When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  I wouldn’t dare reread those novellas I wrote in three hours on the deck of my boat and revised in haste while having an apéritif in the sun. How little awareness I must have had! Or how little faith in and respect for ‘Literature’?

  Sunday, 30 April 1961

  Back with ‘the papers’. Stormy, unpleasant weather. Showers.

  When we settled at Echandens, we did what we had done in Lakeville: had swings and gymnasium gear set up for the children at the back of the garden. All last summer, Pierre (he will be two years old in three weeks) would see his brothers, his sister, and their friends use them. But he used to circle them at a distance, he never came closer.

  A month ago, at the beginning of spring, I had a swing with a back and a belt put up for him, but he only looked at it, shaking his head in refusal. For four weeks he looked at this apparatus distrustfully.

  Not until day before yesterday did he decide to sit in it, though refusing to be swung. Yesterday, he could be gently pushed.

  It was almost the same thing with his rocking horse. He loved it from the first day – wanted to have it in bed with him – but it took almost a month for him to get on it.

  Since he has been eating things other than milk, he has had the habit of smelling each new food with the same distrust, of turning it over and over for a long time, examining it before putting it in his mouth.

  This reminds me that my three other children were no different. Children are said to be reckless because they play with matches, touch electric outlets, etc. But these objects look passive and harmless.

  On the contrary, if I can judge by my own, the child is as careful, as distrustful as an animal. I would even say fearful. His attachment to his parents has a good deal of fear in it, fear of being left by himself.

  Why does he become reckless at a certain age? (Not always!) I think it is because he wants to impress other children, or grown-ups, or even himself. I should not be surprised if he became aggressive in proportion to his fear. I could swear, for example, that Marc was always afraid of his big motorcycle, as I always felt a bit afraid with automobiles.

  Physical courage, when it isn’t a matter of fighting for one’s skin, may very well be an artificial sentiment that animals don’t know, since they never run unnecessary risks.

  All the same, isn’t there another kind of courage, moral bravery? After the security furnished by its parents, doesn’t the child or the adolescent seek the same thing in groups?

  So without really wanting to I come back to a subject that I’ve sniffed around several times, and I don’t like the conclusion I’m tempted to come to, because it is the negation of the individualism I care so much about.

  Essentially, then, is man gregarious out of fear?

  How many people live alone, are able to live alone, by inclination, by destiny? Isn’t love most often a way of escaping solitude and its terrors?

  Strong men, paratroopers, for instance, act as a group; one could even say a group that draws closer together as its members become more aggressive and more brutal.

  The war hero is a group hero. And knowing this, the philosopher who moves against the current of his times or ahead of it, the avant-garde artist, almost always keeps in touch with several of his own kind.

  The truly isolated man, the hermit by nature, is very rare, and psychiatrists consider him a pathological case.

  If this is true, if man instinctively moves towards the herd, towards rule, towards obedience … These past days I’ve been irritated by propaganda, which begins pouring in on us in the morning and goes on all day in all forms. But the propaganda of the past in the form of daily masses, which even kings could not escape, the sermons, the confessions …

  From this point of view, why such horror at the thought of the world of today and tomorrow in so many informed minds who panic at the thought of mass civilization, mechanization, standardization, which is actually hardly more advanced than it was in the life of the Middle Ages? Didn’t serfs, peasants, take comfort from living more or less peacefully in the shadow of the castle, which offered them a refuge in time of danger?

  If the child is naturally fearful …

  Are there any real exceptions? Yet I see men who mouth the word ‘liberty’ accepting posts, honours, ridiculous titles, gilded medals, cattle-show ribbons.

  A Blaise Cendrars … A Henry Miller … Other people I know who have had the reputation of being real wild men, wholly pure, spend a good part of their lives seeking each other out for reassurance. Blaise Cendrars accepted a most belated medal on his deathbed. Miller wears the rosette of the American Academy on his sports jackets.

  Isn’t it pitiful how, beginning with nothing but a swing, a simple parental observation, in spite of myself I come back to one of the three or four ideas I’m always circling around like a circus horse?

  Aren’t our little habits, our manias, also a way of reassuring ourselves?

  We speak of man as if he existed in the individual state. What if there were only men, a mixture of men, much more like each other than they first seem to us, a sort of human caviar which …

  Come on! I’m off again. And living, then? What do these ratiocinations have to do with life? And the papers I’m going to read? And the television I’ll be watching tonight? And the rage that comes over me as I listen …

  In ten minutes we’ll sit down to our meal and Pierre will watch the door until every one of the family is in his place in the dining room.

  For him, the unit now is the family, until it becomes the school, the regiment, the office, the political party, the country, Europe.

  How I wish the unit were man!

  3 May

  Day before yesterday morning in my study, a bumblebee flew in clumsily, beating against the three windows, passing close to my head each time. I know they don’t sting. But was it a hornet? Still, I know the difference. But I kept dreading some unpleasant contact and suddenly I decided to kill it. Because I wasn’t sure. And because I wasn’t used to it.

