When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  Yesterday I received a telegram from Georges Charensol, of Nouvelles Littéraires, asking me urgently for an article on the occasion of the Prix National des Lettres which my friend Blaise Cendrars ought to receive next Saturday or Monday unless there’s some last-minute manoeuvre. I said Yes, of course. I’ve sent an open letter, since I haven’t written any articles for a long time, and I am ninety-nine per cent sincere in it.

  As with the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris, this prize is not awarded until the winners are dying and it is almost always given to them on their deathbeds. Jean-Paul Fargue, Carco, were in that condition. Cendrars has been paralysed for more than two years and if I haven’t gone to see him it is because, according to what I’m told, he feels humiliated in front of his friends.

  In my open letter, I speak of Henry Miller and of Chaplin. Cendrars is a Bohemian too, a sort of perennial anarchist, and I would like to modify what I wrote day before yesterday on this subject.

  All in all, these notebooks are like my novels. I take up a subject or a character in a novel. It continues to pursue me because I have the impression of not having gone to the end of my thought, of having left it unfinished, or inaccurate. After a certain time, I take the subject or the character up again in another form.

  There are some I’ve taken up five or six times and I’m not yet satisfied. Some critics reproach me for it, or speak pretentiously of my ‘themes’ as if it were a matter of obsessions. But this is accepted in painters, who paint a Pietà or a vase of flowers twenty times over.

  I’m coming back to Miller, to Cendrars, to Chaplin. We certainly belong to more or less the same family. And now, not speaking of them directly any more, I come to Bohemians in general, to rebels, to marginal lives.

  I’ve known many of them, in Montmartre, in Montparnasse, in the South, then in Tahiti, in Greenwich Village. It seems to me that they become more and more numerous as man becomes more and more uniform, more and more domesticated, and there are veritable colonies of them in Rome, for example, and now in San Francisco.

  But I am both very near and very far from them. I share their anticonformism, most of their ideas, their resentments.

  Why do they trouble me? Because apparently I live like a bourgeois? I don’t think so. It goes further. I’ve spoken of their purity – an infantile purity – and I have suspected for a long time that they are not always the weak or the maladjusted nor yet rebels by nature.

  Many of them have realized that weakness, apparent or real, is the best armour in a hard world. Apparently unarmed, they get all the sympathy, all the help, all the indulgence. They are the ones whom the patrons not only adopt but seek out. It’s for them that governments create useless positions or scholarships.

  What is asked of them is to be awkward, ingenious, uncompromising. They are that way with women, too, with their children, in the sense that they accept no responsibility, no rules.

  At bottom, there is no doubt very often a real weakness, an authentic infantilism. Not always. And that quickly turns into a comfortable pose.

  This pose, rightly, irritates D., and I understand her. Her almost pathological sense of justice makes her bristle before a certain tolerance which appears and which perhaps is undeserved.

  What am I doing, I, in this brotherhood? It is simply that I have, basically, the same anticonformism, the same rebellions. I am a true anarchist, I too, but because I live in a society, because in spite of myself I profit by it, I consider it my duty to follow its rules. Without believing in them. Without teaching them to my children. I follow them the more scrupulously because I do not believe in them, because that is my way of ‘paying my share’.

  All this is still not to the point, I feel. I love these Bohemians whom I would call planned. I am comfortable with them. There are almost fraternal bonds between us. At the same time they make me shudder as I must make them shudder. I remain conscious of the part they play, almost sincerely, and this is almost what constitutes the whole problem. Like children, they are marvellous actors. And does one ever know where ‘acting’ begins and ends with a child?

  Apropos acting in my last little chapter, D. made me notice that I used the word wrong, that in any case it is too strong. She is right. I should have written: ‘X did his act.’ And still this may be too strong. It is very difficult, above all with words, to place a boundary between a man’s sincerity and insincerity, whether it is a matter of comedy, or tragedy, or of simple convention. I feel it. It triggers something inside me. But as for saying at what moment the insincere has begun, and to what degree someone has left sincerity behind …

  That’s all for today, for this morning anyway, and I would like to be as empty as possible to leave room for my next novel.

  Should I add a little paragraph? Last evening, S. spoke on television of his new novel. He knows my work. He is writing a book on me. He told me, here, that his novel is directly inspired by one of mine. The subject is the same. Same situation. Central character almost identical. He added, still here, that he was so aware of this that out of honesty he had put a sentence from my book on the title page. But now, on television, he spoke of this case as a personal psychological discovery. Desgraupes – unless it was Dumayet, I mix them up – who knows my work too, did not bring it up either.

  Bitterness? Honestly, no. A slight deception, which is connected with what I wrote above. I am not weak enough. I give the impression of being strong and it is possible that I am to a certain degree.

  Basically, society avoids strong men. They are distrusted. They are envied. They are ignored. The weak man makes others feel good. The strong man makes them ashamed.

  Sorry! I ought not to have spoken of that, but I know that this will interest Johnny, whom this question already bothers and who is learning to take his responsibilities bravely, the more bravely in that he believes in them no more than I do.

