/Monday, June 27, 1960 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 been just 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? Nonetheless 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 reestablish 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 note-books. One myth supplants another! /Saturday, July 2, 1960Last 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. I have just spent nearly a week with the photographer and editor from Match, then with an English journalist. The superiority of photographers to most journalists. I've often observed them when, at Cannes, for example, they descend in a bunch, almost in a swarm, on their victim. They seem hard, cynical, almost cruel. They often are — aren't "raw" shots demanded of them? They're used to all kinds of dramas and, above all, to all sorts of truths. Actually they do have a good deal of contempt for their victims. A false smile, a studied pose, faked nonchalance, and phony sincerity don't deceive them. Perhaps that's the reason why they can appreciate the truth better than anyone else. So they really seem grateful when you don't try to fool them, to give them a chance not to be tough. The Match photographer, who lived four or five days in the bosom of my family, had not known me before he came but left as an old friend. The writer, theoretically more "cultured," but who managed to ask hundreds of impertinent questions, came to do his work, no more, and add an article, a victim, to his collection. Why do we receive them and give them our precious time when we might be relaxing? Not for reasons of publicity, for these always inaccurate articles 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 photograph, a family group, posed like a royal portrait. I've wondered if really he is so indifferent to what the public thinks of him. I've envied him. And now he is busy writing his memoirs, in several volumes, without any interference from a journalist. So it's the opposite of indifference. He wishes to set down his truth or his legend, just like Gide and so many others. Which reminds me of one of the first questions Gide asked, if not the very first, when, at his suggestion, we met for the first time. "Tell me, Simenon, at what period did you choose your character?" Now I'm not sure if he said "choose" or "fix." I didn't understand him immediately. "My character?" For a moment I wondered if he weren't speaking of Maigret, and I almost answered that he was not my character, that Maigret was only an accident to whom I attached little importance. No! He was talking about me. He explained: "Each of us, at one age or another, creates his character, to which he remains more or less faithful...." This confused me a good deal. I only understood what he meant when I saw photographs of him at different periods. It was true. From the age of eighteen or twenty, there were the same poses, the same look as at sixty. Isn't that frightening? I haven't chosen any character. I've changed my attitudes a hundred times. But I wonder now if it isn't, at least in part, because I've read in the papers that I work in such and such a way that I continue to do so. That depresses me. It seems to me that I am obliged to ... One of these days I'll have to give myself a shake, not do what is printed in the newspapers. In that case, it will be best to say nothing about it, so as not to become imprisoned in a new legend. In fact, I'll have to cheat! | 
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