When I Was Old

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

‘I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov'

— William Faulkner

‘A truly wonderful writer … marvellously readable – lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with the world he creates'

— Muriel Spark

‘Few writers have ever conveyed with such a sure touch, the bleakness of human life'

— A. N. Wilson

‘One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century … Simenon was unequalled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories'

— Guardian

‘A novelist who entered his fictional world as if he were part of it'

— Peter Ackroyd

‘The greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature'

— André Gide

‘Superb … The most addictive of writers … A unique teller of tales'

— Observer

‘The mysteries of the human personality are revealed in all their disconcerting complexity'

— Anita Brookner

‘A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal'

— P. D. James

‘A supreme writer … Unforgettable vividness'

—
Independent

‘Compelling, remorseless, brilliant'

— John Gray

‘Extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century'

— John Banville

Georges Simenon was born on 12 February 1903 in Liège, Belgium, and died in 1989 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had lived for the latter part of his life.

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First published in French as
Quand j'étais vieux
by Presse de la Cité 1970
This translation first published by Hamish Hamilton 1972
Published in Penguin Books 1973
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2016

Copyright © Georges Simenon Limited, 1970
Translation copyright © Helen Eustis, 1971
GEORGES SIMENON ® Simenon.tm
MAIGRET ® Georges Simenon Limited

Cover photograph © Reporters Associes/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images. Author photograph courtesy of Simenon.tm

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

eBook ISBN 9781101991930

‘I
only did what I could,
no more than I could …'

– Claude Bernard (1878)

Praise for Georges Simenon

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Preface

First Notebook 1960

Second Notebook 1960

Third Notebook 1961-1963

In 1960, 1961, and 1962, for personal reasons, or for reasons I don't know myself, I began feeling old, and I began keeping notebooks.

I was nearing the age of sixty.

Soon I shall be sixty-seven and I have not felt old for a long time. I no longer feel the need to write in notebooks, and those that I did not use I've given to my children.

Épalinges, 24 December 1969

It's been four days – from the twenty-first – since I finished a novel, my hundred-eightieth-and-some, which I'd wanted to be easy. But the first day that I began to write it, towards the ninth or tenth page, I had the feeling that it was useless to try to go on to the end, that I wouldn't be able to make it come to life.

As I always am when I'm writing, I was alone in my study, with the curtains drawn. I paced up and down five or six times, and if they hadn't seemed in some way human, I would have torn up those few pages and waited a few days before beginning another book.

That has happened to me two or three times in a year. This time, I began to sob. Then, without too much confidence, I went back to my typewriter. Now I think it's the best of the Maigrets. I will know when I begin the revision. Since the Cannes Festival, I've been wanting to write a novel that would be full of sunshine and tenderness. I had one in mind, with the characters and the background at hand. I only wrote three pages of that one. It wasn't about Maigret, and my principal characters were in their thirties. I suddenly realized that in
Maigret et les Vieillards,
which in
a way replaced this abandoned novel, I expressed the same tenderness, put in as much sunshine, but with characters who were all between seventy-two and eighty-five years old …

Well then! That isn't at all the kind of thing I meant to put in this notebook. But I must begin somehow. I have neither any intention of writing my memoirs nor of keeping a journal. Do I want somehow to arrest the flow of life from time to time? Not that either.

I believe that in reality it's much more childish than that, that it stems from a time long ago. From the age of seven or eight, I've been intrigued by paper, pencils, erasers, and a stationery store always fascinated me more than a candy store or a bakery. I loved the smell of it. A special kind of yellow pencil, too hard to be used in school, seemed to me more elegant, more aristocratic than anything I could think of. The same way with certain papers, for instance a drawing paper which was called, I think, Whatman paper and was used by those of my mother's boarders who were studying to be mining engineers at the university. They worked for three weeks or months on the same sheet. At the end, when all the tracings were retraced with India ink (the elegance, also, of those little bottles!) they washed the much-used paper like linen.

I suppose my passion for notebooks dates from that same period, not for my school notebooks which seemed childish to me, but for what were called student notebooks, square-ruled, fat, with a red top stain, bound in thick grey or tan canvas. I would slip into the students' rooms to look at these, touch them. Nearly all of them
were filled with tiny, scarcely legible writing, and scattered through them were geometric drawings for the science courses, or parts of the human body for medical studies.

I was about eleven years old, I think, when I finally bought my first student notebook, knowing as little as I know today (forty-seven years afterwards) what I was going to put in it. My name on the first page, of course. Then a few lines of verse, several quotations taken from the writers whom I was reading then. I probably filled three or four pages that way, with plenty of blank spaces between.