  24 November 1960

  10 o’clock in the morning

  A little note just for myself. I am supposed to be a strong man, this is what they try to make me believe, what I appear to be, what I make myself believe I am, perhaps, while in fact I know that strong men don’t exist. This week I was twice tempted to call for help. For nothing definite. For nothing serious. Only the person I could have called was the one who had failed me or whom I believed to have failed me. This ought to be deleted, I think. And besides it has no meaning except for me. ‘He who must be strong at any cost.’ He who is condemned always to be strong! Let’s say no more about it. And excuse this weakness.

  24 November 1960

  5 o’clock in the afternoon

  All erased, as if by a wind. Two-hour ride in the car, slowly, smoothly, over the little roads and little byways in the country. D. asleep beside me three-quarters of the time, and Pierre, on her knees, sleeping, looking contented as a bear cub in his mother’s fur. We didn’t exchange ten sentences. It was enough. I know it. I always know it. And all the same, each time, I despair.

  Everything begins anew and I am going to cleanse my body of the whisky (I haven’t once overindulged) of this last day.

  Then a novel. And our good life.

  How easy and how difficult everything is at the same time! And how much simpler it would be if we were never tempted to judge.

  To live.

  Welcome, D., as they say in your country.

  Thursday, 1 December

  I find you again, old notebook friend, sooner than I would have believed and than I would have wished. I was hoping not to see you again until after the holidays, in 1961.

  Yesterday, at about 3:45, I settled down in this same study, the ‘Do Not Disturb’ on both doors, the coffee beside me, four dozen new pencils freshly sharpened, a new pad too, of yellowish paper, and the brownish envelope with the names, ages, addresses of my characters – a pile of railway guides … Curtains drawn, typewriter and pipes cleaned … In short, my routine which finally has become superstition.

  Eight to ten days of preparation, as usual, the most unpleasa
nt, during which I’m in a bad temper. I try out subjects, characters, as one tries on garments in a store, or furnished apartments …

  I wrote the title: Le Train. Then ten lines, without conviction. Then I stopped and thought. No panic, no anxiety, as on other occasions when I felt that it didn’t go right. In fact I could have written this novel consciously as homework, an exercise. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been bad? Perhaps the spark would have come?

  I stopped because I realized that I was not writing this novel out of need, but in spite of something, to prove to myself that I was still capable of writing four novels a year. But I have written only three, L’Ours en Peluche, Betty, and Maigret et les Vieillards. Plus my Balzac broadcast, which took me more than a month.

  I was writing out of fear. And the proof of it was that I had chosen an easy subject, with predetermined action, dialogue and characters. But not one substantial character who imposed himself on me.

  Wasn’t that cheating? I preferred to stop. The end of the year is always a pressured period, preparation for the holidays, etc. And a short stay on the Côte d’Azur planned for the 15th.

  I put my material away without depression, glad I hadn’t pushed on at any cost. I hope to write a novel in January, perhaps a Maigret in order to get my hand in again.

  Certainly not a manufactured novel. (I will have to explain some day why I don’t consider the Maigrets, which are minor works, to be manufactured.)

  A little shame, I admit, at D., the children, the staff, seeing me coming out of my office before time.

  ‘No novel?’

  But, the same evening, on television (‘Reading for Everybody’) there was a lady of fifty who just won the Prix Femina – an innkeeper by occupation. Why do you write? What inspires you? Do you put yourself in your novels? Etc., etc.

  Then a mechanic of thirty, Bohemian, attractive.

  Both of them just happen to write … yes … because … It’s hard, but it’s fun … they will go on …

  I was thunderstruck. Such frankness! It goes on every week on the same programme, celebrities and non-celebrities who talk about themselves and their work in a way that amazes me.

  Do I too … ? I can’t believe that I am like them, that I write for the same reasons (except two or three of these colleagues whose words strike another note).

  ‘When will you start a new novel?’

  ‘Not for several weeks because that’s the time I have to stay in Paris for the launching of my book.’

  And that one has talent and will be in the Academy.

  I don’t believe in a priesthood. But still – !

  Still … when I was starting out, at twenty-five, at thirty, didn’t I answer in somewhat the same way, often out of modesty, which falsified my interviews of that period?

  Come on! Let’s be frank. I had a certain cynicism and I was capable of saying of a novel that I thought had come out badly:

  ‘It’s good enough for the public anyway.’

  It’s now that I get stage fright, that I have scruples. Out of respect for what?

  I believe in art, to be sure. It is the only human manifestation that seems to me to be worthy of some pride. But from there to believing that my own work, the words I set down, have importance …

  Work well done? Certainly, I have a craftsman’s conscience. This is not enough to make one impose on oneself the anguish that I go through.

  To live with characters who …

  I think I know the explanation. I am a happy man. Whatever one says and whatever I myself may have said in jest, I don’t write to cure my complexes.

  When I was very young, I dreamed of leading several lives at once. One of my first heroes in a popular novel, whom I called Jarry, had been a real peasant in the country, a real fisherman in Brittany, a man of the world in Paris, etc.

  I too have done everything, as an avocation, been fisherman, farmer, horseman, sailor, etc. But it is in creating characters that I come closest to living a multiple life.

