When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  Today, I’m giving in, really, to a kind of anger, a certain resentment. I believe I’ve spoken of all the journalists and critics who have streamed through Echandens during the past months.

  The first was a woman, L., a friend who is editor of a big magazine. She had telephoned asking permission to send one of her writers to interview D. immediately. This was three days before our departure for the Cannes Festival. We didn’t want to refuse, and while we were getting ready for this departure, fittings, luggage, instructions to the household staff, children, etc., we had this charming woman and her photographer at our heels from morning to night.

  On our return from Cannes, three weeks later, it was a certain C., from another important weekly. C. stayed four or five days – with his photographer. To both, I repeated that I refused to talk about money, that I would not answer – nor would my wife – any question on this subject.

  Before leaving, C. read us his article, in which, in fact, there was nothing about money. I warned him against his editor, who, I know, loves to raise such questions. He made us every promise imaginable.

  The two articles waited in type until the news (Brigitte Bardot, Vadim, Distel, Yves Montand …) left space for them and as it happened this week both periodicals published their interviews at the same time.

  In one: ‘The man who pumps billions from his inkwell.’ In the other: ‘The man who sold the television rights to Maigret for a billion three hundred thousand francs.’ And my wife handles millions (daily, according to them). A thirty-six-room château!

  I don’t want to get up to copy the exact dates. And in one, our love becomes the panting romance of a popular novel.

  Result: begging letters begin to arrive. There will be more next week. It is as regular as clockwork. If an article appears in an English magazine, England ‘begs’ for two weeks. Professionals. Sometimes, a year later, I get exactly the same letter from people who forget that they have already written. Then it’s Sweden, Denmark, Italy …

  Some readers are indignant at our boasting, sure that we are the ones who talked complacently about our income.

  However, the figures are wrong. C. told me that they estimated the amount of our BBC contract, which no one knows, according to averages calculated as exactly as possible. But since this contract is a partnership contract, no one, not even ourselves, can foresee what it will yield.

  What infuriates me is the rank prejudice shown by the owners of the big newspapers and magazines. It’s a matter of policy, the same in every country. These people are almost all great captains of industry. They handle billions, not every year, but every week. They have five, six estates, country places, town houses, yachts.

  For the most part they have inherited their fortunes, all they had to do was to increase them.

  But each week they publicize the hugeness of the fees, or income, of this star, that painter, that writer.

  It’s a sort of alibi for them, an excuse. We act as lightning rods. No one speaks about them, about what they earn, what they spend, but everyone knows the falsely astronomical figures of artists’ earnings.

  I think that if I were to read the two articles about us with different names I would hate the people they were written about.

  Is that the purpose? One begins to wonder. Upper-middle-class jealousy?

  When Buffet, by a miracle, after starving – I’ve starved too, like Chaplin, like so many others, and I’m very glad of it – when Buffet, at thirty, sells his canvases for two million bad francs and buys a château that is in fact quite dilapidated – the papers positively organize campaigns against him.

  Because he earns money, he can’t be a real painter. His prices will go down. He’s just about finished. His downfall is at hand.

  The public reads all this and passes on! This week, in the eyes of thousands of people I pass for a lucky dog who piles up royalties – a good thing I didn’t steal them – caring nothing for the distress of so many homes, for the ill-housed, ill-fed, the sick children and the old who are dying for want of care.

  Not a word about forty years of efforts which were sometimes almost desperate. I am just a juggler. I’ve won in the literary lottery. I’m a clever fellow or, at best, I’ve known how to take advantage of human stupidity.

  Raimu once spoke to me of his bitterness on this subject, and I wrote a short article about it.

  It’s not the first time it’s happened to me. Probably it’s not the last. Must I close my door to journalists? That would be useless. Three years ago, the representative of a big English daily said to me:

  ‘I’ve been particularly commissioned to ask you a question about your income. My editor insists. If you don’t give me an answer, I’ll invent one and you can always sue me.’

  I answered him:

  ‘I’m so little involved in money matters that I would have a hard time telling you what I earn. I’m sorry for the people who are so concerned.’

  Which he translated in his article into something like:

  ‘Simenon told us that money is coming in so fast that he can’t keep track of it …’

  Disgusting, isn’t it? It is, however, what literary history is made up of, and we are judged by it.

  An excellent lesson in humility, if I needed one, and which should be enough to remove all desire to set down opinions in these notebooks. I finally had a limited edition (two thousand copies, I think) printed of a pamphlet: ‘Le Roman de l’Homme’ (lecture at the Brussels Exhibition). I sent it, as a token of friendship, to thirty friends and to those people who, I know, follow my writing assiduously. I didn’t receive more than five acknowledgements.

  My wife and I take pains to answer all letters. I go through all the manuscripts and books that are sent me. Often I read them thoroughly. And I write personally to the author.

