Pantani won another stage before retiring from the race, perhaps to concentrate on his forthcoming criminal trial at Forlì, in central Italy, for the use of banned substances back in 1995. The final mountain stage was won by Virenque, soon to be up before the beak at Lille, charged with “complicity to supply, incite the use of, and administer drugs”; also with “complicity in their import, possession, supply, transport, and acquisition.”* How many of those I had watched who went up the Ventoux were taking something fortifying yet legal, or illegal yet undetectable, or illegal yet detectable yet worth taking the risk for? The evidence is always contradictory. Riders who are notoriously clean, like Chris Board-man, a world-class time-trialist regularly defeated by the mountains, never seem to notice anything going on. Whereas the whistle blowers, the drug-takers, and the drug-givers offer a picture in which everyone is doing it and only the naïve or the ridiculously principled abstain. Benjo Maso remembered a French rider from the Seventies called Dominique Lecroq being asked on French television what percentage of riders took drugs in his day. “One hundred and twenty per cent,” he replied, meaning that the masseurs, soigneurs, mechanics, and support staff would be doing so as well. Voet confirmed this social overflowing of the drug habit, but his own estimate was that sixty per cent of the peloton were users.
The world portrayed by Voet is enclosed, secretive, furiously competitive, and not too bothered about moral questions. Chris Boardman says, “My own reasons for not taking drugs are ultimately more practical than moral. Why should I risk it?” To which the seductive answer comes: Because with this new drug it isn't a risk; you'll be ahead of the game in both senses. Voet describes Virenque approaching a hospital biologist and trying to get some synthetic haemoglobin (which oxygenates the blood without raising the haematocrit level); according to one source, it is already being deployed widely in Italian sport. Voet also derides the notion that a foolproof test for EPO will clean up the Tour: “EPO is already being supplanted by other forms of doping, both cellular and molecular.” During Voet's last weeks at Festina, the team doctor was busy studying the sporting application of the cancer drug interleukin. It would be ironic indeed if Armstrong, medical victim and sporting hero to many, had inadvertently redirected attention from laboratories to hospitals.
Does it matter, finally, if a leader swaps consonants and becomes a dealer? Cyclists use bike technology to beat one another; they use performance labs and wind tunnels to discover the best aerodynamic positions; they are “computer slaves,” as Armstrong puts it. The U.S. Postal Team riders have two-way radio contact and wear heart monitors so that their team director can tell them to adjust their pedalling accordingly. Would it matter if they also used drug technology to acquire that additional edge?
It matters, I think, for three reasons. Sentimentally, we want there still to be some connection, however thinned, between the world of the Rudge Whitworth Keep Fit Girl* and that of the professional cyclist. Morally, we are still Petrarchians, and recognize that certain shortcuts are wrong. Sport's history is bleakened when we remember those defeated by steroidal shot-putters, testos-teronic East German women swimmers, or American sprinters whose body profiles thickened alarmingly in close-season training. In cycling's case, we need only quote Voet's epitaph for Charly Mottet: “Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved.” Finally, and practically, it matters because the complex relationship between spectator and athlete, fandom's pot Belge of explosive emotions, depends at bottom on truth and trust. The Tour de France may be an example of “purposeless suffering”; it is also, as Armstrong says, “the most gallant athletic endeavour in the world.” Whether we are the puzzled president of the French Cycling Federation on Hautacam, or Martine of Coiffure Salon Martine sitting by the roadside in Saint-Didier waiting for two minutes of lurid lycra to pass, what we need and what we want is simply this: to know what we have seen.
* Edith Wharton thought there were two candidates for the title “the sublimest object in Provence”: the Pont du Gard and Mont Ventoux. For her, the Pont du Gard finished (a close) second.
* The most popular stimulant was the innocently named “American coffee”: caffeine in combination with strychnine, cocaine, ether, and nitroglycerine.
* There was an Italian rider of the postwar years called Brambilla, who was famous for his masochism. When riding badly, he used to hit himself round the head with his cycle pump, and deny himself water. In 1947 he lost the Tour on the very last day. In response, he punished his bike, by burying it at the bottom of his garden: a deed he was not allowed to forget. “Is it true?” André Brulé asked him, as the riders were rolling out one day in a subsequent Tour. “Why did you do that?” “The bike had wooden rims,” Brambilla replied sarcastically, “and I wanted to grow some poplars in my garden.” “Lucky you didn't plant your water bottle as well,” said Brulé, “or you'd have grown a pharmacy.”
