‘I’m coming tomorrow morning. Get everything ready.’
How to find a donor? The gardener? There wasn’t time to make the necessary tests, Wassermann, etc. Some day the child might be called on to reign.
The next morning the doctor got out of it by injecting some physiological serum, counting on hearing nothing more of the matter.
But six weeks later he received a telephone call from the couple to thank him and congratulate him. The wife was well and truly pregnant …
In other words, before coming to the clinic she had taken her precautions, had had relations with a lover, and the artificial insemination was only an alibi!
This is a very, very great lady, an old woman today, about whom there never has been the slightest gossip and who leads an exemplary life.
Aren’t these stories rather extreme?
I hope that without being inaccurate I have shuffled the cards enough so that names cannot be attached to the people and that, anyway, the interested parties are or will all be dead when these pages are published, if they some day are.
The world closes its eyes and behaves ‘as if’. These things didn’t happen today, to be sure, but doesn’t the same thing happen today in another sense? Must it go on for ever?
This week, three hundred children died daily of starvation, in one small Congolese town. Aeroplanes are flying in dried fish for them.
5 o’clock in the afternoon
Clinic. Came back to see the children. Accident on the road. Cyclist knocked down by a car. Saw another this morning at the same spot.
Difficulty in harmonizing the ‘pity for the masses’ so peculiar to our times and our sense of responsibility, if not of guilt about them (a New York financier talks to his psychoanalyst about the starving people in India or China and makes a real neurosis of it), with the discoveries of biology.
Not a difficulty of personal morality but of a way of life, of behaviour which will harmonize with ‘biological law’.
On the one hand our evolution moves in the direction of the individual, and our duties towards him.
On the other, science moves in the opposite direction and might arrive at a point of absolving Hitler.
Sentimentality? Instinct?
And our reason, which might impel us to wipe out millions of beings to preserve the species?
I write novels which I feel. I tell about men whom I try to understand, and at the same time I wonder if this isn’t a kind of new romanticism, this time a romanticism of the masses, which would be worse than romanticizing the individual, and which could lead …
Tea, now, with D., in our sunny room.
Shit on abstract ideas!
Sunday, 5 March 1961
Another real Sunday, though at the clinic, with even a Saint-Honoré with whipped cream for dessert, reminding me of my childhood.
At home this morning, Pierre pulled me into a corner of the room where I was changing and was annoyed because I couldn’t understand what he wanted. Finally he took me by the hand and gave me the telephone receiver, saying: ‘Mamma!’
He wanted me to call his mother so that he could talk to her and more especially hear her, and he got his wish.
He does not go into his brother Johnny’s room (Johnny has the flu) but stands in the doorway. This morning, however, he purposely dropped some small object a foot or two inside the door, then hesitated, jumped in to snatch it, the way you see kids jump into the river just at the edge.
Marie-Jo, who envies her brother for being in bed, constantly touches him, hugs him surreptitiously, in the hope of catching the flu.
I have watched the awakening of intelligence in each of my four children. It is so quick, so impressive, that one wonders how such a progression can end … in what we are.
Why, when, how this halts, if not actual regression? We should all become geniuses!
Wednesday, 8 March
At home since Monday. More and more often a terrible temptation comes over me not to write any more. I’m speaking of my novels, not these notebooks. And yet! Why not stop entirely?
I comfort myself by saying to myself that in the two or three years that this has been happening to me I’ve written novels like Le Président, Le Veuf, La Vieille, Betty … What discourages me is that each time I decide to get to work, obstacles arise. But before? Wasn’t it the same? Isn’t this the way it is for everyone? Isn’t it an excuse, an alibi?
We shall see.
To write with joy, what rubbish!
Friday, 10 March
All right, then, I won’t begin my novel on Monday as I planned (why?) and it will probably not be – or may not be – the novel I was trying to write around 20 March. The idea had already been rattling around my head for some time. At the clinic, in particular, and since I’ve been thinking of it in spite of myself and that’s always bad.
I’ve noticed that nothing is gained, quite the contrary, by ‘worrying’ an idea. We’ll see. It doesn’t really matter. My biggest mistake is announcing in advance when I’ll get to work, as if I were ashamed of doing nothing.
It also serves as a kind of alibi. It’s a way of getting out of invitations, of putting off demands for interviews and appointments until later. And when the moment comes, I’m ashamed to back out.
This must have begun during the period when I was working on assignment because I had to. For a long time I signed an annual contract with Gallimard every year for six novels, because in terms of income that corresponded to my style of life. The novels had to be done well within the year. I had to turn them in on fixed dates. So I knew, in a less pressing way, the difficulties that weighed so heavily on Balzac.
You could say that now that these difficulties no longer exist, when writing no longer has anything to do with my material needs, I have instinctively kept the habit. I made it my trademark then to get the manuscripts in before the deadlines, never a late one.
