When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  ‘I think I did something stupid. I didn’t dare pay …’

  The poor man had thought I kept a commercial bar in my house!

  On board the Ginette, during my tour of France along the canals and rivers, in the Midi, I used to fill a ten-litre demijohn at pumps that looked like gas pumps. I drank when I was thirsty, never to get drunk.

  On board the Ostrogoth, in Holland, it was rarely wine, too expensive in that country (I had a barrel sent to me from France at Stavoren), but from time to time a glass of gin.

  It was at about this time, and after my return, at Morsang, still on board the Ostrogoth, that while writing the first Maigrets I got the habit of working on wine. From six in the morning. And as I was writing morning and afternoon, that is to say three chapters a day …

  At Morsang, there was a barrel in the fork of a tree next to the boat. The habit was formed. I went on like this until 1945. Wine, white at Concarneau (cider in the afternoon), red in Paris or elsewhere, grog when I had a cold, brandy and water at other times.

  Once again, I was rarely drunk, but I needed, as early as the morning, especially to write, a pick-me-up. I was persuaded in good faith that it was impossible to write otherwise. And, away from work, I drank anything, apéritif, cognac, calvados, marc, champagne …

  I was not at all aware of being an alcoholic, but only a temperamental fellow, and the fact is that my days were long and full, that I was intensely active. I travelled a lot and while travelling I drank more.

  My lowest consumption of wine, a little before and during the war, was about three bottles of Saint-Emilion, which I considered very modest, since the farmers of the region (Saint-Mesmin) drank their eight to ten litres of white wine.

  In 1945 I left for the United States and I admit that I then began to drink American style, no longer wine with my meals, but before them, Manhattan after Manhattan, then dry Martini after dry Martini (with an onion, which is called a Gibson).

  I began to have painful awakenings, hangovers, attacks of gas pains during which I thought I was dying of angina pectoris each time.

  With D., we had two or three months of wild life, which I don’t regret and of which I often think nostalgically, but she had the courage, from the beginning, to propose to me (which meant to force me) to work … on tea. The first novel written on tea is Three Rooms in Manhattan written in a log cabin on Lake Masson in the Laurentians in midwinter.

  We got around on skis. We crossed the frozen lake in a car. Logs blazed in an immense fireplace. I was sure I would never come to the end of that book.

  Trembling, D. waited behind the door of my study (neither she nor anyone else has ever seen me write a novel) listening to the rhythm of the typewriter, and ceaselessly bringing me hot tea. I left the door half open, stuck my hand out, and grabbed the cup without a word.

  She had reason to tremble, for if the experiment had failed I would, in all probability, never have tried it again, and I would be dead at this moment.

  We continued to drink pretty seriously from time to time. Then we cut the liquor, allowing ourselves only beer (very strong in Canada, also strong in the USA).

  We had an occasional sherry or port, and finally, one fine day in Arizona, we decided to put ourselves on the wagon (complete abstinence).

  Not out of virtue. Only because we knew that we were, both of us, incapable of stopping in time.

  I am not trying to write an edifying story and I don’t pretend that I’m saved for good. Every two months, every three months, we get off the wagon for an evening or for two or three days, whether because of some occasion, a celebration, or simply, I would say, out of hygiene, so that this does not come to seem a deprivation, thus an obsession.

  Wine or liquor, because of the fact that we are detoxified, and because we have lost the habit, has much more effect on us than it used to, and I have got drunk on two or three glasses.

  The rest of the time there is no wine on the table, no beer, nothing – water – Coca-Cola for me the rest of the day. And we have managed, for example, when I was presiding over the Film Festival of Brussels, then the one in Cannes, to get through a luncheon banquet, three or four official cocktail parties a day, without touching a drop of alcoholic beverage.

  We started our abstinence in 1949, which makes about eleven years. This does not keep me from considering myself an alcoholic.

  I may add that in my current life the odour of alcohol has become disagreeable to me and that I, who was a wine expert (I bottled my wine myself and I bought from the wine-growers in all the wine-growing regions of France), I have come to find the first glass unpleasant, to barely appreciate the second, and to drink the rest only out of habit.

  Few of my French friends understand it. And I resent those who have made drink the indispensable complement to every friendly, worldly, or even official meeting.

  11 January, 8.30

  In an hour D. and I are going to the radiologist for the last test. Radiology of the gall bladder. Then the doctor will pore over a file as thick as a criminal dossier. May they find something!

  I should add a note to what I wrote yesterday on alcoholism. It is quite striking, I think, that I did not become truly alcoholic with an alcoholic consciousness except in America; put another way, after having drunk for more than twenty years and often having drunk much more than I did there.

  I’m speaking of a particular, almost permanent state, in which one is dominated by alcohol, whether during the hours one is drinking or during the hours when one is impatiently waiting to drink, almost as painfully as a drug addict waits for his injection or his fix.

  If one has never known this experience, it is difficult to understand American life. Not that everyone drinks, in the sense in which my mother used this word, but because it is part of private and public life, of folklore, you might say, as is proved by the large, more or less untranslatable vocabulary, most often in slang, that relates to drink.

