There have been few writers as prolifically désengagé as Georges Simenon, the author of nearly two hundred absorbing, intensely readable thrillers and detective novels under his own name and many dozens more not-so-readable novels and short stories under a variety of pseudonyms. Unlike the celebrated engagée writers of his generation (Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir), Simenon rarely composed a single novel or short story in order to elaborate on his political or philosophical beliefs (even if they often reflected a self-centered, right-leaning complacency). In fact, over decades of producing novels—often at the rate of eight to ten a year—it’s unclear if he even possessed any firm beliefs in anything but his art and his largely remorseless pursuit of physical comforts and pleasures.
Simenon, like many of his characters, lived an only superficially middle-class existence: writing in his office every morning (sometimes atop a houseboat), going downstairs to enjoy his wife’s freshly cooked meals, playing with his children—and then disappearing for a few hours every afternoon or evening to meet up with women in brothels or local bars. The middle-class life, he believed, was only pleasurable if you were constantly cheating on it; and to him, intimate pleasures were a lot more enjoyable if you kept them clandestine.
Simenon the man was, in fact, the very opposite of his most famous detective, the always-about-to-retire Jules Maigret, who was most happy in only a few places: at his job arresting murderers, on holiday (during which he often solved murders as well), pottering in his garden, eating at the table prepared by his wife—the formidable Madame Maigret—or escorting her arm-and-arm to local cinemas. One of the most unusual detectives in modern fiction, Maigret lacks the penetrating intellect or forensic skills of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, and rarely needs to use pistols or fists on the various criminals he encounters, unlike hard-boiled contemporaries such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Instead, Maigret’s entire “method” is to spend time in the homes of his suspects, drink beer and eat meals in their local cafés, and follow them (or have them followed) to see where they go and who they spend time with in the course of a normal day.
Although Simenon is best known for the Maigret novels, he was most proud of and creatively committed to his less popular “dur” novels, or “hard” novels, which he wrote over intensely brief periods of time, and only after a complete health exam and “all clear” had been delivered by his doctor. (He claimed that when he put himself in the minds of his often distraught characters, his heart and nerves suffered similar, health-challenging stress.) The hard novels are much darker than the Maigrets: After all, Maigret has a home to go to at the end of the day, and all the novels’ horrors are visited on the men and women he investigates. Meanwhile, the hard novels are not really mysteries; they are simply about people who commit crimes and can’t seem to hold themselves together, and while occasionally they are pursued or arrested, the detectives are fairly inconsequential. And it is these works, which Picador is now issuing in new translations, that show most clearly Simenon’s obsession with furtive desires and misdeeds to the exclusion of nearly everything else; in them we see a writer who could see in an ordinary person tremendous depths but at the same time finds almost nothing worth noting in the occupation of Paris—through which he lived more peacefully than most—the rise of fascism, and the conflagrations of World War II.
Born in Liège in 1903, Simenon spent the first part of his life exploring the two most obvious extremes of his nature—that of the middle-class conformist and that of a world-spanning explorer of continents, foreign cultures, and sexually available women. The son of middle-class Walloons, he grew up accustomed to sometimes excruciatingly dull rituals—family dinners and holidays, taking in lodgers, and office-bound occupations. Even if stale to the young Georges, he used parts of this life affectionately in his fiction: He claimed that Maigret was based on his father, who died of a heart condition when Simenon was only 18.
Despite a good Catholic school education (where he learned to dislike nuns) and an interest in medicine, at the age of 15 he was hired by a conservative Catholic newspaper, and quickly graduated to become their chief crime reporter, as well as filling regular opinion and gossip columns. From a young age he was producing so much work so quickly that he began using a pseudonym (the first of many), Georges Sim—under which he published his earliest, crudest, apprentice-level crime novels. After military service, he moved to Paris in 1922, married young to an artist, Régine Renchon (whom he referred to as “Tigy”), and began cheating on her immediately and to a prodigious extent. He claimed to have slept with many thousands of women, and had a decades-long affair with the family’s housekeeper, as well as a briefer liaison with the American performer Josephine Baker.
Many of the “dur” novels draw on the illicit atmospheres that Simenon seemed to enjoy in his secret life. His “dur” protagonists find themselves in unusually extreme predicaments. These deeply flawed characters possess an inarticulable desire for new passions and frontiers. Unfortunately, when they are led away from their cozy homes and communities, they often get lost in a strange naturalistic jungle they both desire and fear, and become easily scared, enticed, seduced, enraged and ignited. They don’t have any innate desire to commit criminal acts, but once they find themselves exiled from their normal and predictable social relations, they feel enlivened by doing all the things they aren’t supposed to do.
