When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  But chance has it that the ones who become more or less friends aren’t always the ones I admire most. I say more or less because I have no real friends. I have a wife. I think you have to choose. Or rather that one is a friend type or a couple type. One can also, like Céline, be a solitary type, I think.

  Can’t these be recognized by a certain tone in their work? Don’t they give themselves to it more than the others, more obstinately, in any case? Always, it seems to me, with a note of bitterness, which hurts me. If I often happen to admire the works of these solitaries – in all the arts, past as well as present – still I never feel on equal footing with them.

  Same day, 3 a.m.

  Among the stupid things the papers publish on the (probable) suicide of Hemingway there is one that strikes me. Almost everybody considers this end as almost predestined. Given the writer’s temperament, he must have reacted this way to a threat of slow death, progressive decline.

  But less than a year ago, another writer, Blaise Cendrars, died, whose character and myth rather resembled Hemingway’s. Cendrars too travelled all over the world looking for adventure, he too celebrated the brutal joys and fearless male nobility in his books.

  However, he chose an opposite solution. Far from committing suicide, he lived for several years, ill, paralysed, struggling against his disease with tenacity, and they say (?) that he refused all medications which could have lessened his suffering in order to remain lucid in spite of everything. I believe it. It would be like him. For I knew him well.

  Today I’m thinking a good deal about those two men with parallel lives and different ends.

  It’s a lesson for the psychologist. A given man, with a given character, in given circumstances, does not necessarily react according to a given logic.

  Unless there is a Hemingway logic and a Cendrars logic applying to each in the same circumstances.

  As to knowing which of them chose the easier solution …

  17 July 1961

  Bürgenstock. So this is holiday homework, almost in mid-holiday. We have been here ten days with the three children (first time Pierre has been away from home). From the first day, as we did last year in Venice, we adopted a routine nearly as rigid as the one at home.

  Wherever we are, D. and I, we keep to a schedule, even for three days, as recently in Berne; we establish habits that we follow almost religiously. I think it originates with me. However, I’ve always envied people who live impulsively.

  Swimming pool in the morning (except for the past three days. It rained too much and the water was cold). A few games of ping-pong with the children and golf in the afternoon. Two tea dances. At nine in the evening we are in our suite.

  Relaxed. Real holiday mood. We haven’t spoken to anyone, made any acquaintances.

  The formal atmosphere of a big hotel in the mountains doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel any need to chat with people. On the contrary. It may be laziness.

  At twenty, I went to night clubs, and all the places where people play, to observe them. I was looking for what I called the ‘common denominator’. I pretended that men could be known better by seeing them at play than at their everyday occupations.

  I still think so. My neighbours here, as in Venice and elsewhere, are almost all important people in one field or another, and their employees must tremble before them. Here, they play with a little ball, stammer in front of their tennis, or golf, or swimming teachers.

  I’ve always believed, too, that one knows someone only after seeing him naked. I have gone to bed with women not because I desired them but so as to see them naked, with the little flaws in their skins, their cracks, their bulges, their faces bare of make-up.

  It isn’t a need to debase, to depoeticize. On the contrary! A need for the real, a contact with the real person. One knows a man better after having seen him make love.

  It’s not so much a matter of taste that we stay in these ‘palaces’, and I often envy those who go to the more simple inns. I’d prefer to meet ordinary people without fuss, and that’s why I like bistros so much.

  But I confess my hatred for the WC at the end of the hall, the bathroom on the landing, etc. And the telephone facilities, the mail, the service, are indispensable to us.

  I regret it for my children, who consider it quite natural to have service at their disposal whether at home or travelling, and I must bite my tongue not to make the ridiculous remark:

  ‘When I was your age …’

  It isn’t their fault, but mine. Here we are together with them from morning to night, and I am discovering many things. I would like to be perfect and never irritated, and above all not to go against my own principles, as happens to me all the time.

  Because of the framework of conventions, I’ve turned out little conformists in spite of myself. Out of fear of annoying the neighbours, shocking them, etc.

  The Americans have found a solution to this problem. The richest of them take their vacations in what they call camps, log cabins out in the wilds, far from any facilities, where they do their own cooking and housework.

  This is the greatest luxury to them, to be without telephones, without mail, and the ne plus ultra is to find a spot by one of the Canadian lakes which can be reached only by helicopter.

  Impossible here. It is true that there are bathrooms and every comfort in these camps. In New England, however, a few miles from Boston, some of them spend their summers in bungalows with neither running water nor electricity. Would I be able to do it? Or my children?

  Another of my ideas that have never changed, that I’ve had since adolescence: a man can be content with the necessary, with the indispensable, and be almost happy. But when one gets into the realm of the superfluous, luxury or near luxury, there are no limits, therefore no satiety, no satisfaction.

  And we are in a period when the superfluous has become necessary to everyone, or almost. Doesn’t this explain many of the anxieties that we hear so much about, especially in the most highly developed countries, and even certain illnesses – not just mental ones?

