I shall never achieve the perfection you have arrived at in life. You (both) inspire me, give me the courage to believe that all is still possible.
Letter, Henry Miller to Denise and Georges Simenon
(November 1960)
When he left Shadow Rock Farm on 19 March 1955 Simenon had no clear idea where he would settle next. In Memoires intimes he described his decision to depart as a permanent one and wrote that as he drove away from the house which he had loved and which he would never see again he had not the heart to look back. But Marc’s headmaster at Darrow School, New Lebanon, was expecting Marc to return in the fall and Simenon and Denise did not pack up the furniture in Shadow Rock Farm. The house was left ready for immediate reoccupation. So, uncertain about the future, Simenon took the heavily loaded Dodge estate into the New York dockyards and boarded the Liberte. Denise, who had been 25 when he had met her in this city, was now 35. Johnny was 6, Marie-Jo was 2 and Marc 16. Tigy at least was delighted to be returning to France. She had been increasingly isolated and unhappy in Connecticut. Boule was happy to be with the children wherever that was.
They went briefly to Paris but by April had moved into a house called La Gatouniere, in Mougins, between Cannes and Grasse. It was here, during the course of the summer, that they decided not
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to return to America, although two of the children, Johnny and Marie-Jo, always hoped that one day they would go back to the happiness of Shadow Rock Farm. They stayed at La Gatouniere for six months (with Tigy and Marc nearby) while Simenon wrote two romans - one set in Connecticut, one in the Midi - and two ‘Maigrets’. ‘Why did I choose Cannes?’ Simenon asked himself later, and decided that it must have been because he did not like living in a big city such as Nice or Marseille, but still wanted a place where Denise would have a certain amount of life around her. He also wanted a place where there was a full range of medical facilities, explaining to Denise that this was essential for the children, although he was just as anxious about her and, not least, about himself. In June, while they were still at La Gatouniere, Denise suffered a miscarriage. When she had recovered they set off on a ‘tour de France ’ looking for a place where they might settle. They went to Marseille, Bergerac, La Rochelle and Les Sables d’Olonne. They drove past Tigy’s house at Nieul and ended up back in the Midi at Porquerolles. All this time Tigy and Marc were living in a hotel near Cannes and Marc, who was not ready to enter a French lycee, was receiving private tuition. The tour provided no solutions and so in the autumn Simenon and Denise moved to a magnificent villa above Cannes itself called ‘Golden Gate’, which they rented for the next ten months, the last months that Simenon was to live in France.
In 1950 Thomas Narcejac had published one of the first fulllength critical studies of Simenon’s work, entitled Le cas Simenon. He was concerned with the ‘paradox’ that such a popular and prolific writer could be worth serious critical attention. Simenon’s election to the Academie Royale had done him no harm among critics, but it had not compensated for the damage done by his departure from Gallimard, and his persistence with Commissaire Maigret. By moving from Gallimard to Nielsen, and flouting the advice of Gide, Simenon was saying that if he was to have literary success it would be on his own terms. Now, a francophone writer of Belgian origin who had returned from ten years of American exile, he was out of the intellectual mainstream. In 1947, the year when Simenon had predicted that he would win the Nobel prize, it went to a francophone novelist, but he was called Andre Gide. In Simenon’s lifetime five other French writers were to be selected for the Nobel: Mauriac, Camus, St John Perse, Sartre and Claude
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Simon. Simenon was not pleased about this. In 1961 he wrote in his diary that he probably wouldn’t accept the Nobel, even it were
offered. It was too late. ‘Let them f-off and leave me in peace. ’
But in 1964 he was abusing the Nobel jury as ‘the cretins who still haven’t awarded me their prize’. While he still had hopes of winning the Nobel he could not always hide his bitterness about the lack of critical acclaim. The critics remained uncertain what to write about Simenon, tending to seize on his supposed deficiencies, but his fellow writers were more and more generous in their praise. And as time passed Simenon no longer wanted literary success, even on his own terms, and grew to despise the ‘literary’ world which continued to withhold its adulation. His son, Johnny, remembers that Simenon’s contempt for the world of honours and medals was genuine, but says that his father also felt disappointed that he had not had more recognition for what he considered he was good at, not ‘literature’ but the art of novelmaking. Two more serious studies of his work were published during this period, one by Claude Mauriac entitled L’alitterature contemporaine (1958), and Bernard de Fallois’s Simenon (1961). Mauriac’s criticism was to some extent in sympathy with Narcejac, arguing that Simenon’s work was of literary value even though it was in a new category of ‘ alitterature’ , or anti-literature. Simenon was much better pleased with de Fallois’s argument, which took exactly the opposite line, insisting that the merit of a good writer lay not in spite of the pleasure he gave but because of it. De Fallois noted that the contemporary novel was too often a work of philosophy, a work in which the critical devoured the imaginative, where the power of analysis put a brake on the imagination. Simenon, he wrote, stood in solitary defiance of this trend.
Simenon also took some comfort from the continuing stream of unsolicited tributes he received from fellow writers, some of them critics of the first rank. In March 1955 T.S. Eliot wrote to thank him for sending a copy of L’horloger d’Everton :
I had already read [it] ... I am proud and happy to possess this copy with your dedicace ... I am always particularly fascinated when I find you returning to one of your fundamental themes . . . [L’horloger] treats the problem of father and son from the point of view of the father seeking the son, the opposite
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approach to that of either Le destin des Malou or La neige etait sale.