In one of Simenon’s best and most often translated novels, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938), the protagonist, Kees Popinga, has worked most of his dull adult life as a clerk until he abruptly learns that his boss has stolen all of the firm’s money—and the money of his clients. After Kees accepts a small share of the bounty, he is drawn into a world in which most people (like his boss) steal what they need or want, and have sex with whomever they like; by the novel’s end, he has committed a murder and goes almost insanely happy taunting the police about it. By this point, there’s nothing he can do but make his exit from society—through either suicide or imprisonment.
And in The Blue Room (1964), a middle-aged man is awoken from his tranquil family life by an affair with a childhood friend whose passion is so great that she bites his lip until he bleeds. When he tries to end the affair, she does not want to let go, and commits a murder in which the police consider him an accomplice. (As his brother warns, the affair “may be over for you, but not for her!”) Like several Simenon novels, The Blue Room develops as an official investigation into a man’s past—and yet the protagonist never seems to understand his life better, or more quickly, than the police and psychiatrists who are asking the questions. For him, the most significant aspect of the affair is that the room in which he often met his lover was painted the color of the laundry detergent his mother used when he was a child. The truth of life, Simenon’s characters often conclude, is as significant to them as it is inexpressible to anybody who thinks they know them.
In one of his best late novels, The Neighbors (1967), a middle-class husband becomes obsessed with a woman who moves in next door, staying awake until late at night to hear her making loud, passionate love to her gangster-looking boyfriend; and once this no-longer-tranquil middle-class husband follows her into the unknown streets of her life, the pretensions and formalities he has long relied upon start to break away, leaving him vulnerable, confused and, to some degree, invigorated. In Belle (1952), yet another shut-down middle-class husband learns that someone has raped and strangled his au pair in her downstairs room while his wife was out and he was tidying the kitchen. When the police and neighbors treat him as a suspect, he is insulted—but soon appreciates that others consider him capable of committing monstrous acts. There are many gradations of guilt in Simenon—from the withdrawn unassuming people who only feel guilty about what they might be capable of all the way up to the serial murderer in The Hatter’s Ghosts (1949), who kills both methodically (his chosen method being a cello string) and out of unpredictable spontaneous rage.
Just a list of Simenon’s titles conveys the commonly beleaguered subjectivities of his psychically imperiled men and women. The Reckoning. Red Lights. The Strangers in the House. Black Rain. Strange Inheritance. Last Refuge. Lost Moorings. The Long Exile. Magnet of Doom. Sometimes, this sense of peril refers to the eternal, quotidian strangeness of living next door to anybody you don’t know—such as The People Opposite, or simply The Neighbors. In Simenon’s universe of slippery slopes and shadows emerging from alleys, the biggest worry isn’t simply that the neighbors might be spying on you—it’s even more disturbing when you’re enticed into spying on them.
Preoccupied by secret urges and hidden wrongdoing, Simenon proved strangely oblivious to the horrors that were unfolding in the open all around him. Awaiting the arrival of his first child in Nieul in 1939, Simenon worried about whether he would see “the garden bloom” in time for his son’s birth, and took little notice of the ravings of one Adolf Hitler. (In his memoir he recalls distantly that “a man with a hoarse and commanding voice had been screaming over the radio in a language none of us understood.”) Simenon purported to find mass politics largely oppressive, bourgeois, and predictable. In 1938 he told a journalist, who was inquiring about his support for the monarchist movement: “I love ordinary people, real ones, and I am therefore horrified by democracy.”
It is hard to think of another writer who produced so many “realistic” novels that more or less ignored the seismic upheavals of the day. Who else, having lived through most of the occupation in Paris, could have published a novel entitled Maigret in Vichy (1968), describing an adventure in the famous spa town without any reference to the French collaborationist government? And in one of the very best Maigrets, Signed, Picpus (1944), written and serialized in the mid-forties, Maigret strolls through his standard milieu of Parisian bars and brothels without spotting a single Nazi soldier, or reflecting for one moment on the historical situation in which he finds himself. Instead, Maigret and his fellow Parisians enjoy their normal seasonal routines of taking country holidays and playing cards at the local club.
