When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  About that, I don’t want to write. Nor about anything else, which means, I think, that a new novel isn’t far off. Providing my head cold and dizziness f … off. Have rarely felt so clearly as during this brief trip to Paris – a dress rehearsal, supper afterwards, visit to the doctor, dinner at the Elysée Club with friends – what a stranger I am to all that, only interested in our little family unit. And, when I have a desire to escape it, it is for an even more limited unit: to be anywhere at all, in a hotel apartment, or on the sidewalks, with D. The essential unit: the couple. After which one gathers one’s chicks under one’s wings.

  An amusing (?) idea came to me just now. At last report, Professor A. dixit, and he seems to me right, that the cause of my recent troubles, minor dizziness, etc., could be an infection of the inner ear called Ménière’s syndrome.

  Now it so happens that among the recurring motifs which are found in my novels, and which some people have tried to explain by hook or crook, is a sudden sensation of unreality of the environment, of people, of the outside world, which one of my characters experiences.

  If, some day, the critics learn that I was more or less subject to attacks of Ménière’s disease, they would discover that this sometimes causes such sensations.

  From there, to conclude that … It’s utterly idiotic. And I’m aware that one could thus go on infinitely to make diagnoses of books and authors.

  I had this sensation of unreality even as a child. I’m sure that every one of us has had it at one time or another in his life. I would swear that it is inherent in the human condition.

  But the critics wouldn’t believe that. Didn’t I react as they do with regard to Balzac and to Cushing’s disease? So much the worse for me. Not to mention the fact that it hasn’t the slightest importance.

  27 September

  Regret I wrote the preceding. Seems to me both pretentious and forced. But I promised myself neither to cross out nor to tear out pages. On the subject of A., I’m struck by his assurance, and that of other top medical men.

  Is he, are they, really sure of themselves? Isn’t this a professional attitude which they find necessary to use with certain patients? Do they come to believe it themselves? I suspect so, and this fits in with what I’ve said about statesmen, politicians, etc. They speak, make gestures, go and come as if … But in reality? A very small detail struck me. At a certain moment, A. gave me his latest book, a big treatise which, I think, is considered important by people in his field. Apparently it was to have me read a quotation of Ménière.

  ‘You see that I too write my novels!’ he then said to me in a voice in which I sensed some bitterness.

  There was no doubt he would have traded his big treatise for a few novels. His colleague, Professor D., spends half his day at literary tasks, the other half only at his scientific works.

  What does that prove? That they are not so easy in their skins as they would like to appear. They do not believe in themselves, or at least they don’t believe in themselves all the time.

  The more I know people the more I mistrust self-assurance. I would like to ask the Pope a few questions, eyeball to eyeball.

  Tomorrow Johnny’s birthday. I see Tumacacori, Tucson, twelve years ago, D. and me eleven years ago. It’s so much more important than anything else. But that has no place here, nor anywhere. Basically, I’m talking about everything except what I really have in my heart, because one cannot speak of certain things without falsifying them.

  Happy birthday, my dear old Johnny! And Marc, and Marie-Jo, and little Pierre. And D., who wants so much to make us all happy.

  One doesn’t find any of that in my novels, either.

  28 September

  I know, like all men of my age, no doubt, how old a novelist is by the meaning he gives to the word ‘old’, or to the age of someone he calls ‘old man’. In my first books, old men were often scarcely more than forty-nine or fifty years old.

  But what young men cannot understand is that at fifty-seven, or sixty, or seventy (I don’t yet know) one has just the same hopes that they have.

  Today, for example. I had a twinge of the heart about Marc and his wife leaving in a car for Paris with a little suitcase on the baggage rack of the MG. We too, D. and I, used to take off that way, without preparation, for anywhere at all, or sometimes quite at random.

  Now, the slightest whim, sometimes just to take a walk in town, demands complete preparation, orders to give to everybody in the household. You would imagine – I used to imagine it too at one time – that after a certain age one settles down, is almost without wishes, dislikes whims and the unforeseen. How indignant one feels at the idea that a mother and father at the age of forty still make love!

  They imagine that we no longer have other satisfactions, other desires than to enjoy a big house, have a comfortable life, buy furniture and pictures. But all this is only imposed on us. We submit to it. The kids will realize one day all the desires held back because of them, without bitterness, only, sometimes, with some sadness, a remembering of the time when it was possible to make love any time, I was going to say any place, without wondering if … and if …

  It’s no use having an enormous house – and for work and relative freedom of each it is indispensable that it should be so – D. and I still have to make a great effort in order to be alone together for a moment. I regret none of it, on the contrary. Each time I meet a bachelor of a certain age, a couple without children, ageing or aged Bohemians, I can’t help feeling sorry for them.

  And I know very well that one day, when all the children have flown the nest, we will think nostalgically of our house when it was so full. It is true that I will be really old then. But will I think myself old? I am beginning to wonder. My carcass will have shrunk, surely. But will the rest change? For the better? For the worse? If I live long enough I will know the answer one day. But it is not impossible that I will keep putting it off until later, until so late that no one will be able to give it, which would explain why we never have enough satisfactory answers to these questions. So why ask it?

