When I Was Old (40 page)

That's all. I left it. I hold it against myself, because it is an intervention by the author, it's intruding an idea that isn't worth expressing. I promise myself to cut it when I receive the proofs for the last corrections. I would have made a terrible playwright.

So I'm not exempt, as I'd like to be, from a certain smugness, and in a short text that I wrote for a radio broadcast, for I don't know which friend's anniversary, I put down a sentence that I had the weakness to believe important:

‘The only thing that life has taught me, as it has taught so many others, is that man is worth much more than he thinks, whether of others or of himself.'

That doesn't amount to much, one way or the other! But it's better to write a novel without gems from the author or pseudo-philosophical thoughts!

A beautiful day, luminous and warm. Last night, a fairy-tale hour. We are getting ready for the holiday. D. is on edge. In a month all this will have disappeared into the past.

One might say we use our time to manufacture memories as if only the present didn't count. Always horrified by the importance we attach to the past and the future and the slight importance we give the present.

Wonder if it exists. I don't believe I'm far off in saying that scientifically, biologically, the answer is no.

An hour later – went to play with Pierre and Marie-Jo in the garden. And suddenly, because of what I wrote just now, something struck me. I don't know yet if there's truth in it or not. In my popular novels, then in the first
Maigrets, and even in my first non-detective novels, I almost always wrote in the present.

Little by little I began to use the past (for which I have been much reproached) and only later was it called flashback.

But it wasn't planned on my part. It didn't help the story, which was only further complicated by it, quite the contrary. What I suddenly ask myself is if I didn't use this device almost instinctively, out of intuition, feeling that the only way to give weight to an hour or an event was to give it through a memory, that is to say by means of the past.

In the present, it remained insubstantial, incomplete. Each thing takes on its real life only with recall, the unconscious filter of memory.

In any case, it never was a device on my part, a method. This is the first time I've thought about it this way and that I've found a justification for what was purely instinctive.

A
Tour de France
Sunday. Yesterday read a book by Astier de la Vigerie:
Sept Fois Sept Jours
. Glad it didn't come out before I wrote
Le Train
. However, it isn't a novel. Astier is more preoccupied with politics.

But, as in
Le Train
, I find in it a sort of relief at the moment of downfall, as if in losing a life that weighed on him, or for which he no longer had any taste, he
discovered a new reality, his own, at the same time as objective reality.

Like my character in
Le Train
, like everybody, no doubt, his receptivity to the external world is much greater in difficult or tragic moments.

Out of this very simple and rather trite idea, what is called my atmosphere was born. What is true in time of war, in mass catastrophe, is true at a personal level, of drama which does not affect millions of men.

I liked the book very much. I shall see d'Astier, who wants to see me too. We have certain positions in common, including our reaction when the war was over and we hoped things would change, were sure of it, and then we saw the world go back to its egoistic concerns.

In any case this book once again showed me the dangers of reading for the novelist. If I had read this book six months earlier, I might not have written
Le Train
, or I would have written it differently, afraid to follow another's path.

The two books are as different as possible, one about an ordinary, mediocre man to whom almost nothing happens and who allows himself to be carried along by the current, the other about a man of action who is one of the people who started the Resistance.

Curious how, in the end, they aren't so far from each other.

And now, the papers.

D. has to clear away her mail before beginning the packing and she dictates ceaselessly. I'm doing nothing.

I enjoy playing golf and I've already got out my clubs and have been trying them out in the garden.

Hemingway died yesterday. I suppose he committed suicide because he was ill. I feel upset by it. I never met him. I read little of him. Nevertheless he was one of those with whom I felt a bond.

I keep a rather curious memory of him. When I moved to Lakeville, my lawyer was also the lawyer of the first or second Mrs Hemingway. He gave me one of my novels bearing the date 1934, on the first page of which Hemingway had written his name and address. And it was at about that period that I was reading him.

D. finished her work last night, or rather tonight, and this morning she is already in town doing errands. I'm hanging around the house waiting to leave. It's very hot. This morning Pierre has his first girl friend, his own age or a little younger, the daughter of a temporary housekeeper.

Since she is Italian, he uses the few Spanish words he has learned at meals, where we are waited on by a Spanish maid. He is already putting on protective airs. To see them, one would call them a couple, a little female and a young male.

This morning at eight o'clock it was announced again that Louis-Ferdinand Céline was gravely ill. The same radio station announced at eight thirty that he died on Sunday and that he was buried this morning.

One might say that his career ran in every way counter to that of Hemingway. I wonder which of the two will endure – unless both of them do. I never met Céline either. I know very few of my colleagues, and those I do know I know by chance rather than by choice.

But chance has it that the ones who become more or less friends aren't always the ones I admire most. I say more or less because I have no real friends. I have a wife. I think you have to choose. Or rather that one is a friend type or a couple type. One can also, like Céline, be a solitary type, I think.

Can't these be recognized by a certain tone in their work? Don't they give themselves to it more than the others, more obstinately, in any case? Always, it seems to me, with a note of bitterness, which hurts me. If I often happen to admire the works of these solitaries – in all the arts, past as well as present – still I never feel on equal footing with them.

Among the stupid things the papers publish on the (probable) suicide of Hemingway there is one that strikes me. Almost everybody considers this end as almost predestined. Given the writer's temperament, he must have reacted this way to a threat of slow death, progressive decline.

But less than a year ago, another writer, Blaise Cendrars, died, whose character and myth rather resembled Hemingway's. Cendrars too travelled all over the world
looking for adventure, he too celebrated the brutal joys and fearless male nobility in his books.

