When I Was Old by Georges Simenon

again to the other, which explains how I was able to feel myself American during ten years in the United States and return to being more or less Latin in Europe.
    Eventually, in these articles and in others, I rid myself, in advance, of what I didn’t want to put in my novels, the picturesque, and also of some more or less philosophical or political cogitations.
    I didn’t do it on purpose. I instinctively adopted this hygienic practice which I’ve consciously discovered only today.
    There is another series that I must reread, in spite of my horror of rereading myself. It is called, I believe,
‘Police-Secours’, a study of crime in Paris, taken by districts and written for a daily with a large circulation.
    Now once more I find studies of the same kind in the very professional
Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science
, published by the Northwestern University School of Law in the United States.
    I’m not foolish enough to take myself for a prophet or a phenomenon. What I note, with satisfaction, I admit, is that unconsciously I’ve steered my life in such a fashion that it has served my function as a novelist, little by little ridding myself, in the form of articles, of what could not serve me and which threatened to weigh me down.
    If I’ve just gone on at such length about it, it’s because it explains my need of these notebooks. I no longer write articles (nor stories, nor novellas). I’m incapable of it. I no longer think that my feeling on this or that subject has any value whatsoever. I would not dare make statements, as in ‘The Hour of the Negro’, and finally my style has been ‘neutralized’, ‘toned down’, to such an extent that outside of a novel it seems dull. I need to advance ‘step by step’, slowly, by little touches, with backward glances, regrets, to wed the simplest states of mind of my character with the simplest possible words. The story, the novella, demand plots, telescoping, and finally what is called ideas, things that have become foreign to me.
    With these notebooks I have found the means of releasing the overflow; in any case, that’s what I hope. Whether the formula works (the term ‘formula’ is not correct here, since I did it without conscious purpose and
anyway all this is only a hypothesis), I will only know after I’ve written several novels.
    It’s taken me four pages to say such a simple thing!
Saturday, 23 July
    I was right not to get too excited over the Congolese affair. Last night we learned that everything was settled, not so much by the offices of the UN as between the Congolese government and an international financial group that is largely American.
    For eight days now the papers – even those of the right – have been revealing financial combinations influencing the attitudes of Belgium, of Katanga, etc. A few years ago, they would not have mentioned them. This backstage activity was then known only to some initiates. In France and in many other countries this sort of thing is still kept secret from the general public (in France, the affairs of the Sahara, Algeria, etc.; in England, ‘scandalous’ stories about the Court).
    With regard to the Congo, one might say that an ingenuous people suddenly refused to follow the rules of the game and spilled the beans. Naïveté or trickery, it makes little difference.
    Previously, only a few people in the know. Then, in what is called democracy, a few hundred.
    Suddenly the general public.
    This last has largely become uninterested in (or mistrustful of) religions. Now also of politics …
    I’m delighted. A little worried at the same time. Who will replace the Oracles?
    The same people who applauded the implausible de Gaulle were willing, for the space of three days, to risk a war in order to defend the poor white victims of the wicked blacks.
    That reminds me, I don’t know why, of a comment I made as I was reading medical reviews and medical works, French as well as American or English. There