  Nielsen did the publicity, less than usual, I suppose, because of the small number of copies printed and also because the edition was sold out. For my novels, I receive a great number of press clippings. For this little book, there was only one review, or rather a single mention, in Paris-Presse. And even that only quoted an anecdote about Charlie Chaplin. It is now going the rounds of papers, especially the English ones. About the rest of it, nothing. Yes: Paris-Presse says that this book, in spite of its small number of pages, is packed with intelligence. Thanks.

  I was quite wrong in publishing it. I didn’t want to do it. I gave in when people wrote me about it from all over.

  Serves me right!

  Wednesday, 31 August 1960

  I had noted on a bit of paper:

  Tepid fruit dish

  Marsilly statue

  Place des Vosges

  First Move

  The hundred days in Tucson

  Nothing important. Memories. It will come back, no doubt. For the moment, we’ve finished packing. D. and I are going to take a rest in Versailles for six days. She’s the one who needs it most. As for me, after the operation, and especially after the antibiotics, I would like to get back in shape for work. In a hurry to plunge into a novel. Now, all I can do is hope. We’ll be back around the 10th. End of the month, the 29th, is Johnny’s birthday and I can’t be working on a book then. Will I have time between the 10th and the 26th or 27th? It’s unlikely.

  We have the best-organized house there is. But the better organized we are, the less leisure we have because we become slaves to routine. We have to eat at an exact hour (give or take five minutes) as in an army camp. The least slip-up, the least whim, spoils everybody’s schedule.

  But to write a novel I need almost a month of peace without any disturbances (seven to eight days of writing, it is true, but to get into the mood and identify with my characters it takes me longer and longer. I don’t believe it is age, weakness, drying up, but that it has more to do with my becoming harder and harder to please. There was a time – twenty-five years ago! – when I used to say to myself: ‘It’s good enough for the public.’ Now, it’s no longer the public I’m preoccupied with. Perhaps I’m wr
ong).

  So, we’ll just hope. No journalists, friends, obligations. And not even world events must trouble me!

  Each time I think I am ready, something makes me put it off three days, then eight, and I end up letting my characters evaporate.

  D. struggles with the mail, the house, organizes, smooths out difficulties. She exhausts herself so that nothing may bother me, and seeing her struggle this way distresses me.

  Besides, I am more and more the paterfamilias. I’m not sorry. On the contrary. I would like – like D. – to be with the children all the time. And it’s the nurse and the staff who see the most of them!

  Well then! Plane at three o’clock. Versailles at about five thirty. Bringing a maid so that both of us will be free of cares. D. is bringing her typewriter.

  This shouldn’t be taken for bitterness. I was feeling low when I thought I was writing less because I was beginning to be impotent. This must be the thing that haunts all creative people. (I don’t like the word ‘artist’, which, like the word ‘poet’, seems pretentious, quaint to me, and the term ‘creative person’ even more so. How to put it? How designate a profession which basically doesn’t exist?)

  Summing up, I’ve decided, after a good deal of worry, that it’s my external life, more complicated all the time, that keeps me from writing as much as I used to do. And maybe the fact that my books are both shorter and simpler.

  Pierre is playing under my windows. I just went to look at him.

  I want to go down to be with him. D. is in her boudoir and I want to go up to see her. Then to look for Marie-Jo, whom I’ve barely seen today, then to go get Johnny from school. So I feel guilty about spending a few minutes on these lines which have no interest, no importance, except, perhaps, later for the children.

  And this gets me to my note ‘The hundred days in Tucson’. But this morning, that would take me too far afield. Maybe at Versailles, where we’ll be on holiday? Holiday? In any case, we’ll both be there and I’ll be able to talk to D. at any hour of the day without someone – other than the telephone – interrupting, which rarely happens here. To have a ten-minute conversation we have to take the car and drive somewhere!

  Saturday, 3 September

  In Versailles since Wednesday for a conventional rest in a conventional hotel where, as in Venice, I find people doing exactly the same thing I am.

  I’m amazed to observe again what has struck me so often. The lack of cleanliness, of real comfort in what are called luxury hotels. How can so many people be satisfied with this? Some spend virtually their entire lives in such places. Served by strangers who come and go in your privacy by relays, appear and disappear without your knowing their names. Is this a personnel crisis, as the management claims? It’s possible.

  For a number of years already, in France, in England, in the United States and elsewhere, I have been appalled at certain specimens of fauna in these places: valets, floor waiters, chambermaids, especially the ones on night duty. Where do they come from? One guesses at dreadful secrets. They answer you with surly or scornful indifference.

  What is there under these uniforms of questionable cleanliness, questionable as the armchairs, the draperies, the pantries on each floor where our coffee or tea is prepared, among the brooms and God knows what?

  The public dreams of this luxury life, which few housewives would find acceptable in their own homes, with the negligence, the lick-and-a-promise cleanliness.

  I looked back at entries. They don’t seem interesting any more. I’ll explain the last. When we were in Tucson waiting for Johnny’s birth, we had to be separated from Marc for the first time, who went ahead to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. Marc was ten years old. He didn’t read French. My English was still poor. And he would have had trouble making out my handwriting.

