When I Was Old

by Georges Simenon

  I rarely give myself to any activity other than my literary activity in this way. On the one hand, it was a question of health. I rediscovered a physical life that I haven’t enjoyed for a long time. On the other hand, and above all, I feel wonderfully happy with D. in a place where no one disturbs us and we stroll along side by side.

  Now I go back to my study, where I have only been a visitor recently. I wonder if I’m going to be able to write again. For weeks, I’ve felt guilty. Feeling of playing instead of doing my work.

  Surely and always this has to do with the fact that I was born among the common people and I learned that one must earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow. However, if I were a civil servant, if I were Maigret, I would be retired.

  Now I’m in a rush to reassure myself, to prove to myself that I can still write. I’m going to spend laborious hours and days until one or two chapters are written. There is rattling around in my head a Maigret that I tried to get on paper before, when I came back from Bürgenstock. Sometimes I’m tempted to choose another subject, sometimes it comes back to me insistently. I don’t know yet what I’ll do. First, it’s important to put myself in a state of grace.

  In any case, two good months, in spite of guilt. Weren’t they, D.? Monday the children will be in school, the factory will be working full tilt on the ground floor, and I’ll be doing my best here to go back to being a novelist. As if, really, that were any more important than hitting a little white ball and walking over the grass.

  Monday, 11 September 1961

  Novel finished at nine forty-five. Unable to say if it’s good or bad. In a hurry to reread it. Going to play golf first.

  Saturday, 23 September 1961

  Suddenly an urge to speak of a lot of things here, to write at great length of things good and bad. Sweet and a little bitter. It will come tonight or tomorrow. I don’t know.

  Ten minutes later

  Is it laziness or reticence? Each time I open this notebook I feel overcome with something like dizziness, and instead of writing quietly what I meant to write, I hedge, I leave it in a sort of shorthand.

  For example, I wanted to tell in detail what has just happened to D. For more than two weeks, while I was writing my novel, then when we had our friend Sigaux here for three days, then during my revision, she was living a life that was removed from – though so close to! – mine.

  I found her nervous, absent-minded. At a certain point I seriously thought that she found my novel bad (a simple Maigret) and didn’t dare let me know. I kept telling myself that one day it would happen, that the spring would snap, that my sentences would no longer make any sound. In short, I was spying on her and I was worried. I even wondered if she wasn’t beginning another depression like last year’s.

  Evening before last, she went down to put her office in order before we went to bed. She knew I was in a hurry to go to sleep. But I heard her call on the extension, then, for more than twenty minutes, the green light on the telephone was lit.

  I came close to feeling resentment. I remembered the telephone call to our friends the Martinons when she was at her worst. I looked into my own heart … Suddenly she signalled me to pick up the receiver …

  ‘I have just got the best news of my life … Do come downstairs a moment.’

  I had guessed nothing. And suddenly I learned that for more than two weeks she had been keeping it from me that a doctor believed that Marc had pericarditis; all the time, unknown to me, deceiving me in order to make long-distance calls, she had had him get tests by professors and doctors in Paris, then in Cannes. Her last call, in response to a letter in code, was to a cardiologist in Cannes, who entirely reassured her.

  Two years ago both of us lived through the same story with Pierre when his life was in danger. We almost sneaked him to Lyons, like thieves. We waited day after day. But there were two of us then, and we didn’t have to hide anything from each other. But I was scarred by it for more than a year.

  I have been the centre of a conspiracy of silence, so much so that I speak of it now with a sort of detached stupor. I lived through a drama without knowing it. I didn’t learn of it until the moment of the happy ending.

  I knew that D. considered Marc as her son. I just now felt it. It has been her turn to be thoroughly shaken, and for two days now she has had a hard time recovering from the shock.

  As for me, outside of a warm wave of tenderness, a curious sense of having remained offstage this way, of having known nothing, of having behaved the same as usual, of having suspected D. of heaven knows what when this conspiracy had only my peace of mind in view.

  All that over a Maigret which, after all, may be no good. For I begin to have doubts. Or rather … But we are going out tonight, D. and I, and the rest will follow another time, if I can screw up the courage or if I still remember it – it concerns the ‘bitter’ part announced in the inventory. I’m going upstairs to dress and we are going to a fashion show at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, which may be fun.

  Sunday afternoon

  Yesterday morning I promised: some sweet and a little bitter. I’ve written the sweet, though perhaps unable to express all the tenderness I feel.

  The rest is still more hazardous, for if I don’t give each word its exact weight, if I don’t encompass my thought with precision, I risk falling into the grotesque or the melodramatic.

  Also, this is not a matter of thoughts, properly speaking, but of vague ideas, barely formed sentiments which come to me from time to time – quite often in these last months – and if I finally speak of them here, it’s so that the children – my own, of course – will one day learn why I am occasionally more irritable with them than I would like.

  In a few months I shall be fifty-nine, nearly sixty. I feel in good physical form, especially since I’ve taken up golf again – and intellectually, too, insofar as I’ve ever been in any intellectual form at all.

  Always when Maigret announces his retirement for three years hence – because he is fifty-two and retirement age for a police chief is fifty-five – I myself feel that I also want to retire.

