When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  Our five doctors have all been on vacation for the past eight or ten days and are not coming back until next week. Of course they need a rest, like everyone, and much more than most.

  But that doesn’t make it any less of a problem, linked to the social problem of the organization that some day must be set up, an entirely new organization, which is going to force change on us, the older ones, but which appears indispensable to me.

  I would be greatly upset to find myself in a clinic before a more or less anonymous doctor ‘in possession of my file’. But won’t this be better than the present semi-anarchy? Three times in less than a year all our doctors were away when we needed them, and their substitute would have been helpless faced by a complicated problem on which he had no information.

  D. is in good spirits today. Last evening, in the car, she told me a little of what oppresses her, almost all of it, in any case almost all she is aware of.

  For my part, I’m still puzzled. I envy the clear minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom man was so simple. They believed in intelligence. They believed in primary truth, in black and white, and were satisfied with caricatures (excuse me: with simplifications) almost as crude as the ‘Caractères’ of La Bruyère.

  Will we appear later as a grey turbid age, a time of gropings, of restlessness, of unresolved questions? Who knows? A period of sick men which, in the quest for understanding of life, will be brushed aside?

  In terms of art, the passion for wretchedness has already been discussed. I am afraid, sometimes, of creating such wilful wretchedness or ‘morbidity’.

  I try to remain detached, objective, not to succumb to sentimentality.

  What comforts me is that professional researchers, scientists, arrive at almost the same … I was going to say conclusions, when there are none … Say at the same difficulties, at the same doubts, at the same anxieties as I do; even that last word embarrasses me.

  Friday, 6 January 1961

  Expecting Dr R., who is in a hurry to see the book he has written about me published and who is also persuaded that he has discovered some subtle or secret things. He does not suspect – and I shall not say it to him so as not to hurt him – that I have the impression that all he writes about me diminishes me. I shall have to keep D., who is less patient than I, especially about what concerns me, from speaking her mind too openly. It’s all the more difficult since I am very fond of him and admire his talent.

  Am I not a bit like Anatole France taking umbrage at his portrait by van Dongen? But van Dongen was right.

  What I would like to set down this morning is this. It is probable, if some day I reread these notebooks, that I will find the same subject taken up twice, twice in the same way. Loss of memory?

  Certainly I have less and less – I never had any – memory for names or numbers. As it happens, this is not a matter of memory, I think. But, for example, doing errands in town I will say: ‘I must make a note of this.’ Then, as I don’t attach any importance to it, it will go out of my mind to return a month or six weeks later. At that moment, I wonder: ‘Haven’t I written that already? Or did I only mean to?’ The opposite can happen too.

  Same thing for my novels. Often a subject comes to my mind, haunts me for two or three days, and all of a sudden, when it takes shape and outlines itself, I am aware that I have written the novel five, ten, or twenty years earlier, anyway that I have used the theme.

  This morning, I don’t know why, perhaps because R.’s visit reminded me of studies written on me which speak of my sexuality in the falsest and most fantastic way, I wanted to bring up this question, quite simply and frankly, for if I have a sense of modesty in certain areas, I have none in this one.

  But haven’t I already done this? I don’t remember and I am not going to leaf back through these pages to see. In any case, I haven’t the time now. Dr R. is about to arrive and I have spent a part of the morning, delightfully, walking to Morges with Johnny and Marie-Jo, buying dessert for lunch and flowers for the table.

  It will come back to me. It isn’t a matter of an account to settle with critics who are too naïvely Freudian, but a restatement of a question that seems to me natural.

  In short, I consider myself a perfectly normal man in this area. Which may surprise certain people, in that I never mix sexuality, sentiment and love.

  With one woman only, D., sex and love were merged, are still merged. With the others, no. And this is neither cynicism nor vice. I consider sexuality, all sexual acts, as natural and beautiful.

  I have no need of more or less forced and artificial sentiment to stimulate myself.

  I like to see the beautiful body of a woman and it matters little to me whether she has this or that mentality, whether she comes from this or that background. A professional often gives me more pleasure than anyone. Just because she does not force me to pretend.

  I will add that I feel for all women, when I take them, some sort of tenderness, what I would call human tenderness. This is not sentimental. I do not ask myself questions about them. I don’t feel compassionate about their lives.

  It is a tenderness for the human being, for the species, for the living flesh, for a body which, for a brief duration, in my arms, represents all life. That I can produce in that body certain vibrations delights me more than my own enjoyment, although that enjoyment is more often necessary to me than I might wish for my own peace of mind.

  During my first days in Paris, for example, I remember that I would leave the arms of one woman at eleven o’clock in the morning to go back to another only a few minutes later, and be obliged to accost a professional or to go to a house of assignation to begin all over again twice the same afternoon.

  Isn’t this natural? It has been written that I was questing for the lost woman, the humiliated woman, the sinner, as for a kind of redemption.

  Pure invention. If I slept more often with professionals or demi-professionals than with others it is, first, because I am revolted by the play-acting the others demand, by the wasted time, by what I call the height of pretence. Besides, the meddling jealousy of my wife scarcely permitted me affairs, or, most often, even what are called adventures.