Eliot twice adds in ink, beside his typed text, a rather anxious, ‘is it not?’ Sacha Guitry wrote in the same year of how he and his wife were tearing Simenon’s books out of each other’s hands. “‘No, that one’s mine this evening.” “I forbid you to tell me the plot.” “It’s two o’clock, for goodness’ sake put out the light.’” The image of the Simenon reader continuing throughout the night until he or she had finished was a common one. De Fallois had quoted Stendhal in its support: ‘What use is a novel if it doesn’t pass the night?’
Henry Miller continued his running commentary of appreciation:
Few writers are able to express this everyday, intimate, universal realm of thought and sensation. It makes me envious . . . It’s what you leave out that makes your books so full of reverberations. You create a real and honest collaboration with your readers. I would like nothing better than to some day write a book like this [ Antoine et Julie] ... It makes me realise how much I have omitted from my huge books!
Somerset Maugham was sufficiently intrigued by Simenon to travel from the Villa Mauresque for lunch. They had a number of interests in common, apart from the creation of popular fiction: money, tax and how to avoid it, health and begging letters. Also the dismissive views of the higher criticism. In his autobiography Maugham gives an account of this lunch and adds what, from his pen, was the ungrudging praise of a contemporary and rival: ‘For my part I know of no better way to pass the time on a plane from Nice to Athens or, say, from Rangoon to Singapore, than to read one of Simenon’s novels.’ Simenon remembered Maugham’s visit with mixed feelings, not because he considered his praise grudging but because Maugham had coached Denise in how to screw more money out of film companies when negotiating contracts, and Simenon considered that the advice was disastrous and led to the loss of several potentially valuable deals.
Simenon retained the instinctive respect for Gide that Maigret had for ‘Madame la Comtesse’, the chatelaine of Saint-Fiacre.
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Maigret, who had been brought up on the estate, the son of the steward, never escaped from ‘the shadow of the chateau’, and Simenon, who had left school at 15, never considered that he could be the intellectual equal of Gide. Gide’s letters continued until shortly before his death. The last that survives is dated 29 November 1950:
How many people still don’t know about you! When they come to me to ask, ‘What should I read of his?’ I reply, ‘Everything.’ What Narcejac, despite his well-motivated praise, fails to emphasise sufficiently is that kind of intoxication which overcomes the reader as soon as he opens one of your books; and which I have experienced again on rereading you. Without any possibility of being surprised, my delight is as strong, stronger even, than on first reading. What better guarantee of immortality! Dear Simenon, I am very fond of you and send you all my love.
When Simenon was in America, Gide had written suggesting the possibility of visiting him, ‘provided that he was able to travel incognito ’, as Simenon recalled later. This comment summons up a wonderful picture of Gide struggling to preserve his incognito among the ranchers, sheriff s deputies, whores and wetbacks who were Simenon’s neighbours in Arizona. Oddly enough the surviving letters in which Gide proposed such a trip (dated 12 and 16 February 1948) do not mention travelling incognito, and ill-health swiftly prevented the Nobel laureate’s fame from being put to the test. Gide was getting slightly vague at this point in his life, with his ‘heart flagging’ as he wrote in his last letter, and in 1948 he ‘discovered’ Le testament Donadieu, forgetting that he had first praised it in 1939. To the end he talked of putting the finishing touches to his study of Simenon, which was never published (and what he had already written seems to have disappeared). However he confessed that he and his friends were all ‘ atteints d’une simenonite aigue to the last, and he too drew a picture of a household absorbed in Lettre a mon juge, II pleut, bergere . . Le haut mal (The Woman of the Grey House), Le bourgmestre de Fumes, Le cheval blanc (The White Horse Inn) and Les fian^ailles de M. Hire.
Simenon addressed the question of whether or not he was a literary figure in 1960, in his radio talk on Balzac. It is an unexpec
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ted fact that this 7000-word biographical essay took him one month to write, a period of time in which he was capable of writing three novels. Although he was always irritated with comparisons between his work and Balzac’s the essay is notable for the number of similarities he traces between his destiny and that of his subject. Recalling that Le pere Goriot was written in three days Simenon asked whether ‘the need to create other men, to draw out of oneself a crowd of different characters’ was ‘found in a happy man, a man merged into a little world made to his own measure’:
Why struggle to live the life of others if one is self-assured and if one has no need to rebel against oneself . . . Isn’t peace of mind given to a child by its mother’s love and its love for its mother?
Balzac, wrote Simenon, was haunted by the conviction of his own mediocrity; the only solution was to achieve something marvellous. He was attracted to older women and he married one - ‘Motherly women, sweet, forgiving, capable, who would not only love him but admire him.’ He too was spurned by his peers, in his case the Academie Frangaise. In order to succeed at his work Balzac had been obliged to wreck his life. On only one point did Simenon find no echo in the life of Balzac. Balzac apparently thought that, in order to develop a superior intelligence, it was necessary to be chaste:
One saw him in neither the theatres nor the cafes. He did not take a mistress, he had no sexual relations and he never seems to have had recourse to the filles faciles who teemed in the arcades and gardens of the Palais-Royal.
There seems to be a note of genuine puzzlement rather than admiration in Simenon’s text at this point. But the most important similarity concerned Balzac’s unloving mother. ‘A novelist,’ Simenon wrote, ‘is a man who does not like his mother, or who never received mother-love.’’ And he concluded that Balzac’s need for glory had been provoked by his need for revenge, and that his achievements were based on his shame at his own mediocrity. Balzac felt inferior because he had not been loved. The similarity
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to the boy from Liege who had once told his mother that he would never be one of the world’s fessees is clear.