However, he chose an opposite solution. Far from committing suicide, he lived for several years, ill, paralysed, struggling against his disease with tenacity, and they say (?) that he refused all medications which could have lessened his suffering in order to remain lucid in spite of everything. I believe it. It would be like him. For I knew him well.

Today I'm thinking a good deal about those two men with parallel lives and different ends.

It's a lesson for the psychologist. A given man, with a given character, in given circumstances, does not necessarily react according to a given logic.

Unless there is a Hemingway logic and a Cendrars logic applying to each in the same circumstances.

As to knowing which of them chose the easier solution …

Bürgenstock. So this is holiday homework, almost in mid-holiday. We have been here ten days with the three children (first time Pierre has been away from home). From the first day, as we did last year in Venice, we adopted a routine nearly as rigid as the one at home.

Wherever we are, D. and I, we keep to a schedule, even for three days, as recently in Berne; we establish habits that we follow almost religiously. I think it
originates with me. However, I've always envied people who live impulsively.

Swimming pool in the morning (except for the past three days. It rained too much and the water was cold). A few games of ping-pong with the children and golf in the afternoon. Two tea dances. At nine in the evening we are in our suite.

Relaxed. Real holiday mood. We haven't spoken to anyone, made any acquaintances.

The formal atmosphere of a big hotel in the mountains doesn't bother me. I don't feel any need to chat with people. On the contrary. It may be laziness.

At twenty, I went to night clubs, and all the places where people play, to observe them. I was looking for what I called the ‘common denominator'. I pretended that men could be known better by seeing them at play than at their everyday occupations.

I still think so. My neighbours here, as in Venice and elsewhere, are almost all important people in one field or another, and their employees must tremble before them. Here, they play with a little ball, stammer in front of their tennis, or golf, or swimming teachers.

I've always believed, too, that one knows someone only after seeing him naked. I have gone to bed with women not because I desired them but so as to see them naked, with the little flaws in their skins, their cracks, their bulges, their faces bare of make-up.

It isn't a need to debase, to depoeticize. On the contrary! A need for the real, a contact with the real person. One knows a man better after having seen him make love.

It's not so much a matter of taste that we stay in these ‘palaces', and I often envy those who go to the more simple inns. I'd prefer to meet ordinary people without fuss, and that's why I like bistros so much.

But I confess my hatred for the WC at the end of the hall, the bathroom on the landing, etc. And the telephone facilities, the mail, the service, are indispensable to us.

I regret it for my children, who consider it quite natural to have service at their disposal whether at home or travelling, and I must bite my tongue not to make the ridiculous remark:

‘When I was your age …'

It isn't their fault, but mine. Here we are together with them from morning to night, and I am discovering many things. I would like to be perfect and never irritated, and above all not to go against my own principles, as happens to me all the time.

Because of the framework of conventions, I've turned out little conformists in spite of myself. Out of fear of annoying the neighbours, shocking them, etc.

The Americans have found a solution to this problem. The richest of them take their vacations in what they call camps, log cabins out in the wilds, far from any facilities, where they do their own cooking and housework.

This is the greatest luxury to them, to be without telephones, without mail, and the
ne plus ultra
is to find a spot by one of the Canadian lakes which can be reached only by helicopter.

Impossible here. It is true that there are bathrooms
and every comfort in these camps. In New England, however, a few miles from Boston, some of them spend their summers in bungalows with neither running water nor electricity. Would I be able to do it? Or my children?

Another of my ideas that have never changed, that I've had since adolescence: a man can be content with the necessary, with the indispensable, and be almost happy. But when one gets into the realm of the superfluous, luxury or near luxury, there are no limits, therefore no satiety, no satisfaction.

And we are in a period when the superfluous has become necessary to everyone, or almost. Doesn't this explain many of the anxieties that we hear so much about, especially in the most highly developed countries, and even certain illnesses – not just mental ones?

Enough! We were to spend the day on the lake but the rain stopped us, and as in Lausanne or elsewhere I drove D. to the hairdresser. Just now it's Johnny's turn. Waiting for him, ping-pong. I too play with little balls, and it relaxes me, like playing with a new pair of breasts.

A significant detail comes back to me as I look through press clippings, which I always find more or less irritating. Someone who saw these notebooks (didn't read them –
saw
them – and only because he wanted to know my handwriting) wrote in effect:

‘Simenon only writes on one side of the page in the notebooks he keeps, which is revealing.'

Revealing of what? Does he see in it an intention of publication, texts to be sent for composition being written only on one side of the page? It's much simpler than that. If I only write on the recto, it's because in a notebook it is uncomfortable to write on the verso because of the bulge it forms, and besides it is unpleasant to see the writing through the transparency of the preceding page. What use is there in explaining such natural things to a journalist?

End of vacation tomorrow. For three weeks we have lived the formal life of big hotels. Bath. Luncheon. Golf, sometimes ping-pong with the children. Bowling. In the evening, half an hour of dancing with Marie-Jo; one evening, hours of dancing with D. as if we were alone in the world.

After a week, decided to take golf lessons again. For two weeks I was the middle-aged gentleman whom a pro tried in vain to teach the natural movements of childhood, and whom he encouraged with positive tenderness.

There must have been several millions of us in the world at the same moment, people of my age or older, who were thus relearning some game with humility: golf, tennis, swimming, riding (under the interested eye of a ‘monitor').

Some of these pupils are famous or important people feared by thousands of clerks and workers. Others have risked ruin in the casinos, or have been ruined, by watching a little ball seeking its hole. 7? 21? 8? Good luck or bad.