  Each novel is an enrichment for me, an experience that I live. If a problem bothers me, it is through one of my characters that I find an answer.

  I don’t escape myself … I …

  It’s complicated. There is no real reason, however, I should live eight days with all sorts of characters – I don’t say artificial ones – created for a specified action.

  The Train started out with an idea. One of my characters was real and I was beginning to live inside his skin. The others, to move the action forward, had to be less real, or at least more schematic.

  I preferred to give this one up, and today I’m glad of it, proud, though a bit lost to find myself free at the hours when I should have been working.

  Once more I see that elderly innkeeper on television, so sure of herself, so self-satisfied … knit three, purl two … The difficult thing is to find the tone, she says … Once the tone comes … And the needles click …

  There’s a woman who’s happy without knowing it. The young mechanic too.

  ‘What I came up with is, roughly speaking, to write on two levels, the present and the past … the story takes place in the present within twenty-four hours but is constantly interrupted by flashes of the past, several pasts …’

  Yes, indeed!

  3 December 1960

  I have a dream which I shall probably never realize. Still, I’ve been playing with it for more than thirty years, nearly forty years, it’s come back to me over and over, particularly each time I’ve begun to see my next novel. It is to write a picaresque novel, a long story without head or tail, with stops, as in the course of a stroll, with characters who rise up and disappear without reason, secondary stories which, in turn, introduce others.

  I don’t think I’m capable of it. In spite of myself, by instinct much more than by dogma or conviction, I tighten. I cut short. I restrict myself, each time, to a precise, limited universe. Is this related to my phobia regarding crowds, which frighten me, to an instinctive reaction against disorder?

  I’ve also dreamed of a house where nothing would have its proper place, a changing house, changing according to my mood or the moods of my family. I have a sixteenth-century Dutch painting, nothing special, which shows the common room of a country house. The men wear lace on their doublets, plumes on their hats, which indicates that they are, as one used to say, ‘well-born’. However, near the baby’s cradle and some children playing, next to the laid table, a pig goes its way, and hens and roosters. The bed is not far from the hearth where the meal is cooking. One feels that whoever wants to can come and go and won’t disturb, that the house is open.

  In my early days in Paris, I had a friend from Liège who got there a little before me, a painter, who had settled on the Rue de Mont-Cenis in a loft at the far end of a courtyard. There, too, there was only one room. My friend was married. He had a little girl. However, sometimes there would be ten or fifteen of us to feed (each one chipped in a few pennies to buy bread, cold cuts and red wine for everyone), to smoke, to drink, to argue until three or four o’clock in the morning, sitting on the floor or on the only bed …

  You never knew beforehand whom you would find there, but you knew that you would find someone. It turned out badly. My friend died shortly after his daughter (dead at seven or eight years of age) of cirrhosis of the liver. And of all those I knew there in these three or four years I know few who stayed afloat. They came to sad ends.

  Even then, observing them, I had the impression of being able to diagnose each one, to foresee his fate.

  I am against every established order, against every imposed discipline.

  But I cannot live without order and discipline and there is no object on my desk that is not in its place. I get up from my armchair to pick up a tiny piece of paper on the carpet.

  Contradiction? I’m not sure. Protective instinct? It’s possible, for I may have just missed becoming a Bohemian.

  Can I risk another hypothesis without seeming arrogant?

  I possess, I belie
ve, a certain lucidity which makes me see causes and effects at the same time. I know what picturesque characters basically are and the fate that awaits them. In Montmartre and Montparnasse I met a good number of people about whom I could tell the funniest stories, all true, as Vlaminck used to.

  Only, I also know the end of these stories, an end that is not funny at all. Vlaminck, sturdier than I, nearer to the truth, to a certain health, could adjust both to the funny and to the tragic.

  For me, the fun was wiped out.

  No doubt that is why I will never write a picaresque novel.

  It would fail. One can write a book stuffed with dozens of characters. Not with dozens of destinies.

  Or else I would have had to begin at twenty-five on a single work – a hundred or a hundred and fifty volumes long.

  But isn’t that just what I have done, more or less consciously?

  I had just finished the preceding note when it seemed false to me, as almost always. In a picaresque novel, what counts most is the picturesque, the differences between men, the warts, the crossed eyes, the stammers, the limps, the phenomena of every kind. Each thing that grafts itself onto man as certain little white shells onto the mussel shell.

  It is the accidental. The fortuitous.

  But, in spite of myself, I always come back, not to the differences, but to the resemblances.

  I couldn’t have written a hundred-volume work with a hundred characters. But perhaps a work in a hundred volumes with one character.

  Which is still not accurate, of course, but which appears to me already more satisfactory.

  As for what that story is doing here, I don’t know. I suddenly thought of it when I was dreaming after lunch, and leafing through the papers, about writing the novel of a whole street, or of a large apartment building. It would almost certainly be reduced to three or four characters!

  We are going to take Pierre for a ride in the car, D. and I, as in Carmel each afternoon we used to take Johnny, then, in Lakeville, Marie-Jo. The same actions. The same peace. The same deep well-being.