In the antepenultimate chapter of Tender Is the Night Dick Diver watches the Tour pass in the South of France. In the late Twenties the race evidently went more slowly, as he is able to distinguish expressions on the faces of the riders. After they have passed, Fitzgerald pertinently has Diver notice “a light truck [which] carried the dupes of accident and defeat.” This is the “broom waggon,” which sweeps up those who, like Diver, are forced to abandon a gruelling competition.
* On the second day of his trial Virenque finally admitted his drug-taking, while still deploying the evasions of metaphor: “It was like a train going away from me and, if I didn't get on it, I would be left behind. It was not cheating. I wanted to remain in the family.”
* Shortly after this piece appeared, I received a letter from the Honorary Life Vice-President of The Fellowship of Cyling Old-Timers pointing out that Mrs. Billie Dovey was both still alive and an active member of the club. As yet, no Fellowship of Old EPO-takers exists. Meanwhile, the court at Forlì gave Marco Pantani a three-month suspended sentence for a thwocking 60.1% haematocrit level; the conviction was overturned when a higher court in Bologna decided that doping “is not seen by the law as fraud.” Chris Boardman retired from competition. From the start of his career the Englishman had suffered from a naturally low level of testosterone, which caused a condition similar to osteoporosis. The cycling authorities would not allow him to boost the level and continue in the sport. The Guardian announced the news with the wry headline: “Boardman quitting to take drugs.”
In 2001, Lance Armstrong won his third successive Tour de France (and spoke French to journalists again); and Tom Simpson's memorabilia were moved to a museum in his home village of Harworth, Nottinghamshire.
(7)
The Pouncer
Georges Simenon with all his needs (the maid is off camera), 1930s
In his book on the Lucan affair, Trail of Havoc, Patrick Marnham made one of the most vivid calculations in modern British biography. Lucan, he explained, was a very unadventurous eater. In his days as a house player at the Clermont Club, his taste ran to nothing but smoked salmon and lamb cutlets. The latter were grilled during the cold months, and served en gelée in warmer times. The biographer therefore estimated: “If Lord Lucan ate four lamb cutlets a day, for four days a week, for forty weeks a year, for eleven years, and if there are seven cutlets in a sheep, then he would have despatched 1,006 sheep.”
Marnham has been schooled to write well about Georges Sime-non: he has forensic, journalistic, and francophonic expertise. But an additional qualification must be a small numerological kink. Figures stud Simenon's life as pungently as cloves in an orange. The 400-plus books he wrote; the 55 cinema and 279 television films made from them; the 500 million copies sold in 55 languages; the 1,000,000 francs he took one Sunday morning in cash, in a suitcase, to buy back from Fayard the subsidiary rights to his first 19 Maigrets. He moved house 33 times; when separated from his eldest son he wrote him 133 letters in three weeks; when interviewing for a bilingual secretary he got through 180 candidates in a single afternoon. Then there is his famous est
imate of having bedded 10,000 women. Even in laundry he was not modest: at his Swiss retreat there were six washing machines in continuous operation. This blizzard of numbers also invites us to make our own lamb-cutlet calculation: if Marnham was commissioned to write his biography shortly after Simenon's death, and if it took two years to complete, and if biography is half research and half writing, and if research is half reading and half interviewing, then in order to have read all the Belgian's books Marnham must have despatched them at a rate of more than two a day.
Writers are dangerous. They are also, frequently, not very nice. When they become famous, they can be not very nice in the manner of other famous people—vain, tyrannical, inflexible, and so on. But they can also be not very nice in a way specific to writers: by exploiting the one skill which sets them apart from others, by making clear that it is they who fix the official version of events. Those who live close to writers sooner or later inevitably strike against this discouraging truth:
Whatever happens,
They have got
The typewriter
And we have not.
