Reading Simenon makes us realise how tenuous the boundary is between life experience and the imaginary experience. Some twenty or thirty years later, the memories we retain of certain episodes from his novels persist in haunting us more obsessively than do memories of actual events that happened to ourselves. In fact, these readings were themselves events in our lives.
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 essentiaclass="underline" 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?
An artist can take full responsibility only for those of his works that are mediocre or aborted — in these, alas! he can recognise himself entirely — whereas his masterpieces ought always to cause him surprise. Georges Bernanos, who was certainly not inclined to literary daintiness, commented on his Diary of a Country Priest: “I love this book as if it had not been written by me.” And actually, in a sense — the sense suggested by Belloc in the observation which I quoted at the beginning — it was not by him. Indeed, could any clear-sighted writer ever believe that the source of his inspiration lies within himself? He might as well believe that he owns the rainbow or the moonlight which transfigures for one moment his little garden!
In the end, the gift of writing novels is not unlike God’s grace: it is arbitrary, incomprehensible and sublimely unjust. It is not a scandal if novelists of genius prove to be wretched fellows; it is a comforting miracle that wretched fellows prove to be novelists of genius.
I have still not told you when Simenon was born, when he died, or how he lived. I have said nothing of the triumphs of his public life or of the dramas of his private life; I did not dwell on his parents, his origins, his career, his travels, his adventures, his pipes, his women, and all the Maigret folklore… And you begin to see — I trust — why I shall not raise these matters. They are all false tracks, red herrings, dead-ends; they lead nowhere. What a zealous researcher might finally catch in his net — after dragging bleak expanses of mud — would hardly repay his efforts. Every life leaves behind an accumulation of broken odds and ends — bizarre and sometimes smelly. Rummaging there, one can always unearth enough evidence to establish that the deceased was both monstrous and mediocre. Such a combination is quite common — whoever doubts it needs only look at himself in a mirror.
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.
*Speech to the Académie Royale de Littérature Française of Belgium on the occasion of my election to the Chair of Georges Simenon (1992).
THE BELGIANNESS OF HENRI MICHAUX
Georges Perros, who was a marvellously sensitive reader. . had told me that “Even if one knows nothing of his background, reading Henri Michaux carefully leaves one in no doubt that he is Belgian.”
This need [of Michaux’s] to dig deep, this persistence of his, is not French. It is the advantage and the drawback of having been born in Brussels.[1]