When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  I am being given, I am obliged to accept, a literary award at fifty-eight! And I can’t refuse. It carries no prestige, since it is unknown, and no doubt it was specially created for me. This one is given septennially by the province of Liège, which has had many interesting or illustrious (?) men, but never a novelist. I am obliged to accept. As I was obliged to accept a seat in the Academy of Languages, etc., etc. And the decorations that have twice unexpectedly been bestowed on me.

  So, later, they will be able to say – they will say – that I was a worthy citizen who … and that …

  What to do? Refuse? So lend importance to what has none?

  More touching is the idea of the city of Liège giving my name to the public library in my neighbourhood. I shall attend the opening ceremony. Until the age of eighteen, all my reading was in public libraries, and I feel great gratitude to them.

  If some day my name should be given to a street in my native city, let it not be the Rue Pasteur where I spent my childhood years, but the Place du Congrès nearby, where I played my first games. It is a square where modest people live, far from the centre of town, and I spent wonderful hours there. I do not wish for it.

  6 o’clock in the afternoon

  Went. Didn’t enjoy it. Odd idea to inoculate myself in this way against future urges!

  Last Saturday at this time I was triumphant over finishing my book. I’ve had a happy week.

  Today, battered, discouraged. We had a fierce fight over nothing, over a misunderstanding, D. and I. She too is miserable and I can do nothing but be quiet and wait. It is one thing to understand mankind and another to understand those near to one. It seems that at some point I failed miserably. On only one point, it is true, as if there always had to be a spot of shadow in the picture, no matter what. Poor us!

  20 June 1961

  Calm, sweet, reassuring day yesterday, in perfect harmony with D. This afternoon I hope to begin the revision of La Porte, but so far this morning I feel quite lazy. Weather beautiful and warm.

  Last night, going off to sleep, a rather absurd idea came to me. It is quite unlikely that I shall be remembered in the future as what is called a great writer. I know the value of my contribution, my limits, which are of the modest sort. However, anything is possible. It is just this possibility that troubles me.

  I remembered a sentence of Talleyrand’s, I believe, but which I’m not going to take the trouble to look up. In substance: ‘Nations would be terrified if they knew by what small men they are ruled …’

  Isn’t what is true in politics also true in other areas? Suppose that I should be classed among the great writers some day: would they realize what a small man I am, with all the weaknesses, all the temptations, all the ridiculousness of which those who make up the crowd, the common man, imagine that others are exempt from?

  Happily, the prospect is improbable. I should have the feeling of a hoax.

  I have known two men who believed themselves or knew themselves to be great men, behaved as such, without shame: Anatole France and André Gide.

  What struck me about them was the care they exerted to appear as they were thought to be. They lived for their image – and not their own lives. This greatly disillusioned me at the time, and I wasn’t surprised to see their stature diminish later.

  23 June

  Revision of La Porte finished in four days. I go from the heights to the depths. Finally I no longer know. I’ll begin at once to live in the next novel, in the hope of succeeding at something, of attaining I don’t know what.

  In the meantime, I’m going to pick up D. and buy some kitchen chairs.

  25 June 1961

  Sunday! A real one, as in a picture book. The first of the summer. Warm, bright, rumbling with the departure of the Tour de France for Rouen. I feel calm, relaxed, breathing in the small joys of a family Sunday, and I feel very close to everyone, understand everyone.

  Have no desire to write in this notebook. I do it as a duty. It would be unfair not to put down anything but troubled or anxious days.

  But I’m afraid I see a certain tendency in myself to note these moments especially. Happy hours, hours of complete harmony, it seems enough to live them and there is no temptation to set them down in a notebook. With the ultimate result that this would be a very unfaithful mirror, showing nothing but shadows.

  Many tender thoughts of D. I marvel at this conscientiousness that keeps her going from the time she gets up, this need for perfection which sometimes irritates me but at other times, like today, I understand better.

  Tonight she got up to write down things to be done in the house during our vacation. As for me, sometimes, in an otherwise empty day, the fact of being obliged to do an errand in town is enough to darken my mood.

  She has neither idle days nor idle hours. She is like the spring in a mechanism that becomes more and more complicated and eats away at her from morning to night.

  It is easy to tell oneself that this is her own need. How much effort, great and small, humanity patiently expends, knowing that in the end … And not only man, but all of nature, everything that lives; no doubt some time or other science will tell us that this is what we owe our life to.

  An immense and marvellous machine that has run this way since … must one count by billions of years? … Or even more? …

  To go where?

  I don’t find that an anguishing question – not today – and I am content to marvel, to be. I and mine. This little cell among all the other little cells that gravitate like ours in the infinity of time and space.

  At noon, Sunday dinner. Roast beef, as in that other little cell where I spent my childhood, as in the cell in Ottawa, with other parents, other brothers and sisters, where D. spent hers.

  A new whole, made with pieces of other wholes, which in turn …

  3 o’clock in the afternoon

  This could be entitled ‘You can’t have everything’.

