To put it another way, they are: Man + … + … + …
Each of these ‘pluses’ brings mannerisms and taboos with it.
Suppose it were only those +s that we hate in our neighbours?
Suppose, under that little crust of +s, we were to discover that man is no different from the baby or the dying?
Suppose it were only the acquired factors that separate us?
Curiously enough, as one sees in times of catastrophe, war, earthquakes, floods, shipwrecks, etc., whenever a powerful external event momentarily attenuates or destroys these acquired characteristics, there is sympathy, compassion, a sort of love between men who hated each other the day before.
The difference between what I call the naked man and the clothed one.
Are we really moving towards the naked man? It seems possible, since today, for the first time in history as far as I know, the undernourished peoples are talked about and the overfed people have bad consciences.
Is this healthy? Was it healthier for each one to defend his place in the sun, to subject the weak to slavery and to kill for a yes or a no?
We begin to respect human life to a point of extremity. We almost make a religion of it. It’s true of me. But I sometimes wonder if this is not sentimentality, if we are not going against natural law.
The events in Africa worry us.
What is most troubling of all is to consider the same events, in turn, from the historical point of view, the biological, the sentimental, and the political.
In the past, we must have had instinct, which guided us to where we are now. Is it still with us? Where is it? When does it speak?
And if we have lost it, when and why did we lose it?
Same day, afternoon
A mass-circulation paper, hence a paper that caters to public opinion and is careful not to shock it, yesterday or the day before carried an article by a lawyer not noted for his revolutionary opinions. It was concerned with the archaic quality of the Penal Code, both here and elsewhere, with laws that take no heed of our medical knowledge, particularly in the matter of the degree of responsibility of the criminal. He envisaged for the future a jury of specialists – not specialists in jurisprudence, but in medicine and psychology – and the conversion of prisons into asylums.
This is a familiar theme in specialized journals almost everywhere in the world and particularly in the United States. The idea began by seeming revolutionary. Even today, among the doctors whom I meet, many are sceptical, and lawyers continue to believe in exemplary punishment and Society’s revenge.
My very first Maigrets were imbued with the sense, which has always been with me, of man’s irresponsibility. This is never stated openly in my writings. But Maigret’s attitude towards the criminal makes it quite clear.
I don’t write this in order to demonstrate that I was ahead of my time. I invented nothing. Even at that period these ideas had certainly been formulated by others. But it is still a fairly recent movement. It began with articles in the criminology reviews.
Now it is reaching the general public. I’m delighted. Now that the idea has reached this point, it is bound to lead to reforms.
Does anyone realize what these will imply? Certainly not the public, for it would not feel reassured.
The whole basis of society is changing, with a new concept of man. A concept already apparent in unemployment insurance, social security, old-age pensions and more or less free medical care, including cures at therapeutic spas and dental prosthesis.
I’m delighted, as I said above. That’s true. But I’m a little worried too. In fact, I wonder if our ‘humanity’ will not some day be called sentimentality and if it will not be recognized fearfully that we have transgressed natural laws. Certain methods of agriculture have killed the soil for hundreds of years. By destroying insects with DDT we have diminished fertility. The English have to import bees to save their fruit trees. When, for a while, the rabbits disappeared from France, the rangers were concerned because the balance of the forests was disturbed.
How curious is man’s fate! He is determined to know, discovers fragments of truth, draws conclusions, acts on them only to see afterwards that he has transgressed some still unknown rule and unintentionally unleashed catastrophes.
He struggles to readjust his knowledge, makes new discoveries which, in their turn, on application prove to be just as dangerous.
What admirable and moving perseverance!
The Eucharist – another concept affected by science, by scientific vulgarization, or our false – or fleeting – discoveries in human behaviour.
The Host, the body of God, which the faithful incorporates by swallowing, was no doubt one of the most poetic and real flashes of genius of the Church. Primitive tribes ate the brain, the heart, the sex, some part of the human being, to reinforce in themselves that part and its function (an idea which, though in a very different way, is pursued by certain bypaths of present-day science). The mother may say to her child, in a burst of tenderness:
‘I could eat you up!’
The lover and his mistress … The absorption of one part of the beloved being answers a sort of need for fusion.
The idea of incorporating God in man was thus admirable psychology.
Then, after the public became familiar with the details of digestion, with the chemistry of the stomach and the intestine, this poetic idea began to seem almost repulsive or profane.
The Church wanted communion to be taken fasting, in the morning, in order to obviate any image of this material process.
Today communion and mass can take place at any hour, under certain conditions, which are very nearly those of surgical operations.
Communion, because of our knowledge of the digestive tract and what follows, has lost its beauty, like the tribal chief his right to eat the brain of his enemy.
All this is linked, related. A new way of looking at man himself, and, consequently, at his relationship with other men, is on the march.