Perhaps the most important change that came over the public personality of Simenon on his return from America was that he no longer felt he had anything to lose, and with Gide dead he no longer had anyone to please. He was a ‘made’ man by now, he would not change. For better or worse the lines of his achievement were fixed, and he took on a somewhat truculent air. While living in Cannes he resumed his friendship with Georges Clouzot, who lived in St Paul-de-Vence and whom Simenon regarded as the ‘real’ director of Les inconnus dans la maison (he had in fact adapted the book for the film). Simenon now went out of his way to draw attention to this film, which was no longer blacklisted and which had been among his principal reasons for leaving France in 1945. In 1956 he read an introduction to a gramophone recording of Raimu’s big speech in the film, the final speech for the defence made by the drunken barrister Loursat, and he described it as ‘this good and sturdy film of Henri Decoin’s’.
Clouzot and Simenon used to make regular visits to the striptease clubs in Cannes, usually in the company of Denise, and Simenon became friends with the girls. (In Memoires intimes he recalled how he used to accompany one of them to the changing rooms above the stage while the other was performing and take her amid the frocks.) It was by his own account a carefree relationship; after the show he would accompany his friend home, dandle her baby on his knees and listen to the story of her life while she cooked supper. The anecdote suggests, wrongly, that one of the reasons why Simenon kept in touch with prostitutes, and girls on the verge of prostitution, was to gather material for his novels. But it was from the friendship with the girl in Cannes that he based one of his romans of the period, Strip-tease (Striptease). In the novel the relations between the dancers and their audience are not always so friendly, and one of the girls, the heroine, having narrowly failed to commit first murder and then suicide, takes to the streets and is bumped off by her Arab pimp.
Clouzot wanted to make Strip-tease into a film and together he and Simenon wrote a scenario, but once again the project failed. However Simenon received some compensation for his lifelong difficulties with the cinema when he was asked to become president first of the Brussels and then of the Cannes film festivals. His
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appearance at Cannes in 1960 was one of the great publicity triumphs of his career and a spiritual victory for the truculent people of the world. Simenon gave a hint of what was to follow when he told the organisers that, contrary to tradition, he would not be accepting any hospitality during the festival and would pay his own expenses. At the first meeting of the jury he was officially appointed president by M. Fabre-Lebret, the secretary of the organising committee. Simenon had carefully studied the rules and silently noted that this was a breach of them because the jury was supposed to elect its own president. At the next meeting Fabre-Lebret was once more present and Simenon politely asked him to leave as he was not a member of the jury. He did so, although no president had ever expelled him before. Simenon had also noted that among the jurors was his friend Henry Miller, who seldom watched the films, preferring to play ping-pong, which was his latest passion. Miller’s vote was therefore in his pocket. He also had his own vote and his casting vote, and he quickly formed an alliance with a female juror.
During the festival Simenon fell under the spell of Giulietta, the beautiful wife of Fellini, whose film La dolce vita was among the contenders. He also met and immediately liked her husband. He claimed later to have practised alcoholic abstinence during the festival, which was probably true, and in the final judging he needed all his wits about him to impose his choice, La dolce vita , on a lobby led by the juror from French government television, which favoured a film by Antonioni which was judged more ‘artistic’ and which was certainly less scandalous. When the judging was over Simenon emerged with the results to find FabreLebret waiting for him, together with an official from the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign ministry. Fabre-Lebret had already let him know that it was essential, for diplomatic reasons, to give one of the major prizes to an American film, a practice which has become a tradition. The tw o fonctionnaires were not at all pleased with Simenon’s list, but in those days it was still the president of the jury who announced the prizes and there was nothing they could do. Just before parting the curtains Simenon was able to whisper the good news to the adorable Giulietta, and so it was that he stepped out in front of the cameras and lights of the world’s press to make his solemn announcement with an enormous lipstick mark on his cheek. A government-inspired claque
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was waiting for him and the victory of La dolce vita was greeted with boos, rattles and whistles while Giulietta sobbed on Simenon’s shoulder. Fellini himself enjoyed the fuss immensely and the occasion was the beginning of one of the great friendships of Simenon’s later life. But he was never again asked to preside over Cannes or any other jury by the French government. This did not bother him at all. Simenon had a genuine and deep loathing of President de Gaulle which grew with the great man’s return to power in 1958. He was opposed to the whole concept of ‘the hero’. In Quand j’etais vieux he compared de Gaulle to Napoleon and said that he should be locked up. Some comments he subsequently made about Mme de Gaulle were removed from one of his Dictees by his publisher.
One of the reasons why Simenon had agreed to go to Cannes was that he thought it would amuse Denise, and he was right. They had a suite with a balcony in the Hotel Carlton, what Simenon called his ‘usual second-floor suite’, overlooking La Croisette and the plage. Every night they had to be escorted the few hundred metres to the Palais des Festivals through excited crowds hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars, and Denise showed no signs of her usual tension and fragility. But in general the move to Europe had not effected the change in Denise’s health that her husband had hoped for, and behind the facade which he had erected of happy family man and immensely successful writer, a domestic catastrophe was building up. It was while they were living at Golden Gate, outside Cannes, that their son John, aged 5, became aware that his parents were not getting on. ‘That was when I first saw the spaghetti hitting the wall,’ he says.
