Panama he called on a man who had flooded the Spanish market with pirated editions of his books. Having armed himself with a pistol he told the man how much he was owed and said he wanted the money within one hour. The pirate publisher said he needed more time. Simenon said he would be paid in one hour or he would shoot him. The man got busy on the telephone and ‘within half an hour another man walked in with a bag containing the money’. The anecdote is the stuff of fantasy, but something like it may have occurred since Simenon did not generally invent the events in his life unless they had some basis in fact.
For Tigy the journey was an excitement and a distraction, and of course another opportunity to find subjects for her painting. But for Simenon it was more than a distraction; it was a flight. He had developed the habit of moving on whenever he felt trapped or perplexed. ‘All my departures have been flights,’ he was to write later. He fell in love with Tahiti and sometimes thought that he could happily have lived there, but it was an impracticable scheme since much of the attraction lay in the girls and, as it was, Tigy nearly caught him out one evening when he had given a farewell feast for the whole village and his companion had had to jump out of the bedroom window. On the voyage home from Australia there was another incident. Simenon fell completely in love with a young English girl who was travelling with her parents. He became so enamoured of her that he even tried to fight one of her younger admirers on the dance floor. This time even Tigy could not help noticing, and for the first time since leaving Liege she began to worry about her hold over him. The romance with the English girl remained platonic, the first time Simenon had experienced such a thing since those summers in Liege before he was a teenager. He took this to be confirmation of the seriousness of his intentions. They spent entire nights together talking in the girl’s cabin, and after his return he continued to write to her in England for some months. But she was 16 and it eventually became clear to him that she had found some other novelty to occupy her attention. His dreams of another flight had come to nothing.
They had left Boule in charge of La Cour-Dieu but on their return in September 1935 the Simenons moved to a luxurious apartment on the boulevard Richard-Wallace in Neuilly, opposite the Bois de Boulogne, cancelling plans, which had been drawn up by an
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architect, to build a magnificent hunting lodge in the forest of Orleans. The rooms were expensively redecorated for Tigy’s pleasure. Here, in October, Simenon wrote only his second novel of the year. The third came in December during a skiing holiday in the Haute-Savoie.
If 1935 turned out to be Simenon’s worst year since 1924, when he had written his first three pulp novels, 1936 was a little better. There was no world tour, or any foreign travel at all, and four books followed. None was written in the boulevard Richard-Wallace. In the spring Simenon went down to Porquerolles to write Le blanc a lunettes (Talatala ), then paid a final visit to the Chateau de la Cour-Dieu where he wrote Chemin sans issue (Blind Path). In the summer, again in Porquerolles, he wrote the untypically long Le testament Donadieu (The Shadow Falls), which was hailed as an early masterpiece, and finally, on another skiing holiday, this time in Igls in the Tyrol, he wrote L’homme qui regardait passer les trains, again acclaimed as a major work. Boule accompanied him to Igls and remembers that by then Simenon had become extremely jealous of her. If she ever said ‘that one isn’t bad-looking’ about a passing stranger Simenon would become ' 'furibard ’ (livid). In Igls the Austrian men were very ‘ galant ’ and correct. Simenon would sit at a table with Tigy and Boule and the Austrians would ask his permission to invite them to dance. Simenon always gave permission, and the Austrians danced beautifully, but Boule could see that Simenon was becoming ‘ enrage and she eventually told the men to stop asking.
Back in Paris Simenon seemed to recover from the loss of La Richardiere and from the restless attempts to escape the life he shared with Tigy. His drive to write had been restored, but his daily routine no longer satisfied him. He had returned to the hectic social habits of Montparnasse which he had fled in 1927, but now, against the background of Neuilly and the ChampsElysees, conducted on a grander, less innocent, scale. He bought an expensive car, a Delage Cabriolet. He dressed in blue suits, or sometimes in plus-fours, and favoured pearly grey Homburg hats and kid gloves. He went to Rome for his ties and to London, where he stayed at the Savoy Hotel, for his shirts. Every afternoon at 5 o’clock he would draw up outside Fouquet’s on the Champs-Elysees for the cocktail hour. His friends, no longer
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poor, were called Pagnol, Vlaminck, Foujita, Picasso and Rothschild. ‘I became a snob,’ he said later. He even had his own table at Maxim’s, and he divided his time between social life in Paris and working somewhere else. Tigy was perfectly happy about the arrangement but a part of Simenon found it unbearable.