One of these days it will shape into a new religion, or a state religion, which amounts to the same thing.
Surely, in the name of this religion, we will kill those who …
Is there any change?
6 o’clock in the evening
I just happened to try out on someone the story of the baby, the dying man, and the man between these two ages or between these two states. The result was catastrophic.
It seems to me that people would rather confess to the worst crimes than admit that they have not received the very best education (?), that their manners are not the only acceptable ones, that their taste in all things is not good taste, etc., etc., all these characteristics furthermore affected by the city, the neighbourhood, the social position, the family, the street …
Perhaps it is the heritage of the clan, and the tribes of Equatorial Africa may attach the same importance to tattoos.
What surprises me is to find these survivals so deep-rooted, and such violent reactions among educated and – on other subjects – open-minded people.
Heard an American in Florence saying to his wife:
‘These people don’t think or live the way we do.’
There was astonishment and perhaps some pity in his reaction.
This is a reaction I never had during the ten years I lived in America, any more than I had it in London, in Italy, in Turkey, in Russia, or in Switzerland.
It’s true that I don’t belong to any clan, to any human unit, and in moments of discouragement it occurs to me to regret it.
It must be reassuring to belong to a race, a country, a superior class.
Alone, one is superior to nothing.
I begin to feel a novel coming on. Tomorrow, Dr R., one of the ones writing a book about me. On the 15th, another, for another book, the fourth this year. This last, Bernard de Fallois, is the most intelligent of the four, I think, a critic I’ve never met. What questions will he ask me? What will he make me think of this time?
I’m in a hurry
for this to be over, in a hurry to be plunged into a book again, and to be writing nothing in this notebook because I’ll be writing a book. Provided the stage fright is not too long or too painful this time. I would like to show, bring to life, a strong man, or fairly strong, anyway. But this is not necessarily what will come out. I grope. I avoid pinning myself down. I am waiting for the spark and it’s a very uncomfortable period during which I suffer because I can’t help being irritable.
What a crazy profession! Balzac complained all the time about his slavery, and Dostoevsky, in his correspondence, used the term, very romantic for him, ‘prisoner of the pen’.
I don’t like big words. Let’s just say that it’s a bad moment to get through. As for knowing why one imposes the job on oneself …
9 August, 10.30 at night
Still a little sickened. As always. Dr R. brought me his book, which he told me was almost finished. He insisted on reading me two or three short passages. Asked me a series of questions. Made me promise to read the manuscript and tell him what I think of it when he is finished, about a month from now.
Have no desire to read it. No curiosity. As for him, he has read a hundred of my works. What surfeit! And above all what obsession. He is a paediatrician but he has been a neurologist. He informed me that the basis of his work about me will be, to some extent – no, this sentence leads nowhere. I wind up talking the way these people do. He is studying me, it appears (?), from the viewpoint of a work by C. von Monakow and Monyne, written twenty years ago and called Biological Introduction to Neurology and Psychotherapy.
I’ll read that book. But not for the same reasons. I’ve always the same discomfort in reading what is written about me. All right if it’s about my work, although I rarely have the impression that the critic has understood. Gide’s praises never really gave me pleasure because I felt he was studying a case. Next, Le Cas Simenon by Narcejac … then that first volume of P.’s full of fake Freudianism. One after another they come to peer at me under the magnifying glass.
It ends up giving me stage fright. I’m afraid of writing now. They interpret everything in their own way. And when they talk to me about my novels, which I never reread and of which I retain only a vague memory, I no longer recognize them.
The hundred-and-ninetieth will be next. Provided this won’t be another disappointment, that once all this is over I can clean myself out with a good novel.
They have managed to disgust me also with this notebook; among the passages from my books which they’ve read me because they are quoting them, there were sentences almost identical to what I set down here. Am I just repeating myself ? Saying over, only worse, what I have already said?
And I don’t like the photographs they have made of me any better – especially the ones which the others consider good. I don’t recognize myself.
Wednesday, 10 August 1960
Last year, for the third or fourth time, we took up with Sven Nielsen (it had already been done with my other two publishers, getting the three together one day in my apartment in the Georges V) the question of my complete works, illustrated perhaps, in a semi-deluxe edition, putting several titles in each volume, of course. Even so, because of the number of titles, this poses such complex problems, both technical and financial, that we put the project off until later. What was mainly lacking was a suitable person to see such a long project through.
Commercially speaking, not more than two or three high-priced volumes could be published annually. At that rate it would take almost ten years and if, during those ten years, I kept writing at the same pace …
In short, the project was postponed. However, I’ve received some beautiful dummies, big books with white pages in solid bindings. It’s tempted me, I’ve chosen the most beautiful, and I’ve begun to make notes in them from time to time.
Now that I’ve begun this notebook, I’m going to see if there’s anything in those notes I’d like to copy here.