The events that turned Simenon’s passionate love for Denise into an equally passionate hatred took place over the years from 1956 to 1965. After two years of indecision following their arrival on the Cote d’Azur Simenon and Denise finally decided to settle this time it was to be for the rest of their lives - in Switzerland. There were several reasons for this decision. One was because of the children. They wanted them to be given a good education in two languages, and to have the best medical facilities close at hand. Another was that they both liked Lausanne, with its striking position on the shore of Lake Geneva, directly opposite the French Alps. A third reason, which Simenon never mentioned,
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was tax. Simenon was wary of the French tax authorities and Switzerland offered advantages to people who were wealthy enough to qualify for them.
In July 1957 they took the Chateau d’Echandens, outside Lausanne, on a six-year renewable lease, not having found anywhere suitable that was for sale. The chateau was both a fortified castle and a large country house. It stands on a hillside, dominating a valley which is full of vineyards, in a position which gives a splendid view of the lake and the French Alps; there is a little village at its gates. They had found Echandens after making numerous tours around the countryside in a taxi. Simenon was careful to choose a very slow taxi-driver, which in a city where the traffic moves with sedate predictability suggests how much he had aged mentally since Arizona, only seven years before. Marc was by now 17, and about to take his baccalaureat at the lycee in Nice; Johnny was 6; Marie-Jo was 3. By the time they left the house seven years later the marriage of Simenon and Denise was virtually over. The most remarkable thing about this period, one of the most stressful in his life, was that throughout it his work continued at its normal rate, and the quality if anything improved. It may be significant that although Simenon’s characters sometimes visit Switzerland ( Maigret voyage, Le train de Venise (The Venice Train), La disparition d’Odile (The Disappearance of Odile ) he never set one of his looks in his last country of residence. Among the finest books he managed to write at Cannes and Echandens were En cas de malheur (In Case of Emergency), Le fls (The Son), Le President (The President), Le passage de la ligne and Les anneaux de Bicetre. His usual habit was to sign his books on the last page with the date and the place in which they had been written. In the case of the books written in Chateau d’Echandens he signed each of them ‘Noland’, a habit which mystified his readers for many years. He himself later stated that he had done this to avoid the possibility of casual visits from readers, but Denise said that he had actually been more concerned about Swiss tax laws, and had been misled by Charlie Chaplin into thinking that it was inadvisable for foreign residents to earn money while in the country.
Simenon was by now able to live in some style. Advised by the prefet de police in Nice to get rid of his vast Dodge from Connecticut because it was too big for the little streets of Cannes and because it attracted too much attention, Simenon had bought
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not one but three 4-horsepower Renaults, and studded Denise’s model with every gadget in the showroom. Simenon also bought her a little house in Cagnes-sur-Mer which they were supposed to use as a refuge together. It was linked by a bell to the restaurant opposite. The only time they tried to use it the man who lit a fire to welcome them managed to set the chimney alight. They never tried to use it again. Later, in a day of madness at the Geneva motor show, Simenon bought first a Chrysler and then a RollsRoyce, paying for each with a cheque. Denise shopped at Lanvin, Hermes and Cartier, and went to Weill for her furs. Their new house was guarded by a high iron gate. The chateau had a courtyard, a tower, a dungeon and a range of outbuildings and garages as well as a walled park with lawns and trees. Such a large house needed servants and they started with a staff of six which gradually increased to eleven. At this time too Denise took on a secretary, Joyce Aitken, and soon a second secretary, Blima Silberberg. Simenon called all his staff by their surnames but he did not feel he coma shout out ‘Silberberg’ all day long so, as Joyce Aitken recalls it, ‘since she had a very sweet face and her complexion reminded him of a bun he thought of the Russian blinis in which you pour caviare,’ and Silberberg was called ‘Blinis’ from then on. In addition there was a nurse for Marie-Jo, a laundress, a gardener/chauffeur /maitre d’hotel and, of course, Boule, who continued to do the cooking. There were two maids, one or other of whom was generally ‘honoured’ by Simenon on a daily basis.
In December 1961 his Italian publisher, Arnoldo Mondadori, responding to a request from Simenon, recommended a young woman from Venice, Teresa Sburelin, for the post of housemaid. Mondadori and Simenon had known each other for fifty years; they got on extremely well and Mondadori knew what was required. Teresa was interviewed by Denise and Simenon in Mondadori’s office and started work soon afterwards. Some time later Simenon came upon Teresa about her duties one morning, bending over a dressing table, and, as he wrote in Memoires intimes, ‘penetrated her from behind, while she did not move or protest’. Teresa later recounted the same incident as follows: ‘I was in the salon, bending over a table, polishing. He came up behind me, lifted my skirt, et crac! . . . c’etait lajoie /’ Thus started an intimate relationship that was to last for the rest of Simenon’s
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life. Teresa was then aged 34. Denise was soon made aware of the situation and accepted it; it was entirely normal for Simenon to have regular sexual connections with the maids. Denise wrote later that one new maid, on learning of the situation, asked a colleague: ‘On passe toutes a la casserole?'' (Do we all get laid?) She was told that it was not compulsory, but she would certainly be asked.