  When I was very young, like my son Johnny, I had a passion for beautiful paper, beautiful printing, handsome layouts, editions that were not vulgarly elaborate but of a simple and noble design. (From the time I was fifteen to nineteen the greater part of my pocket money went to booksellers, and later, at about twenty-one or twenty-two, in Paris, I sold my first editions of Balzac, Hugo, Bourdaloue, etc., bought during my adolescence and lived off the proceeds …)

  Having become a novelist, one might think I could have had the pleasure of seeing my own works well printed. Isn’t it paradoxical that for the launching of Maigret, I initiated the six-franc book (the usual book was then sold for twelve francs), badly printed, on bad paper that yellowed in a year?

  The public I then reached, the public I wanted to reach, the largest possible, I’ve since kept, so that I am doomed to see my books come out in rather cheap form.

  Yesterday I was brought two beautiful works, handsomely designed and produced. But they are printed in editions of one or two thousand which won’t be read, but will stay on library shelves. I’m not complaining. I’ve had what I wanted. But all the same, sometimes I’d like …

  But I certainly would have been indignant if at sixteen someone had told me on what paper and how I would be printed.

  The children are playing in the garden. Birds are flying through the fountain to cool off. Below me, I hear D. dictating.*

  I’m going to read one of these books in the coolness of my study, books so carefully designed as to make me feel ashamed.

  28 June

  Strange! I’ve never written about the war of 1939 (except Le Clan des Ostendais, which is rather special). Now, just two months ago, I wrote Le Train, which plunged me back into the atmosphere of the exodus. The novel is still being serialized and isn’t even in the bookstores yet when here we are, storing provisions again as we did in 1914 and 1939. This time on the advice of the Swiss government, which wants to avoid panic buying.

  Same lists as before: noodles, oil, sugar, tea, coffee, soap … I’m adding razor blades and nails because I reme
mber the difficulty in finding the smallest nail around 1942! And thread! This afternoon I went to buy tin boxes, like biscuit boxes. They are already hard to find.

  So history repeats itself. Not to the end, I hope. Next week we leave for the mountains, and for the first time we shall take Pierre, who has never spent a night away from home. So he’s going to rub elbows with the outside world, experience the comings and goings of a big hotel.

  Preparing for our departure, D. is juggling with the household, furnace men, painters, carpet layers, cleaners. I don’t understand how she keeps it all in her head. Not to mention the fact that the whole family needs summer clothing, staff vacations must be arranged, etc.

  And here’s the nuisance of supplies on top of all the rest! Which makes the other worries a little less urgent, a little less real. Suddenly we remember the basic needs, and the gasoline, the candles that must be thought of take on more importance than the refrigerator and our many conveniences.

  In about 1944 I bought very dearly a cask of carbide that came in most handy when the electricity was cut off in the Vendée.

  A story comes back to me which I’ve never told. Right from the beginning of the war I dreamed of getting back to the free zone. Not out of patriotism. More because the atmosphere of occupation was stifling to me. Because Marc was then a baby, and because of my duties at the reception centre, I could not leave at once, and later it became very difficult.

  One day I met a friend whose activities I had never exactly known. Married to an Englishwoman, he went back and forth between Berlin and Madrid by car, provided with all the passes in the world, and I was told that he had an easy access to Hitler as to the English and American ambassadors in Spain. I don’t know what became of him.

  So I mentioned to him my wish to go to the free zone and he promised me a pass for my car. I laid in supplies of gasoline, litre by litre, in exchange for butter. As there were no shortages in the Vendée, I laid in a ham, butter in jars, rice, etc., etc. My car not being large enough to hold all this, I rented from a garage owner in Fontenay-le-Comte – I swear this is true – the truck used to carry the dead from one city to another.

  Weeks later, my friend, unable to obtain my pass, lent me the licence plate of his own car for a week, and I had it affixed on mine.

  We disinfected the truck-hearse. We spent the night loading it. We decided to leave at six in the morning.

  At six o’clock I started the engine, and while awaiting the others I turned on the radio.

  It was to learn that the Germans had just entered the free zone that very night. There was no longer any reason for leaving.

  I emptied the truck, the car … and, of course, returned to my friend his magic plate, which had been of no use to me.

  This sounds like fiction, or edited fact. All the details are true, however.

  The people of Fontenay wondered why I hadn’t left. To exchange occupation for occupation …

  Later, after the Liberation, I left for the United States, where I stayed more than ten years, and where I was to meet my wife.

  30 June 1961

  I have so much hatred – or rather distrust – for the word ‘author’, for the telling phrase, for slowly simmered ideas that have to be phrased ‘just right’, that for a full week I’ve been ashamed of myself.

  For the first time in one of my novels I used a phrase of this kind, not a very original one, and I haven’t had the courage to cut it. I hesitated. I thought of it in bed.