In 1937 the infernal round started again. Once the skiing holiday was over in the Tyrol it was back to Paris, where in January Simenon wrote only the second book he achieved in the boulevard Richard-Wallace. He called it a novel, presumably to satisfy his contract with Gallimard, but it was nothing of the sort, as he himself admitted in the first sentence. (That did not stop Gallimard describing it as a Toman on the cover.) This was Les trois crimes de mes amis, and was based on recollections of the sordid poverty of Liege during the occupation.
On 19 February Simenon went down once more to Porquerolles to write M. La Souris. And then for five months he did nothing. He wrote no ‘Maigrets’, no short stories, no ‘pulps’ and no romans durs. Returning to the boulevard Richard-Wallace he found ‘actors and film producers on every floor’. Into the Delage Cabriolet and over to the terrace of Fouquet’s which he found packed with film producers and actors:
What was I doing there? I have no idea . . . [sometimes] having spent the whole afternoon at Fouquet’s I would drive to Le Bourget with Tigy, get on the first plane leaving and set off for Prague or Budapest, anywhere at all, without taking any baggage ... I was about to go under and I don’t know what saved me.
He returned to Porquerolles for long enough to write Touriste de bananes (Banana Tourist), a sequel to Donadieu but much shorter, which he finished on 8 June. That year saw a total of seven novels, apart from Les trois crimes de mes amis, a series which ended in December with one of his early sinister studies of an enclosed family, Les soeurs Lacroix (Poisoned Relations) A Then, in 1938, there was another block. To his deep dissatisfaction about living
* It was after writing this book that he announced that in ten years’ time he would win the Nobel prize.
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in Paris another distraction was added. He had become very worried about the possibility of war.
,In January Simenon had taken an entirely uncharacteristic step, involving himself in a political movement called ‘Sans Haine’ (Without Hatred), a pacifist organisation, dedicated to the belief that there would be another European war. Its founder was Lucien Descaves, an influential literary critic who had been one of Simenon’s first champions. The emblem of the movement was the dove of peace, and in associating himself with this pressure group Simenon was of course for the only time in his life making the classic commitment of the French intellectual. He was struck with the mocking slogan ‘To die for Danzig’ coined by the maverick leftist Marcel Deat, and he himself was in time to be farouchement munichois .*
All through the successive European crises of 1938, the Anschluss in March, the Sudetenland in August and Munich in September, Simenon was haunted by his memories of war and its consequences. He went to Porquerolles and then to an inn in the Dordogne where he wrote a novel, Le coup de vague, which he set in Marsilly near La Richardiere. Having buried himself in the countryside he set the book in his own ideal countryside. In May he returned to Paris, and it was there, one summer day, that his personal crisis came to a head. Whatever happened Simenon was determined not to be caught again in a large city during a war. He had been bombarded and half starved once, and knew that in time of defeat the place to be was in the country. He himself never admitted as much but it seems certain that in the impulsive decision he took one morning in the boulevard Richard-Wallace his memories of war must have played a decisive part. In Memoires intimes he set the scene in 1937 but it actually took place one year later. ‘Installed in my luxurious apartment in Neuilly I suddenly revolted against everything that surrounded me, against my role as a puppet in a world of puppets ... I was sickened by the life I was leading . . . One morning I said to Tigy, “I want to work
* There was nothing controversial about being munichois in France in 1938. When Paris-Soir invited its readers to subscribe to a fund to buy a house for Neville Chamberlain, in gratitude for the Munich agreement, over one million Frenchmen responded.
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somewhere else, in a little house which is my size, miles away from towns and tourists, with the sea close by.” ’ Tigy realised that he had had enough and agreed.
Again it was a return to the past. They started in the north of Holland in Delfzijl, driving there directly from Paris, then worked their way down the Channel coast. They passed through Holland, Belgium and northern France, then Normandy and Brittany. Eventually they reached the Vendee and the same thing happened as on the last occasion when they had been working their way northwards from Porquerolles in 1932, looking for mist: the light changed just before they got to La Rochelle. They were back by La Richardiere and Simenon knew it was where he wanted to be. Very depressed, they invited themselves for lunch at the house of a friend, Dr de Bechevel, and asked him if there were any houses for sale in the neighbourhood. He said he thought he might know of one. An old man, father of a girl who had once worked for them as a maid, was rumoured to be considering selling up and moving in with one of his children. It proved to be true. The house was 500 metres from the sea, quite close to La Richardiere, smaller and in every way ideal. The sale was completed one month later, in July. When they first saw it Simenon said to Tigy that it was ‘the sort of house children come to, to spend their holidays with their grandmother’. His words, he claimed later, influenced Tigy and within a few weeks, while the builders were still at work on the house in Nieul-sur-Mer, after fourteen years of marriage, she was pregnant. She, on the contrary, said that the reason she had delayed for so long was for Simenon’s sake, because he was not ready to settle down with a family.