  Enough! We were to spend the day on the lake but the rain stopped us, and as in Lausanne or elsewhere I drove D. to the hairdresser. Just now it’s Johnny’s turn. Waiting for him, ping-pong. I too play with little balls, and it relaxes me, like playing with a new pair of breasts.

  18 July

  A significant detail comes back to me as I look through press clippings, which I always find more or less irritating. Someone who saw these notebooks (didn’t read them – saw them – and only because he wanted to know my handwriting) wrote in effect:

  ‘Simenon only writes on one side of the page in the notebooks he keeps, which is revealing.’

  Revealing of what? Does he see in it an intention of publication, texts to be sent for composition being written only on one side of the page? It’s much simpler than that. If I only write on the recto, it’s because in a notebook it is uncomfortable to write on the verso because of the bulge it forms, and besides it is unpleasant to see the writing through the transparency of the preceding page. What use is there in explaining such natural things to a journalist?

  27 July 1961

  End of vacation tomorrow. For three weeks we have lived the formal life of big hotels. Bath. Luncheon. Golf, sometimes ping-pong with the children. Bowling. In the evening, half an hour of dancing with Marie-Jo; one evening, hours of dancing with D. as if we were alone in the world.

  After a week, decided to take golf lessons again. For two weeks I was the middle-aged gentleman whom a pro tried in vain to teach the natural movements of childhood, and whom he encouraged with positive tenderness.

  There must have been several millions of us in the world at the same moment, people of my age or older, who were thus relearning some game with humility: golf, tennis, swimming, riding (under the interested eye of a ‘monitor’).

  Some of these pupils are famous or important people feared by thousands of clerks and workers. Others have risked ruin in the casinos, or have been
ruined, by watching a little ball seeking its hole. 7? 21? 8? Good luck or bad.

  A whole industry, perhaps the most important in the world, has been built on this need for play in every sense: need to recover the movements of the child or the African native’s faith in luck. No doubt it’s a good thing, a real need.

  Friday I shall be at home in my study. I promise myself to continue to play golf. That was good for me. I have never felt so well. I know that it will take a lot of will-power for me to continue, to believe in it, to make it the important hour of my day. However …

  Sunday, 30 July

  Home! Since Friday. For the first time a bit awkward around the house. Pulling the wrong drawer, for instance. And not knowing just how to fill time. Realize that basically the schedule was and is going to be as artificial here as there, with the difference that here it is considered important, as ‘work’. Believe I found a subject for a novel yesterday, a Maigret, but don’t want to hurry myself and first want to play a few games of golf, for discipline and health. Almost to prolong my holiday. This morning haven’t followed the Sunday schedule but walked in the Morges park where at one end campers are crammed together, more crowded on top of each other than in Paris apartments. And since they all have radios, and some television … But didn’t we do the same?

  Thursday, 3 August 1961

  For several weeks little desire – and again today – to write in this notebook. I don’t think this has only to do with the holiday mood which I’ve been in for the first time in years.

  For about two years, if my health hasn’t been really bad, I’ve often felt tired and especially dizzy, more exactly, I’ve had dizzy spells (Ménière) for which I was treated. These discomforts suddenly disappeared almost at the moment when I was writing Le Train. All at once I recovered a taste for physical life, for exercise, and my study stopped being a sort of refuge.

  What connection with these notebooks? Did I write here only when I felt under par, threatened? I don’t know. Diagnosis is delicate. On the other hand, I have never had such an urge to work, to write. Three novels by the first of July, and I itch to get into another.

  So there is a marked difference between my need to write my books and the need to write in these notebooks. On the one hand, better health makes me write more. On the other, this improvement almost takes away the need to write.

  This is the truth today, but what will be the truth tomorrow?

  Golf yesterday. Golf the day before. Golf this afternoon with D. I’m enjoying it. Even if I play badly.

  8 August

  I have the impression that we’re very much on the wrong track in our explanations of bacteria, microbes, viruses, etc. (including the latest theories on interferon) and that some day quite soon all this rubbish will seem ridiculous.

  On that day, will cancer seem no more frightening than tuberculosis and syphilis have become?

  Tuesday, 15 August 1961

  Day before yesterday my wife cleaned my pipes; yesterday, my typewriter. In the evening I carefully arranged my accessories in my study, as a circus acrobat takes care of his gear and checks it, as a magician fills the pockets of his suit.

  This morning at six o’clock, for the hundred and eightieth time approximately – people find this figure enormous; it seems ridiculous to me when I think that I am fifty-eight and have done nothing else in my life! – this morning, I repeat, I went down to do my number.

  Coffee. ‘Do not disturb’ on both doors, etc. An hour afterwards, with five pages written, I stepped off the runway. It’s by design I’ve used these circus and music-hall terms. I was wrong, it would seem, in wanting to write this novel somewhat as a performance.

