I don’t want to travel any more, I’m happy at Lausanne. In Switzerland I have discovered a country where people have respect for human beings. I have never had anyone ringing my doorbell without an invitation. Nobody has ever asked me about my political, religious or philosophical ideas.
Simenon, interview (1973)
On the morning of 6 September 1989, a woman in late middleage stepped into the garden of her house in Lausanne and walked towards a tall cedar tree which dominated the house and was said to be the oldest tree in the town. She was carrying a small stone pot which contained the ashes of Georges Simenon, the man with whom she had lived for the previous twenty-five years and who had died two days earlier. Having scattered the ashes under the cedar tree she returned to the house and authorised the announcement of Simenon’s death. The news made headlines across the world and drew a tribute from the President of France, but by the time the reporters reached the door of the little house in the avenue des Figuiers there was nothing to see. The cremation had taken place without any form of ceremony. Teresa, Simenon’s companion, had asked not to be disturbed. Of Simenon there was nothing left at all. It was a press conference called by a ghost, which was just as he had wanted it to be. Simenon had a lifelong
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THE MAN WHO WASN’T MAIGRET
mastery of publicity as he had a lifelong horror of the ceremonies surrounding death.
The following day’s papers devoted hundreds of column inches to the life and work of Georges Simenon. In Moscow TASS issued a special release. In Brussels Le Soir made the story the front-page lead and carried three full pages inside. In Paris Le Monde also carried the news on the front page and in the course of the week devoted nine further articles to the novelist. The popular paper France-Soir, in letters 3.5 centimetres high, announced ‘ Le pere de Maigret est mort\ and the Simenon display cases in the Paris chain store FNAC emptied within hours. The French-language tributes to Simenon told a fabulous story.
He had written 193 novels under his own name and over 200 under eighteen pseudonyms. His world sales were said to be over 500 million copies in fifty-five languages, exceeded among writers of fiction only by Jules Verne and William Shakespeare, which made him the world’s best-selling novelist. At the same time his work had been compared to that of Balzac, Dostoevsky and Dickens and had been praised by Celine, Max Jacob, Robert Brasillach, Colette, Anouilh, Cocteau, Pagnol, Mauriac, T.S. Eliot, Henry Miller, Thornton Wilder, Somerset Maugham, John Cowper Powys, George Steiner, John Le Carre, Charlie Chaplin, Fellini, Jean Renoir and Sacha Guitry, among others. Andre Gide had described him as ‘the greatest of all, the most genuine novelist we have had in literature’. Simenon’s press cuttings went back over sixty years and filled two large cupboards at his publisher’s office in Paris. The story of his life was a publicist’s dream. Coming from a poor family in Liege, Belgium, he had made himself a multi-millionaire. He had taken less than two weeks to write most of his books and in the forty-four years up to 1972, when he retired from writing fiction, he had produced an average of between four and five titles each year. He had moved house thirty-three times. Fifty-five cinema films had been based on his books and 279 television films. A doctor had advised him to restrict himself to two bottles of red bordeaux a day while writing, the wine being neither too young nor too old. He had employed a vocabulary of 2000 words, while admitting that he knew more for his personal use. At the height of his fame he had built a house of thirty rooms overlooking Lake Geneva where he had employed eleven servants and kept a garage of five cars. He
LAUSANNE 1989
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had been married twice and had twice conducted lengthy affairs with his wives’ maids. He had been a devoted father of four children and had once sent his son 133 letters during a separation of three weeks. And, as almost everyone knows, he once claimed to have made love to 10,000 women.
But although the obituaries of Simenon were full of detail and well researched they were also highly inaccurate. They were bound to be inaccurate, because their authors had relied on the numerous accounts which the writer himself had given of his life. Simenon wrote two autobiographical novels and four autobiographies, and after his retirement as a novelist dictated twenty-one volumes of memoirs. But his autobiographical writings formed a complex web of fact and fantasy which he ended by partly believing himself. He once said that he found it difficult to tell the story of his early years ‘because we make up the memories of our childhood for the rest of our life, and we change them as we go along’. Certainly in his own case this was true.