Faced with the potential chaos of war Simenon had instinctively taken refuge in the only shelter he knew, family life. In August, just after they had bought the house in Nieul-sur-Mer, but before the builders were out of it, Simenon and Tigy were living in La Rochelle and had begun to re-establish themselves in the locality. In June their new dog, Loustic, won first prize in a local dog show. Then in July Simenon wrote a novel, Chez Krull (Chez Krull), which concerned the return to a French family of one of their German cousins, and the family tensions this relationship ignited, including memories of the First World War. In August, just at the time when Tigy discovered she was pregnant, the crisis
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broke in Sudetenland. This time war seemed certain, and on 29 September Simenon and Tigy set off for Brussels in their enormous chocolate-coloured Chrysler which he had bought in 1932. As a reservist he had been recalled to the colours, and the Belgian army was about to mobilise. As he told the story in Memoires intimes he was just about to cross the frontier at ‘La Panne’ (actually De Panne) when the customs officer was called away and came back to say that the radio had announced the news of the Munich agreement and he could turn round, which, after spending one night in Belgium, he did. It was a reprieve, but Simenon remained shaken. In the exhilaration of July he had written, as well as Chez Krull, nineteen short stories mostly set in the area of La Rochelle. Now, after the scare of Munich, he found himself silent again and wrote only one more book that year, interestingly enough set in Belgium, Le bourgmestre de Fumes (The Burgomaster of Fumes).
Simenon was happy to be back in La Rochelle and happy to find a society into which he had already been accepted. ‘The Rochelais are distrustful at first,’ he recalled later. ‘I am thinking of the bourgeoisie and the big families who own fishing fleets. They watch you for a bit and then one day they invite you to a tea party where everyone can examine you. And only then will they adopt you, and after that one can become very good friends.’ The Simenons became close friends with the notable shipping clans of La Rochelle, the Delmas and the Vieljeux, although he and they sometimes observed each other with a sardonic eye. Simenon was astonished to learn that the children of one of these families were not allowed to drink in a cafe in La Rochelle or Nieul in case they found themselves side by side with one of their father’s employees. Pierre Vieljeux, in his turn, recalled that Simenon came to see him one day and asked him how much he paid his domestic servants:
I gave him a figure and he told me that he paid twice that. I told him that was going to cost him a small fortune and he said, ‘Oh no. I have a system of fines. A soup that is not just right means a retention of two francs, a broken wheelbarrow two francs and so on. The result is that at the end of the month I only have to pay about half of the total.’
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Simenon hotly denied this story when it was repeated to him in 1985.
In 1928, when he bought the Ginette, Simenon had seen nothing of the world except Liege and Paris and a few weeks spent in the Limbourg, in Antwerp and Aix-la-Chapelle. By 1935 he had seen a large portion of the world. His travels had confirmed his theory that ‘ I’homme nu was the same the world over and he could now set his books either in exotic locations observed on his travels or in parts of France and Belgium which were already familiar to him. On the surface he was a worldly, cosmopolitan Parisian, but beneath this he retained his original preoccupations.
In Liege Simenon’s grandfather, Chretien, had died in 1927, aged 86, still living in the rue Puits-en-Sock, having survived his son Desire by over five years. In 1928 his brother Christian had married and set out for the Congo. In 1929 Henriette had remarried. Her new husband, born in the same year as Desire, was in many ways Henriette’s ideal husband. He was a state pensioner who had worked for many years for Nord Beige as a railway guard, and she was now free from her lifelong nightmare of poverty. l Le pere Andre’, as Henriette and later Simenon referred to him, although he had no children, had a little house on a hillside outside Liege, but he and Henriette lived at her house, the one she had been able to buy shortly after Desire’s death, 5 rue de l’Enseignement on Outremeuse.