  Saturday, 1 October 1960

  I often say I’m apolitical, and I think it’s true. However, at this moment if I were a French national, it is probable that I’d yield to the temptation to sign the manifesto of the 121 or 125, the number doesn’t matter, which demands the right of desertion for the soldier sent to Algeria and more or less forced to commit acts against his conscience. I envy a little those who have risked it and who are now suffering for it. I hope that all actors, authors, etc., will go on some sort of strike in solidarity with their colleagues who have been barred from television, films, subsidized theatres – and worse, the teachers, who have been hit even harder. All these things upset me, make me indignant.

  I do nothing. Not only, I’m sure, because I am not French, but because, as always, I feel that there is exploitation for murky ends on both sides. This is neither egoism nor, I’m sure, concern for my peace of mind nor that of my family. Nor is it wisdom. It is more an uneasiness that I feel in the face of a certain kind of use of ideas, no matter how pure they are.

  At the same time I am aware of a feeling I am ashamed of but which I can do nothing against. From the beginning of the de Gaulle experiment, I was revolted by his conceit, by his scorn of the opinion of others, by what he and his entourage represent (theoreticians from the great schools who are obliged to reduce social problems to equations – all more or less tools of the great banks and business groups), I have been revolted, I say, and also convinced that the experiment will inevitably end in failure. That must have been two years ago.

  This failure, for a time at least, for a short time I hope, is a failure for France. It can be seen today, it will be seen even more tomorrow in the United Nations if nothing unforeseen happens.

  I love France. Of all countries, it is the one nearest to me, although I do not belong to it and I don’t go there regularly.

  So, I am surprised by myself, watching television, for example, when
I hope for a new failure of French policy, because it is de Gaulle’s policy.

  Is it because I hope, in a more distant future, after God knows what revolution, for a return to the past, a real success for France? Isn’t it so that I’ll be proven right? Or because I rejoice at the failure of a man who is antipathetic to me, for whom, however, I begin to feel pity now that he is almost alone?

  I would like to be sure that these last hypotheses are not the true ones.

  Sunday, 2 October 1960

  D. and I, in the company of Pierre, have just made our traditional trip to the Lausanne station for the papers. This morning I want to tell a story, not because I attach importance to it, but because it came to my mind just now while I was shaving, and also because it’s a beautiful autumn Sunday, sweetly familial, and then perhaps because I hope to begin a novel on Tuesday or Wednesday, which I’m getting into little by little, because I don’t want to go too fast, because the birth of the characters must never be too thought out, or willed. I’m giving myself a short respite. An intermission.

  The story has been told in the papers several times, but never, if I remember correctly, in an exact way. And sometimes an attempt was made to connect it with the character of Maigret, who must have been born ten years later.

  I was a beginner, a reporter on the Liège Gazette. Every morning I used to write one of those daily columns like the ones one sees published in italics in most of the provincial papers. Maybe it was the Lausanne Tribune that refreshed my memory today. These little columns most often focus on local life, with a bit of poetry, some facile and affected philosophy, some irony, etc.

  To indicate clearly that my little corner in the Gazette was separate, my editor had proposed to call it ‘Outside the Hen-house’ and to sign it ‘M. le Coq’.

  I admit that at first I did not understand either the title or the signature, which I changed later into Georges Sim, because one of my colleagues told me that Le Coq was a collective pseudonym for the editors.

  All this takes a long time to tell. It seems to me that in a novel it would be given only a sentence or two. It must have been in 1920, hence a little more than a year after the Armistice of 1918 and the liberation of Belgium. About the war as it had developed in France or elsewhere, those of us who lived under the occupation more than four years knew only what the Germans allowed us to know, plus a few gleanings from the rare Dutch papers that got across the border from time to time.

  At that period I liked to roam around City Hall, which, at Liège more than any place else, is the real centre of the life of the countryside. I wandered, sniffing the wind, eating cherries in spring, later candy or biscuits that I kept in my pocket, because I was always hungry. I loved the noise, the bustle, the colours, music … I loved the little cafés of the neighbourhood which smelled of gin and were frequented by Walloon poets and actors from the local theatres.

  Professionally, I was obliged to be at police headquarters behind City Hall every morning at eleven o’clock, where my four colleagues and I would be given the daily reports.

  Opposite, to the left of the staircase of City Hall, was another station, and one day, by chance, I saw three monumental and very heavy cases in the corridor which seemed to me mysterious. Who told me about them? I forget. Still, I learned that these cases had been sent to the city of Liège by a Belgian violinist living in Paris, and that they contained a complete collection of L’Illustration (the big magazine of that time) of the time of the war, along with other reviews and journals.

  The sender offered this documentation to his fellow citizens and asked that it be placed in the public library.

  The cases sat there, unopened, for more than a year. Wasn’t it important, for us who knew so little about the war, to be able to consult these collections?