In his numerous accounts of his upbringing and family background Simenon frequently claimed to be descended from a Breton soldier who had settled in Belgium on returning from Napoleon’s campaign in Russia and had married the daughter of a Walloon farmer. The Simenons, he said, were settled people and reasonably prosperous, small traders and craftsmen. ‘Everything that moved was to a Simenon suspect.’ His mother’s family, the Briills, were on the other hand constantly on the move. They had known ruin and despair. They were Flemish and therefore, to the Walloon Simenons, they were ‘foreigners’. Henriette, his mother, had lost her father at the age of 5 and had been sent out to do the family shopping in the streets of Liege even though she could not speak French. She never learnt the language properly and to the end of her life the mistakes she made would cause people to smile. The early years of Henriette’s marriage to Desire Simenon were dominated by fear of her Walloon mother-in-law, Marie Catherine Simenon, a woman ‘who entered the room like an icy draught’, who never kissed Georges and who never smiled because she was in permanent mourning for a child of her own who had died young. Both Desire and Henriette came from families of thirteen children. When the Simenon clan were seated for Sunday lunch there were twenty-five around the table. Georges’s maternal great-grandfather, ‘ Vieux-Papa , lived to be over 90.
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THE MAN WHO WASN’T MAIGRET
During Georges’s childhood his mother took in Russian students as lodgers and they taught him to read Gogol and Dostoevsky. When he was 15 his father became seriously ill and Georges was instructed by the family doctor to leave school immediately in order to support his family. He never benefited from family influence or connections. He became a newspaper reporter purely by chance after wandering into a newspaper office one day, driven mainly by curiosity. Later he arrived in Paris, penniless and without a friend, and was forced to tramp the streets looking for lodgings, to live off croissants and camembert cheese, and to take work as an office-boy. He never studied scientific police methods. He invented the character of Maigret one grey morning on the quayside of a Dutch canal after drinking one or three gin and bitters and gradually perceiving ‘the powerful and impassive bulk’ of a feasible commissaire de police looming through the mist. During the Second World War, while living in occupied France, a radiologist made a serious misdiagnosis and convinced Simenon that within two years he would be dead of heart disease. These were among the legendary milestones in Simenon’s life which were reproduced in his obituaries but which were largely fictional. There was usually a basis in fact, but the facts were embroidered.
Simenon’s life spanned the most destructive national conflicts that Europe has so far experienced, but as a Belgian citizen of partly Dutch and German descent he himself was inoculated against all national sentiment. He loved Liege and l le plat pays’ beyond it, but as for Belgium he once said that his country was ‘always occupied’. Yet Simenon, a man with no country, invented a country of his own which became familiar to over 500 million readers. They recognised his land as part of their world and his vision as a truthful and sometimes dreadful version of life in their century. Simenon’s country town, Simenon’s hotel rooms, could be frightening places where ordinary people were overpowered by superficially banal events, where every refuge proved illusory, where love was misdirected and turned to hate, where elderly couples attempted to poison each other, where family ties were founded on the inheritance of property, where one brother would deliver another up to his killers; where passion was divorced from affection, and where affection was often fatal.
Georges Simenon, after a certain age, also started to conceal his
tracks in other ways. A convivial man, known for his wealth, his large house, his obsessive interest in ‘ I’homme nu and his pressing need for the company of women, he actually started to become a recluse twenty-three years before his death, and spent his last sixteen years living in a cottage with one companion, giving very few interviews and seeing very few of his friends. He had made his fortune from his gift for evoking the colours and smells and urgency of life in bars and markets and streets in France, Flanders and North America, and yet, when he could have lived anywhere in the world, he chose the clinical surroundings of a country where ‘no one ever rang his doorbell without an invitation’. All his life he had surrounded himself with books and pictures and been proud of his craftsmanship as a writer. Yet at the end he moved his library into an apartment on the opposite side of town which he never visited, stored his pictures in a bank and said that he, was ‘almost ashamed’ of all the books he had written and no longer wished to see them. He went to the Belgian consulate and changed the description in his passport from ‘Novelist’ to ‘No profession’. The rooms he lived in were bare, lit by strip-lighting like a cheap hotel. There were no pictures on the walls, few ornaments on the shelves, no bookcases, no carpets on the floor. The furniture he chose was made from metal and plastic - he was convinced that wooden furniture harboured insects - and he rarely went into the garden unless it was to please a press photographer. His previous home had enjoyed a magnificent view of Lake Geneva, and this too he gave up without regrets. The new house was 500 metres from Lake Geneva but had no view at all. Simenon had been born into a large family and had always wanted a large family of his own, but when his children came to visit him in his final years they generally stayed in a hotel and he told them that they would learn of his death from the radio. He had acquired the habits of a man pursued.
Georges Simenon’s life was a series of flights and exiles. He left his native city at the age of 19 and when he left he promised himself that nothing in his future would resemble the world he had been surrounded by as a child. He kept that promise. But in almost everything he wrote the shadow of that childhood can be
seen.
PARTI