‘Where was I when I heard the news?’ Simenon wrote in Lettre a ma mere. ‘Was I in France, Africa or the United States when I received your letter saying that you had just remarried?’ In fact Simenon was in none of those places. In October 1929, at the time of Henriette’s remarriage, he was in Holland, on the Ostrogoth. That same spring he had taken the boat through Liege. In September he had written Train de nuit and sent the manuscript on a fruitless journey to Fayard. In October the Ostrogoth had just been recaulked at Delfzijl and he had set out for Wilhelmshaven, a military port from which he was to be expelled by the German police in November. ‘I admit,’ he wrote, ‘that when I received the news I was shocked. I had such a worship of my father that I found it impossible to imagine you replacing him ... You sent me your new husband’s picture. He was a man of the Ardennes, thin and wizened, with jagged features and a blank look on his face. I only met him once . . . ’
Henriette married Joseph Andre in 1929. Andre died in 1949. If Simenon met him only once in twenty years it was almost certainly during a visit he made to his mother in 1934, during which he made a brutal remark to Henriette about the human race being divided into ‘ Jesseurs etJesses' (the spankers and the spanked), adding that he preferred to be ‘tm fesseur . That was the extent of the relationship between mother and son after the remarriage of the mother. Simenon noted that although his mother had replaced his father with another man she still used his father’s name. She now called herself Madame Andre Simenon. ‘That hurt me, ’ he wrote in Lettre a ma mere. ‘It was in my eyes a breach of trust. Another man had taken my father’s place in your house, in your bed, but you continued to use your first husband’s name. Was it because I was already famous? Did you look on my name as a lucky charm?’ In 1931, when Simenon began to write his romans durs, the remarriage of Henriette, for which he was never to forgive her, was merely the most recent injury she had inflicted on him and a reminder of all the earlier ones. The lines of battle which were to dominate his subconscious and his fiction for the rest of his life were now drawn up. What was to follow was a detailed settling of accounts.
Henriette would not have appreciated the implication made in the highly autobiographical novel L’Ane-Rouge (The Night Club; 193.3), that Desire had not in fact died in his office but in a nearby brothel. But worse was to come with the book which Simenon always described as his first roman, La maison du canal, written in January 1933. The book drew a prompt letter of extravagant praise from the Cubist poet and Catholic convert Max Jacob. The house of the title is the old Briill family house which Simenon had visited as a child during the First World War. It would have required only a short detour for the Ostrogoth to pass the original maison du canal on Simenon’s voyage into darkest Flanders in 1929. So, while he was planning the Maigret series, the seeds of his later work were also being sown. The characters who inhabit the maison du canal are based on several members of the Briill family, although they are not straightforward portraits. But it is the atmosphere of the house which is perhaps closest to actuality
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and to the memories of the visiting cousin from Liege. Simenon hardly altered the name of Neeroeteren, the nearest village.
The book opens in one of Simenon’s most evocative settings, the large railway station. In the first sentence his world springs fully formed into life: ‘Amid the crowd of travellers surging through the barrier, she was the only person who was not in a hurry.’ ‘She’ is called Edmee Van Elst, her father was a doctor who died suddenly, she is alone in the world, she is going to live with her Flemish cousins who have agreed to take her in, she feels embittered because her father’s death means that she will never be able to study medicine as she had planned. But she brings her textbooks with her and uses them to avoid doing the washing-up and to diagnose her cousins, her hosts, as hereditary syphilitics. This is already a Simenon. It is certainly also an early Simenon there are several clumsy changes in the point of view, but sex is already a potential source of shame and violence. It is the head of the Van Elst (or Brull) family, the dyke-master, who is syphilitic. One of his sons, a monstrous figure, has hydrocephalus and eventually rapes and strangles Edmee, the only woman he loves, and his first cousin, who by then is also his sister-in-law. As the tension in the family grows, Jef, the monster, kills and skins squirrels, cats and mice, which he subsequently eats. The family’s use of Flemish in the sombre farmhouse darkens the atmosphere still further in the eyes of Edmee. Sexual feelings are trapped within the isolated family. Edmee’s journey across Flanders, away from the lights and life of Brussels to the dank farm, is accompanied by a sense of doom. All the demons which haunted the childhood and adolescence of Simenon are present in this book, transposed to the imaginary world of his Flemish fathers. There is light and dark, city and Limbourg, Simenon and Briill, and the darkness enclosing a young person at the start of her life who travels in the wrong direction, and who is lost as a consequence. In La maison du canal , the canal itself is seen not as the giver of life to the surrounding countryside but as a threatening mass of water which can drown horses and ruin men following a moment’s inattention. The atmosphere of menace is so strong that when a policeman asks Jef why he has raped and murdered the only woman he ever loved he is able to reply, ‘What would you have done?’