  While the manuscript was being photostated, I very nearly went down in order to cut the precious phrase. Now the text has gone to the publisher and I’m still bothered. What is it? A small thing, really. In an argument between a husband and wife, a half-sentence saying approximately: working people rarely worry beyond their immediate chores.

  That’s all. I left it. I hold it against myself, because it is an intervention by the author, it’s intruding an idea that isn’t worth expressing. I promise myself to cut it when I receive the proofs for the last corrections. I would have made a terrible playwright.

  So I’m not exempt, as I’d like to be, from a certain smugness, and in a short text that I wrote for a radio broadcast, for I don’t know which friend’s anniversary, I put down a sentence that I had the weakness to believe important:

  ‘The only thing that life has taught me, as it has taught so many others, is that man is worth much more than he thinks, whether of others or of himself.’

  That doesn’t amount to much, one way or the other! But it’s better to write a novel without gems from the author or pseudo-philosophical thoughts!

  A beautiful day, luminous and warm. Last night, a fairy-tale hour. We are getting ready for the holiday. D. is on edge. In a month all this will have disappeared into the past.

  One might say we use our time to manufacture memories as if only the present didn’t count. Always horrified by the importance we attach to the past and the future and the slight importance we give the present.

  Wonder if it exists. I don’t believe I’m far off in saying that scientifically, biologically, the answer is no.

  An hour later – went to play with Pierre and Marie-Jo in the garden. And suddenly, because of what I wrote just now, something struck me. I don’t know yet if there’s truth in it or not. In my popular novels, then in the first Maigrets, and even in my first non-detective novels, I almost always wrote in the present.

  Little by little I began to use the past (for which I have been much reproached) and only later was it called flashback.

  But it wasn’t planned on my part. It didn’t help the story, which was only further complicated by it, quite the contrary. What I suddenly ask myself is if I didn’t use this device almost instinctively, out of intuition, feeling that the only way to give weight to an hour or an event was to give it through a memory, that is to say by means of the past.

  In the present, it remained insubstantial, incomplete. Each thing takes on its real life only with recall, the unconscious filter of memory.

  In any case, it never was a device on my part, a method. This is the first time I’ve thought about it this way and that I’ve found a justification for what was purely instinctive.

  3 July

  A Tour de France Sunday. Yesterday read a book by Astier de la Vigerie: Sept Fois Sept Jours. Glad it didn’t come out before I wrote Le Train. However, it isn’t a novel. Astier is more preoccupied with politics.

  But, as in Le Train, I find in it a sort of relief at the moment of downfall, as if in losing a life that weighed on him, or for which he no longer had any taste, he discovered a new reality, his own, at the same time as objective reality.

  Like my character in Le Train, like everybody, no doubt, his receptivity to the external world is much greater in difficult or tragic moments.

  Out of this very simple and rather trite idea, what is called my atmosphere was born. What is true in time of war, in mass catastrophe, is true at a personal level, of drama which does not affect millions of men.

  I liked the book very much. I shall see d’Astier, who wants to see me too. We have certain positions in common, including our reaction when the war was over and we hoped things would change, were sure of it, and then we saw the world go back to its egoistic concerns.

  In any case this book once again showed me the dangers of reading for the novelist. If I had read this book six months earlier, I might not have written Le Train, or I would have written it differently, afraid to follow another’s path.

  The two books are as different as possible, one about an ordinary, mediocre man to whom almost nothing happens and who allows himself to be carried along by the current, the other about a man of action who is one of the people who started the Resistance.

  Curious how, in the end, they aren’t so far from each other.

  And now, the papers.

  D. has to clear away her mail before beginning the packing and she dictates ceaselessly. I’m doing nothing.

  I enjoy playing golf and I’ve already
got out my clubs and have been trying them out in the garden.

  3 July

  Hemingway died yesterday. I suppose he committed suicide because he was ill. I feel upset by it. I never met him. I read little of him. Nevertheless he was one of those with whom I felt a bond.

  I keep a rather curious memory of him. When I moved to Lakeville, my lawyer was also the lawyer of the first or second Mrs Hemingway. He gave me one of my novels bearing the date 1934, on the first page of which Hemingway had written his name and address. And it was at about that period that I was reading him.

  D. finished her work last night, or rather tonight, and this morning she is already in town doing errands. I’m hanging around the house waiting to leave. It’s very hot. This morning Pierre has his first girl friend, his own age or a little younger, the daughter of a temporary housekeeper.

  Since she is Italian, he uses the few Spanish words he has learned at meals, where we are waited on by a Spanish maid. He is already putting on protective airs. To see them, one would call them a couple, a little female and a young male.

  4 July

  This morning at eight o’clock it was announced again that Louis-Ferdinand Céline was gravely ill. The same radio station announced at eight thirty that he died on Sunday and that he was buried this morning.

  One might say that his career ran in every way counter to that of Hemingway. I wonder which of the two will endure – unless both of them do. I never met Céline either. I know very few of my colleagues, and those I do know I know by chance rather than by choice.