At fifteen, a new notebook, and this time the poetry in it was my own. Two pages of it at most.

Third notebook at twenty-one. This was the period when I was writing stories for newspapers. I wrote between three and seven a day, to make a living. In the evening, in my notebook, I wrote ‘for myself'. I remember twenty stories which I must have kept in some file, since after they were written I typed them up.

About the typewriter, it seems to me now that I, who so loved beautiful papers, notebooks in hard cover, pencils, pen-holders, began at the age of sixteen and a half to type because it was expected at the paper where I was a reporter. I got so used to it that for years, even decades, I've been virtually incapable of writing by hand.

In 1940 I bought other notebooks, at Fontenay-le-Comte, where I spent part of the war. By that time it was already impossible to find real student notebooks of the kind that so impressed me in my childhood. No more canvas bindings. No more red top stain.

This time, in '40, I wrote on the first page, in India ink, the word
Pedigree
. Then, on the following page, I drew a sort of genealogical tree of the Simenon family.

This notebook was intended for my son Marc, and I did not hope for any other children, because a radiologist had just told me that I had a year, or two or three at most, to live.

Curiously enough, chance decreed that it should turn out like the other notebooks. I wrote a certain number of pages in which I described my childhood and especially my family for the benefit of my son who, according to the radiologist, would have little chance of getting to know me. (Marc was a year and a half old.) Claude Gallimard came to see me, bringing news of Gide, whom he'd met several times in the Free Zone. (In Nice, I think.) Claude had spoken to Gide of these notebooks. Gide, with whom I corresponded for several years, asked me to send him one. After which he wrote to advise me to abandon the pen and the first person and to type my life story like a novel.

The manuscript pages became
Je me souviens.

The typed text became
Pedigree.

Of the three or four notebooks I bought, only one and a half were filled!

(I just mentioned my correspondence with Gide. It is almost the only regular correspondence I have kept up with anyone. And it was always Gide who invited my letters. Actually, I have never written letters unless I had to, and while I do have some friends, I never write to
them without some definite reason. As for my wife D., since we have never been apart she hasn't a single letter from me.)

I return to the story of the notebooks. From 1940 to 1960, nothing. Not even trivia. Then, early this year, a telephone call to my friend and publisher Sven Nielsen to ask him to have a dozen made for me. They weren't a total loss, but the shape wasn't long enough. The corners were less rounded. The top stain wasn't red. For three months now these notebooks have been in a drawer in my study and I fear my children's covetousness, for my son Johnny shares my passion for paper, pencils, etc.

Am I trying once again to satisfy a youthful longing? That's a real part of it. It's true that I have long dreamt of being seated in a familiar study, surrounded by objects that I love, and writing by hand. That is how I imagined the life and work of a writer.

Actually, not only have I written most of my novels on the typewriter (except, a few years ago, a sort of daily scribble, in pencil, for non-Maigrets) but I have never lived in my study, I have never known the satisfaction of writing by hand.

Except when I was writing popular novels to learn my trade and earn my living.

Since I first tried my hand at creative writing, it has been a laborious process, hours of anguish rather than euphoria. The more I wrote the more difficult it became, or, more exactly, the more I got stage fright.

Now this anxiety has reached such an intensity that I
am physically sick with it on the days that precede the beginning of a novel and on the first morning.

I used to write my novels in three or four days (the popular ones).

Then twelve a year (at the time of the Maigrets).

Then six (for nearly twenty years).

Now it is down to four, because the older I get, the more they exhaust me. It is true that each time I struggle towards greater concentration.

(Gide asked me once how I managed, in the course of a scene, to give simultaneously a sense of the present, the past, and the future. I answered him, truthfully, that this had been my aim from my very first stories on. In fact, one of these stories,
M. Gustave
, written in the notebook of my twenty-first or twenty-second year, bears testimony to my endeavour to make time merge in some way. I have never experimented. I have never tried out new styles as I went along. I have always tried to move forward slowly in the same direction.)

Does all this explain why this morning I began to write in this notebook? Has it a more or less fixed goal? Like the
Pedigree
notebooks? I am thinking mostly of my children. I am addressing them as much as I can. Will they be curious to know more about their father some day? I'm not sure. As for the public … Will anyone still be concerned about me and my work in twenty, thirty years? I don't know, of course. At any rate, I don't intend to pose for posterity. On the contrary. I had rather destroy legends, get rid of all the ‘glamour', all the picturesqueness, to say:

‘It's much simpler than that!'