  We knew that state, D. and I, only intermittently, and I admit that alcoholism for two, accompanied by love, by passion, by exacerbated sexuality, is not at all disagreeable, quite the contrary.

  All of life is coloured by it. New York, for example, seems made to be seen in this state, and then it is an extraordinary New York and, strange as it may seem, comradely.

  The crowds cease to be anonymous, the bars cease to be ordinary ill-lit places, the taxi drivers complaining or menacing people. It is the same for all the big American cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston … From one end of the country to the other there exists a freemasonry of alcoholics (like the one that exists for Alcoholics Anonymous) …

  Then a couple lives folded in on itself. The hotel room becomes a home. The bed takes an unexpected, unforeseen importance, whether for sleeping, for making love, or for suffering. The hours of the day are different from what they are for most people, measured by successive drinks, a little as in a convent they are marked by religious rites.

  I’m not exaggerating. It is another world in which certain preoccupations disappear, where the order of importance of things changes. For two, I repeat, it’s marvellous. And, because it is marvellous, it is vital to leave it as soon as possible, for after a certain time, as with drugs, this exaltation and privacy become a hell. Intoxication begins.

  We fled in time, D. and I. We went on the wagon (the wagon, that is to say the water cart from which at one time drinking water was sold in the streets).

  Nevertheless, I have a nostalgia for certain nights, certain mornings on Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson, for certain days at the Drake in New York … We tried at Cannes, soon after my return to Europe, to rediscover these sensations when the occasion presented itself. It wasn’t the same thing.

  Because we were in Europe? Because we had been detoxified too long and for that reason the mornings after were too painful?

  Or, again, because we had acquired a sense of guilt? For that too is a part of the problem. For twenty odd years in France, until 1945, I drank without remorse,
without seeing anything wrong with it, I was going to say: quite the contrary.

  In the United States I learned shame. For they are ashamed. Everyone is ashamed. I was ashamed like the rest. Which contributes to that sensation of solitude, of isolation, to a certain withdrawing into oneself and at the same time to that solidarity with all other men. A solidarity which is almost universal there.

  12 January

  Utterly overwhelmed. I discover once more, with D., that everything you know, everything you have learned, counts for nothing, that the truth is always different. But I wasn’t far off. And God knows if my love ought to have helped me in what I dare not call my diagnosis. Impossible to talk about it here, because the form is too specific. I would need a novel, a transposition, which would be nearer to reality than what I could say here.

  This morning I almost wrote: is she perhaps right in spite of and in the face of everybody else? I didn’t because I feared her reaction to this question when she read it.

  Friday, 13 January 1961

  Yesterday I had my best (I hope our best) evening in the last two years. Dinner tête à tête, slowly, quietly, at the Grappe d’Or and, as happens to me rarely, I was in no hurry to leave the table. Because of this, the Grappe d’Or, where we scarcely ever go except when we have to take out friends who are passing through, has almost taken on, in my eyes, the aspect of our dear Brussels in New York, where we saw each other for the first time and where we go back so often on a pilgrimage.

  I am happy, I am thinking about my novel, and we will be able to escape for a few days, D. and I. It seems to me that this will be our first real holiday in a long, long time. We’ve earned one.

  14 January 1961

  Last evening received and read the book that Bernard de Fallois devotes to me. It seems to me the best of those written about me (including the less important studies). He speaks less of me than of my work, which is a relief. However, I always feel the same embarrassment reading studies of this kind. Of course I believe in the importance of what I do, or I wouldn’t have been writing for forty years. But from my believing in it to hearing someone else speaking of this importance, seriously discussing this or that passage in a book …

  Strange as it may seem, it’s unpleasant.

  From another point of view, it’s equally unpleasant to me when my work is treated cavalierly.

  An hour later, D. is reading the Fallois manuscript and is overwhelmed by it. I wouldn’t want the above note to be misunderstood. I, too, was happy to see the importance of my books to a fellow I’m very fond of.

  Certainly, D. is capable of protecting my books, on my behalf, not only from the material but from the literary and moral point of view. In my successive wills I’ve designated the Société des Auteurs my executors, as a last resort, and for want of a better. (I have a horror of the Gens de Lettres.) I must correct my will and write in de Fallois’s name instead.

  The ‘embarrassment’ I mentioned earlier is not aimed at him. It’s what seems to me the natural reaction of any creative person to an analysis of his work. One is divided between pleasure and pain. Difficult to explain.

  It appears the three books will come out at the same time. This one, then Dr R.’s, and finally the one by S., which I haven’t read.

  I hope it will be de Fallois’s book that will receive the attention of critics and readers.

  What I’m most grateful for is that he doesn’t speak of me as of a ‘phenomenon’, hasn’t tried to analyse the ‘creative mechanism’, hasn’t looked for ‘sources’, but has tried to understand a certain number of novels – and has understood them. When I say a certain number, I mean all my novels, for he read them all scrupulously, some of them two or three times.

  Later, perhaps, I will be able to read this kind of work without being thrown into a panic.

  I mustn’t form an idea of myself yet, much less of what I write.

  21 January 1961

  In the middle of a novel: Maigret et le Voleur Paresseux. Today, page 100. I want to get rid of an idea that came to me suddenly last night. I think that my work will have much less importance later than certain people would like to think. I am speaking very sincerely.

  If that came suddenly to mind, it is because I had the impression, I don’t know why, that I was mistaken in thinking that I was at the beginning of a period, that I had in some way found a certain way of feeling, of penetrating man, of giving importance to his surroundings and even to the objects, etc., as well as to a certain rhythm in my novels. So I would have been at the beginning of a period:

  1930–1960 ……………………….

  and that would have given a certain weight to my writing. But if the opposite is true?

  1930 ………………………. 1960

  Well, too bad, I’ll never know. All the same, it bothers me a little and I mustn’t work with any less faith in what I do. Above all, now.

  23 January 1961

  There now! Another novel finished. Feeling of relief first, as each time, because I got to the end, that I’m no longer at the mercy of any touch of flu, any headache, any moment of discouragement.

  And also, because once more I’ve done my job. Then, almost at once, a wavering, a dull worry: readjustment to everyday life. Not disagreeable at all, though, rather the opposite.

  Tomorrow morning I shall be surprised not to be wakened at six o’clock, not to have to build my fire, make my coffee, not to follow the routine of work days. And I will plunge joyfully into the life of the house.

  169th, 170th novel? I no longer know. So many figures are published. It is enough for me to ask D., who keeps the count up-to-date. The number doesn’t matter.

  Whatever it is, it suddenly seems to me ridiculous. Less than two hundred times, this impression that I’ve just described … It isn’t much when you think that I’ve been working at my trade for about forty years. How many times does one make love in a lifetime? How many times does one get off a boat, a train, a plane, does one make contact with a different world?

  I envy painters. They do many more canvases than we do novels. Yet pictures are works that are just as complete, as finished. Why?

  I don’t yet know what I shall think of my last Maigret when I revise it. It’s a fairly disorganized sketch, by design, two stories that intertwine, I don’t quite know why. Some passages will make the reader laugh. I purposely put in a lot of light touches. And I wonder if I could have treated the same subject in one of my harder novels, if then it wouldn’t have been unbearable, at any rate to many people.

  That’s one thing that de Fallois, who is coming tomorrow, understands very well – the first person who has, except D., of course – that in Maigret I often take up subjects that are more serious than those in my other books. But in a playful manner or, at least, with the poise of my police chief as a counterbalance.

  The next week a holiday at last. D. and I will fly to Cannes, where we will spend several days together. Ouf!

  And already I am thinking of writing, as soon as possible, my second novel of the year, with another holiday in mind, in Paris, probably. I’d like that very much. Many books in order to have these brief moments alone together, no matter where.

  If I took these holidays without having written first, I would have the feeling of not having earned them.

  24 January 1961

  As I foresaw, I woke up at six o’clock and couldn’t go back to sleep. By tradition, I went to the barber.

  Last evening, happened to hear on television (heard, because the pictures broke down) Giono talking about our profession. I haven’t read him. As with other contemporaries, I once skimmed through one or two of his books, but, from what I know of him and his work, he is a writer whom I respect. (Not responsive to his lyricism, personally, which is perhaps a lack in me; I wonder if I wasn’t a little jealous, before and during the war when he was one of the novelists most popular with the young. He isn’t any more, but I’m not either. End of parenthesis.)

  Giono said that h
e did not understand novelists to whom writing is a sort of agony. In his eyes, this is a hangover of romanticism. The creator, he says, is like any craftsman, like a shoemaker, and one cannot imagine a shoemaker suffering over making a shoe. (The shoemaker is his analogy.) He added that if writing were painful for him, he would have chosen another trade.

  I envy him. The shoemaker, having finished his apprenticeship, is sure of being able to finish the shoe he has begun. There is a simple, known technique which he has learned. There also are norms. And everybody knows whether a shoe is successful or not.

  But with a novel? With any work of art?

  So Giono is sure of himself. He is sure, in beginning a book, that he will be able to get to the end and that he will succeed in saying what he means, of getting the right vibration, the right degree of emotion, of communicating it on the right page, of finding the words, the rhythm …

  For me this is so miraculous that I never dare believe in it.

  If it were a matter of a novelist working commercially according to proven formulas, this wouldn’t bother me. I didn’t worry either when I was writing popular novels and adventure novels, and I used to go to work whistling.

  So I find that not everybody suffers from stage fright. By contrast, Maurice Chevalier, on television the night before, admitted openly that for the past sixty-six years he has always felt his throat dry up and his knees weak when he went on stage.

  One is not necessarily right and the other wrong. Just the same, it bothers me.

  Wednesday, 27 January 1961

  Yesterday went to have a film screened, the film of the Balzac television broadcast that I did about a year ago and which de Fallois (who left last evening) had missed at the time. Odd impression. Last year, seeing it on my own screen, I was preoccupied with knowing if it had been cut much, if it held up, if I hadn’t stammered, etc. Yesterday, I realized that while I can’t stand my photographs, even those taken by the best photographers, because I don’t recognize myself in them, I recognize myself very well on the screen.