  For similar reasons people have slaughtered snakes that are useful and harmless, other animals, screech owls, bats, etc., which are now greatly missed, according to zoologists.

  Gide used to say to me, speaking of my son, that I should be sure to teach him natural sciences, especially about plant life, the study of which had always delighted him.

  Alas, I never studied botany, because in my time it was largely a science of nomenclature. I’ve studied very little zoology. Johnny isn’t studying it at all in school – at least up to now.

  I feel remorseful at having killed this bumblebee, which had only a few days or hours to live.

  The same evening, on television, Night and Fog, a documentary on Nazi concentration camps, crematory furnaces and gas chambers, piles of naked corpses, etc.

  Doesn’t the one explain the other? The same fear, the same ignorance, the same disgust.

  Yesterday, in a rage, Johnny called me a bastard. As I promised myself I would, I have taught him not to ‘respect’ me as my mother insisted on my respecting her, on my respecting my uncles and aunts, grown-ups, institutions. An hour later, poor Johnny was very sad. I was too. I still am, a bit. However, for him the word means nothing. It is an outlet for righteous wrath. I had been fooled by his sister’s air of innocence and had scolded him unfairly. Today we both wanted to ask each other’s forgiveness.

  A holiday. Going to Geneva, D. and I. Lunch alone together somewhere. Ouf!

  Wednesday, 3 May 1961

  Yesterday was a better day than I expected. Not only did D. and I enjoy it, but everything fell into place for us, everything went well, it was as if we were juggling life and dropping nothing.

  Found the English desk I’ve been looking for for six months in an antique shop, even more perfect than I’d dreamed, also a unique armchair, and the English dining set that we’d given up on into the bargain.

  Scarcely back at the house, two phone calls for D. both on business, both successful. A day that will figure in our int
angible album of memories. And for me, another opportunity to appreciate, vividly and in depth, D.’s maternal quality, her amazing patience. In a single day, she was companion, businesswoman, buddy, mistress, mother, I don’t know what not.

  In the evening, alone with Johnny, tender and troubled.

  ‘Did I hurt your feelings yesterday?’

  I admitted he had.

  ‘Mostly because I understood that you couldn’t help it, and I was afraid for you …’

  He understood. It was the ‘bastard’ that most perturbed him. Like his mother, he needs to explain, not to leave anything in the dark.

  ‘You know in school we don’t mean anything by that, it’s a word we use all the time. It’s not even as strong as “idiot” or “imbecile” …’

  Dear Johnny, who forgets that in all of his rages he calls me an idiot or an imbecile!

  As for Pierre, here he is in his turn, in love with his mother, unwilling to let go of her in the evenings, inventing pretexts as cleverly as Marie-Jo. He doesn’t go to sleep before nine thirty, after exhausting all the resources of his imagination.

  I’m already beginning to feel the itch to write a new novel. A party at the school in the course of which Johnny is to play the part of a Chinese and be carried on a shield by his schoolmates.

  D.’s birthday the 14th. The 23rd or 24th – I never remember my children’s birthdays – Pierre’s second birthday. Life is lovely and good.

  Friday, 5 May 1961

  All right – let’s try to talk about this damned question of money. Each time I begin to write in this notebook my dream is to do it lazily, sometimes elaborating a detail, following the course of my thoughts without haste. I never manage it. I always ‘work small’.

  I don’t think it’s laziness, although I can’t stand sitting too long at my desk. It’s more a sort of reticence that keeps me from giving too much importance to a reflection, a detail. It’s the same for my books, whose brevity is the despair of my English and American publishers (they often have to publish two novels in one volume). I condense in spite of myself and I am reinforced in it by my apprenticeship in the popular novel, in which there must always be movement, where it is forbidden to leave the slightest space for boredom.

  The question of money has occupied, and occupies, very little place in my life, although it had such a great one in Balzac’s or Dostoevsky’s, to whom I should never think of comparing myself.

  From the beginning, I’ve wanted it, so as to be free of certain worries, and especially not to have to count it. To buy without asking the price. To live without knowing what life costs. It was already a dream in my childhood, in a house where calculations went on from morning to night.

  But I don’t keep it. I don’t hoard it. I have always said that money is only stored-up man, since a given sum represents so many hours of labour, thus so many hours, so many days, so many months, of human lives.

  From there to keeping these symbols of life in a safe … It horrifies me. To such a point that I have often made enough crazy purchases to find myself broke again and forced to work.

  I have a horror of capitalism. It seems revolting to me that money should earn money.

  That’s all. It seems to me that I had a lot to say on this subject, and I see I’ve already exhausted it. For today, anyway.

  I’m not afraid of going back to a way of life I knew in my childhood, of living in a small apartment or in a little house in the country and, if no one wants to read me any more, of working at a publisher’s, at no matter what, like so many former colleagues.

  However, I should not like to have my children suddenly in straitened circumstances, having to account for francs and centimes.

  ‘No, Pierre, that’s too expensive …’

  Or: ‘We can’t afford that.’

  Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, since life has rarely been so fluctuating and unpredictable as it is today.

  I shall have done what I could.