  Not to stop working, though. Not to stop writing. I have written for more than forty years. At the beginning, when I wrote popular novels for money, I turned out eighty pages a day. Then I wrote both as a job and for pleasure. Then, finally, for myself, out of personal necessity. I’ve often said so.

  Only my novels are not all there is. Little by little, something more and more important, something almost obsessive, has been engrafted onto these, which is a full-time occupation for my wife and two secretaries. At Echandens we have a whole floor of offices, and that’s not too much.

  D. takes care of all this, of course, but this business still dominates our life, our schedule, our comings and goings, etc. I sometimes say to myself that I have reached the age when a man who has worked hard finally has the right to live for himself, in his own way, according to his own tastes …

  Then, really, I have a more or less vague wish to retire. For example, I should like to live in the real country, grow apples, plums, tend espaliers, have chickens, etc. I’ve had them before. I quickly had enough of them. It is probable that I’d have enough of them as quickly again … I should like … to get away from the Simenon business, from the mail, from the exploitation of my work. And it’s impossible.

  We’ve worked a lot. First I, then my wife, especially she, to escape from the author’s being exploited by publishers. Result: everything is negotiated from here, translations, radio, movie rights, serial rights, television … We are constantly answering letters. And the work cannot be done from some other place. It would be giving up a struggle when we have won it, for the only way would be either to take on an agent, who would spoil everything, or to sell rights to publishers …

  I’m trying to follow my thought, and I see that it is twofold, that what I have just said is true, but that perhaps it begs the question. When I speak – smiling, I assure you, children – of retiring from business, I also have in m
ind another aspect of my professional life. To speak frankly, I am not only a writer – I am not so much a writer, perhaps – as a kind of star.

  It is the star that the magazines and papers talk about most, and not about the content of my books. If I hadn’t written nearly two hundred, if there were no star performance, no doubt I would be left in obscurity.

  Is that what I’m tired of? Certainly, in part. And of writing at my determined, obsessive pace, which is, however, my very own.

  I should like: in a simple house, after cultivating my garden, to write, by hand, a few pages now and then without worrying about whether they would become a novel.

  Or rather, for some years I have wanted to write a long novel with no beginning or end … I’ll never do it. If I were in the house of which I’ve just written, I’d soon hire a gardener, enlarge the premises, and soon we would have a staff of ten and four cars again …

  There is nothing serious in all that, a dream that everyone has, I think, when turning sixty?

  Playing golf almost every day, I realize one of these dreams. I do it guiltily, to be sure, as if I were stealing time. I should like … everything and nothing!

  At bottom, at the very bottom, I wonder if the truth isn’t that I really don’t much believe in my work any more. But it isn’t a question of pride. If it isn’t important, if it isn’t worth the trouble, what’s the point of having adapted my whole life to it, and continuing to do so?

  For the rhythm of the house, the life of my children, everything around us depends on my work. It produces articles – mostly about our life, even more than about my books – some sympathizing books, letters from readers, above all from spongers.

  It furnishes us with a great deal of comfort, but with a little flair the same amount of industry in any other business or enterprise would have made us richer still. If my work doesn’t exist, I have created a market of fools. And it is just this question that I ask myself more and more often.

  For a year, when I had the dizzy spells, I thought about stopping working, writing, because of my health, and this wasn’t too tragic because I considered myself something of an invalid.

  Today, when I feel in good shape, I sometimes say to myself that if I were to stop writing, except for myself …

  For myself! An expression I was already using at sixteen, when I was a young reporter. To write for myself, that is to say regardless of all the rules, all the forms, all idea of publication. Would I really write? Without wanting to, without knowing it, wouldn’t I come back to the same old treadmill on which, in spite of myself, I grind out my works, like a craftsman who repeats the same movement over and over?

  Discouragement? No. Disappointment? Perhaps a little. Much has been given me, but little of what I hoped for. Next month I shall write another novel along the same lines, mine, always trying to push on a little further.

  I’m the one who chose this way, because I believed in it. Basically I still do. But this simplicity, this starkness, this wilful absence of originality, of brio, of obvious ‘art’, how can I expect people to understand it?

  Perhaps some day I’ll tear up these two pages. I should like to have my children read them, however, for they will then forgive me certain moments of ill-temper that are not characteristic of me, certain impatient reactions that make me ashamed. Isn’t it ridiculous at my age, when I’m supposed to be a man, to play the frustrated writer and threaten to give it all up?

  Retire! I know I never will, or rather I hope not, for a grave threat to my health is the only thing that could force me. Accepting this, from time to time, alone in my corner, I grumble, like Maigret, and I dream of his little house in Meung-sur-Loire, of his strawberry plants, his espaliered apples, his chickens on the manure heap, and his fishing pole.

  Forgive me, D., you who carry the weight of the ‘Simenon business’ on your shoulders (plus the ‘Simenon family’!), this moment of defeat or of romantic reverie. Do you remember? At Bradenton Beach there was no office. We went fishing together, any time, and we went swimming naked at midnight in the Gulf of Mexico … No office? I forget the telephone calls to London, Paris, the money worries … Come on! I’m going down to see you and we’ll play Bradenton Beach in the garden. With three children around us, who give me so much joy.