The distance between Simenon and Denise, which had first become apparent in Connecticut, only became greater in Switzerland instead of narrowing as he had hoped. To start with he used to take her for drives in the afternoon, talking to her about everything that interested him, but invariably finding when he eventually turned towards her that she had gone to sleep. He continued however to make love to her, his favourite time being after lunch when he would come to find her in her office and invite her to leave for a while. ‘What do you want?’ she would ask. ‘You.’ ‘Again?’ Then she would sigh, tell Aitken to wait a few moments and accompany him to the nearest bedroom where she would pull down her pants, lie on her back and say ‘ Fais vile’ (be quick). Slowly the act of love turned into the act of hate. ‘Nearly every afternoon, perhaps because we were both naked after our showers, I wanted to make love. Either Denise would submit with resignation, or she would say “Oh no, not again today . .
Simenon, remembering months of alcoholic bliss at the beginning of their relationship, tried to renew the experience but had to admit that the experiment was not a success. Once he summoned a doctor in the middle of the night to calm Denise with an injection, only to find the doctor deciding to give him the shot instead. Sometimes it was Denise taking refuge in Boule’s room to escape Simenon, sometimes it was the children running out of the house into the night to escape Denise. Denise’s behaviour seems to have been wilder and more irrational, but Simenon, at the best of times, was a man of strong moods who could fill a house with sunshine or intimidate everyone present. Years later, in her novel Le Phallus d’Or, Denise described the force of his personality. ‘His voice rang through the house from morning to night, and when he was out it was as though the silence was awaiting his return. ’ Simenon has given a long account of his problems with Denise in Memoires intimes and she has given a
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shorter account of her side of the story in Un Oiseau pour le Chat. What is clear from his fictional work written after his departure from the United States, is that he began to associate sex with despair - sex assumed frightening, sometimes lethal, proportions, whereas before it sometimes carried a message of hope.
In 1956 Simenon was approached by RTF, the French government radio station, to talk about one of the seven deadly sins. Fie could choose whichever he wished except Sloth, which had already been chosen by Cocteau. Simenon promptly chose Lust. In his talk, which was never broadcast, Simenon depicted Lust as the most innocent of sins and traced it to a nostalgia for childhood. He described,
the need to plunge back into a state of natural innocence ... an existence without duties or rules . . . Surely the wonderful and secret life of a child is not only found in a sunbeam, or in the brightly coloured images of a world which is still quite fresh, but is also to be found in the joys the child can find, without remorse, in its own body, in the sensations which are awakened by cold or heat, from eating or drinking, and from subtler excitements which the child never seeks to explain. The child like any young animal ... is a lustful creature. So why, when he has become a man, should he not try to rediscover the swift satisfaction of his sexuality? ... I do not believe that the Lust I have described is necessarily a form of depravity, so much as a form of escapism ... In time of revolution or war, when the pressure of events is at its strongest, there is frequently an explosion of sexuality ... So if I were to be accused of Lust I would happily reply: ‘A man (or woman) to whom you have given tasks which are beyond his powers to accomplish, does what he can to behave like an adult. But it sometimes happens that he closes his eyes and on closing his eyes he rediscovers the scent of a lost world and he tries to regain it.
And Bernard de Fallois has written: ‘It is as if eroticism is of capital importance to Simenon because he sees it not as an exercise of intelligence and will-power but as a desperate attempt to connect with life and the very sources of existence. ’
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This view is supported by Simenon’s work during this period. Sixteen of the twenty-three romans durs written between 1955 and 1965, when his marriage was breaking up, are concerned with marital poisonings, female alcoholism, crimes passionnels or suicide. In six of the books written between 1955, when he was living in Cannes, and 1961, six months before his wife’s first departure to a psychiatric clinic near Lausanne, Simenon wrote some of his darkest fictions on a sexual theme. The first, Les complices (1955), was the most explosive. A moment’s inattention on the part of Joseph Lambert, preoccupied with caressing his secretary, Edmonde, while driving his car, leads to the death of forty-eight schoolchildren in a holiday bus. The action of the book is over in the first two pages, virtually in the first four paragraphs, and the remainder of the story concerns Joseph Lambert’s state of mind and the life of a small town in the Midi, in summer, stirred up by the horror of the disaster and the efforts of the police to find the culprit. Lambert’s only escape from his overpowering sense of remorse lies first in his relations with Edmonde, who never makes any comment on the horrifying event she witnessed, and then in his friendship with a prostitute de passage who senses that he is a troubled man. In due course, and before his guilt is suspected, Lambert decides to kill himself, but he is only driven to this decision when he is unable to please Edmonde while making love to her and he realises that the last escape route from his torment is blocked. He loses the reassurance that his private truth is the valid one and shoots himself in his office leaving a suicide note that reveals his innermost conviction: ‘I am not guilty. ’
In Strip-tease (1957), the heroine, Celita, has degenerated from being a professional dancer to working in a strip-club in Cannes. She is engaged in a merciless battle with the proprietor’s wife for the proprietor’s affections, being the only girl on the staff who is capable of troubling him when he sleeps with her. Celita sees Leon as ‘a real man with the urge to dominate’. She therefore sets out to prevent him from feeling so sure of himself; he can never be absolutely certain that he has ‘vanquished’ her. Leon remains attracted to her but is also wary, and Celita conceives their relationship in these combative terms: ‘they would have made ... a fine couple, tearing away from each other only to come together more completely, shattering each other’s pride, hum
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bling each other’. Leon’s wife dies, but instead of winning Leon, Celita loses him to an ingenue at the club and, unable to revenge herself on him, she destroys herself instead. Strip-tease is not one of Simenon’s most successful books, because he failed to enter the personality of his principal character, Celita, as effectively as he usually did. When he describes her occasional desire to have sex for pleasure alone, it is with a surprising lack of conviction.
