The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  Samuel Johnson said: “Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.” I am not sure if this sort of experience would have been of much use to Simenon’s biographer—or to any other great writer’s, for that matter. Isaac Bashevis Singer once observed (forgive this abundance of quotations, it is not pedantry—simply, the fact is that, for the last fifteen years, I have been frequenting books more than people; furthermore, why should we attempt clumsily to reinvent what good writers have better said before us?) that, even if Tolstoy were living next door, instead of paying him a visit, he would rather stay home and read Anna Karenina again. This is elementary wisdom. The encounter of geniuses is not always an occasion for sublime exchanges. The only meeting between James Joyce and Marcel Proust is a good example: these two giants of modern literature once shared a taxi, but they spent the entire time arguing whether to open or shut the window. (This anecdote must be true, since it was invented by Nabokov.)

  People are often surprised when they realise that, in life, great writers do not bear much resemblance to the image they had formed of them while reading their works. For instance, with naïve astonishment they may discover that a fierce polemicist, whose fire and violence had filled them with awe, actually is a quiet, shy and retiring man; or again, the orgiastic prophet of burning passion, who had stirred their sensual imagination, proves in fact to be a eunuch; or the famous adventurer, who set their minds dreaming of exotic horizons, wears slippers and never leaves his cosy fireside; or the aesthete from whose exquisite visions they drew so much inspiration eats from plastic plates and wears hideous neckties. They should have known better. Quite frequently, an artist creates in order to compensate for a deficiency; his creation is not the joyous and exuberant outpouring of an overflow—it is more often a pathetic attempt to answer a want, to bridge a gap, to hide a wound.

  Hilaire Belloc admirably described this divorce between the writer and his writing:

  I never knew a man yet who was consonant to his work. Either he was clearly much greater and better than his work, or clearly much less and worse . . . In point of fact it is not the mere man who does the thing: it is the man inspired. And the reason we are shocked by the vanity of artists is that, more or less consciously, we consider the contrast between what God has done through them, and their own disgusting selves . . . When the work is of genius, he is far below it: he is on a different plane. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent him from outside.

  Simenon granted countless journalistic interviews. In his free time (that is, when he was not writing novels) he would entertain journalists sometimes as often as twice or three times a week. The media found him to be a golden topic. With apparent good will, but not without shrewdness, he complied with their many requests; in front of television cameras, he performed his old routine with well-oiled smoothness; he deftly fed his numerous visitors all the humbug they wished to swallow, in the same fashion as, at the zoo, one throws peanuts to the monkeys.

  He enjoyed worldwide celebrity. His fame can be conveniently encapsulated in a series of figures which, though often quoted, never cease to amaze: his books have been translated into fifty-seven languages and published in forty countries; he wrote some 450 novels—the exact figure, which may possibly constitute a world record of fecundity in the history of literature, still escapes the investigations of the most diligent researchers, as in his youth he produced countless pot-boilers (adventure stories, soft pornography watered down with sentimental romance) that were issued in cheap, obscure and short-lived serial publications, under twenty-seven different pen-names. In his early period, he would sometimes turn out one or two novels in the course of a single day. As success came, he began to travel restlessly; at the same time, he became a compulsive landlord, setting up for himself thirty-two successive residences. And also, naturally, let us not forget the 10,000 women with whom, according to his own computations, he managed over the years to have sexual intercourse.

  However, Mauriac warned us: the true life of a writer can only be told by the children of his imagination. Do Simenon and his creatures tell the same story? We might, for instance, subject them to a single elementary test, such as the one Malraux suggested when he said that, in order to know a man, one should examine his attitudes towards God, towards sex and towards money.

  On God, Simenon’s characters remain generally silent, which is fairly normal. Their creator’s silence, however, was positively shrill, which is rather odd: “I would rather walk stark naked in the streets than confess my true views regarding the existence of God.”

  On the subject of sex, Simenon was fond of portraying himself as a man liberated from all taboos: “I enjoy perusing beautiful female bodies . . . Quite often, prostitutes give me more pleasure than non-professionals...I have sex straightforwardly, healthily, as often as I feel the need to.” He cultivates sexual pleasure “without afterthoughts and without fuss.” If we are to believe him, it would seem that, for him, regular participation in orgies was some sort of exercise akin to bicycle riding or calisthenics.

  For his creatures, however, things are not so easy or pleasant. Unremitting loneliness crushes the entire world of his fiction, where loveless passions are leading inexorably to disaster, and sex is nearly always a grim, shameful, hasty and furtive experience. Thus, for instance, the protagonist of the most autobiographical of all his novels imagines:

  ...dingy beds, wallpaper in tatters, a broken-down and stained sofa; he sees, he wants to see the face of a woman, with dark rings under her eyes, a weary mouth and a sickly body, slowly stripping her clothes in a grey twilight, with a mixture of boredom and disgust . . . Everything is so ugly! It is dirty—that is the word: dirty—and he wished it to be even more dirty, dirty to a point which would make you cry from disgust or pity, which would make you crawl on the floor and moan.

