When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  Too bad. I’ve already said that I have the same impression in politics. In almost every area, in fact.

  I wasn’t an anarchist, nor of the Left. On the contrary, though poor I recognized the necessity of social classes without bitterness.

  It has been through getting to know – little by little, from close up, sometimes intimately – those who govern, who lead, who dispose, who decide, and who think professionally, that I’ve begun to be frightened.

  If there were a scale to weigh men …

  I’ve followed the path opposite to tradition. It is only as I’ve grown older that I’ve become ‘against’. I would say almost against everything.

  Man remains for me. I hope to be able to go on believing in him.

  Lazy days, loving and paternal. Went to gather mushrooms, Johnny and I, and for two hours we were the same age.

  Hurrying to revise Betty and to write another novel. I want this one to be different. It’s a long time since I’d wanted to write a different novel, to give another point of view, a less tragic one – that’s not the exact word but I can’t find another to fit. Then, at the last moment, sometimes after an almost ironic first chapter, as in La Vieille, in spite of myself I go back to my habitual tone. For a couple of hours or for several days (?) I can see things differently, but I find myself back again with my customary point of view.

  Are my thoughts beginning to run in circles?

  Many joys, in any case, these days of intermission, with my wife and my children. Are there any others that are real? I doubt it more and more and it is not – is no longer – unthinkable for me that one day I may no longer be a novelist. Later, of course. Much later, I hope. But I think of it now without terror.

  In the meantime I am as anxious as ever to write my next novel – the one I would like to be, that I hope will be, different.

  Zut!

  28 October 1960

  Corrections to a few sentences written yesterday. I’m trying to clarify my thought. It’s not that I’m tortured by political matters. But, once more, as in 1936, at the time of the Spanish revolution, then the war, the Liberation, I see how politics inundates us again and I fear the moment – aren’t we already there? – when France will be divided into camps again and each will be forced, especially writers, to be ‘committed’.

  What I wrote yesterday about my scant sympathies for the Left at one time in my life, precisely when I had the most reason to oppose the Right, capitalism, etc., is not quite exact. It was more scepticism (easy!) on my part. Since there must be a government, and since, after a while, one government is as good as another …

  And also: why ask the street sweeper or the village drunk for his advice on foreign policy?

  I still believed that evolution of human quality more or less corresponded to a certain intellectual evolution.

  It was only later that I realized how rarely this is the case, that the opposite is more likely to occur, that in raising himself in the social scale man grows harder and ends, perhaps unconsciously, by no longer perceiving anything but his own instinct. Not to speak of the need for power, which becomes overweening.

  What criterion to use to weigh men, to judge them?

  That’s what I meant yesterday, but which I believe I explained badly and which I still explain badly.

  Today I always trust the simplest, the least evolved man, most, the least provided with worldly goods who also, as the Scriptures say, seems to me the nearest to … To what? Difficult to answer that question without going into the domain of morality. And what morality? Based on what?

  Even from the point of view of a certain individual serenity (not to say happiness), material evolution has failed. Man has lost his purity, which, if I were pushed to the wall, I might finally call an animal one. And I prefer the cruelty which accompanies that purity sometimes to the conscious cruelty, studied, political, of the more highly developed man.

  Is it because I have scarcely any of this in myself? I haven’t yet come to an understanding of the place assigned to what is called intelligence. In any case to its power.

  Sometimes it seems to me a sort of curse, since most often it runs counter to all our instincts if not all harmony.

  9 November 1960

  Nothing special to say. Even nothing at all to say, anyway anything that is worth the effort of writing. However, a desire, since this morning, to bring this notebook up to date. Is it important?

  Finished the revision of Betty and am well enough satisfied. Why not admit: very well satisfied? Sharp desire to write something else, to change. What I always promise myself for the next novel. I would like to be still capable of writing a novel with an intrigue, a plot, a host of characters. But, when I begin, my microscope only takes in a tiny segment of humanity.* I shall try again towards the end of the month after the visit of Henry Miller, who is arriving tomorrow or the day after by car.

  Have S. here, and half his book. Much talk. Much too much. I swear each time not to talk. Then the need to convince …

  The house is warm, well protected, folded in on itself. An anniversary that touched me more than the preceding ones: the 15th of our meeting, D.’s and mine. Fifteen years! The only years of my life I’d like to relive, Sainte-Marguerite, New Brunswick, Florida, Arizona, Carmel, and finally the house in Lakeville which I keep for no reason, out of sentiment. Fifteen really full years, in every sense. And three more children than at the start, not counting Marc’s boyhood and adolescence.

  I shall end up, I think, seeing no one but my family. Too bad if I’ve already said that and am repeating myself. Other people make me repeat myself even more by always asking me the same question to which I think I must answer like a phonograph.

  Growing friendship with Johnny and, recently, with Marie-Jo, who is becoming a most attractive person.

  A young Belgian, named N., just sent me his thesis on Solitude in the Works of Simenon. He isn’t the first to have written on that subject. To my mind, they all deceive themselves. I am one of the least solitary of men, the least capable of living alone.