Shortly after La maison du canal Simenon wrote another out
standing book, his fourth novel, Les fiangailles de M. Hire , which was made the basis for a cinema film as recently as 1989. This is a less autobiographical novel, but it nonetheless contains at least •one scene taken straight from Simenon’s life, that of an innocent man pursued by a vengeful mob on to the roof of a house where he is in danger of falling to his death. M. Hire is the son of a Jewish tailor. He lives alone, and the chief excitement in his life is watching a girl who works as an assistant in a cremerie, who possesses ‘ une poitrine exuberante ’ and who lives in the room opposite to his. The plot is simple. M. Hire’s obsession allows the girl to frame him for a murder which was in fact committed by her boyfriend. While this plot unfolds several of Simenon’s familiar themes are set out - the street life of Paris, the routine of daily life in a brothel, the near-prostitution and drudgery of domestic servants and shop assistants, the drama and hope offered by a railway station, the uncomfortable proximity of life in a jerrybuilt Paris apartment block and the methods of investigation used by the police. But this is the Paris police force seen from the suspect’s point of view, and it is a police force without Maigret. These policemen drink heavily on duty, take the shop assistant into a doorway for ‘a nice short time’ and even go to sleep on M. Hire’s bed while they are waiting to arrest him. The reader accustomed to Maigret has the impression that when in Les fiangailles de M. Hire a detective decides to suspect and investigate M. Hire, led on by the shop assistant and chiefly because the tailor’s son is a convenient quarry, a more realistic picture of the police in action is being drawn. When M. Hire goes to talk to the police voluntarily he is questioned by a chief-inspector who lifts his head to look at him for the first time, ‘his eyes still preoccupied with the previous case’. The police have a file on M. Hire, they know all about him, they interrupt him, they put the worst interpretation on everything, the best they can do for him is to tell him, ‘We won’t arrest you yet.’
It was during this period that Simenon’s work began to attract the attention of a more discerning readership. The letter from Max Jacob, written before Simenon had even signed the contract with Gallimard, when he was still known only as a popular novelist, referred to Simenon as ‘one of the greatest novelists in history’. Some time later Francois Mauriac wrote to him, ‘I know nearly all your work . . . you have the humility of a great talent.
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One only has to cast an eye over one of Robert Brasillach’s novels to understand why he detests yours. You have everything which he hasn’t got, the gift of being able to create living people in a living atmosphere . . And in 1938 Mauriac was joined by the doyen of the higher criticism, Andre Gide, whose first surviving letter to Simenon notes that ‘a curious misunderstanding exists about you: you are regarded as a popular writer but your books are not intended for the general public but for ... the discriminating’.
The direction in which Simenon’s imagination was heading was already clear. His original interest in detective stories had grown while he was a police court reporter, and he based his literary novels on the same sort of material. In the age of mass communication Simenon is the supreme modern French novelist of the fait divers, the brief news item. He wanted, like Balzac, to portray the lives of the ‘ petites gens’ and, having started as a reporter in the great tradition of French newspaper crime writing, he knew to what extent the fait divers illuminated the unsuspected dramas in the lives of ordinary people. The world of his novels is the world of police stations, mortuaries, traffic accidents, suicides, criminal courts and lunatic asylums. Unlike so many reporters drawn to this sort of reporting by its vivid fictional possibilities, Simenon was the exception, the reporter who went on to make fictions out of it. In taking faits divers as his raw material Simenon was, of course, also following in the tradition of Stendhal, who had done the same in Le rouge et le noir, of Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, and of Gide in Les caves du Vatican or Lesfaux-monnayeurs. But one of his early novels was based a little too closely on real life and resulted in a libel action.
The case followed the publication of Le coup de lune, a novel written in 1933, directly after M. Hire and after his return from Africa, which Fayard had published in the same year. It is set in colonial Libreville and one of its principal characters is called Adele Renaud, a Frenchwoman who keeps the only European hotel in town. Adele,a widow, is l genereuse de sa personne ’, and one night a boy, an African servant, who has been blackmailing her, is found murdered. The public prosecutor delivers the telling line, ‘We will soon find a guilty man,’ meaning a black man. The hero, who has become one of Adele’s innumerable lovers, a young man newly arrived from Europe, denounces the plot by which a young
black man is framed for the murder and, over-affected by West Africa like a character from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is sent home suffering from dementia muttering, ‘It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist.’