  Soon, I was at the home of my editor-in-chief, Joseph Demarteau, and I told him my plan. He approved of it with a certain amount of hesitation, and he warned me that if anything went wrong I could not make use of his name.

  The next day, on a beautiful sunny morning like today, I left the paper in the company of a linotypist who is still alive and continues to give me news of himself from time to time, he pushing a handcart, I looking unconcerned. A big wedding was taking place, so there was much activity in the court of City Hall.

  In a few minutes, my linotypist, who was stronger than average, put the three cases on the handcart without anyone’s questioning him. A half hour later they were in the hands of the head librarian of Chiroux, the kind Walloon poet Joseph Vrienst, who had sent me his first books when I was a boy of ten.

  Two hours later the Gazette appeared with an enormous headline across an entire page:

  INDIFFERENT ADMINISTRATION POORLY GUARDED CITY HALL

  The story was told in detail. At five o’clock, I was called to the office of the police chief, who told me there would be legal proceedings, at the request of the alderman of Public Instruction and Fine Arts.

  The next day, for fear of ridicule, the alderman withdrew his complaint. He held it against me for a long time. Later, when he was a very old gentleman, I saw him during one of my trips to Liège, and we talked, laughing about the famous cases.

  That is the only time that Joseph Demarteau sent me a box of cigars, which I shared with my linotypist. Why cigars? I was seventeen years old and only smoked a pipe.

  For forty-eight hours, or maybe a week, I was a sort of celebrity. But, of course, I was thinking much more of Rouletabille than of Maigret.

  12 October 1960

  Novel finished this morning. Was going to be called Le Cauchemar. Finally, it will have Betty as a title. Working full tilt for seven days. Nothing else seemed important to me. This morning, after writing the word ‘End’, it all seemed wasted, almost absurd. I wondered why in a few months people would pay to read it. And I dread the moment when I will have to undertake the revision. The tragedy, to use a grandiose word, is perhaps that between novels I can’t believe in the last one … Funny profession!

  20 October 1960

  On the subject of L’Ours en Peluche. What I’m about to say is at odds with the last entry. It is a novel to which I attach a certain importance (or attached?) perhaps because I had the impression of discovering a little area of humanity that only the psychiatrists had paid attention to. Then, when de Fallois, who seems to have understood all my books and who has read them all, read it he said to me:

  ‘I followed the character [by followed he meant: I identified with the character] up to a little before the end. The three or four final pages escaped me.’

  Yesterday, young Mauriac, who also knows my work and who has written some things about me which I find to the point, wrote almost the same thing in Figaro. He saw the last page as a concession, or a set piece. I, who never write to critics to correct them or explain myself, almost sent him a few words.

  For it is just the last three pages that are important and which would explain many crimes that are apparently inexplicable. For a long time my character was obsessed by the desire to throw in his hand, to get rid of his responsibilities, while remaining the centre of attention. He needed to be a kind of hero, needed to be questioned about himself, to be discovered finally as not so simple as those around him thought.

  For a long time, he has not seen any other means of obtaining this result than suicide, a spectacular suicide, which would create excitement. Then, at the moment when there seems to be no other way out, he discovers the possibility of a substitution. He can obtain the same result without dying and, thus, be present at the upheaval that will follow. The gesture will be almost the same. A difference of only a few centimetres in the angle of the revolver. It is another who will die. And, as assassin, he has the same advantages as he would have had as victim.

  This substitution seems to me to happen often and could be, consciously or not, the basis of a great number of homicides and crimes of passion.

  De Fallois and Mauriac do not understand. The other critics will not understand either, which
means they do not understand the meaning of my novels. Am I wrong in not explaining, in not dotting the i’s, in refusing to use a moralistic or exegetic tone? I have the impression that if I did so I would betray my craft as novelist.

  This shouldn’t bother me. But there are moments when it discourages me.

  Will they understand Betty? They will again talk about the sexuality in this novel when it is only secondary in my eyes. Mauriac mentions it in discussing L’Ours en Peluche where there can’t be more than thirty lines that have to do with sexual life in all the novel!

  I would like so much to be indifferent to opinion. Entirely indifferent. I manage to be in what concerns me personally. Not yet in what concerns my characters, as if, in my eyes, they are more important than myself.

  Tomorrow Lyons. Criminology Congress. I’m curious to know the level of these men who indirectly dispose of people’s heads. If I can judge by the works of some of them, it’s rather frightening.

  27 October 1960

  Three days at the Criminology Congress in Lyons. Jurists, doctors, psychiatrists, medical experts, social workers, chaplains, policemen, each one well versed in his profession. Assuredly professional conscientiousness (also many petty ambitions). But an astonishingly average level. Each speaks his own language and barely deigns to explain himself to the specialist next to him.

  As for the criminal who, in the last analysis, is the foundation of this activity …

  He is examined. With a microscope, or a scalpel, or with theories. He is made to undergo somewhat ridiculous tests, like those for the driver’s licence in some American states. And the man? All these people function as members of their background, their class. Once again, they examine. And the appearance of a photographer interests them more than the reports being made.