When I Was Old (41 page)

A whole industry, perhaps the most important in the world, has been built on this need for
play
in every sense: need to recover the movements of the child or the African native's faith in luck. No doubt it's a good thing, a real need.

Friday I shall be at home in my study. I promise myself to continue to play golf. That was good for me. I have never felt so well. I know that it will take a lot of will-power for me to continue, to believe in it, to make it the important hour of my day. However …

Home! Since Friday. For the first time a bit awkward around the house. Pulling the wrong drawer, for instance. And not knowing just how to fill time. Realize that basically the schedule was and is going to be as artificial here as there, with the difference that here it is considered important, as ‘work'. Believe I found a subject for a novel yesterday, a Maigret, but don't want to hurry myself and first want to play a few games of golf, for discipline and health. Almost to prolong my holiday. This morning haven't followed the Sunday schedule but walked in the Morges park where at one end campers are crammed
together, more crowded on top of each other than in Paris apartments. And since they all have radios, and some television … But didn't we do the same?

For several weeks little desire – and again today – to write in this notebook. I don't think this has only to do with the holiday mood which I've been in for the first time in years.

For about two years, if my health hasn't been really bad, I've often felt tired and especially dizzy, more exactly, I've had dizzy spells (Ménière) for which I was treated. These discomforts suddenly disappeared almost at the moment when I was writing
Le Train
. All at once I recovered a taste for physical life, for exercise, and my study stopped being a sort of refuge.

What connection with these notebooks? Did I write here only when I felt under par, threatened? I don't know. Diagnosis is delicate. On the other hand, I have never had such an urge to work, to write. Three novels by the first of July, and I itch to get into another.

So there is a marked difference between my need to write my books and the need to write in these notebooks. On the one hand, better health makes me write more. On the other, this improvement almost takes away the need to write.

This is the truth today, but what will be the truth tomorrow?

Golf yesterday. Golf the day before. Golf this afternoon with D. I'm enjoying it. Even if I play badly.

I have the impression that we're very much on the wrong track in our explanations of bacteria, microbes, viruses, etc. (including the latest theories on interferon) and that some day quite soon all this rubbish will seem ridiculous.

On that day, will cancer seem no more frightening than tuberculosis and syphilis have become?

Day before yesterday my wife cleaned my pipes; yesterday, my typewriter. In the evening I carefully arranged my accessories in my study, as a circus acrobat takes care of his gear and checks it, as a magician fills the pockets of his suit.

This morning at six o'clock, for the hundred and eightieth time approximately – people find this figure enormous; it seems ridiculous to me when I think that I am fifty-eight and have done nothing else in my life! – this morning, I repeat, I went down to do my number.

Coffee. ‘Do not disturb' on both doors, etc. An hour afterwards, with five pages written, I stepped off the runway. It's by design I've used these circus and music-hall
terms. I was wrong, it would seem, in wanting to write this novel somewhat as a performance.

I've already written three this year. I dreamed of writing five or six, as I used to, and, in my mind, it was a way of proclaiming that I'm not getting old, that I'm still in good form. (At the same age that I am today, Chevalier, as if in defiance, gave a solo performance for an hour and a half.) I had all the best reasons for not beginning this novel. Holidays, first of all, the children's, everybody's, the atmosphere of vacation to which I am not immune, telephone calls, unexpected visits from friends. Then, perhaps above all, a mad desire to play golf until I'm sick of it, to spend myself physically, since this was so good for me in Bürgenstock. I wanted to write in spite of everything, to get five or six done by the end of the year, and it's too bad about me.

I forgot Berlin, the Berlin crisis as they say, and the threats of international conflict. I admit that after two wars, two occupations, twenty threats of universal explosion, this reason was not uppermost in my mind, though to listen to the radio and television one necessarily has a doomed feeling of uneasiness and unimportance.

Still, I wrote
Il Pleut, Bergère
just as war was declared in 1939 to prove to myself that life goes on. It went on. Not for everyone, alas!

Basically, threats of catastrophe rather stimulate me to write – as bombardments help me sleep – as a way of detachment, because personal life must go on.

Strange that I could detach myself from catastrophe but vacation should affect me.

It was a Maigret, but a Maigret that could have been a very short novel. I'll probably return to the subject when it has cooled off.

I think I know the truth of this failure. D. recently turned up some stories written some twenty years ago, and God knows why, probably because I forgot them, they had remained unpublished. I had the bad idea of rereading them, since people are always asking me for stories and novellas for newspapers and magazines and I can no longer write them. Question of wave-lengths, as they say today. And for once the expression is right. I think too novelistically to write short stories any more.

Whatever it is, this reading disturbed me. I suddenly realized that like a painter I've had my ‘periods'. And the period of these stories corresponds to the Fauve period of the painters I've known, Vlaminck, Derain, etc. I found an Impressionism, or more exactly an Expressionism, of which I'm no longer capable, a jumble in words, in sentences, in images, which suddenly discouraged me.

Do my painter friends, when they approach sixty, have the same feeling as they arrive at a period which people call neo-classical? Did they take it for a weakness, a possible impotence, a lack of daring, a lack, certainly, of youth? I have Derain in particular in mind. Picasso is the only one of the group to have followed the opposite course, and I wonder if it isn't out of cleverness.

Anyway, my Maigret of this morning –
Maigret et l'Honnête Homme
, which I almost called
Maigret et l'Assassin Consciencieux
– suddenly seemed flat, heavy, and slow, without sparkle.

I wasn't too upset, contrary to what usually happens in these cases. We were to play golf. I played badly. This afternoon I went to see some girls, without enjoyment. On the other hand, I had the pleasure of finding an Egyptian scarab that was missing from D.'s necklace, and I was happy about that.