  For example Miller, who is going to arrive with the two friends he picked up on the way (lady friends?), at seventy or seventy-two. I don’t know what he’ll say to me this time but we chatted at Cannes and he has written me since. He must have lived the whole of his life as a solitary. A vagabond, but a vagabond open to all comradeships, friendships, enthusiasms, loves … He has children from three or four wives, and today these women keep them from him. At least that’s what I’ve understood. That, to me, is real solitude. But then, most often it is the solitude of those people who can only live surrounded by others.

  I’ll know on Friday or Saturday if I’m right. One of his last letters has a tragic tone.

  I’ve known other men like him, happy Bohemians, and I’ve seen them at seventy; some have committed suicide.

  Nevertheless, I’m a Bohemian too, in my own way. I don’t think that it’s ancient bourgeois instinct which forces me to live otherwise, to have deep attachments – not roots, however, nothing in depth. With me it’s more a certain sense of animal life.

  ‘You never talk about friendship!’ S. said to me.

  It’s true. I looked at him a little stunned. If he had said companionship, comradeship, accompliceship … But friendship? This word means nothing to me.

  He didn’t understand me, from his point of view, while I was astonished by his concept of man, of a humanity barely twenty centuries old – when in my eyes it is at least a million years old and when prehistoric man interests me much more than contemporary man.

  When I admitted to him that I envied the gorilla family in the equatorial forest, I must have sunk in his esteem, or else he thought it was an affectation on my part.

  But the father gorilla fascinates me much more than Archimedes. I am sure a day will come when the lessons we learn will not begin arbitrarily either with Sumeria, or Egypt, or Greece, but with a much longer and more important past. More beautiful, too.

  Mon
day, 14 November

  Miller just left, in beautiful sunshine. Fresh gay morning. Before his arrival, I had meant to speak here of two things, of no more importance than others, except, perhaps, for my children. My daily schedule and my reading, about which so many stupidities have been written. I’ll come back to them later. I note it here, not to remind myself, since I don’t reread these notes, but to date this preoccupation.

  (Apropos rereading, day before yesterday it happened that I had to reread, for a new revised edition, two chapters of Three Rooms in Manhatten in proof. Not happy with the style, but how I was reminded of the beginning of my love for D.! What a road travelled since, better, with romanticism, with nothing forced or literary! And how, with Oona Chaplin … But that will come later.)

  So, four days with Henry Miller. My fears proved groundless. However, I was afraid when I saw him getting out with two more or less parasitical ‘friends’, whom he soon got rid of by sending them to spend the day in Lausanne, and whom, in spite of our polite invitations, we didn’t see again until this morning for their departure.

  Four very full days, fruitful, I think. D. and I aren’t cut out to accommodate a third party, but in spite of that, of all those who have come here, he was the least cumbersome, the most tactful, and the one who fitted into the household best. The children adopted him at once.

  He is a pure soul. Also a child, actually, in spite of his seventy years. Full of experiences, certainly, but always ready to leap to the attack against husbands and against … women. I shan’t put down any indiscretions here. I have respect for my guests and for anyone who confides in me. But in the case of Miller, he himself has written the truth about everything that concerns him so one may talk about him.

  A Bohemian, certainly, a sort of anarchist, but in the long run, less so than I, who seem to be a bourgeois because of my externally material life.

  Pure? In a sense. He cannot refuse himself a toy, the first woman he sees. And he is incapable of refusing her what she asks, living with her, marrying her. From which results a situation so tangled that he can hardly find a way out. For he cannot break with any of them either. He does not cut ties. He remains bound to all these successive women, legitimate and illegitimate. He has children who go from one wife to another.

  He loves these children. But for a simple whim, he will sacrifice them, send them back to their mother or back to a stepmother, take them back, send them off again.

  In another man, this could be odious. In him, no. That is why I wrote the word ‘pure’. He loves them. He continues to love, in his way, his wife or his successive mistresses. It is the organization of society that is at fault, not he.

  Many points of contact outside of this question. I’ll come back to it perhaps. Not a moment of boredom during these four days. No weariness. Joy, however, at being together again, D. and I, in a house without strangers this morning.

  We are not good friends for others. I think that one cannot be part of a couple and have true friends. The proof is that the most solid friendships are those made during the war or in great calamity – when there are no women.

  Saturday evening, a curious impression. Dinner here with Charlie and Oona Chaplin, the Millers – and us. At the beginning, Charlie tells stories, mimes, brilliant, gay, amusing. Then suddenly, to Miller and me, he admits:

  ‘I always have to go into my act, at least in the beginning, first out of shyness, and then because I know it is expected of me.’

  Not by us. He realizes that. He knew that about me. But not about Miller. And, after dinner, there are the three men, not in easy chairs, of which there are plenty in the drawing room, but leaning on our elbows around the round table as if in a bistrot, while D. keeps Oona company in a corner.

  A parenthesis. Oona is one of the rare women, maybe the only one, whom I would have married if I had met her before D.

