However, Mauriac warned us: the true life of a writer can only be told by the children of his imagination. Do Simenon and his creatures tell the same story? We might, for instance, subject them to a single elementary test, such as the one Malraux suggested when he said that, in order to know a man, one should examine his attitudes towards God, towards sex and towards money.
On God, Simenon’s characters remain generally silent, which is fairly normal. Their creator’s silence, however, was positively shrill, which is rather odd: “I would rather walk stark naked in the streets than confess my true views regarding the existence of God.”
On the subject of sex, Simenon was fond of portraying himself as a man liberated from all taboos: “I enjoy perusing beautiful female bodies… Quite often, prostitutes give me more pleasure than non-professionals…I have sex straightforwardly, healthily, as often as I feel the need to.” He cultivates sexual pleasure “without afterthoughts and without fuss.” If we are to believe him, it would seem that, for him, regular participation in orgies was some sort of exercise akin to bicycle riding or calisthenics.
For his creatures, however, things are not so easy or pleasant. Unremitting loneliness crushes the entire world of his fiction, where loveless passions are leading inexorably to disaster, and sex is nearly always a grim, shameful, hasty and furtive experience. Thus, for instance, the protagonist of the most autobiographical of all his novels imagines:
…dingy beds, wallpaper in tatters, a broken-down and stained sofa; he sees, he wants to see the face of a woman, with dark rings under her eyes, a weary mouth and a sickly body, slowly stripping her clothes in a grey twilight, with a mixture of boredom and disgust… Everything is so ugly! It is dirty — that is the word: dirty — and he wished it to be even more dirty, dirty to a point which would make you cry from disgust or pity, which would make you crawl on the floor and moan.
Finally, one cannot leave this subject without mentioning the contrast — rather striking, you will admit — between, on the one hand, Simenon’s jolly polygamist binges and, on the other, Maigret’s austere monogamy (and there is no need to be Freud or Jung to be able to identify Maigret as Simenon’s “mythical ego”).
On the subject of money, it would be all too easy to juxtapose the spectacular success of the creator with the sordid end of nearly all his creatures. Paradoxically, as the former became a prisoner of his own wealth and fame, we see the latter dropping their worldly moorings and drifting away in a sort of desolate freedom. 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.
In contrast with this literary businessman, beaming and prosperous, Simenon’s characters break your heart: they are small people, humble and lonely; rebels and misfits; failures, losers, victims. Look at Maigret (even him!): “When Maigret has to enter a wealthy household, he feels unwelcome and embarrassed, he is uneasy, he knows he does not fit into these splendid surroundings…”; “Maigret is not comfortable when he must deal with important people… He is both in awe of, and shocked by, the upper class.” His father was the intendant of an aristocrat, and he himself remained indelibly marked by his servile origin: “There is a certain type of human relations, of social habits, for which there is no cure. One can recover from many diseases, but never from that — a certain humility in front of certain people.” In fact Simenon told the same story a hundred times; his major novels have only one theme: the fall of a man. Fate, an outside incident, an inner impulse, suddenly triggers an implacable process of disintegration. A man wakes up and finds himself a stranger amidst his own people; he tries to break free from his familiar chains, and he perishes.
Since Simenon gave so many interviews and published lengthy tape-recorded confessions, some people might believe that he was inclined to self-exposure. This is not the case at all. He merely endeavoured obstinately to project a certain image of himself — the image of “an ordinary man,” a man without problems, at peace with himself.
A judge, handed the Simenon file, would certainly be puzzled by the flagrant discrepancies between the cheeky self-confidence of the accused and the harrowing evidence of his characters. But didn’t Maigret himself warn us never to trust judges? Judges understand nothing. If they understood, how could they still judge?
Once, however, as if by inadvertence, Simenon made a genuine confession. A writer may sometimes speak most truthfully about himself when he thinks he is merely commenting on another writer whom he particularly likes. In 1960, in a radio broadcast devoted to Balzac, Simenon said things far more revealing than the lengthy, embarrassing and superfluous memoirs he dictated at the end of his life. In this portrait of Balzac, some statements carry a singular weight: “The need to create other men, to draw out of oneself a crowd of different characters, could hardly arise in a man who finds himself harmoniously adjusted to his own little world. Why should anyone obstinately endeavour to live out other people’s lives, if he is himself self-confident and without revolt?”
It can hardly be doubted that Simenon was utterly and irretrievably “ill-at-ease in his own skin,” that he never recovered from having been deprived of his mother’s affection, that his whole life was a long and impossible attempt to get even for all the humiliations of his mean and narrow childhood; yet, in the end, these matters should only concern professional psychologists. Let us return to literature.
The urge to create characters, to invent other beings, reaches in Simenon the proportions of an obsession so exclusive and devouring that one could use his case to make a clinical analysis of the physiology and pathology of literary creation. Indeed, it is this very compulsion that injects his novels with a sense of inescapable necessity. Reading his works, one verifies the truth of Julien Green’s observation: “The only books that matter are those of which it could be said that their author would have suffocated had he not written them.” Few writers were ever so purely and totally novelists; good connoisseurs such as Gide and Mauriac noticed this very soon — and their admiration for Simenon’s phenomenal ability was tinged with a shade of envy: how did he manage — this uncouth and commonplace Belgian shopkeeper — to outclass them so bedazzlingly on their own home ground?
Conversely, as soon as Simenon stopped writing novels, it was as if he ceased to exist. He had nothing to say, or when he insisted on speaking he would utter platitudes, or display an embarrassing caddishness with cold insensitivity. Never mind! To an acrobat who had just walked across the Niagara Falls on a wire, who would think to ask what he can do besides? Even though Simenon at rest could sometimes provoke the perplexity of his admirers, these unfortunate impressions never detracted from the superior powers of his art. Open any of his major novels: at once, a magic takes effect. From the first paragraph, you are gripped as if by the jaws of a steel trap that will not release its hold until the final full stop of the last page; and, even then, after you have shut the book, you remain stunned, and it takes quite a while to re-enter your own familiar little world, having glimpsed while you were reading its dark and vertiginous reverse side.