Simenon

At the peak of his career, Simenon was living in a pseudo-castle which he designed himself—a mixture of palace, factory, health resort and fortress where he was waited on by an army of secretaries, butlers, chauffeurs, cooks and gardeners. Whereas Simenon’s novels resemble life, his life increasingly resembled a novel—one of those cheap romances which, in his early years, he would sign with phony aristocratic pseudonyms such as Jean du Perry or Germain d’Antibes, and entitle suggestively Voluptuous Embraces, Frivolous Perversities or Alone Among Gorillas.
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The strength of Simenon is to achieve unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious), making him the most translatable of all writers: his writing loses nothing by being turned into Eskimo or Japanese. It would be difficult to make an anthology of his best pages: he does not have best pages, he only has better novels, in which everything hangs together without a single seam.

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

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

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

This type of creation, however, confronts us with an enigma (which Shaffer grasped well in his Amadeus—musicologists and historians who criticised him missed the point): the created work possesses a splendour and a depth that far exceed the calibre of its creator. The work is not only greater than its author, it is different in nature: it comes from somewhere else. The author shocks those who admire his work; in contrast with it, he seems vacuous. And yet—was it not precisely this very emptiness that enabled him to provide a free channel for his works to be born?
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Why should anyone work so hard to portray a Simenon who, in the end, looks like anybody else? The only Simenon who interests us resembles nobody, and this is what enabled him to write Letter to My Judge, Widow Couderc, The Escapee, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, and so many other novels where, strangely, again and again, we return to draw the courage to contemplate our own misery without flinching. The truth that inhabited Simenon lies in his works, and there only. Whoever still insists to look elsewhere for it ought to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s lines:

By this, and only this, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries,
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider,
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms.

Simon Leys
The Hall of Uselessness