  Finally, one cannot leave this subject without mentioning the contrast—rather striking, you will admit—between, on the one hand, Simenon’s jolly polygamist binges and, on the other, Maigret’s austere monogamy (and there is no need to be Freud or Jung to be able to identify Maigret as Simenon’s “mythical ego”).

  On the subject of money, it would be all too easy to juxtapose the spectacular success of the creator with the sordid end of nearly all his creatures. Paradoxically, as the former became a prisoner of his own wealth and fame, we see the latter dropping their worldly moorings and drifting away in a sort of desolate freedom. At the peak of his career, Simenon was living in a pseudo-castle which he designed himself—a mixture of palace, factory, health resort and fortress where he was waited on by an army of secretaries, butlers, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners. Whereas Simenon’s novels resemble life, his life increasingly resembled a novel—one of those cheap romances which, in his early years, he would sign with phony aristocratic pseudonyms such as Jean du Perry or Germain d’Antibes, and entitle suggestively Voluptuous Embraces, Frivolous Perversities or Alone Among Gorillas.

  In contrast with this literary businessman, beaming and prosperous, Simenon’s characters break your heart: they are small people, humble and lonely; rebels and misfits; failures, losers, victims. Look at Maigret (even him!): “When Maigret has to enter a wealthy household, he feels unwelcome and embarrassed, he is uneasy, he knows he does not fit into these splendid surroundings...”; “Maigret is not comfortable when he must deal with important people . . . He is both in awe of, and shocked by, the upper class.” His father was the intendant of an aristocrat, and he himself remained indelibly marked by his servile origin: “There is a certain type of human relations, of social habits, for which there is no cure. One can recover from many diseases, but never from that—a certain humility in front of certain people.” In fact Simenon told the same story a hundred times; his major novels have only one theme: the fall of a man. Fate, an outside incident, an inner impulse, suddenly triggers an implacable process of disintegration. A man wakes up and finds himself a stranger amidst his own
people; he tries to break free from his familiar chains, and he perishes.

  Since Simenon gave so many interviews and published lengthy tape-recorded confessions, some people might believe that he was inclined to self-exposure. This is not the case at all. He merely endeavoured obstinately to project a certain image of himself—the image of “an ordinary man,” a man without problems, at peace with himself.

  A judge, handed the Simenon file, would certainly be puzzled by the flagrant discrepancies between the cheeky self-confidence of the accused and the harrowing evidence of his characters. But didn’t Maigret himself warn us never to trust judges? Judges understand nothing. If they understood, how could they still judge?

  Once, however, as if by inadvertence, Simenon made a genuine confession. A writer may sometimes speak most truthfully about himself when he thinks he is merely commenting on another writer whom he particularly likes. In 1960, in a radio broadcast devoted to Balzac, Simenon said things far more revealing than the lengthy, embarrassing and superfluous memoirs he dictated at the end of his life. In this portrait of Balzac, some statements carry a singular weight: “The need to create other men, to draw out of oneself a crowd of different characters, could hardly arise in a man who finds himself harmoniously adjusted to his own little world. Why should anyone obstinately endeavour to live out other people’s lives, if he is himself self-confident and without revolt?”

  It can hardly be doubted that Simenon was utterly and irretrievably “ill-at-ease in his own skin,” that he never recovered from having been deprived of his mother’s affection, that his whole life was a long and impossible attempt to get even for all the humiliations of his mean and narrow childhood; yet, in the end, these matters should only concern professional psychologists. Let us return to literature.

  The urge to create characters, to invent other beings, reaches in Simenon the proportions of an obsession so exclusive and devouring that one could use his case to make a clinical analysis of the physiology and pathology of literary creation. Indeed, it is this very compulsion that injects his novels with a sense of inescapable necessity. Reading his works, one verifies the truth of Julien Green’s observation: “The only books that matter are those of which it could be said that their author would have suffocated had he not written them.” Few writers were ever so purely and totally novelists; good connoisseurs such as Gide and Mauriac noticed this very soon—and their admiration for Simenon’s phenomenal ability was tinged with a shade of envy: how did he manage—this uncouth and commonplace Belgian shopkeeper—to outclass them so bedazzlingly on their own home ground?

  Conversely, as soon as Simenon stopped writing novels, it was as if he ceased to exist. He had nothing to say, or when he insisted on speaking he would utter platitudes, or display an embarrassing caddishness with cold insensitivity. Never mind! To an acrobat who had just walked across the Niagara Falls on a wire, who would think to ask what he can do besides? Even though Simenon at rest could sometimes provoke the perplexity of his admirers, these unfortunate impressions never detracted from the superior powers of his art. Open any of his major novels: at once, a magic takes effect. From the first paragraph, you are gripped as if by the jaws of a steel trap that will not release its hold until the final full stop of the last page; and, even then, after you have shut the book, you remain stunned, and it takes quite a while to re-enter your own familiar little world, having glimpsed while you were reading its dark and vertiginous reverse side.