Unfortunately, Adele was identified as a portrait by a real widow, Mme Mercier, a hotel keeper in Libreville whose hotel, like the hotel in the book, was called the Hotel Central. She came back to France in May 1934 to give evidence in the libel case, but Simenon had chosen one of the most talented and sarcastic advocates in Paris, Maitre Maurice Garmon (who was already a friend of his), and Maitre Gargon destroyed Mme .Mercier with his cross-examination. The weakness of her case was that she could claim the book was about her only by admitting to the accuracy of the portrait. Maitre Gargon told the court that it was probably the first time they had witnessed a woman come halfway round the world to tell them that it was true that ‘she had once been a whore in the place des Ternes’. Mme Mercier lost her case, and a lot of money, and what was left of her reputation, and Simenon’s triumphant progress continued unhindered.
Simenon’s brushes with the law of libel confirm the extent to which he depended for his plots on actuality. He was the opposite of a ‘fantastic’ novelist; his fiction was genuinely fictional, but nonetheless rooted in the world around him. Fiction and fact enjoyed an extremely close relationship in his imagination, and one which was eventually to cause him problems which were considerably more serious than a libel action. Throughout the series of forty-four romans durs which Simenon wrote between 1931 and September 1939 there is a consistent autobiographical strain. In L’Ane-Rouge, written in 1933, the hero is a young journalist on a local newspaper called the Gazette de Nantes. His mother is forever in tears, his father returns home in the evening to read his newspaper seated in a wicker armchair; his father’s sudden death leaves the young man desolate. Much of the plot of Le locataire (The Lodger, 1932) is set in the kitchen of a house where the mother of the hero’s girlfriend feeds her foreign student lodgers. The Universal Exhibition held in Liege in 1905 is mentioned in Vevade (The Disintegration of J.P.G; 1932). A cargo steamer plying between Matadi and Bordeaux is the setting for 45° a Vombre (Aboard the Aquitaine; 1934). The hero of Vassassin (The Murderer; 1935), a married man, sleeps with his wife’s maid.
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In II pleut, bergere . . . (Black Rain ; 1939) a mob drives a hunted man on to a roof (again). The hero of Touriste de bananes (1936) has a passionate affair with a native girl while visiting Tahiti. And alcoholism plays an essential part in the lives of numerous characters, including heroes, and particularly in Quartier negre (1934), Les inconnus dans la maison (The Strangers in the House-, 1939) and Bergelon (The Country Doctor, 1939). But if it is clear that autobiography was an essential part of Simenon’s fictional apparatus, just occasionally the apparatus which changed fact into fiction failed to operate, notably in the case of Les trois crimes de mes amis, which he wrote in Paris in January 1937.
The trial of Ferdinand Paul Joseph Deblauwe had taken place in October 1933, that of Hyacinthe Danse in December 1934. Two years later Simenon attempted to write a novel about these two men, but succeeded only in writing his first volume of autobiography. Presumably the links with his own life were in this case too numerous and too strong to fictionalise. Deblauwe, Simenon’s old friend, was arrested by CommissaireDivisionnaire Guillaume, Simenon’s new friend. Deblauwe had nearly got away with the murder of the gigolo Carlos de Tejada by making the shooting look like a suicide. The forensic investigator who failed to exclude this possibility was Dr Paul, a friend of Simenon’s and, of course, in his fictional persona, a friend of Maigret’s. Deblauwe killed the gigolo in the rue de Maubeuge near the Gare du Nord in July 1931. Then he took the train to Liege, and by the time the body was discovered four days later Deblauwe was hiding with his parents on Outremeuse at 44 rue des Recollets, the house where Simenon had so often called for him on his way to work. He stayed there for some months while the trail went cold but was eventually arrested and interrogated by Guillaume in August 1932. (In Le pendu de St Pholien Simenon had, of course, sent Maigret to Liege to investigate the criminal background of his own childhood.) Simenon did not attend Deblauwe’s trial in Paris, though he followed it closely. But he did not want to sit in the reporters’ box while the man he had so often sat beside in another reporters’ box sat in the dock. And besides, as he wrote in Les trois crimes de mes amis, ‘It occurred to me that Deblauwe risked losing his head and I had no right to go to court and risk upsetting him or risk him losing the slightest drop of his sang-froid. ’ When Simenon looked at the photographs
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of Deblauwe in court, calmly denying his guilt, he thought that if he had only had his notebook in hand he could have been any court reporter at any trial.