En cas de malheur (1955) is a much better book, this time about a middle-aged man’s obsession with a younger woman. Lucien Gobillot is a barrister who is asked to take on a hopeless case defending a rootless young woman accused of robbing an elderly jeweller. Lucien secures the acquittal of his client, Yvette, but then becomes obsessed with her to the point of damaging his career and putting his perfectly contented marriage at risk. Together he and Yvette have sex with her maid. He also has a younger rival who is equally obsessed with Yvette and who eventually murders her. After her death Gobillot hands over his dossier on Yvette, which recounts their affair in all its sordidness, to the colleague who is defending the younger rival on the murder charge.*
In Dimanche (1958), a hotel-keeper, Emile, living on the Cote d’Azur is dominated by Berthe, an unattractive and mean-spirited wife. Eventually he takes refuge in a happy carnal relationship with Ada, an uneducated young Italian maid. One day his wife surprises them together during their siesta and demands that Ada be dismissed. Emile flatly refuses to do this, the first time he has successfully opposed the wishes of his wife, and he and Berthe thereupon agree to keep up appearances but privately to give each other their freedom. Emile decides that he would rather rid himself of his wife completely and be able to lead a contented life with Ada. With infinite care he arranges to poison Berthe over a period of eleven months. All goes well, and eventually he manages to serve her with the lethal risotto. On returning to the hotel dining-room he meets his wife’s gaze, ‘calme et dur; she has handed the risotto to Ada, who has almost finished eating it.
Betty, the principal character of Betty (1960), is a drunk, an habituee of bar-stools on the Champs-Elysees who drowns her
* The book was filmed by Claude Autant-Lara with Jean Gabin and Brigitte Bardot in 1958.
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sorrows in a sea of cocktails and casual affairs. Eventually she is expelled from the family home and loses all rights in her children in exchange for a regular remittance.
Finally, in La porte (1961), a man with no hands is cuckolded by a man with no legs. Bernard Foy, who lost his hands in an explosion during the war, is tended and loved by his attractive wife, Nelly. Forced to live at home and do what he can of the housekeeping while earning pocket-money by decorating lampshades, he becomes tormented by his inability to caress his wife and possessed with curiosity and jealousy about her activities. Every day Nelly visits Pierre, a younger man confined to a wheelchair who lives in a flat below. Pierre’s sister works in the same shop as Nelly and her visits are merely to carry messages. Bernard eventually comes to believe in his wife’s love and true devotion and is reassured enough to face life and the possibility of their happiness together. Fie sets out to do the day’s shopping unexpectedly early, but passing the open door of Pierre’s apartment sees Nelly bending over the wheelchair kissing Pierre, who holds her in his arms. Bernard does the shopping and returns home to find Nelly has killed herself. He follows suit.
The autobiographical references in this succession of six books on a theme of sexual despair, written over a period of six years, make an impressive list. In Les complices the successive incidents in which Edmonde, alone or with the aid of her employer, is brought to the moment of climax, in his car, at her desk in the office or in a convenient field, were echoed in Simenon’s life when he enjoyed over a number of days the same experience with a temporary secretary who was taking dictation. The real girl’s silence and apparent indifference to any form of communication, other than a physical one, is also repeated in the fictional Edmonde’s habitual indifference and calm. While the police hunt for the driver of the car which caused the school bus to swerve into a stone wall, Joseph Lambert continues his routine of going each evening to the Cafe Riche to play the usual game of bridge with the police commissioner, the owner of Prisunic, the sousprefet and the town’s insurance agent - Simenon’s daily routine in La Rochelle and Fontenay-le-Comte. Reporters and photographers arrive from all over France to carry out the tasks with which Simenon was so familiar, and there is the character of Lea, the ‘jille publique\ with whom Joseph Lambert consoles himself, and
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who tells him, as so many prostitutes had told Simenon, the story of her life.
In En cas de malheur there is the familiar situation of a marriage without sexual attraction interrupted by a relationship based on sexual obsession. There is also a sexual relationship with a housemaid and the introduction of a scene in which Lucien Gobillot, to his own surprise, finds himself in bed with two women at once, one of whom he has scarcely been introduced to. The biographical references in Strip-tease are fewer, perhaps because it is one of the few books which Simenon wrote at someone else’s suggestion. The two main biographical elements are the state of mind of someone, in this case Celita, who has staked everything on the success of a sexual passion, and a secondary character, an amateur stripper who brings herself to the point of climax through excitement at her own performance, and who was based on a real dancer at the local club. There is also a male character, a customer at the club, who is more interested in talking to the girls than watching them perform and who ‘studied people with a curiosity that seemed too compassionate’.
In Dimanche there is the marriage which is a living death succeeded by a relationship based on sexual passion, this time with an Italian maid (an interesting case of ‘anticipated memory’ in Simenon); then there is the discovery of the hero and his mistress by the wife during the afternoon siesta in a room outside the house, and the decision to keep the appearance of marriage going for reasons of convenience. In Betty there is another anticipated memory with the ‘lost soul’, traumatised by experiences in her childhood and driven to alcohol and promiscuity, who is expelled from her own house and deprived of the company of her children. This, with the exception of the promiscuity, was to be the fate of Denise (although she was not the original of the character). But the autobiographical references in La porte, the last book in this series and the one written closest to the final crisis in Simenon’s own marriage, are perhaps the most striking of all.