  I’ve already written three this year. I dreamed of writing five or six, as I used to, and, in my mind, it was a way of proclaiming that I’m not getting old, that I’m still in good form. (At the same age that I am today, Chevalier, as if in defiance, gave a solo performance for an hour and a half.) I had all the best reasons for not beginning this novel. Holidays, first of all, the children’s, everybody’s, the atmosphere of vacation to which I am not immune, telephone calls, unexpected visits from friends. Then, perhaps above all, a mad desire to play golf until I’m sick of it, to spend myself physically, since this was so good for me in Bürgenstock. I wanted to write in spite of everything, to get five or six done by the end of the year, and it’s too bad about me.

  I forgot Berlin, the Berlin crisis as they say, and the threats of international conflict. I admit that after two wars, two occupations, twenty threats of universal explosion, this reason was not uppermost in my mind, though to listen to the radio and television one necessarily has a doomed feeling of uneasiness and unimportance.

  Still, I wrote Il Pleut, Bergère just as war was declared in 1939 to prove to myself that life goes on. It went on. Not for everyone, alas!

  Basically, threats of catastrophe rather stimulate me to write – as bombardments help me sleep – as a way of detachment, because personal life must go on.

  Strange that I could detach myself from catastrophe but vacation should affect me.

  It was a Maigret, but a Maigret that could have been a very short novel. I’ll probably return to the subject when it has cooled off.

  I think I know the truth of this failure. D. recently turned up some stories written some twenty years ago, and God knows why, probably because I forgot them, they had remained unpublished. I had the bad idea of rereading them, since people are always asking me for stories and novellas for newspapers and magazines and I can no longer write them. Question of wave-lengths, as they say today. And for once the expression is right. I think too novelistically to write short stories any more.

  Whatever it is, this reading disturbed me. I suddenly realized that like a painter I’ve had my ‘periods’. And the period of these stories corresponds to the Fauve period of the painters I’ve known, Vlaminck, Derain, etc. I found an Impressionism, or more exactly an Expressionism, of which I’m no longer capable, a jumble in words, in sentences, in images, which suddenly discouraged me.

  Do my painter friends, when they approach sixty, have the same feeling as they arrive at a period which people call neo-classical? Did they take it for a weakness, a possible impotence, a lack of daring, a lack, certainly, of youth? I have Derain in particular in mind. Picasso is the only one of the group to have followed the opposite course, and I wonder if it isn’t out of cleverness.

  Anyway, my Maigret of this morning – Maigret et l’Honnête Homme, which I almost called Maigret et l’Assassin Consciencieux – suddenly seemed flat, heavy, and slow, without sparkle.

  I wasn’t too upset, contrary to what usually happens in these cases. We were to play golf. I played badly. This afternoon I went to see some girls, without enjoyment. On the other hand, I had the pleasure of finding an Egyptian scarab that was missing from D.’s necklace, and I was happy about that.

  So here I am at leisure for a time. Golf? I hope so. And above all, nothing intellectual. I have a bellyful of the intellectuality into which people – or the emptiness of life in my study – plunge me in spite of myself.

  Do anything at all, but do something, and be done with this need to analyse once and for all.

  Live quite simply. Like someone who isn’t a novelist. Even, if possible, like an imbecile.

  Friday, 25 August

  Golf every morning. Then more holidays until the children’s are ended. Although D. and I scarcely speak on the links, each of us pursuing his little white ball, there are few places where I feel so close to her.

  On this subject, a small – very small! – idea is going around in my head. It isn’t the key to any serious problems, but I wonder if it wouldn’t open certain doors.

  Like everybody else, I’ve had successive, changing opinions about love, not only the love of the couple, but the love of children, friendship, even the kind of love that some devote to a collective or an idea, to the fatherland, for example, or a party, or a regiment.

  I devoure
d Freud in 1923 or 1924, then his disciples, and I continue to read with great interest the works of Jung, who extended this notion of love to the tribe, even to the species.

  And now I end by wondering if all that, romantic love, passionate love, sexual love, love of the child or of the mother, patriotism, etc., can’t be traced back to one elementary idea, to a minute common denominator that could be expressed as follows: the essential, vital need of every human being, strong or weak, to rely on someone or something, to have confidence in a single being.

  A single being! With certainty. Whom one doesn’t doubt. And one is saved.

  Mother, fiancée, lover, bride … For some the friend … And finally, if there is no person, a group or an idea: the regiment, the party, the fatherland.

  Give me a place to stand and …

  If it is true in physics, why shouldn’t it be true in psychology?

  What strikes me is that the deceived child and the deceived patriot, the duped lover and the duped partisan react in the same way, use the same terms to express their resentment, sometimes commit the same spectacular desperate acts.

  … on whom one can count … a person or idea. I prefer the person to the idea and I prefer the female for the male, and for the female her male.

  Happy is he … Happy is she …

  Happy am I!

  Saturday, 2 September

  End of holiday. Two months of golf, with gritted teeth, as if my life depended on it and sometimes with the same panicky fear as when I start a novel. I went back to it passionately and this morning, having a last round before taking up again our usual life, I felt a kind of nostalgia.