Among Simenon's published works are a psychopathic number of autobiographical texts: twenty-seven in all. There is no obvious justification for leaving more words of autobiography than Chateaubriand: Simenon was little concerned with public events, foreign travel, or the society around him. These Dictées are made up instead of relentless self-explanation, guilty confession, and cocky boasting—the testimony of a man incapable of being bored so long as he remains the topic of conversation. Though cast as restless seekings after truth, they amount to an obsessive seizing of the historical record from those around him. To rub it in, Simenon also endowed a vast archive of professional papers in his native city of Liège.
The human race, Simenon told his mother in 1934, is divided into the fesseurs and the fessées: the spankers and the spankees. He added that it was his intention to be un fesseur. What the novelist had not yet discovered when he proposed his theory is that this division can exist within the same person, either running concurrently or, as in Simenon's case, consecutively. His life falls into two clear parts: the rise and rise of the super-spanker, followed by the slow decline of the spankee. You could make a moral tale out of it if you wished, and it is to Marnham's credit that he declines to do so. In this he is following Simenon's own example. One of the distinctions of the fiction, especially of the romans durs, is to show sympathetic understanding for driven, obsessed, morally affectless characters who inflict and sustain often terrible damage. The refusal to moralize makes them less distant, less safely other. Simenon in one of his more engaging moments said of himself: “Maybe I am not completely crazy, but I am a psychopath.” Calling in the ethical police doesn't particularly help understand psychopaths.
The rise of the super-spanker began in Liège in 1903. He had an indulgent, invalid father and a dominant, unsatisfiable mother: Henriette, a woman who “found unhappiness where no one else had suspected its existence.” As a child he knew the morally unsignposted world of a country first occupied, then liberated. He escaped quickly, through journalism and through marriage, to Paris, where he learned the local rules: “I now understand everything one has to do to win success in Paris. And I will do it. But I am appalled at what I will have to do.” Pulp fiction brought him money, the Maigret series world fame, and the romans durs serious critical acclaim and the sometimes embarrassing admiration of Gide, Cocteau, Thornton Wilder, and so on. Cars, houses, boats, parties, booze, snobbery, posh friends, and bucketsful of women: prostitutes, dancers (up to Josephine Baker), occasionally mistresses—though he did not like the involvement—and always the housemaid. One new employee enquired of another girl, as if checking the job description, “On passe toutes à la casserole?,” whose pungency is rather lost in the English “Do we all get laid?”
Late in life, and bubbling with senile sexual pride, he told John Mortimer in a Sunday Times interview about the 8,000 prostitutes he had known: “I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was faked.” The connoisseur, the gentleman: elsewhere he presents himself as the big-game hunter, and the tourist among women. Naturally, though, Simenon didn't exceed the number of Casanova's conquests merely out of sport, or even a pure love of sex. As he told Fellini in an interview: “It wasn't at all a vice. I have not the slightest sexual vice, but I have the need to communicate.” Later, he elaborated: he did it “because I wanted to learn the truth … I do not know these women any longer, I have forgotten them … but with these 10,000 women I am beginning to know ‘the’ woman.”
Here is a typical sexual encounter from the Twenties, at the time of the writer's engagement to his first wife:
With Simenon, early one morning, lying awake in the Hotel Berthe, the need was so great that when he heard a chambermaid outside in the hallway cleaning the guests' shoes, he got up, opened the door, lifted the girl's skirt and possessed her on the spot—while she was brushing away. She did not even stop what she was doing but merely said: “Oh Monsieur!”
Now skip two marriages, forty years, and nine thousand-odd other women, and catch the truth-seeker's first sexual encounter with Teresa, his final housekeeper-companion:
A month after she started work at Echandens, I unexpectedly walked into a room and found her bending over a table that she was polishing. The sight was too much for me. I advanced upon her, feverishly pulled down her knickers and penetrated her … Teresa did not play the coquette. She had an orgasm as violent as mine, still bent over the table, with a duster or chamois leather in her hand … We did not even look at each other. I just walked out of the room and locked myself in my office.
Simenon doesn't elaborate on which particular truth he was confirming on this latter occasion—perhaps that the conscientiousness of domestic staff had not declined over a period of forty years. But the encounters are typical of Simenon's vaunted manner: the sudden pounce, the rapid penetration, the unfailing female orgasm, and the retreat into the study. There his technique was not all that different: literature's pouncer, he wrote each novel in a swift, uninterruptible burst. For once, psychobiography provides the perfect fit.