In the first forty-four romans durs, the guillotine plays a role in one, alcoholism in two, lunacy in one, the seduction of domestic servants in three, the association of sex with death or paralysis in three, and suicide in twelve. Three of the suicides are by hanging. This was the world, as noted by his friend Vlaminck, of ‘seedy hotels’ and ‘men dragged down by misery’, and in each case Simenon entered it by the process of total immersion in the personality of his leading character. He had discovered a means of writing fiction whereby he did not imagine his fictions, he lived them. He subconsciously imitated the walks of his characters, he drank up to two litres of red wine a day while writing about them, he lost weight nonetheless, he possessed the world he was creating. He went into ‘a sort of trance’ which was too exhausting to keep up for more than a few days at a time. The trance could not be broken or the characters would die. He left the trance when the book was finished and his subsequent revisions of the text were perfunctory. He knew when it was time to start a novel because he felt uneasy, ‘mal dans sa peau\ and he knew he would not feel better until he was rid of the phantoms beginning to form in his subconscious. The process of creation would usually start on a walk, and be ‘triggered’ by a colour or a smell. This would remind him of a previous time in another place, sometimes another country, when that colour or that smell had been associated with a view or a house, or a situation between two people, and he would begin to see the setting of his novel. The characters were at first less important; they were ordinary people, they might come from any walk of life, what was important was what was about to happen to them. The events which were about to overwhelm them were the expression of the anguish in his own mind which had led to his original sense of unease.
Simenon’s methods of preparing for the ‘Maigrets’ and the romans durs were identical. In both cases he took a manila envelope (his famous ‘enveloppe jaune’) and used it to sketch out the biographical details of his principal characters, and the geographical locations of the story. He needed to have that clear in his head before he started to write. But from then on the experience was completely different. There was less and less strain for him in
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writing the ‘Maigrets’. They were not an expression of inner anguish, he did not need the ‘trigger’ or the ‘immersion’ and after a while he did not suffer the exhaustion which was associated with the writing of the romans durs. If anything the return to Maigret’s world was an expression of an inner happiness.
There are further biographical references in two novels Simenon wrote concerning family life shortly before the outbreak of war. In December 1937 he finished Les soeurs Lacroix, his account of suffocating unhappiness in a family living in Bayeux. The epigram of the book is ‘Every family has a skeleton in the cupboard’, which was to become one of his favourite sayings and one which he regarded as ‘typically English’. It is the story of a painter, Emmanuel Vernes, who lives with his wife, Mathilde, their sick daughter, Genevieve, and his wife’s elder sister, the widow Leopoldine, or ‘Poldine’. The household is dominated by Poldine, whose power rests on the fact that she too was seduced by Emmanuel and that her sister’s husband is the real father of her own daughter, who also lives in the house. Emmanuel is reduced to helplessness when his wife discovers the truth, and eventually tries to poison both sisters with minute doses of arsenic, a move which Poldine discovers almost at once. Shortly afterwards Emmanuel hangs himself in the attic where for many years he has spent most of the time painting. After his death the sisters are able to look at his pictures. They discover that there are hundreds of them, all of the same scene, the roofscape visible from the attic window. Emmanuel’s death leaves his beloved daughter, Genevieve, even more isolated than before, dying from an undiagnosed illness. Les soeurs Lacroix is a study of hatred enclosed within the walls of a family home, but also of a sexual secret within a family. There are references to Simenon’s own domestic arrangements,* but it is also the story of a man whose life ends in suicide by hanging, and of a man who treats his private anguish, as Bernard de Fallois has pointed out, by locking himself up in a room at the top of the house where he obsessively repeats the same work of art throughout his working life. In that sense it is one of the earliest ‘prophetic’ novels of Simenon. It is also one of the very few Simenon novels to contain a character (Genevieve)
* In later life Simenon wrote that he had been secretly in love with Tita, Tigy’s younger sister, when he married Tigy.