Today, it’s funny, I force myself to write them on the date I have fixed for myself or that I have happened to mention to someone else just to get rid of him.
It’s quite unexpected. I have to take myself in hand when a delay upsets me. And if I become less prolific anyway? Anyway, it doesn’t signify that I’m losing interest in people, quite the contrary.
Is it because I no longer have as much confidence in my little discoveries, or because I judge people more severely, that I reject some as uninteresting which I formerly would have delighted in?
In short, here I am on vacation again for ten days and I can only hope that during that time, at some moment or other, the spark will come.
So I’m still a wage earner. I revolted early against my parents’ servitude and that of the people in my neighbourhood. I ran away from them to be free of it. But I have ended up in a voluntary servitude. It doesn’t change anything to call it discipline and, all things considered, it isn’t accurate. It is almost a conditioned reflex.
Next week I shall give myself a little pleasure that I’ve been promising myself for some time: go to the automobile dealer in Geneva to buy a new car for D., who gave hers to Marc.
A drive and a walk in Morges with Johnny. First walk in the garden with D.
I read an interview in Newsweek with one of my Irish colleagues, Frank O’Connor, best known for his short stories, whom I met ‘once upon a time’ while at Harvard for several days for a seminar on novel-writing.
‘The writer,’ he said, ‘has to have a good streak of solid selfishness to get his own work done. He should throw his wife out and make his children go out and work to support themselves at a really early age so he will be able to concentrate on his own writing.’
If I write down that sentence it is because it sums up the attitude of many writers, of artists in general, who pretend to have a right to a life different from that of common mortals, and who demand material aid, whether of their families, or rich patrons, or governments, etc.
This coincides with Gide’s opinion, of which I believe I spoke, that the life of a couple and the obligation
s created by a family, thus paternity, are incompatible with the profession of writer.
This contention has always irritated me, first because I think that the artist is basically a man like any other, without special rights (he is often a dangerous element to established society, but to my mind this is not a bad thing, rather the contrary, though it explains the harsh measures of this society against him, as for instance under almost all dictatorships), and then because the novelist, at least – I freely exempt the pure poet – needs as total a knowledge of man as possible.
Is that why I’m incapable of reading certain books, highly praised by critics? From the beginning I feel in them what I shall call an incomplete man, a man who does not accept his responsibilities and who, I’m sure, has chosen art – whether it is literature, painting, the theatre, or the cinema – only to escape daily realities.
At a meeting of the ‘Belletriens’ of Lausanne to which I was invited, one of the provincial luminaries to whom I remarked that I was doing certain things – receiving journalists, photographers, for example, though it meant being asked the same questions over and over again – to whom I said, then, that I did this so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings, answered me with assurance:
‘That’s where you make a mistake!’
But for an hour I had been listening to his quite tedious lecturing and I had tried to answer his questions. I was in a hurry to meet D. at the clinic, where I knew she would be worrying. What would this gentleman have said if I had not gone to that meeting, or if I had left him in the midst of his chatter?
In every book, in every work of art, I look for the man, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. The fuller a man’s life is, the more complete it is, the more it covers the gamut of human experience.
Perhaps that’s why I hate the words ‘man of letters’, ‘literature’, ‘artist’ …
‘I am a man and everything that that …’
An American university gave Frank O’Connor asylum, as the kings of other times named a poet or playwright gentleman of the bedchamber, or what have you, and as France now appoints them curator of a museum or a library, or travelling lecturer.
Among modern writers, none of those, to my knowledge, has given us an important work, while a Bernanos, for example, had his six or seven children trailing behind him.
Enough! What is the use of discussing these things as if pleading a case? Won’t we always end by believing in what suits us best personally? It’s for this reason that I can never convince myself that any man is wholly insincere, even a politician.
Sunday, 12 March
A curious phenomenon. For about a fortnight during which D. was either at the clinic or convalescing here – and so, when I was more or less missing her – I pondered the subject of a novel that only half attracted me, which I resigned myself to writing at the risk of stalling after the first chapter, which would no doubt have happened.
Yesterday, first day of reunion. We don’t need many external elements. This morning, visit to the gynaecologist. A drink in a bar, not for the sake of the drink, but just to be together, to be close in the atmosphere of a charming little bar.
In the afternoon, walk on Place Saint-François and Rue de Bourg. Then, later, dinner alone together in a good restaurant, television at home with Johnny. That’s all.
But it was a perfect day, what I called a day of perfect happiness when I was fifteen (then it was a matter of reading alone in my corner, eating and drinking coffee and smoking my pipe. It was during the war. To eat, drink and smoke were very important things).
Result: the novel in question dropped into darkness and another was born in my head and skin, full of warmth, of animal tenderness … Provided I am able to write it. It is a subject (like the other one) that I abandoned last year at almost the same time for technical reasons, and I seem to have suddenly struck on the solution, a perfectly simple one.