Even The Train (1961), one of the rare Simenons that actually places characters in a recognizably specific period of history—when Belgians were fleeing the German advance in 1939–40—focuses on a raw simple human relationship that develops between a man and a woman. The Train was based on Simenon’s experience in 1940, when he was assigned by the Belgian government to organize evacuations. It is narrated by a mid-level seller and repairer of radios, who gets separated from his wife and children, and finds himself jammed into a crowded cattle car where he meets and develops an urgent passion for a young Jewish woman. As usual, Simenon never uses his narrative situations to make political statements, or effect political opinions on the part of readers; the narrator’s eventual betrayal of the young woman (when he meets her in the streets of Paris a few months later, he coldly walks away from her request for help, anxious to get back to his safe home) doesn’t ask the reader to condemn him, but rather simply to understand that, by turning his back on the most significant event in his life, he lost a way to the best part of himself. As Simenon’s biographer, Pierre Assouline, wrote, Simenon wasn’t interested in war as an issue of politics or history; he only used it as a setting on which to explore “a personal encounter between man and his destiny.”
His political affiliations were routinely questioned during and after World War II by both partisans and politicians who couldn’t help noticing that Simenon had carried on successfully publishing his novels in occupied Paris throughout the ’40s—not to mention that he was the most often filmed French novelist of the period, especially when it came to working with the German-owned film company Continental. The actress Simone Signoret later noted that “if there was a division among actors, it could only have been between those who agreed to work for the Germans at Continental and those who refused.” Simenon was one of the writers who quite happily agreed.
Simenon was investigated several times for collaboration; while he received a rather shaky exoneration in 1945 (they judged him not to be a traitor, but just a selfish writer), he left France for many years, setting up new homes along the Rio Grande in Texas and, for an especially lengthy stay, in Connecticut, where he wrote some of his greatest “durs,” perhaps because the snowy winters kept him locked away in the house with few distractions.
One of his best Connecticut-set thrillers, The Man on the Bench in the Barn (1968)—now in a new translation from Picador titled The Hand—describes yet another unassuming man who, at a party, spots his wife making love to one of his best friends (who is visiting from abroad); returning home in a snowstorm, their friend gets lost from them, and when the narrator pretends to go out looking, he instead spends some blank time smoking cigarettes in the barn. It’s a perfect example of the Simenon method—set up the situation early, in which the protagonist makes a decision that changes the course of his life, and then wind tight the narrative clock. On each page, the first person narrator feels the authorities encroaching upon the secret truth that is in him. There’s no way out of such a situation for the protagonist—except, of course, to see it through, in Simenon’s words, “to the end.”
In Connecticut, Simenon lived with his secretary Denyse Ouimet, a young woman he had met in New York—a romantic adventure that he wrote about in one of his most autobiographical novels, Three Beds in Manhattan (1946). They married in 1950, a day after his divorce from Tigy came through. By the time he returned permanently to Europe in the mid-fifties, he was growing estranged from both his current and ex-wife; and while he continued moving—from Switzerland to Paris to Épalinges—he quite suddenly quit writing in 1972. He never gave a very clear explanation for why he quit writing so suddenly, but claimed that conflicts with his second ex-wife, who was going in and out of hospitals for alcohol abuse, made it increasingly hard to concentrate.
Simenon was clearly a man who loved to indulge himself, but even his indulgences began to lose their attraction. He cut down on drinking, settled down with a woman in a “small pink house” in Lausanne, Switzerland, and not long after the suicide of his beloved daughter Marie-Jo in 1978, began writing his memoirs, beginning with the large, dense, and fascinating Intimate Memoirs (1981), recalling the endlessly active life of a man who seems capable of forgiving almost anybody for anything, especially himself.
At his best, Simenon turned his forgiving nature on the most dissipated and distressed souls. In his fiction, he expresses continual sympathy for his characters, especially those who represent the most extreme emotions of human life—whether they are isolated, lonely, angry, jealous, passionate, withdrawn, or (more often than not) homicidal. This is probably because, for Simenon, fiction wasn’t a matter of producing good prose or clever imagery and turns of phrase; it was about exploring the inner life of people who might appear simple and common, but who harbored deep and often unrestrainable intensities. When he wrote, Simenon explained, “All the day I am one of my characters. I feel what he feels.” And however horrible, or simply unattractive, they might be, he tried “to make each one of those characters heavy, like a statue, and to be the brother of everybody in the world.”
He was proud to relate that when he encountered or heard from readers, they never spoke “about my beautiful style.… They say, ‘You are the one who understands me.’”
