When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page B

later, I had my second boat built at Fécamp, the
Ostrogoth
. I brought it first to Paris, where I had it
christened (on a whim) by the priest of Notre Dame when we were anchored at the Vert-Galant. * * Then Belgium, Holland, Germany.
    At Delfzijl, on the bank of the River Ems, I wrote my first Maigret; there and at some other places, among them Stavoren, where I spent the winter on board, two or three other novels in the same series were written.
    But I didn’t intend to tell here about my life at that period, at least not today. Again I only meant to put down a few sentences.
    After my return to Paris, there followed a succession of trips almost right up to the war. Norway and Lapland in winter, then a long tour of Europe, Africa, in particular a route from East to West, at the time a very difficult and complicated undertaking, the United States, Panama, the equator, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, India, etc. Also Russia, Turkey, Egypt …
    Now I’m at the point I was aiming at. I was not in search of the picturesque. There’s little of that in my novels. You can count on your fingers my novels which I would call exotic:
Les Clients d’Avrenos
set in Turkey,
Quartier Nègre
in Panama,
Coup de Lune
in Gabon,
Quarante-Cinq Degrés à l’Ombre
covering the route from Matadi to Bordeaux,
L’Aîné des Ferchaux
in the Congo,
Le Cercle de la Soif
in the Galápagos. I may have forgotten some but not many.
Touriste de Bananes
in Tahiti,
Long Cours
a little bit of everywhere. Still the exotic element did not play any great part.
    I maintain that when one lives in a place, a tree is a tree, whether it’s called a kapok tree, a flame tree, or an oak.
    Local colour exists only for people who are passing through. And I hate being a tourist.
    I’m not seeking the sense of being abroad. On the contrary. I am looking for what is similar everywhere in man, for the constant, as a scientist would say.
    Above all I’m trying to see from afar, from a different point of view, the little world where I live, to acquire points of comparison, of distance.
    I travelled at my own expense. But since I knew several newspaper or magazine editors, before I left I proposed to one of them a series of six, eight, or twelve articles to be written under contract, which would cover my expenses. I did the same when I travelled for nearly a year in the Mediterranean, on my third boat, the
Araldo.
    Since, in the past week, the Congo has figured so large in the news (what style!) – it still does – I felt a curiosity, which I’ve never had before, to read over the articles I wrote. I was surprised at first to see that my style then was so full of sparkle, much more brilliant than my style of today; and that fascinated me, because for years my chief effort has been to simplify, to suppress, to make my style as neutral as possible in order to make it fit as closely as possible the thoughts of my characters.
    What struck me most was that these hastily written articles, with no philosophical or political intent, foresaw everything that has since happened in Africa. The very title could be used today: ‘The Hour of the Negro’.
    And the conclusion: a film at that time was called
Africa Speaks
. I took this title and added: ‘It Tells You: Shit!’
    On Sunday, my publisher Nielsen and I debated whether to republish these articles, which would no doubt help people to understand the African situation today. Sven had decided for it. Finally, I said no.
    I am a novelist and want to be only a novelist. Above all I don’t want to give prominence to manuscripts I’ve dug out of a drawer. The title of another series, on Eastern Europe, in 1933, is no less curious to read today: ‘Hungry People’. Then it was audacious, almost a taboo subject.
    Another series, ‘Europe 33’, was a panoramic view of Europe during a moment of its history.
    ‘Mare Nostrum’, a consideration of Latin–Anglo-Saxon antagonism. Even then I was sometimes pulled to one side, and