I noticed immediately that here and there I wrote a word as caption to the day’s notes, like a dictionary, which I’m almost tempted to do here too. As here too, I’m mostly asking questions.
So, on page 1:
‘Is there a possibility of establishing (by intensive research on fossils) a numerical proportion between men (including hominoids and prehominoids) on the one hand and the different species of animals on the other in the successive periods of history and prehistory?
(Cf. of the considerable number of fossils of mammoths in Asia as compared to the number – alas – of human skeletons – though these are less fragile than those of the small mammals, which are very numerous.)
‘Number of men and of bison, for example, at the time of the discovery of America by Europeans.
‘Same for Africa (elephants, predators, antelopes).
‘Same for Australia.
‘Etc.
‘Rise, fall, or disappearance of different species.
‘Same for insects. (Probably impossible.)
‘Period of the organization of ants, bees, termites …
‘Increase or decrease of species?
‘Rats: does their rising curve (?) follow that of the human race?
‘Diseases of prehistoric animals.
‘Then of those that succeeded them.
‘Of prehominoids … hominoids …
‘Does the number of diseases follow that of the growth of populations and the life of societies?
‘Comparisons between:
‘Biological struggle against disease.
‘Intellectual struggle against disease.
‘Have mutations coincided with the periods of more or less radiation?
‘Is there a connection with the changes in the mineral kingdom?’
End of this note. I looked for the answers in a good number of specialized books and reviews. There was only scattered information. Nowhere did I find a systematic study of these questions. Perhaps I wasn’t thorough enough in my search?
Second note (they aren’t dated):
‘Relationship insects–fermentation.
‘Is there a shrinking of the number of insects? Of the number of species?
‘If so, does this affect the number of birds?
‘Then on …’
The relation of men to rats seems to me important. Parallel evolution? Coinciding numerical growth?
Reason for the adaptability of the rat.
Third note: ‘Intelligence and Instinct (all right, that’s my hobbyhorse and no doubt that is why all those who write about me question me when all I do is question myself).
‘Comparison between animals, hominoids, men, living in families or in small groups, and those living in large herds. Bison and lizard, for example. Primates and dog-faced baboons. Same for insects.
‘Is organization lessening or killing intelligence little by little, or individual instinct?
‘Experiment: what would become of highly organized insects, ants or bees, if one transplanted the individuals strictly indispensable to fecundity? Would they start the process of organization all over again?
‘This must have been tried. What was the outcome?
‘Idem for man. (The Australian experiment? New Guinea?)
‘Group instinct or intelligence, where each individual is specialized, as against individual instinct or intelligence.
‘Evolution of each genus. Rise or decline as specialization is accomplished?
‘Influence of this specialization on defence against disease.
‘Same in psychiatry.’
‘Comparison between animals, hominoids, and men living in society and those in isolation from childhood.
‘At what age, in each group, does self-defence develop?
‘Influence of society or group on precocity.
‘Idem for number of offspring in the litter, among mammals.
‘Number of offspring among hominoids and prehominoids.’
‘Triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, which are a rarity in our times: are they an ac
cident or a kind of throwback to earlier stages?
‘(Twins seem to be a hereditary characteristic. Was there a time when they were the rule or the majority?)
‘What is the frequency of twins, triplets, etc., among primates?’
End of quote. Since then I’ve looked for some answers without finding them. But not in a very systematic way. Perhaps future reading will permit me to fill in the blanks.
No doubt the rest will come much later, when we discover new ways of investigating the past, as we have just discovered the process of determining the age of a fossil by radiation (which is not quite exact, I’m summing it up in a word).
Same day, 5 p.m.
Intermission. Photographer for two hours. English this time. Study. Pencil. Children. Garden, library, etc.
I’m continuing copying my notes. They date from barely six months back. However, I’m transcribing them rather uneasily.
The same discomfort I feel when I am obliged to reread a passage from a novel only a year or two old. Or when I think of such and such a year in my life. Or when I see old photos again.
It always seems so incomplete to me! (It means me.) Tomorrow it will be the same for the present. Isn’t this true of man in general? 1900 seems ridiculous to us, childish. Yesterday’s science makes us smile. Today’s will make us smile in its turn. At what moment will I be satisfied with myself ? I’d rather not answer.
Nevertheless I am copying, without conviction, like a lesson, knowing that it all is leading nowhere and probably will diminish me in the eyes of those who read me.
Another caption: ‘The rat.’
‘At what period did the rat appear? Before or after man or the hominoid? Was it a sort of parasite of man from the beginning? Before that was it the parasite of another animal? Has it always lived on the “remains” or the offal of another creature?
‘(The word “creature” leads to nothing or rather to too precise a meaning. All words, basically, are tendentious.)’
When I Was Old Page 8