who prays devoutly. At the end of the book the sisters are left alone in occupation of only part of the house and the last words are, ‘And their hatred became that much deeper, that much denser, that much heavier, that much better, as the space enclosing it was reduced. ’
Simenon’s other pre-war study of family life may have provided a more direct indication of one part of the anguish which he himself felt as he listened to the sounds of approaching war. In Chez Krull Hans Krull, the hero, is German. He has French cousins, also called Krull, and the town in which they live is not named but is quite clearly based on Liege, where in reality the Belgian-Dutch family of Briill, his mother’s family, lived, not far from their German cousins, also called Briill. There are numerous references in the descriptions of the Krull family to the Briills. Joseph Krull, the French cousin of Hans, is a medical student, as were two of Simenon’s Briill cousins. Joseph’s father is a lockkeeper living in the district of Coronmeuse, where Simenon’s lock-keeper uncle, Gilles, lived in real life. When a girl is found in the canal, raped and murdered, the suspicions of the inhabitants of the previously peaceful little town centre on Hans Krull, the stranger, the boche, and then on the whole Krull family. Joseph, the French cousin, is arrested, Hans is expelled from the Krull household and ‘old Krull’, the head of the family, hangs himself, again in the attic. It is a story of a family whom neighbours identify as being untrustworthy because they have divided loyalties, and who are consequently expelled from the heart of their own community, the fate of many Flemish families of Liege during and after the First World War.
In January 1939 Simenon wrote Les inconnus dans la maison, one of his masterpieces and possibly his greatest book about an alcoholic. Hector Loursat is a failure and something of a local figure of fun. He is a barrister who drinks all the waking hours God sends him and who lives a solitary life in the big family house in Moulins in central France. When his wife left him he lost the will to continue with his profession and took to the bottle, invariably a bottle of rather good burgundy. Loursat lives surrounded by books and old wine. He chain-smokes. His grey moustache is yellowed with nicotine. His housekeeper cooks for him carefully enough but despises him for his untidiness and careless habits. When he is drunk, which he is every night, he goes to sleep in his
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armchair and turns in his sleep ‘like a boar in its wallow . When he goes to sleep he makes sure two things are to hand - a poker for the stove and a glass for his bottle. Loursat is a drunk but he remains mentally alert. He is apart from the world but he watches it. He prefers his ‘good stove, some red wine — dark red — and some books, all the books in the world’. The house is full of books; he chooses them at random and starts reading in the middle and loses his place and fetches another. ‘He knew everything! He’d read everything! He could stay in his corner, alone, and chuckle at the idiots in the world.’ And then one night, slumbering over his bottle, he hears a pistol shot inside the house. Mounting the stairs to the vast, abandoned floors above he finds a fresh corpse in a bedroom that, to his knowledge, has not been used for years. And Loursat discovers numerous other things. That his daughter, who lives in the house, and with whom he is on extremely bad terms, and who may not - for all he knows — even be his daughter, entertains a band of friends there and that their activities verge on the criminal. One of them, his daughter’s boyfriend, is charged with the murder on grounds that Loursat finds inadequate, by professional colleagues who are far more successful than he is but whom he despises. So Loursat dusts off his robe and defends the boy himself, triumphantly, and then returns to his dark red wine. ‘As a young man Loursat had already been solitary, out of pride. He had thought that one could be solitary with someone else. Then one day he came home and found the house empty . . .’ His success does not change his habits; Loursat remains outside the town’s circle of successful figures, he carries the wound of his unhappiness with him still, he is still most content with his books and his bottles, but he is now slightly less solitary and can sometimes be found drinking in a bar in town rather than alone in his room.
Such was the world in which Simenon found himself taking refuge when he began to feel ‘mal dans sa peau . Simenon was a sleepwalker as a child and he remained a sleepwalker all his life; he himself was convinced that he did not create his fictional world from his imagination, but that it came from his overdeveloped subsconscious. He would leave the real world for the unreal one, the sordid fate of his hopeless characters would dominate his own days, he would possess these people and bring them to life and accompany them to their fate. And then he would stop writing
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and emerge. The denouement in a Simenon book is quite often abrupt: a suicide, as in La porte (The Door) or Les complices (The Accomplices) a confession - for inadequate reasons; a decision by a man who has started a new life to return to his family ( Lafuite de M. Monde ; Monsieur Monde Vanishes). And one senses that it has been imposed by an author who could no longer stand the strain and who had to leave these phantoms and return to the real world - the Delage Cabriolet, the fishing boat in Porquerolles, the terrace at Fouquet’s. But as time passed the phantoms began to notice the signs of an impending denouement and they declined to be abandoned. They started coming into the real world too.