When I Was Old Read Free

risk wearing the reader out and even, little by little, turning him against an author.
    Still less out of vanity. I don’t mind explaining myself to a man who is trying to understand, and whose opinion means something to me. But that isn’t the case with ninety-nine per cent of those journalists, especially magazine editors.
    If it’s a beginner, or a freelance writer for whom this article could be important, I’m sure to remember my own beginnings and give him his chance.
    But what about the others, so thoroughly smug, who think they know it all, that they are judges of everything, can solve all questions? They arrive at an author’s house having read only a few of his books, some time ago, or even having read only one, on the train or the plane.
    Each time, however, I have hope. A hope of finally correcting legends, destroying exasperating myths, getting rid of continuing untruths.
    There is none. I always answer the same questions. And I end up feeling sickened.
    ‘How does the idea for a novel come to you? … Then what do you do? … What time do you begin writing? … On the typewriter or by hand? … How many hours a day? … How many days? …’
    And now I, in turn, must ask myself a very disagreeable question. For thirty years now, since the beginning of the Maigrets, I have given the same answers. For they have to be the same. If I were suddenly to declare (which would be untrue) that I begin to write at midnight, or that I dictate, my old answers would be printed just the same.
    … Names from the telephone book … Index cards … Outline on a yellow envelope … the coffee I make in the kitchen …
    I follow this whole routine because I believe it is necessary if I’m to set off the mechanism, so much so that it has become a superstition …
    And if, like the readers of magazines, I too am a victim of legend? If I have begun to believe in it by the sheer force of seeing it in print?
    What stops me from writing at eight o’clock in the
morning instead of at six or six thirty? From not writing a whole chapter at a sitting?
    The proof that it’s possible is that at Cannes, when I was convalescent and unable to follow my routine, I wrote
Le Fils
entirely by hand, several pages in the morning, several pages in the afternoon, without worrying about the length of the chapters and without making myself recopy them on the typewriter afterwards to give my sentences a sterner rhythm. It wasn’t I but my wife who typed
Le Fils
, and this novel is no worse than the rest. It isn’t even different from them.
    Then why did I go back to my routine right afterwards?
    Because of saying over and over that …
    This bothers me. I’m tempted to escape the rules I have imposed on myself. Isn’t it stupid not to dare?
    The ritual I’ve adopted is as strict as the mass, I don’t know why, and I’ve tried to explain it because I’ve been asked to do so.
    I’ve succeeded so well at it, I’ve proved so many times that it was necessary to me that now each move has its logic which I finally believe in myself. In spite of the precedent of
Le Fils …
    And this will go on until I begin to write anyhow, anywhere, and on any paper – in ink, in pencil, or on the typewriter, without thinking that for this reason the fire won’t ignite.
    Then I’ll have to explain to the journalists …
    Why, Lord? What has this to do with them or with those who read them? And above all, why should I concern myself with it?
    In three days, just the same, I will repeat the same story – always a true story – to an English journalist who will ask me the everlasting questions for eight or ten days because he has to write thirty columns. It’s more exhausting to me than a novel. It gives me no satisfaction. Nothing but irritation when, later, I read the outcome of these interviews.
    Why not have the courage to say no, to close the door? Charles Chaplin does it more often than not. Once or twice a year he receives journalists for a very studied