Man was not meant to live alone!
Just now, papers at the station, as every Sunday, with D. and the children. In the afternoon, the two final world championship hockey matches on television.
We’re talking about cars. We are promising ourselves to be extravagant at the Auto Show – we’ve earned it, haven’t we?
Still sunshine, the garden full of flowers, and I took a lot of photos of the children there yesterday. They will never know what a state of euphoria I was in when I took them.
Tuesday, 14 March
My first contacts with psychoanalysis date from 1923 (?) when Gallimard published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and between 1927 and 1928 I must have bought Journal Psychanalytique d’une Petite Fille and then Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood.
I was then twenty when I discovered Freud. Since that time I have read Adler, Jung, others, but I think I never allowed myself to be influenced by their theories when I was writing my novels as, for example, the American writers are today.
A psychoanalyst said to me recently that in his way he was a novelist, adding that the discipline of his profession is sometimes less scientific than that of the novelist.
It doesn’t matter. If I speak of it, it’s because it came up yesterday in a television broadcast in which they resorted, as usual, to the mother and father complexes.
I wonder if it isn’t a matter of a certain distortion or, more precisely, if we haven’t been fooled by a label.
The child who cannot break away from his mother – the one who revolts against his father, or, on the contrary, needs his exclusive protection, aren’t they simply more afraid of life? I mean natural life.
I would like to propose a change of labels. The more I observe men and the more of their confidences I hear, the more the title of a bad novel my mother used to read comes back to me: The Fear of Living.
A different fear, like the Freudian complex. For some, fear of the artificial life of society, the need to stay in the primitive cocoon, to return to passivity and the dream.
For others, on the contrary, fear of leaving the beaten path, of finding onself suddenly off the track, of losing the support and approval of society: and so, fear of instinct, of the primitive life we find within ourselves.
With a simple change of words, Freudianism and the theories that result from it lose, in my opinion, their somewhat simplistically systematic character.
I shall be told that the father and mother are only symbols.
All right! But even in these symbols the truth seems to me simpler, more human. At fifty-eight, I am frightened by the number of people who are afraid of facing life squarely. This relates to similar thoughts I noted a few days ago.
It’s a little as if we were taught everything from childhood – except how to live! Where would we find teachers?
Science has taken centuries to evolve rational nourishment (?) for us, for the nursing child, and for the adult. Nutrition has become an entirely new branch of medicine – like the art of ageing. But what have those other doctors who are psychologists, moralists, and philosophers evolved to satisfy our other needs? I’ve known a few of them, three or four, and they were afraid of the man in the street.
As my psychoanalyst concluded the other day:
‘We teach our patients nothing. It is they who teach us.’
The ones on television yesterday, however, seemed rather smug. Of course they were aware of families, friends and acquaintances watching them on the little screen.
15 March 1961
9:15 in the morning
It’s odd how certain tastes persist for long years, even most of one’s life, and how one finds them again passed on to one’s children in one form or another.
Johnny loves to trace maps for his geography class, to write the names on them, in careful lettering. He has just finished a notebook on Brazil for school which he worked on with positive ecstasy. I have always loved cartography too.
And this morning, while shaving, I planned to give myself the pleasure of telling about my successive houses and of describing them, with
a photograph of each pasted in the middle of the page.
It’s childish, especially since I’ve never kept an album. I’ll have no time before my novel – if I write it – but I shall do it some day. For the first stages, it may appear to duplicate Pedigree. In spite of what people think and what, out of laziness, I have let them think, Pedigree is not really accurate. I remember how in writing it I thought of a book of Goethe’s which impressed me very much: Dichtung und Wahrheit … Fiction and Truth … Transposition of truth.
Here, by contrast, I intend to set down some precise information. For my amusement. Anyway, it entertains me today, which doesn’t mean that it will still entertain me two weeks or a month from now.
I realize, as I may already have noted, that if I have lived in many houses, I have never, outside of here, spent time in my study except for the hours strictly necessary to write my novels, and before D., to get through the mail as quickly as possible.
I don’t think it’s just a question of age, of a lessening of my curiosity. Never mind. This morning I’m going to do the last clean-up on the manuscript of Maigret et le Voleur Paresseux, which for me is in the nature of homework to be done in place of an anticipated pleasure.
Tomorrow, Auto Show. Easter soon, already, which doesn’t give me much time before starting my novel. Either I begin on Monday, or once more I must postpone it.
25 March 1961
Novel finished. Ouf! Promised myself to finish it before the holidays. It’s done. I suffered. I failed with the same subject last year. It seemed easy and at the same time awkward. Perhaps, in the end, it will be understood. Euphoria? No! Exhaustion, like my character’s. I am happy to have succeeded. In my own terms.
9 o’clock in the evening
It annoys me to see the best-intentioned people – above all the best-intentioned – look for parts of myself in my novels.
When I Was Old Page 25