  Also, I had to betray D. last evening, and I ask her pardon. But first I must tell about it. Briefly, for what C. Ch. told us we will also find in his book of Memoirs, now finished and nine hundred pages long.

  He tried to make us understand his reactions to the sudden, cruel, pitiless turning against him in the USA. (I wanted to give the same feeling, four or five years ago, in my book Le Petit Homme d’ Arkhangelsk on a lower level, of course.)

  Another parenthesis, because I am trying to follow the thread of thought rather than composing. Well before knowing Chaplin, in Los Angeles, around 1947 or 1948, I already had an idea on this subject which was not his, but which I continue to consider good.

  When he made his first films and for a long time afterwards, Americans naturally (those who know them) believed that he was mocking the little man (as clumsy, ridiculous, useless and petty). They laughed. They were enthusiastic.

  Then they discovered, thanks to the critics and the reactions in other countries, that the little man was the hero, that it was the others who were ridiculous or odious. They discovered an anarchist! Whence their fury at having been duped. It was, for them, like a deception. For years, they had applauded the enemy of the system necessary to American civilization.

  This isn’t fully convincing. Chaplin doesn’t believe too much in it. I’ve seen that this explanation does not satisfy him, that he prefers the one he gives in his book, which will not appear for a year: a certain speech during the war, in San Francisco.

  I return to the three of us around the round table, to our three faces, the two women in their corner, talking about children. Oona indifferent to us, D., on the contrary, trying to hear and understand.

  Chaplin tells us his most moving experience. An unimportant actor earning sixty-five dollars a week in Hollywood, he becomes, from one day to the next, a star with millions. He has to go to New York. He takes the train with his brother Sidney. And, at the first stop, he sees a crowd which overflows the station. He does not yet know it is for him. Music. Officials. He is seized with panic. At the next station it’s worse, then at the third, and when he approaches New York the mayor asks him to get off incognito at 125th Street in order to avoid the crowd which is storming Grand Central and has got out of control.

  The mayor and the chief of police come to meet him, drive him to the Plaza.

  The same evening, when the crowd is looking for him, he takes a walk in the streets without being recognized.

  ‘Everyone knew me,’ he says, ‘and I knew no one. I had no one to talk to!’

  The crowd frightened him. He felt hunted. Solitude frightened him too. He was very young. I think that this marked him for life.

  All this, he told us in a soft, intense voice. Oona wasn’t listening:

  ‘I’ve heard it a hundred times!’

  D. tried to listen while talking about children and labour pains.

  The Chaplins, who had planned to leave at ten o’clock, left at midnight. Miller, very much moved, went back to the drawing room with us, and we talked about it.

  D. spoke the truth, calmly. I don’t remember her words. It is no less significant that we have just been present at an act, that there was a great deal of ‘showmanship’ in what we had just seen of a life.

  I was obliged, although I share her opinion, to contradict her, brusquely, for the truth would have hurt Miller. To him, it was one of the greatest evenings of his life.

  And he too brings a good deal of ‘showmanship’ to his life.

  To say it to him would not only be to hurt him but to take from him a part of his self-confidence. To take from him a little of his faith. So that there I was, in spite of myself, for more than two hours (for this all ended at three in the morning) obliged to argue, against my convictions, against my wife, whom I agreed with.

  I betrayed her in order not to hurt a man whom I admire, of whom I have become fond, but who is nothing to me.

  Stupid, isn’t it? If only I had been able to give her a sign, let her know I was lying, that I was arguing against my own convictions.

  For Chaplin continues his ‘act’. A different ‘act’, closer, ver
y close to himself, but different from reality all the same.

  All this is disconnected, on purpose.

  Johnny understood. Wonderful Johnny!

  I’ll come back to it perhaps. I must go wake D., who finally agreed to lie down for an hour after sleeping three or four hours a night for several days.

  Good morning again, D. Good morning, my old Kay, whom I never forget and who remains dear to me!

  15 November 1960

  Without needing to reread it, I know that everything I wrote yesterday is almost true but not quite. I would have liked to make clear, through two lives, certain kinds of men who ‘take’ without giving, quite naturally, because they have remained children. So cruel and egotistical, like children. That’s what is called Bohemian.

  And Ch. Ch. remains a Bohemian (in his soul) in spite of his seven children with Oona, not counting Sidney.

  Amazing life. Up to the age of fifty-five, he felt no need to tie himself to anything or anyone. He meets a kid of seventeen, marries her, and here he is, at seventy-one, father of seven young children, the last of whom is six months old. He loves them. He loves Oona. He loves his present life. But …

  Same for Miller. He is in love again. He is going to take her to Spain or somewhere else – he doesn’t yet know – a young woman from Hamburg who has two children. His own? He sent them back, not to their mother, who no longer wants them, but to his third wife, who may not want them in six months either.

  I don’t judge him. Once again, they are sincere, both of them.

  I feel I still haven’t expressed my thoughts, my feelings. No doubt it isn’t possible.

  17 November 1960

  The 17th already! If I want to write a novel before Christmas, it’s time. I hope to begin it the end of next week and I’ll do my shopping first.