In August 1960 Simenon invited Bernard de Fallois, then a young academic and specialist in Proust, to stay for a period of time at Echandens. De Fallois had abandoned his original idea of developing his thesis on Proust into a book and had decided instead that it would be a more challenging and interesting task to make good the deficiency left by Gide and to produce a serious
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study of the most popular living author in world literature. The correspondence preceding the visit shows that Simenon was convinced that at last a serious critic had surfaced who might be able to give an intelligent and sympathetic interpretation of what he was trying to do. In the course of time Bernard de Fallois was to become both Simenon’s publisher and one of his closest friends, but at the time of his first visit Simenon was confined to bed following an appendix operation. In consequence de Fallois was installed in a ground-floor room with a desk, while Simenon was confined to bed in the room above him. Denise would relay de Fallois’s questions and requests to Simenon, and would return with the answers and with the appropriate papers from the writer’s archives. This went on for several days, for the greater part of de Fallois’s visit. At the time Simenon was completely obsessed with and jealous of Denise, and after de Fallois’s departure he said, while at lunch with Denise and the children, partly laughing at himself but partly reflecting what he felt, ‘ Enfin on est ensemble, Vamoureux * de Maman est parti’. De Fallois, who had little idea at that time of the intensity of Simenon’s feelings towards his wife, was therefore somewhat startled when in 1962 he received his copy of La porte, written in May 1961, which tells the story of a man who is confined for most of the time to his room and who is unable to express his physical need for his wife, while in the room beneath a younger man, also confined to his room and constantly visited by the wife, is able to do for her the one thing the husband cannot do, which is to caress her.
The interest of these six novels is not so much in the direct biographical references they contain as in the light they shed on the author’s state of mind and methods of work. ‘Pierre Mazeron’ in La porte is not Bernard de Fallois, any more than ‘Bernard Foy’ is Georges Simenon. What the book does is explore the feelings and anguish of a man obsessed with an apparently groundless jealousy over frequent visits made by his wife to a younger man confined in a neighbouring room. In 1960 Simenon remained sufficiently possessive of Denise to be jealous of any attention she paid to a younger man visiting Echandens. The story behind La porte is illuminating because it shows both the extent to which Simenon relied on lived experience for many of his fictions, and
* i.e., ‘the person in love with
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the limits of that lived experience, the point at which fact was abandoned and the novel took on its own life.
Throughout these years of increasing unhappiness Simenon fought hard to save his marriage. In May 1959 Denise gave birth to their youngest child, Pierre, and the couple were brought closer together when the baby, at 4 months, became ill and had to be taken to Lyon for treatment. There, despite getting the best attention available, Pierre very nearly died. ‘For the first time in my life I knew real fear,’ Simenon recalled of the time when he was told that Pierre had a ‘fifty per cent chance with a lot of prayers’. For the first time he knew ‘the sort of fear that freezes you, and leaves you speechless and incapable of reacting’. The effect on Simenon was to bring on such serious attacks of giddiness that he was unable, when in Lyon, to cross the road, unless he was surrounded by a crowd of people; writing of the memory of the event twenty-five years later he found himself immobile once again in his chair, with tears running down his cheeks, sobbing and unable to breathe. The original ordeal for Denise and Simenon lasted for nearly two months before the baby’s life was declared out of danger.
But when unsupported by such moments of crisis the marriage steadily deteriorated. Both were given to moments of violence, though his were considerably more threatening; both drank heroic quantities, in her case whisky, in his wine; and both continued to work extremely hard. Simenon continued to make regular visits to ‘les filles ’ and Denise kept several pages of her telephone book for addresses and numbers in Cannes, Paris, Milan and Brussels, under the heading ‘Filles’. Simenon said that this word showed a lack of respect and so she changed the heading to ‘Frivolites’. Denise spent much of her life in her suite of offices with her team of secretaries. Simenon maintained his usual routine of short periods of intensive and utterly exhausting work followed by lengthy intervals of inactivity when he began to feel himself more and more of a stranger in his own house, superfluous to the administration of his own business affairs, superfluous to his wife’s emotional requirements, and not even able to count on any sustained interest on her part in his conversation. In 1959 and 1960 he even suffered, and on several occasions, from ‘writer’s block’. His main emotional refuge in this situation was the children. Marc had left the house to make his own life and
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Pierre was too young to provide company, but that left Johnny and Marie-Jo, and although he loved them equally, as he should, he undoubtedly received more emotional support from the company of his daughter. Simenon kept hoping that normal life would return. In February 1962 he went to London to attend the banquet given for ‘the pipe-man of the year’. He was accompanied by Denise, her secretary, Aitken, and her new Italian maid, Teresa, and he set himself up in the Savoy Hotel, surrounded by women like a pasha with his harem. But Julian Symons, who met him on this visit, remembers that he was withdrawn and watchful, leaving most of the talking to Denise, who seemed to overshadow him. (It was during this visit that he heard from Marc, now married, that he had become a grandfather.)