  Also, when I think with nostalgia of any one woman I’ve had, it is rarely to a woman whom I had to pay court to.

  D. is not jealous. She gives me complete freedom. Less than ever, however, have I any desire for another relationship.

  I make love simply, healthily, as often as necessary, but I’m not in the grip of any compulsion. I am not driven by any neurosis; only by a need.

  Perhaps some day I will again take up this subject. For the moment it doesn’t seem necessary, but God knows what they will yet find in writing about me and my novels.

  R. is still here, off with my wife, chattering. I have the impression that everything I’ve written this morning is both true and untrue. The sexual need … the need of the act … and that sort of tenderness which I’ve spoken of … I wonder if this is not part of a need that is more difficult to communicate, the need to penetrate humanity … This finally is reduced to an act that appears ridiculous but which is none the less symbolic …

  This would explain why the personality of the partner (except in the case of love) makes little difference, that on the contrary this personality anecdotizes (?) the thing, that the more ordinary the woman is, the more she is never-mind-what woman, the more one can consider her as ‘woman’ and the more the act takes on significance.

  All this is in the unconscious, for I do not indulge in such reasoning when I am confronted with a naked body.

  Even nudity has a meaning. Isn’t it a kind of return to innocence? To undress a woman is also to rob her of the super-imposed, the artificial, of all the ‘contrived’.

  It is in itself a sort of penetration, of communion, if one can call it that. An attempt, in any case. Always fruitless. Always a failure. That is why one must continually begin all over again. Can’t a miracle be produced?

  The proof is
that for me it has been produced.

  Why, having found it, do I continue? Perhaps because at twenty I clenched my fists at the thought that there were women in the world whom I would never possess.

  To touch, to absorb the world. To possess it.

  But all this is so approximate that it becomes almost as false as what the critics write. Why the devil aren’t they content with what I’ve said in my novels without trying to explain. Anyway, if I haven’t done it myself, there is no possible explanation.

  Certain men have a mania for ‘stooping’ to women to raise them to their level.

  How much simpler it would be if everyone, once and for all, would feel equal to every other.

  I can say that this is the case with me. I examine no one. Each necessarily has her own qualities, some of which are clear to me, others of which escape me.

  I have never stooped to anyone, not even, to return to the preceding pages, to the last of the prostitutes (why the last?), and that, no doubt, is why we have always had a good time together, they and I, in giving each other, for better, for worse, to the best of our abilities, pleasure.

  Ten o’clock in the evening. How things that seem important to us at one moment can be forgotten the next! In the course of a crossing from Australia to Europe between 1930 and 1940 (I won’t be more definite since the person I’m speaking of is no doubt married and has children, and surely also a reputation) I almost jumped overboard for a sixteen-year-old Australian girl.

  On another evening, on the forward deck, I had a fist fight with a young man who had asked her to dance! She didn’t speak a word of French. At that period, I hadn’t a word of English. The ship was English. The mother and father were travelling with the girl, and occupied the cabin next to hers. But very early in the morning, very late at night, I found the way to join her, in pyjamas, in her cabin. We did not make love. I was a grown man, a man of almost thirty-five. However, with the aid of a little dictionary, I stammered out my idiocies and I had decided to marry her once we arrived in Europe.

  This seems to me unthinkable. Not just my state of mind, but the risks I took in an ultra-puritanical setting.

  I only wrote to her once when she was in London. She answered me once, too, poste restante. And I returned to my own life. She to hers. How near to tragedy I came in that business! It took, just now, a map on television which reminded me of Australia, for that memory to come back to me.

  But it was probably an important time in my life, for, from that moment, I knew that one day or another, in one way or another, I would divorce my first wife. She was at the end of her tether. She knew this story. For the first time, I think, she felt dimly that I was a stranger to her, more exactly that she was a stranger to me.

  Who knows? Without her constant jealousy perhaps I would have had more adventures in the usual sense of the term. Those that I did have were only of an evening’s duration, a few hours, a few minutes, even with friends.

  Perhaps this permitted me to discover the simple joy of loving with D.?

  Another memory just came to me, very different, also the memory of a crossing, New York–Le Havre, or New York–Southampton, I don’t know any more, with D., this time, a very gay, very happy crossing. The evening of the traditional party on board, I was joking with a pretty woman and asked her – without hope of her doing it – to come to my cabin.

  I was with my wife, getting undressed, when she came in wearing an evening dress with several rows of flounces, of which she opened the zipper, letting it fall at her feet, leaving her naked and pink.

  An hour of pleasure enjoyed without afterthought, without complications. And then when she had taken her pleasure several times, as I was going to take mine, a little phrase inspired by champagne and love:

  ‘For her …’

  To put it another way, she had understood that the essential was for my wife. D. will be able, of course, to suppress this passage. I don’t think she will do it, though. And I am sure that, for her too, it is a pure and joyful memory.