  4 p.m.

  Having a half-siesta just now on the drawing room sofa and allowing my thoughts to wander in the grey of a rainy day, I arrived not so much at ideas as at preoccupations that I don’t like very much.

  Did it begin with the question of Algeria? There is a lot of talk about specific mentalities, the mentality of the French colonials in Algeria, the ‘officer mentality’, or the ‘unit mentality’, etc. … and among so many people who don’t understand each other there no doubt are a majority of men who honestly believe in their cause.

  In the United States I knew the ‘McCarthy mentality’ and the ‘egghead mentality’ and now there is that of the new establishment as opposed to the old, the Pentagon, the CIA, and so forth.

  In Je me souviens I tried to give an idea of the Brüll clan and the Simenon clan. Though I revolted against both, there is no doubt that I remain marked by them, that I sometimes, as today, react as a function of my education.

  In the same way I rebelled against the Christian Brothers whose pupil I was, less against the Jesuits, and this rebellion left its mark. I have often said that the cult of the Virgin changed the behaviour of men towards women.

  In this way I could go back to a number of themes which recur in my mind and, in spite of myself, rule my actions or my thought: ‘Laziness is the mother of …’ ‘Man must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow …’ ‘Only the bread one has earned tastes good …’

  The words ‘idle hour’ … as if there were anything more beautiful than an idle hour!

  Thus we more or less submit to the imperatives of the clan, the race, the family, education, environment.

  I was a jingoist in 1914–18, a pseudo-anarchist in the following years, though these were spent at the very Catholic Gazette de Liège. I took on the style of life of postwar Montparnasse (1921–30) and of the painters who peopled that section.

  I saw life as a sailor when I lived aboard my boats, as a Parisian in Paris, a Southerner in the Midi.

  In the United States I judged the political life and customs from the point of view of Americans, and I scarcely recognized France when I came back.

  Just now, on my sofa, I began to smile at my cult of personality, of the individual. What individual, if a trifle can change him? ‘Conditioning’ – Pavlov’s, and that of the present-day Russians – is it as theoretical as we would like to believe?

  I’ve seen my wife give birth ‘painlessly’ thanks to conditioning, and today in Moscow major operations are performed without anaesthesia.

  What individual? If what I do is the sum of my acquired reflexes, plus what has influenced me plus what has stuck to me and sometimes reappears unconsciously, what is left of me?

  I observe my children. At the moment, they seem original to me. But when I see an old photo of them a few years back, they look to me still unformed, and I have the feeling that their personalities only came to them later.

  What is left of me, of others?

  Tonight we are dining at the house of some friends, medics, as usual. Monday, three days of holiday together. End of the month, end of various engagements, and, I hope, a novel.

  Between the last one and the one to come I will have had three days of vacation alone with D.

  Sunday, 7 May

  Dined at our friends’, yesterday, with a physicist (should I say atomicist?) professor at the CERN [European Council for Nuclear Research] in Geneva, world-famous, it seems, who wanted to meet me. I understood at once why. He is crazy about detective novels and … science fiction. He devours them. Very proud of having his friends call him Nero Wolfe, the hero of my colleague Rex Stout.

  (He is only fifty-four but seemed to me older than I am. This now happens frequently. I meet people who appear heavier, more serious, more established, more mature, and I am surprised that they are younger. Is it possible that I’m mistaken and that they, from their point of view, have the same impression?)

  He is from the Baltic region, like Keyserling, whom he reminded me of a little, like him speaks several
languages perfectly, has lived in Germany, in the United States, in Paris, now for seven years in Geneva. Often goes to MIT. His wife, German, twenty years younger than he, has lived in Paris too, then was seven or eight years with the Mayo brothers in Minnesota. This kind of couple turns up more and more frequently.

  He confirmed certain impressions I had which were based on nothing definite. Oppenheimer: he tended to play Mahatma Gandhi more and more; a scientific romantic. Braun: a scientist with a flair for publicity.

  In scientific circles, he told me, each one knows his precise niche in the hierarchy. No argument possible, for this niche is decided by precisely measurable work. Art and medicine are debatable, have an area of impression.

  He found my first book on a bench on the Champs-Elysées when he was fifteen, and since then has read all of them. I feel it was true. But I found no echo in his conversations as I do with doctors and psychiatrists. It is Maigret who mainly interests him.

  He is the sort of man who speaks with apparent abandon, with a certain humour, and who is then suddenly silent for a long moment, as if the conversation were no concern of his.

  He wanted to have me meet other scientists in Geneva, where they are coming in growing numbers, either as residents or passing through. I don’t yet know if these circles will interest me. I don’t feel comfortable in them.

  We talked about the mean age at which man gives the best of himself in art or sciences, and also in politics. According to statistics, this age is much later than one would think (reassuring!). I’ve already mentioned this. But, according to him, and he should know, this is not true for the sciences. It is considered the rule that a physicist or mathematician who hasn’t made any discovery by thirty will never make any.

  Which brings science closer to poetry.

  ‘In some respects we are poets,’ he told me.