At home Simenon was still capable of high spirits. A wild dinner party with medical friends ended with Simenon doing a striptease and wondering next day if he had gone too far. Bernard de Fallois remembers that meeting him one had the impression of ‘a warm, talkative story-teller with an extraordinary strength in his regard’. But the situation between Simenon and Denise had deteriorated to such an extent four months later, in June, that on the advice of a psychiatrist Denise agreed to leave Echandens and to spend a period of time as a residential patient in a nearby clinic. In her opinion she was tricked into this move, which put her ‘in the wrong’ - and in a poor negotiating position - for the remainder of her marriage, but in the opinion of others, including her son Johnny and her secretary, one of them had to leave the house, and of the two Simenon was the less disturbed and the stronger character. De Fallois remembers that while she was away Simenon was very unhappy, and that he waited by the telephone all day hoping for news from the clinic.
In 1961 Simenon and Denise had learnt that a new motorway was to pass in front of the Chateau d’Echandens, and had decided that the best solution would be to build their own house on the heights above Lausanne. They purchased a large plot, at ‘Epalinges’, in a meadow with a magnificent view of the mountains, and hired an architect to draw up plans for the first house they had owned since Shadow Rock Farm, and only the third house Simenon had owned of the twenty-five he had lived in since coming to Paris. The structure which eventually emerged looks like a Texan ranch house - white, surrounded by timber fencing,
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with two wings and grouped round its own courtyard. Simenon wanted it to be big enough to house all his children and all their children, but by the time the house was ready for occupation in Christmas 1963 his marriage was at its last gasp, and Denise only lived at Epalinges for four months before returning to the clinic. She tried once to come back again, but Simenon, in tears on the doorstep, refused to admit her and told her she had to go back. He had taken his marriage and his passion ' jusqu’au bout’. Bernard de Fallois says, ‘He tried to give Denise confidence by involving her in his work. When this did not give her confidence, but complicated things, he decided to abandon the whole project.’
Looking back now Denise blames Dr Durand, the director of the clinic where she was treated, for driving her and her husband apart. She says that Durand told Simenon that if she came back to Epalinges she would remain a sick woman, and that he told her that Simenon was allergic to her. ‘The last rows we had were staged,’ she says:
He was a man driving out his love. He was much older than me and I think he was afraid, although that is speculation. The day I went back there were tears running down his cheeks. He was a marvellous man, but what a difficult man he was. He was difficult because he was unhappy. For twenty years I was the kind of person he wanted to be with and I was violent enough to understand his violent way of loving. At the end I certainly didn’t give Simenon all the loving attention I should have done. There were the children, and all the contracts. It was too much. So when we made love, I didn’t enjoy it any more and I made believe. He was too demanding and I was too demanding because I wanted to be quiet. He didn’t understand that I was exhausted. I couldn’t stand him telling people at Epalinges how well I made love. ‘Better than a 17-year-old prostitute,’ he said, so I slapped him. And I told him I no longer enjoyed making love to him. And that I think was the end for him. He went downstairs and drank a bottle of whisky.
Simenon’s memories are different:
One day, trying to unfreeze her, I took her in my arms and pulled her on to a sofa. She let me take her without flinching,
without a word, without a single quiver, and faced with that reaction I swore never to do it again.
■When Simenon gave up trying to save his marriage with Denise he did not begin to feel indifference for her. The passion that had been born in Manhattan in 1945 was not over, it had simply changed its form, and was now to be expressed in a hatred that was every bit as absorbing as the love had been. ‘I never really understood the hate that my husband vowed towards me,’ she says today. ‘He hated me in the same way that he loved me. He hated me as possessively as he loved me. ’ It was a feeling that was to dominate the last twenty-five years of Simenon’s life.
Simenon had sought in Denise the ideal companion. When things were going well between them he said that Denise was five people in one: she was his wife, his mistress, the mother of his children, the keeper of his house, and his agent. He also wanted a sixth person, the tender companion, the person who would, for the first time in his life, supply him with the affection and security which his mother had denied him and which his close friendship with Tigy had failed to supply. But Denise was a perfectionist, which sometimes made her over-conscientious, exasperatingly inefficient and fatally inattentive to her husband. She began to feel overwhelmed by his demands and to stand up for herself in a very American way. ‘One of the reasons why he began to hate me was that I was very frank,’ she says. ‘I wanted Simenon to understand who I was. I suppose I was too American to submit to him.’ She was given far too much to do - being one woman is quite difficult, being five is more difficult. And as she withdrew into her daily tasks he began to feel deserted, ‘a stranger in his own house’. Simenon could be a violent man, but Denise says that his violence was not the reason for their separation. Once when Marie-Jo saw her father hitting her mother Denise comforted the little girl by saying that he had been hitting her because he was angry and that he would get rid of his anger in his next novel. Simenon himself admits that he once hit Denise without intending to, because he was still en roman, acting out one of his characters. She noticed after they returned to Europe that he began to drink more when he had finished a novel, while he was getting rid of his personnages.
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And frequently his violence occurred ‘quand il etait pris avec ses fantomes ’, her words for his obsessive jealousy.
Simenon’s jealousy was a consequence of the complete physical and romantic passion he had for Denise, the only time he experienced passion in his life. His love for his mother had been rejected, his love for Tigy had been limited; when his passion for Denise also failed, he became frightened. The characters who entered his imagination reflected this fear; and as his own unhappiness increased he found them increasingly hard to get rid of, and he found their preoccupations more difficult to get rid of. Just as his mother had a lifelong fear of poverty, so he had a lifelong fear of not being loved. They were both dominated by the fear that their childhood phantoms might return.