  Reading Simenon makes us realise how tenuous the boundary is between life experience and the imaginary experience. Some twenty or thirty years later, the memories we retain of certain episodes from his novels persist in haunting us more obsessively than do memories of actual events that happened to ourselves. In fact, these readings were themselves events in our lives.

  The strength of Simenon is to achieve unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious), making him the most translatable of all writers: his writing loses nothing by being turned into Eskimo or Japanese. It would be difficult to make an anthology of his best pages: he does not have best pages, he only has better novels, in which everything hangs together without a single seam.

  “One always writes too much,” Chardonne used to say. Had he published ten times less, Simenon would have enjoyed a literary position a hundred times more important. Detective stories (an utterly boring genre, by its very definition)—which, actually, he himself did not take very seriously and produced industrially as a form of relaxation from his authentic literary creation—ensured his wealth and popularity; yet, at the same time for millions of readers they obscured his true genius, which he invested nearly exclusively in what he called his “tough novels” (romans durs). The latter exacted from him such an intense, nervous effort that sometimes, before starting to write, he would suffer fits of vomiting. Each time, he had to assume imaginatively the persona of his main protagonist—to become him—and then to see with the mind’s eye the world his pen was conjuring as it followed an inner dictation. This psychic metamorphosis is common to all “visionary” writers—Julien Green (once more!) described it well in various passages of his Journal. This phenomenon reached such an intensity that there were times when it scared Simenon, times when he felt drawn towards an uncertain border where his very sanity might founder.

  The mental tension required by this type of writing cannot be sustained long, as it tolerated no interruption and no relaxation; the first draft of Simenon’s novels was generally completed in eight or ten days. His masterpieces are therefore always brief: written in one breath, and designed to be read at one sitting.

  The first draft was nearly a definitive version—subsequent corrections concerned only details. Simenon’s original manuscripts are amazingly neat; in their swift tidiness they remind us of Mozart’s autographic musical scores. To bring these two names together here may appear incongruous—and it is, in every respect, except one which is essential: the workings of the creative mind. For both artists, the starting point was of crucial importance: a musical phrase, an initial vision, was given them; this first phrase once being set, the rest followed quickly, in one impetus, without hesitation, in a continuous flow—what Mozart called il filo. The speed of this process, its triumphant decisiveness, self-confidence and certainty can make shallow observers speak of “facility”; this is a very misleading impression, as, in order to sustain the rhythm of the inner dictation without breaking its thread, the artist must mobilise powers of concentration that are nearly superhuman.

  This type of creation, however, confronts us with an enigma (which Shaffer grasped well in his Amadeus—musicologists and historians who criticised him missed the point): the created work possesses a splendour and a depth that far exceed the calibre of its creator. The work is not only greater than its author, it is different in nature: it comes from somewhere else. The author shocks those who admire his work; in contrast with it, he seems vacuous. And yet—was it not precisely this very emptiness that enabled him to provide a free channel for his works to be born?

  An artist can take full responsibility only for those of his works that are mediocre or aborted—in these, alas! he can recognise himself entirely—whereas his masterpieces ought always to cause him surprise. Georges Bernanos, who was certainly not inclined to literary daintiness, commented on his Diary of a Country Priest: “I love this book as if it had not been written by me.” And actually, in a sense—the sense suggested by Belloc in the observation which I quoted at the beginning—it was not by him. Indeed, could any clear-sighted writer ever believe that the source of his inspiration lies within himself? He might as well believe that he owns the rainbow or the moonlight which transfigures for one moment his little garden!

  In the end, the gift of writing novels is not unlike God’s grace: it is arbitrary, incomprehensible and sublimely unjust. It is not a scandal if novelists of genius prove to be wretched fellows; it is a comforting miracle that wretched fellows prove to b
e novelists of genius.

  I have still not told you when Simenon was born, when he died, or how he lived. I have said nothing of the triumphs of his public life or of the dramas of his private life; I did not dwell on his parents, his origins, his career, his travels, his adventures, his pipes, his women, and all the Maigret folklore . . . And you begin to see—I trust—why I shall not raise these matters. They are all false tracks, red herrings, dead-ends; they lead nowhere. What a zealous researcher might finally catch in his net—after dragging bleak expanses of mud—would hardly repay his efforts. Every life leaves behind an accumulation of broken odds and ends—bizarre and sometimes smelly. Rummaging there, one can always unearth enough evidence to establish that the deceased was both monstrous and mediocre. Such a combination is quite common—whoever doubts it needs only look at himself in a mirror.

  Why should anyone work so hard to portray a Simenon who, in the end, looks like anybody else? The only Simenon who interests us resembles nobody, and this is what enabled him to write Letter to My Judge, Widow Couderc, The Escapee, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, and so many other novels where, strangely, again and again, we return to draw the courage to contemplate our own misery without flinching. The truth that inhabited Simenon lies in his works, and there only. Whoever still insists to look elsewhere for it ought to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s lines:

  By this, and only this, we have existed

  Which is not to be found in our obituaries,

  Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider,

  Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

  In our empty rooms.