No! Whether I go on with this notebook, these notebooks, or abandon them again; whether they are published one day or whether they remain in one of my children's drawers does not matter to me.

I'm not making a confession. I'm not explaining myself. I'm telling neither my life story nor anecdotes about people I've known. Nor have I any intention of explaining my ideas. If I have any, I suppose they are in my novels, in which case, that's where people should look for them.

To tell the truth, I feel an almost physical desire to be at my desk, without anxiety, without the pressure of creation, of working, of bringing characters to life. But to write just the same. Not to have to reread. Not to have to worry over correcting sentences, their rhythm, their life.

To write for writing's sake, which I once thought was the writer's business, when I was twelve years old. And perhaps it's partly true. Only I'm not a writer. I'm a novelist. And the novelist does not know the joy of writing.

In short, the pleasure I offer myself, at fifty-seven, is, finally, from time to time, to write like a dilettante.

I once knew an old Italian mason who lived in Cannes. In the evening, coming home from his shop, or Sunday after mass, he devoted and still devotes his free hours to building, in his very modest garden, the most outrageously elaborate houses and castles, on a doll's scale, on the scale of the sand castles that children build at the beach. There are bridges joining the miniature houses, windmills, what not. Perhaps some day a cathedral a foot high correct in every detail?

A mason for others during the day, in the evening he relaxes (or takes his revenge) by being a mason for himself, a mason for pleasure, building buildings that serve no purpose.

Perhaps that's what I'm doing. If I see my mason in Cannes, I promise myself I'll ask him how old he was when he began to fill his garden with buildings. It would be odd if he was a little under sixty!

Spent yesterday, a typical Sunday, with a
Match
photographer. He's here for four days, after which he will be joined by a journalist for what they call a feature story. It's the fourth that
Match
has published in seven or eight years about me and my family. These two will be followed by
Good Housekeeping
, then by an Englishman who wants to write I don't know how many articles.

Every three or four months we open our doors to journalists this way, one after another. They are almost always charming intelligent people at first glance, and perhaps they really are. Whether they come from Finland, Germany, or Italy, they appear to be making an effort to understand. They listen, take notes, declare that they will make this one ‘different', that they will make it ‘true'.

Then, whether it is in Lakeville, in Cannes, or here, the photographers ask us to take the same poses, in the same spots, so much so that the children now know in advance just what they must do.

The journalists always ask the same questions. Haven't they read the articles their colleagues have published? Most of the time they haven't read my books, either, or only a very few.

This has gone on for thirty years, and for thirty years I have wondered if there are really any readers for these articles. I must believe there are, since the editors of newspapers and especially of magazines say they know just what their readers want.

So? Always the glass showcase, where I have never lived, where I have never written a novel, although my friends of long standing, the people who must know, say it's true – and say it to me – that they have seen me inside this cage.

The legend has been established, once and for all, and whatever I do, whatever I say to those who interview me, it is this legend that they publish. It hardly matters what I have told them during those two, four, or eight days. It hardly matters what documents I've shown them. It hardly matters that they have sworn to me to tell the truth, and that they have sneered at their colleagues.

The article will be the same, with the same photographs, and the same mistakes. For they even garble the name of the village, the titles of the novels they mention. And if it's a matter of figures, they multiply by five, by ten, when it's not by a hundred.

Tablets have just been discovered revealing, it seems, that Herodotus did the same thing with history, and so, we already knew, did Pliny.

Won't my children and my grandchildren be tempted
to believe this legend too? This irritates me. Wrongly, no doubt, for what importance has it?

None the less I wonder if one reason for these notebooks, for this notebook (for nothing suggests to me that there will be others), may not be to try to re-establish the truth. An approximate truth too, no doubt, since there is no other kind. What discourages me a little is my conviction that it will interest no one.

The photographer just arrived and, of course, takes advantage of my writing by hand to take pictures. So now it will be printed that I always write my novels with a pen, in square-ruled notebooks. One myth supplants another!

Last night I was in a great hurry to sit down to this notebook for it seemed to me that I had a lot of things to write in it. Now, this morning, when I have all the time in the world, I find myself confronted with what is nearly a void. My ideas have evaporated, or rather they don't seem important to me any more. To some extent that's the reason I have to write my novels so quickly. After a few days, what I call the state of grace threatens to abandon me, and my characters, whom I believed to be very much alive the day before, suddenly have become strangers.