This had never struck me, although I’m used to seeing myself in the movies or on television. I think I understand. The still photo inevitably gives a false image. The moving image is much nearer to the truth.
The painting, the portrait, without showing the man in movement, does not freeze him at a precise – hence artificial – instant, but gives an illusion of time passing.
Now, however, we have the moving pictures and voices of men.
Would we have the same idea of a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Churchill, a Stalin, etc., without those pictures and voices? Isn’t our whole perspective on great men – or small – transformed by them?
This presents another problem that I have not yet seen raised, but which one day will call for supplementary texts in the Civil Code. Certain North Africans, for example, refuse to allow themselves to be photographed because they believe that in this way a part of their soul is taken from them.
Without going that far, there is, it seems to me, a question of property. I’m not speaking of money. As to political men, the pictures of their public life and their speeches pass into history. But how about all the others whom radio and television interview each day?
I’m lucky to own a print of this Balzac because I refused to be paid for my work and they kindly offered me a copy. That is very unusual.
So, here are a man’s picture and voice which no longer belong to him. He has collaborated in a broadcast at a given moment. In two years, in ten, in fifty, in entirely different circumstances, in other perspectives, they can be used again without the least authorization from him or his heirs.
Radio and television networks thus possess a prodigious capital over which there are no controls.
I’ll take a case. Day before yesterday, out of the year’s literary broadcasts, a single sentence was taken from each writer, a single sequence, and these extracts were shown back to back, out of context, in a sort of symposium in which one or another of them ran the risk of being misrepresented.
The papers complain that some people attack photographers and break their cameras. But for an actress, for example, for an actor, for people from other professions, a stolen picture, taken extemporaneously, can really be prejudicial, even tragic.
Our picture is taken, our voice recorded, with or without our consent, and we subsequently lose all control over them.
There is something there contradictory to the very basis of the Civil Code, and this must finally be recognized. How can it be remedied? I don’t know at all. If I had written the Balzac instead of speaking it, the text would belong to me and no one could use it without my permission. I could also destroy it if later it displeased me.
Because it went on television, and because it was recorded on film, I lose all my rights, moral and material.
In the crowds at a festival or an opening, someone sticks a microphone under my nose and asks me a question (sometimes after a banquet). I answer anything, quickly, without reflection, because it is almost impossible not to answer. This sentence that I speak is only valid in the circumstances, at a certain date, under certain conditions.
But now it can be shown again in other countries at other times, may perhaps be inserted in my obituary.
Are the North Africans so wrong? Don’t they steal a little of our souls?
Certain television journalists pretend to catch their ‘subject’ at the moment of truth with difficult questions.
I would not be surprised if one day this will come to seem incredible – and outrageous.
This is not the reason why I refused the close-ups they asked me for but, after having seen Balzac again, I’m glad I refused.
Johnny delights me more and more. As for Marie-Jo, she ‘tries’ so hard, like her mother, that she touches me and I would like to rid her of her scruples. As for Pierre, he now occupies such a large place in the house that one wonders how we could ever have lived without him.
D. herself is getting well all by herself, as I secretly hoped she would before our visit to Dr Pathé. Good girl!
Saturday, 28 January 1961
It’s difficult not to become a ‘man of letters’ (the word has always sounded a little like ‘general houseworker’ to me: ‘all-round man of letters’) and I understand my colleagues who adopt it. We are continually asked for everything: interviews, lectures, articles on everything under the sun, to preside over juries, etc., and people, sometimes the government, are annoyed if we say no.
This time I have been asked to do something that tempts me: a play for Eurovision planned to be produced the same evening, at the same time, in different languages, in Paris, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, etc. Television has fascinated me for nearly twelve years.
On the other hand, it’s not my trade. I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of the days or weeks of anxiety it would cause me. I’m wavering. Will I allow myself to be persuaded? Or, more honestly, will I give in to the temptation of trying a medium that is new to me? I was promising myself a novel at the end of February or the beginning of March. I am going to think about it for a week while I revise the last Maigret and then be on my way to Cannes. If a subject comes to me …
The same thing happened when the Illustrated London News asked me for a long novella for its Christmas issue. I answered:
‘If I find a subject in two days, yes. If not, no.’
I wrote Sept Petites Croix dans un Carnet.
We’ll see if something will materialize this time or if, more wisely, I’ll stick to the novel.
D. is better and better. I was counting on three more or less difficult months of convalescence. She’s coming back to herself with surprising speed. In the last analysis, with her, one shouldn’t try to interfere. Let her go along according to her own logic, which is after all only instinct.
4 February 1961
Revision finished on the 2nd. Refused the television play. Last evening, Raoul Levy telephoned from Los Angeles. Purchase of movie rights of Three Rooms in Manhattan. That is a film I would like to see made, and at the same time it makes me more apprehensive than the others. It would give me an odd feeling to see Jeanne Moreau in the part of Kay.
Leaving for Cannes soon. As I don’t want to take this notebook along (for fear of losing it, I admit) I’ll take a new one, Notebook III, so that this one stops here, even though there are several blank pages left.
End of Second Notebook
THIRD NOTEBOOK
1961–1963
* * *
Echandens, 11 February 1961
‘My beautiful new notebook’, as I used to say when I was still in school. (I just came back from a walk with Pierre in the sharp cold and my hands are still stiff. The logs are just beginning to burn. Eleven thirty in the morning. Marie-Jo has come back from her music lesson and Johnny will be back at noon. D. is in her boudoir.)
That’s all, really, I just wrote all I have to say this morning between the parentheses. I wanted to begin Notebook III as soon as we were back from Cannes (yesterday afternoon, but the Nielsens were here waiting for us) and most of all to begin it in a peaceful and joyful atmosphere.
Wrote nothing in Cannes. Did nothing. Good news about D.’s health and mine (which wasn’t bothering me). Like certain animals in spring, we both felt a sudden rush of health, of cleanliness of body, and next week we will probably go to the clinic for two or three days for a small correction D. needs after her last childbirth. A stitch broke.
Finally saw P. after all the other doctors. Some day I must write all I can on this subject, which I’m beginning to understand.
So, back at the house, our own bed, my study, clear cool weather, and we’re going to a wedding this afternoon.
Is it because of the mimosa, the orange trees, the flowering almonds in the Midi? For me, whatever the weather is tomorrow, spring has already begun.
Sunday, 12 February
Officially I am fifty-eight years old. In reality I won’t be until tomorrow.
So, yesterday we went to the wedding. Mostly
doctors, most of them university professors, the bride being the daughter of a professor. Among them a man of sixty-five, known around the world as much for his writings as for his international practice.
Two or three years ago, I think it was, he abandoned his chair, his clinic and his practice, because he became addicted to drugs (morphine, according to what I was told). I expected to find him physically and mentally diminished. I spent more than two hours in conversation with him. Of all those present, he was the most lucid, the most human.
Did he notice that I wasn’t drinking anything but water? I’m sure of it. Whenever he was offered a whisky, he would hesitate and refuse most of the time. During those two hours he must not have had more than three drinks. And I felt a sort of question in his eyes.
For the past year he has been living by himself most of the time (he has a wife and a child), in a country house, to write a work which will deal largely, he told me, with instinct and intuition. He asked my permission – as if he had to! – to show me his manuscript.
This is a subject that has fascinated me for a long time and which I’ve found worth researching in works of all kinds, including those on primates, for example, and on the training of wild animals.
Some day I hope to have that man here in my study and to talk with him at leisure. I did not say to him yesterday: if I had accepted a glass of that champagne or of that whisky continually passed under my nose (though I had a long wait for a glass of water, which was very difficult to get) I would have taken a second, then a third, I would have begun to talk volubly, and instead of leaving at nine o’clock I would have been one of the last to leave – at four o’clock in the morning, no doubt. And Sunday in bed, sweating out my alcohol, with palpitations.
That’s the way it was during some twenty-four days of the Cannes Festival.
‘You aren’t drinking anything?’ people marvelled.
Oh no! Nor do I eat any of what is served at all those luncheons, dinners, and receptions. For years, however, I thought that gastronomy was an essential part of my life.
When he comes, shall I tell him that some day I may be tempted to write, uninitiate that I am, a book on medicine and doctors? I have been observing them since my mother’s house was filled with them when I was barely six years old, first medical students, then doctors from the neighbourhood, from the countryside around, and finally the big guns of all kinds.
Is it accidental that more than eighty per cent of the friends I’ve had, the people I’ve made companions of, belonged to the medical world? When it has been called to my attention, and when I’ve been asked the reason for my choice, I freely answer that doctors and novelists have almost the same interest in man, study him from the same angle.
But yesterday, watching those around me, I realized that this is untrue.
The closest to myself was the man who was no longer practising and who is going to write a book not on medicine or his speciality, in which he has made a number of discoveries, but on instinct.
Is it necessary or indispensable that a man touch bottom at least once in his life to become wholly a man?
Touch it himself. Not just be present …
Seriously, if some day I no longer write novels, for lack of creative energy, it is possible that I might try to write a book on doctors. Hasn’t one of them just written a book about me? And a psychiatrist like Delay an extensive work on André Gide in which there is no question of psychiatry?
We promised Johnny to be back at nine thirty and we got back at nine thirty sharp. He was as happy as I to know that his mother danced three wild Charlestons in succession, which exhausted her seventeen-year-old-partner!
Today the whole family went for the papers. The house is quiet. Soon we will take a ride around the village, D. and I.
We won’t go to the clinic next week as I’d hoped, nor the following, because the doctor won’t be free, so that my next novel is postponed to about mid March. A novel on what? I haven’t the least idea. I’m going to begin to empty myself, little by little, to feel myself out.
As almost always when I’m beginning, I promise myself an optimistic novel. I know what I mean. Not conventional optimism. A novel tasting of life. Then, when it is finished …
I’m thinking about a couple I’ve known for forty years. They have both struggled. She must have had virtues, since he used to love her and they were happy. At fifty, she became another woman. A caricature of herself, morally as well as physically. And at any slightest difficulty, she falls ill. But he goes along without a word, smiling … Do some people laugh at him, taking him for a fool or a simpleton? He surely knows it. He pays no attention … He is paying.
He had ‘the other one’ for thirty years. He is used to her faults. Which is the real woman, the one today or the former one? Does he ask himself that question?
I don’t think he submits silently just because it is the only way to have peace. I think it goes further than that, that he is aware that this deterioration, which must have come about imperceptibly, is part of a complex process, a sort of law …
There used to be vaudeville skits about this sort of thing, which made people laugh. Now we try to understand and don’t laugh any more.
It is the same with all known and unknown laws in nature. Man always submitted to them whether he liked it or not, reconciled himself to them.
Today we no longer reconcile ourselves.
And I come back to medicine, which I hadn’t meant to say any more on today: to heal or not to heal?
For the question is asked. I’m not talking about finding the remedy for this or that affliction. I’m talking about caring for and healing the individual, this individual, in these circumstances, with the consequences that this entails …
I just read a phrase of Littré’s. Is it true or false?
‘Imagine how sad one must have been to have composed a dictionary.’
Is there a link between my different notes today? It doesn’t matter. Yesterday, at the wedding, few young people. One, however, who asked me, he too, for permission to come to see me. He is the son of one of the most famous contemporary orchestra conductors.
He is twenty-five years old, paints, seems to be giddy, charming, and aggressive all at once. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became a personage himself, but I foresee an eventful life, if not a tragic one, for him. At the moment he is engaged, in love, full of life. He behaves as if he needed someone to look after him, or cajole him.
At his age I was already saying (and I’ve often repeated it since) that a novelist must live to be an old man, as old as possible, in order to see mankind from every point of view, that of the adolescent, the old man. It is even truer than I thought. One must have led a certain number of lives, been present, from beginning to end if possible, at those experiences which make up human life.
Professor X said to me yesterday, on a parallel subject: ‘As a young man one can express ideas. It takes a lifetime to discover them.’
To rediscover them, rather, even the simplest ones. To experiment with them, to feel them.
It was only last week that I suddenly understood that one of my good friends, also a doctor – another one! – could quite easily become the character in L’Ours en Peluche in spite of his apparent stability. And he too, like my other friend, is silent, silent with a wife who overflows with vitality. Smiling.
Always with a look of … I finally recognize these eyes, which others accept so easily as serene, but which, it comes to my mind, are the eyes Monsieur Monde had – when he came back. Didn’t I have that look myself for years? It is neither tragic nor moving. It’s worse!
I’m very glad I went to New York! If I hadn’t gone, how long could I have continued to have anything to write about? Monsieur Monde … Le Cercle des Mahé … Les Noces de Poitiers … Bilan Maletras … And then? The balance of what?
13 February 1961
So, fifty-eight years old. Sun. Lovely birthday, flowery, affectionate, leisurely, with an afternoon walk in Lausanne
with D.
The thought I write here is yesterday evening’s. Taking off on some idea one wants to get rid of, there it is again at the end of the line in a different form.
We often joke about old men – or middle-aged men – saying that whenever they get together they can’t stop talking about the good old days, about what they’ve lived through and experienced. Now that I have been a middle-aged man for some time and many of my friends are really old men, I know the truth.
There’s no doubt we sometimes recall old times with a kind of exuberance, but that’s only superficial talk after a good dinner in good company.
What an old man wants to know when he meets another is whether the other has come to the same conclusions he has, the same results, though of course the question is not put so crudely. It isn’t asked at all. It’s the young men who ask questions or answer them.
They arrive by soundings, prudent, veiled. They are looking for the flaw. For they know that everyone has a flaw.
A few words, certain silences, looks, are enough to inform the questioner and he rarely goes further, because what remains to be said cannot easily be expressed in words. Or because words seem trivial or absurd.
So many years … So many experiences, hopes, joys, pains, springs, journeys, discoveries, doubts, successes …
And what were they looking for?
Shall I be foolish enough to tell, when I’m still only a half-oldster; won’t they, the real ones, accuse me of betraying the brotherhood?
Like Diogenes, they were looking for a man. Because one would be enough! They have sought outside and inside themselves.
When I Was Old Page 22