A whirl, a riot, a debauch, but also a controlled one, marked by regular, driven work. Marnham quotes Bernard Pivot as saying that for most writers sex is a distraction from work, and adds that with Simenon it was the other way round, work being a distraction from sex. This is neat, but does not seem to fit the facts: Simenon had enviably more than enough time for both activities. By the late 1930s his life was a display-case of literary, financial, and sexual success. The spanker had triumphed, and spanked everyone: professionally, by bossing his publishers, even up to a 50-50 split on gross profits; domestically, by running his home and his sex life on his own uniquely favourable terms. His marriage survived his being busted in mid-siesta with the maid: Simenon's way of discouraging his wife Tigy from sacking the woman was to tell her he had already been unfaithful hundreds of other times, “frequently with people she knew, including her friends.” Tigy, a robust and impressive figure, agreed to continue in marriage and motherhood. Simenon, blaming the victim, later wrote: “A man never forgives a woman who forces him to tell lies.”
In the traditional story, settled, conveyor-belt love may be disturbed by the ferocious intrusion of sex; with Simenon, settled, conveyor-belt sex was disturbed by the ferocious intrusion of love. Yet at first, when he exchanged Tigy for Denise, a 25-year-old French-Canadian he met in New York in 1945, it must have seemed to him that he was trading up. For whereas Tigy reluctantly permitted a ménage à trois, Denise gleefully encouraged a ménage à quatre; where previously his brothel visits had to be hidden from Tigy, Denise now came along as companion and cheer-leader, even packing the novelist back upstairs for a second bash if she hadn't finished her conversation downstairs. Two of her powerful attractions for him were that she smoked with an American pout
and had a “vaginal voice.” But by loving Denise, by finding the only woman in his life with whom “love and sex were merged,” Simenon gave her power; he became a potential spankee. She was more than his match at drinking, hitting, quarrelling, and lying. He got what he wanted; also, if you are feeling briefly moralistic, what he deserved.
In this second part of his life, with Denise and their three children, the disappointments and the embitterments slowly arrived. The professional ones were trivial—like the failure of “the cretins” in Stockholm to give him the Nobel Prize, or his inability to reciprocate the lavish praise offered him by Gide, Wilder, Henry Miller and others (better, after all, to have it this way round). But the personal ones wrought real damage. Denise, after years of mocking inertia during sex (“Fais vite!” she would instruct, and not as a turn-on), finally announced that “I no longer enjoyed making love to him. And that I think was the end of him.” Their marriage collapsed, much aided by drink and jealousy; Denise had a nervous breakdown, they separated, but the battle continued. She attacked him in her pointedly-titled memoir Un oiseau pour le chat; he replied with the 250,000-word Mémoires Intimes—like using a neutron bomb in a cold war. He would never permit a divorce, and for a quarter of a century, as she put it, “he hated me as possessively as he loved me.” Their daughter, Marie-Jo, caught in the crossfire, also had a breakdown (which the novelist typically used as material for a novel) and then shot herself through the heart with a rifle. Finally, implacably, like some terrifying Shakespearean mother returning to curse her boy who has usurped the neighbouring throne, Henriette made her reappearance. On a visit to his Swiss fortress, she cried poor, daring him to be ashamed of her; she handed back all the money he had ever sent her throughout the previous forty years and embarrassingly quizzed the servants about whether the house was really paid for. When his brother died in Indochina, Henriette grieved thus: “What a pity, Georges, that it's Christian who had to die.” In 1970 she herself lay dying back in Belgium; her first words to him were, “Why did you come, son?” She declined to be impressed right up to the end—to his face, at least—and those attracted to the theory that artists are driven by the hope of securing approval from their unloving or at least outwardly unimpressable parents will find support in the story of Georges and Henriette. Perhaps her implacability sparked both his frenetic fiction-writing (each book saying to her: “Like me! Like me!”) and his frenetic philandering (each conquest saying to him: “She likes me! She likes me!”). Within a year of her death he had abandoned fiction altogether and thereafter wrote nothing but look-at-me memoirs.*
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