  During the hundred and some days of this separation I wrote him a letter in English every morning on the typewriter, racking my brains to interest him, each time trying to think of a ‘joke’. Although I was sure he never read these letters to the end. Did he even open them?

  I wonder if these notebooks will have the same fate. I’m probably wrong, since Johnny seems curious about everything I do and write. Perhaps in the end they all will be interested in my chatter?

  Why do I want them to be? It won’t teach them anything, except that I am much pettier than they may have imagined.

  In fact, that’s just what I’d like to happen. To be known in my natural stature, not as a father, not as a writer, but as a man with all that the word implies. Isn’t that the best way to help them if they need help some day?

  ‘My father was …’

  No halo.

  ‘My father was like me.’

  A little less good. I hope so.

  And now for those hundred days, which had nothing Napoleonic about them. It was very hot in Tucson. Those hundred and some letters in a foreign language probably gave me more trouble than the hardest novel. Not to mention the pain of separation.

  I’m coming to the lukewarm fruit dish, which no longer has any importance and which came back to my mind, I don’t know why. That will be for tomorrow or another day. I’m getting lazy and above all I see no reason – today, anyway – to tell these tales with no beginning or end and giving the impression, wrongly, of attaching importance to them.

  Sunday, 4 September, a.m.

  Recently one of the greatest French cancerologists died of cancer, and up to the end his colleagues managed to hide the nature of his illness from him. This doesn’t seem extraordinary to me. I’ve seen other doctors in similar situations. And probably it’s the same for everyone. We are lucid, sometimes perspicacious, even clairvoyant about what concerns others. But the nearer people are to us, the more our judgement is likely to be distorted. I don’t think a healer has power over his own.

  D., last evening, reread my first notebook. We talked about it this morning. I believe that I understand her better, or rather that in the future it will happen less and less often that I misunderstand her for short periods. It’s more difficult because she lives not outside but inside me. Thank you, D.

  Paradoxical. I think that conventions, basically, if one traces them far enough, come from a need to be singular.

  Example. My grandfather was named Christian. He was no more Catholic than any other person. Average. This name was given him because in Belgium it is unusual, and his parents must not have known that it meant Christian.*

  My father, through a kind of family piety, gave this name to his two boys, my brother and me.

  In turn, I gave this same name, also three times, to my three male children, who will no doubt do the same thing with theirs.

  Did my uncles do the same thing? I think so. So that one day there will be dozens, perhaps hundreds of Simenons with Christian as their given names.

  Not by choice. By tradition. And if they are asked why, they will think that once upon a time it was a profession of faith.

  Idem. In my parents’ house, each person’s birthday was celebrated the day before the actual day. In order to avoid having friends, acquaintances, congratulate before the family did.

  I’ve continued the custom. My children will adopt it in turn. Then their grandchildren, but they will no longer know why.

  Families invent traditions, transmit them. Nations too.

  How can one not deceive oneself when, centuries later, one tries to explain them ‘logically’?

  We create – create for others – obligations, which finally no one dares to break.

  Or even obligations which in turn threaten to become a matter of morals. In any case, a form of slavery.

  One man’s singularity becomes, at a given moment, decades or hundreds of years later, an inexplicable rite. Or an affectation. Only a few wore Eton ties at first. It was a countersign. Then hundreds wore them, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

  The fruit dish will come later. It seems too long to explain. I would like to note here only items of a few lines. And things as badly written
as possible so as to stay away from literature. As I sometimes write to my friends; the style of my letters is in inverse proportion to my friendship. With strangers, I am careful. With acquaintances, a little less so. With those whom I really love, not at all. Watching one’s language, whatever one may say, distorts thought. I prefer the approximate word, the ordinary, the first at hand to the precise word which has slowed down thought for even a few seconds and by that fact has robbed it of spontaneity.

  I have some of the same feeling about my novels. That’s why it is so laborious for me to correct them. One of the reasons. The principal reason being that once written they are alien to me.

  Monday, 5 September 1960

  I must get to it, just to be done with it, even though it now seems to me without interest. I ask myself even why I made a note here that I ought to talk about it.

  I must have been a little over seventeen when I wrote two pages under the title ‘Le Compotier Tiède’. Not a story, nor altogether a prose poem. One of those things one writes at that age and gets published in little magazines. The ‘Compotier’ was also published in a fairly important review in Brussels, La Revue Sincère, and I was recently surprised to see in Scharbaeck, I believe, a Rue Léon Debatty, named after its editor. So I too, against all I really thought I believed, I almost went the way of the little reviews.

  It doesn’t matter. This worthless piece of writing still ought to be (?) in my file. It would be easier just to insert it here but I hate the thought of digging up this sort of thing. What is important (in my eyes and actually more than it seemed a few days ago) is the theme, the sunny courtyard of our house on the Rue de l’Enseignement, in the morning, at around ten o’clock, with my mother, in the kitchen, making preserves. On the table, in a shaft of sunshine, a dish of tepid stewed prunes. The smell all over the house.