was the first feeling he expressed, months ago. Will it last? I hope so. Johnny, at ten and a half, still has the same enthusiasm, with the difference that if there is a shadow in a picture, a little fault in an object, a delay in expected joy, he suddenly falls into despair.

Pierre doesn't see the shadows yet.

I myself adjust to them.

Certain works can be written only by the young. I wonder if this is because they demand more energy – creative energy. In the long run, I think it is because they are affirmative works. Later, one no longer affirms. One asks
questions. But are one's works less good? They are different.

If I think this way, is it because I am reaching the age when others have stopped writing novels? Are we inclined to believe – in perfectly good faith – what reassures us?

This brings me back to people's good or bad faith. I don't willingly believe in intrinsic bad faith. This would demand, like true evil, true vulgarity, more strength of character than I see in man. Man needs a certain amount of self-respect. You might say that he comes to terms with what is called his conscience.

Later, if someone should read these lines, it is possible that he will be amazed that at this moment I have preoccupations which do not appear to be proportionate to reality.

The Belgian Congo – Cuba – Algeria. A heightened awareness almost everywhere, in students (this delights me), threats of war … if the event were to take place tomorrow, which is not impossible, one would be tempted to say:

‘At the edge of cataclysm, a man asked questions about …'

About very small things of a more or less personal order, I confess.

I'm not the only one. It has always been that way.

History happens every day and the importance of events only becomes evident after the fact.

One doesn't live with History, or rather one doesn't live History. One lives his little personal life, or that of a
group, or of an instant of humanity, of an instant in the life of the world.

Besides, all these little questions which plague me have a relation to what one calls the great questions of reality.

In rereading the history of the scientific discoveries of the last three or four centuries, especially all those in the field of medicine and biology, I have been amazed to observe that they almost all grew out of the patient observations of naturalists, scholars depicted in popular illustrations as being with wild hair and armed with magnifying glasses, dedicating their lives to a single species, almost always a very lowly one, a fly, a mould, an oyster, a frog …

These scholars are the only ones whom I envy. True, just like other men, they only rarely arrive at certainties. The further they advance, the more their questions lead only to other questions. However, they do succeed in contributing one solid little stone, one pebble of truth from which others will build edifices of hypothesis. I think of the researchers at the University of Leiden, of the correspondence they exchanged for two or three centuries, from country to country (often in wartime), a few resolute men bent on enlarging their knowledge of the nature of our species. In spite of battles and blockades, the Royal Academy of London corresponded with scholars in Paris and neither one nor the other were considered traitors.

Like the great naturalists, I would like to focus on certain human mechanisms. Not on grand passions. Not on questions of ethics or morality.

Only to study the minor machinery which may
appear secondary. That is what I try to do in my books. For this reason I choose characters who are ordinary rather than exceptional men. The too-intelligent man, the too-sophisticated, has a tendency to watch himself living, to analyse himself, and, by that very process, his behaviour is falsified.

I devote myself, in short, to the least common denominator.

If I were capable of understanding snails or earthworms, I would be happy to write a novel about snails or worms, and I would no doubt learn more about life and about man this way than in drawing my characters from contemporary man.

In interviews, I often speak of the naked man in contrast to the clothed man.

What a dream to go back, if it were possible, like the biologist, to the unicellular organisms!

Pierre woke up and we went to do errands in town. With the three children. Three and not four because Marc is married. Next there will be two left with us, then one, then … It's true that Pierre is only a little over a year old. My mother will be eighty next week. I don't know her well, and she knows me still less.

Isn't this inevitable since I left her when I was nineteen? We lived nineteen years together, during which I was first a baby, then a little boy barely aware of the world, then a student more interested in his teachers and comrades than in his family, and finally, at fourteen, fifteen years old, a secretive boy.