  I don’t remember my partner any more at all, but I can visualize her movements …

  Nearly twenty years between the two crossings. But, if I would like to relive the second, I have no desire to relive the first, and its very recollection troubles me.

  This time, here is really a subject that I didn’t want to tackle and I hope that tomorrow I won’t want to retouch it. In searching for a truer truth one risks being carried away. That is why, in the last analysis, these notebooks are in danger of being less close to the truth, in spite of my care for exactitude, than my novels in which I force myself to include nothing of myself.

  We took a walk in the snow, this afternoon, around the village, D. and I. Then, the children not being home yet, I went to meet them and found them with the nurse, noses and cheeks red, walking fast in the snowstorm, with Pierre watching me proudly.

  We like, he and I, to meet that way, as if by chance, in the village or in the vicinity.

  Does he know I’m looking for him? Is he looking for me too? When he sees me, he puts on an indifferent air but cannot suppress a sly smile.

  A delightful game, in which Johnny and Marie-Jo join during the holidays.

  What a fine book one could make out of the day of a man, an ordinary day! How much life! But how much more difficult than a novel full of turmoil and passion!

  Sunday, 8 January 1961

  9 o’clock in the morning

  Yesterday, in bed, thought of many things that I want to write. But now I am going to the station to get the papers with D. and the children. I’ll try later.

  A marginal note, however. An explanation. I never try, in these notebooks, to get to the bottom of a subject, nor to tell a story completely. Out of laziness? Maybe a little. Above all because I force myself to follow the thread of the thought as faithfully as possible. I would like this to be a sort of shorthand, or transcription of thought, with everything that is capricious and incomplete about it. This is the only way to be sincere. I’m not concerned with style. On the contrary. If I can’t think of the right word for a moment, I don’t wait to find it, that would seem artificial to me.

  Once, in Je me souviens, then in Pedigree, I proceeded differently and I’ve never dared reread these books (it is true that I never reread any of my books) for fear of finding them frightfully literary. Pedigree especially. It’s a little as if I were watching myself write. Here, writing has no importance and I’ve even thought of a dictaphone. But then I would be afraid of starting to make speeches or to listen to myself!

  It’s odd that animals which we consider inferior, insects for example, possess more direct means of communication than we do. If thought, with all its haziness, its hesitations, its meanderings, could be projected! Speaking, and, even more, writing, make it necessary to be precise and, in doing so, to falsify.

  3 o’clock in the afternoon

  I came to this subject without meaning to and I would not feel honest with myself if I evaded it. However, I wouldn’t want this to take on the aspect of an examination of conscience, still less a confession. On the other hand, it is indispensable that I should be precise about the fact that when I speak of good or evil I never refer to my entirely personal morality, which also would be difficult, or too long and without interest, to define.

  More than ever what I am going to write will be distorted by the fact that in a few paragraphs I can only outline the large elements of my thought, when to transcribe five minutes or an hour of this thought completely would take thick volumes.

  Not only because five minutes of my thought today involves years of experiences, certain of which are forgotten, plus other thoughts, events, facts, faces, words spoken or understood …

  I was speaking yesterday of a novel to be written on a single day in the life of a man. It might also be possible to write one about five minutes in the life of his brain!

  Enough! Often when I see a fault, a failing, a weakness, never mind the word, in one of my children, I keep myself
from interfering by remembering that once I did the same thing. What reason could I give for asking them not to go through the same experience I have had, or to be more perfect than I?

  I have always had a horror of the father image and mother image as they have a tendency to be created in families. I do not want my children to have a monolithic memory of me, or to attribute to me qualities that I do not have. On the contrary, I would like them to know the vulnerable man that I am, as vulnerable as they and perhaps more so.

  That’s the point from which I took off last night in bed, and my thought followed parallel lines: one about faults and one about risks. I have not made a balance. I fell asleep before coming to a conclusion, but I was no less frightened by what I discovered.

  Suddenly, I blamed myself for having been so apprehensive about Marc when he was fourteen or fifteen years old – and even now that he is married and an adult. I will be just as apprehensive about Johnny when he reaches the age of imprudence, more still, no doubt, about Marie-Jo. Then, if I live that long, it will be Pierre’s turn.

  However, am I not the one for whom someone should have been afraid? I’ve told in Pedigree, more or less romanticizing them, but remaining faithful basically, about certain of my experiences from before the age of sixteen.

  Haven’t I, later on, and even not so long ago, nearly foundered a hundred times? And by that word I mean every conceivable catastrophe imaginable.

  Could I have become a criminal? I don’t know. I have studied criminology a great deal, not only at the time when I was writing only Maigrets, but especially during these last years. One of the branches least known to the general public is victimology, that is to say the responsibility of the victim in almost seventy per cent of crimes. Oh yes, I’ve deserved to be a victim a hundred times and I realize that I would have borne a large part of the responsibility.

  But I have never been conscious of it. I am not particularly brave. I have a certain mistrust for physical bravery and, for example, I have a horror of getting involved in a scuffle, a scrap, even in a mob scene. I also have had a horror of brutality, of anything that injures the flesh, of what uselessly does harm.