So here I am at leisure for a time. Golf? I hope so. And above all, nothing intellectual. I have a bellyful of the intellectuality into which people – or the emptiness of life in my study – plunge me in spite of myself.

Do anything at all, but do something, and be done with this need to analyse once and for all.

Live quite simply. Like someone who isn't a novelist. Even, if possible, like an imbecile.

Golf every morning. Then more holidays until the children's are ended. Although D. and I scarcely speak on the links, each of us pursuing his little white ball, there are few places where I feel so close to her.

On this subject, a small – very small! – idea is going around in my head. It isn't the key to any serious problems, but I wonder if it wouldn't open certain doors.

Like everybody else, I've had successive, changing opinions about love, not only the love of the couple, but the love of children, friendship, even the kind of love that some devote to a collective or an idea, to the fatherland, for example, or a party, or a regiment.

I devoured Freud in 1923 or 1924, then his disciples, and I continue to read with great interest the works of Jung, who extended this notion of love to the tribe, even to the species.

And now I end by wondering if all that, romantic love, passionate love, sexual love, love of the child or of the mother, patriotism, etc., can't be traced back to one elementary idea, to a minute common denominator that could be expressed as follows: the essential, vital need of every human being, strong or weak, to rely on someone or something, to have confidence in a single being.

A single being! With certainty. Whom one doesn't doubt. And one is saved.

Mother, fiancée, lover, bride … For some the friend … And finally, if there is no person, a group or an idea: the regiment, the party, the fatherland.

Give me a place to stand and …

If it is true in physics, why shouldn't it be true in psychology?

What strikes me is that the deceived child and the deceived patriot, the duped lover and the duped partisan react in the same way, use the same terms to express their resentment, sometimes commit the same spectacular desperate acts.

…
on whom one can count
… a person or idea. I prefer the person to the idea and I prefer the female for the male, and for the female her male.

Happy is he … Happy is she …

Happy am I!

End of holiday. Two months of golf, with gritted teeth, as if my life depended on it and sometimes with the same panicky fear as when I start a novel. I went back to it passionately and this morning, having a last round before taking up again our usual life, I felt a kind of nostalgia.

I rarely give myself to any activity other than my literary activity in this way. On the one hand, it was a question of health. I rediscovered a physical life that I haven't enjoyed for a long time. On the other hand, and above all, I feel wonderfully happy with D. in a place where no one disturbs us and we stroll along side by side.

Now I go back to my study, where I have only been a visitor recently. I wonder if I'm going to be able to write again. For weeks, I've felt guilty. Feeling of
playing
instead of doing my work.

Surely and always this has to do with the fact that I was born among the common people and I learned that one must earn one's bread by the sweat of one's brow. However, if I were a civil servant, if I were Maigret, I would be retired.

Now I'm in a rush to reassure myself, to prove to myself that I can still write. I'm going to spend laborious hours and days until one or two chapters are written. There is rattling around in my head a Maigret that I tried to get on paper before, when I came back from Bürgenstock. Sometimes I'm tempted to choose another subject, sometimes it comes back to me insistently. I don't know
yet what I'll do. First, it's important to put myself in a state of grace.

In any case, two good months, in spite of guilt. Weren't they, D.? Monday the children will be in school, the factory will be working full tilt on the ground floor, and I'll be doing my best here to go back to being a novelist. As if, really, that were any more important than hitting a little white ball and walking over the grass.

Novel finished at nine forty-five. Unable to say if it's good or bad. In a hurry to reread it. Going to play golf first.

Suddenly an urge to speak of a lot of things here, to write at great length of things good and bad. Sweet and a little bitter. It will come tonight or tomorrow. I don't know.

Is it laziness or reticence? Each time I open this notebook I feel overcome with something like dizziness, and instead of writing quietly what I meant to write, I hedge, I leave it in a sort of shorthand.

For example, I wanted to tell in detail what has just
happened to D. For more than two weeks, while I was writing my novel, then when we had our friend Sigaux here for three days, then during my revision, she was living a life that was removed from – though so close to! – mine.

I found her nervous, absent-minded. At a certain point I seriously thought that she found my novel bad (a simple Maigret) and didn't dare let me know. I kept telling myself that one day it would happen, that the spring would snap, that my sentences would no longer make any sound. In short, I was spying on her and I was worried. I even wondered if she wasn't beginning another depression like last year's.

Evening before last, she went down to put her office in order before we went to bed. She knew I was in a hurry to go to sleep. But I heard her call on the extension, then, for more than twenty minutes, the green light on the telephone was lit.

I came close to feeling resentment. I remembered the telephone call to our friends the Martinons when she was at her worst. I looked into my own heart … Suddenly she signalled me to pick up the receiver …

‘I have just got
the best news of my life
… Do come downstairs a moment.'

I had guessed nothing. And suddenly I learned that for more than two weeks she had been keeping it from me that a doctor believed that Marc had pericarditis; all the time, unknown to me, deceiving me in order to make long-distance calls, she had had him get tests by professors and doctors in Paris, then in Cannes. Her last call, in
response to a letter in code, was to a cardiologist in Cannes, who entirely reassured her.

Two years ago both of us lived through the same story with Pierre when his life was in danger. We almost sneaked him to Lyons, like thieves. We waited day after day. But there were two of us then, and we didn't have to hide anything from each other. But I was scarred by it for more than a year.

I have been the centre of a conspiracy of silence, so much so that I speak of it now with a sort of detached stupor. I lived through a drama without knowing it. I didn't learn of it until the moment of the happy ending.