  And too bad if in twenty years, in thirty, my novels are mouldering in attics. Too bad if people are beginning to consider me a phenomenon from the era between the two wars, a sort of freakish excrescence of literature.

  Let’s go on! Tomorrow, in two weeks or a month, I won’t think about it any more. Above all, when you read these pages, understand the meaning of the words, try to grasp the nuances, say to yourself that all this is insubstantial, fleeting, and that I’m already looking back at it with a smile. Besides, I never have stopped smiling, for, as you know, I never take myself too seriously.

  Courage!

  5 o’clock

  I just took a walk in the garden with D. and hit a few golf balls. Actually, this week I’ve revised my last Maigret in three days. Is that what depressed me? No, it goes back further. But it’s true that I didn’t feel the spark in revising.

  It seemed pallid to me, a little flat. The next day I wrote a song in one morning, a bit as at Cannes, where, in an hour, I wrote a ballet, La Chambre, for Roland Petit.

  This time it was putting words to the music the BBC is using as a theme for the Maigret series. It was great fun doing it. I’m waiting impatiently to know if it’s all right, for I’m quite ignorant about such things.

  At any rate, I spent an enjoyable morning. Maybe I’m wrong to keep away from everything that isn’t my own work, meaning my novels, with the result that I feed too much on myself. Is this true? I no longer know, for I’m less and less interested in anything that isn’t that work, and above all in anything that isn’t us. Shall I end up by living only for us? It’s not impossible. For my next novel I’ll try to break the pattern, writing by hand, regardless of the time, letting D. type my text instead of doing it myself.

  This was done for Le Fils because I was convalescent. It’s a bit as if I were trying to escape, without knowing precisely from what: from rules I set myself, or rather habits which have almost unconsciously become rules, and which sometimes make me fearful or obsess me.

  Oh, to hell with it!

  Monday, 25th

  Fortunately, I don’t reread myself. I have a horror of rereading myself, even more so this notebook. With what joy would I tear out the two pages from yesterday! Words give not just undue importance but duration to vague passing thoughts.

  I wonder if my discontent with myself doesn’t proceed, at least in part, from the fact that I had to reread myself last week. Not just to myself, but spoken aloud, alone in front of a microphone in a glass cage, with technicians who nodded their heads from the other side of the enclosure.

  It was for a record. Passages were chosen for me, one from Pedigree, the other from ‘Roman de l’Homme’, and while I was reading I was seized with the urge to change everything, to cross it all out, I was ashamed of the imperfections in my text.

  And to think that those who will listen to the record will believe that I revel in my prose! I left furious with myself. Why did I accept this chore? First, because I didn’t realize. Then because it belongs with the rest. As it is, I accept only the minimum of outside demands on the writer. How do those others, who are continually pushed before the public eye, manage to keep it up? I wonder.

  Last night, in bed, thought of that famous rambling novel … which I’ll never write. Against my wishes! Because, once for all, I’ve chosen a way which keeps me going in the same direction, leaving no room for fantasy. I’m wrong to persist in revolting against this discipline, though only occasionally. I don’t know where I’m heading, but I follow the thread. Too bad if others get tired of it, if it seems monotonous or facile. I was going to write that it’s none of my doing. Anyway, it’s too late to change.

  Wednesday, 27th

  Still in periods of
sulks. It makes me think how often we judge someone after a single meeting, without asking ourselves whether this person isn’t going through a more or less exceptional phase. My present mood, for instance, is not my habitual mood. I know that in a few days, perhaps in twenty-four hours, it will have changed.

  There are other cycles, for example, for three months I have lived a largely physical existence, amazed to be rid of my dizzy spells (which I rediscovered, or rather which rediscovered me today) and playing golf as if my life depended on it.

  In these three months I haven’t read one of the medical reviews which I habitually devour the moment they arrive, and which are piling up on their shelves.

  Yesterday, for the first time, and because of what Sigaux said to me about it last week, I opened the definitive edition of the Goncourt Journals, the earlier edition of which disappointed me. Will this one also be disappointing? I read avidly, but also with irritation. Faced with all those stories about men of letters I feel so little the man of letters. Why not consider myself as a craftsman and be satisfied? It’s so much more in character. And wasn’t the craftsman’s life what I dreamed of from twelve to sixteen?

  I’m beginning, very vaguely, to feel the next novel sprouting – I hope to write it when I get back from Belgium – this too has something to do with my mood. Poor D. watches me out of the corner of her eye in these moments and doesn’t know what to say, she’s so afraid of irritating me. It’s true that this morning I lost my temper over nothing, because I was clumsy at golf.

  I hope my next novel, still so nebulous I hardly know anything about it, takes shape quickly!

  29 September 1961

  Johnny’s birthday. He is extraordinary. He is the only one to understand my depression – which, really, is only physical, in spite of appearances. Just now I told him the story of the man sitting on the sidewalk at night howling like a dog at the moon. Questioned by a passer-by, he only howled: