For the Time Being (29 page)

Today Bury, as I well know, is a very different place. The mills are all but gone, the chimneys felled; the air is clean, the town is green with trees and wide spaces; it is proper, neat, contained; cobbles, clogs and polluted drizzle from the thundering cotton-mills have long since been abolished. You might think all is serene and calm, which on the surface it is. But the wounds made in those distant days of 1914–18 are too deep to be stitched and re-skinned by the arrogance of today. The pain still lurks because the town itself is, frankly, too small for agony to be forgotten; far too many families were affected by the slaughter in Gallipoli.

In this elegant, compassionate, deeply researched book, the tremendously caring Geoffrey Moorhouse sets before us the facts and figures, the jingoism, pride, pain, as well as the hideous smugness, the cock-ups, the arrogance and the disasters made by ‘those who know better'. And who seldom, if ever, have to ‘go'. The myths are here as well, for anything as brave as this, as unutterably sad and devastating,
has
to breed myth. Both good and bad. Legends, too, play a part. Finally it all becomes a kind of folk drama: Moorhouse gives us the truth word by word. Not all of it is palatable.

I suppose the most damaging and erroneous of the myths is the belief, and disdain, held in Australia and New Zealand that the Mother Country sent weedy wrecks to fight alongside hefty,
bronzed, open-air Gods of Nature, or, even worse, sat about ‘drinking tea'. The valiant Colonials, on the other hand, shed their blood, bitterly but willingly, to keep Mother England secure: all those miles away. Nonsense, of course. But it has stuck.

It is worth looking carefully at the lettering cut deep into stone in Canberra's vast war memorial: Australia, 8,709; New Zealand, 2,701; India, 7,597; France, 9,874; Britain, 21,255. Turkey, the enemy, lost rather more than anyone with a grand slam of 86,692. However much we bicker, shout and protest, however much we all shake knowing heads, the body-counts are never in doubt. The Great War and those more recent conflicts were put together and ‘paid-for' on behalf of politicians who could not make up their minds or bring the problems to the debating-table; who preferred the shouting and smearing, the innuendo and hate for their opponents' parties, to the welfare and the good of their people.

Geoffrey Moorhouse uses Bury as his pivot: he explores it fact by fact, family by family; this little town in the moors bore a hideous amount of the slaughter in the Dardanelles, no matter what your Australian neighbour may tell you as he leans on the bar and his legend. Mr Moorhouse is a Fabergé journalist on the one hand, and a brilliant and caring historian on the other. He has written here a spinningly glorious book. You will not be dumb with military history, exhausted by facts and figures, wearied by the detail of long-forgotten battles. There is plenty of strategy here, but more heart and pain than you could possibly have room for.

I know now, although I think I knew at the time, why one was so cared for by the ordinary people of Bury in 1941. It is an Army Town and we were its children, destined, if unlucky, to go the way that nearly 2,000 of its children did years before and would do again. While we were among them, they would see to it that we were cherished. And we were, until embarkation.

Daily Telegraph,
4 April 1992

The Man Who wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon
by Patrick Marnham (Bloomsbury)

In my copy of
Larousse
(1977), Simenon merits a slim five lines. In Patrick Marnham's excellent, detailed biography he gets a whacking 300-plus pages, which he deserves if only because he was, in his lifetime, the world's bestselling writer – quite apart from being vastly rich, ferociously active sexually, gifted with a talent some would call genius, casual in his affairs, and known best in the English-speaking world as the creator of the rather tedious detective Maigret.

To put M. Maigret on television here, even though it has frequently been a success, has always seemed to me to be quite mad – like putting Miss Marple into a harem. Maigret is essentially a Frenchman, or a Belgian: Continental anyway. The cases he has to solve bear little resemblance to any British problems. The mastery of Simenon, however, was the incredible manner in which he explored, dissected and displayed his
'petitesgens'.
They are the guts of his works, not merely in the Maigret stuff, but in the novels which, to my mind, are far more compelling and extraordinary.

Born in Liège in 1903 into a poor family, half-Flemish, half-Walloon, Simenon was forced to leave school at fifteen to help support his enormous family on the sudden serious illness of his father. He became a journalist by chance, simply because he happened to wander into an office – and the writing began.

In a lengthy lifetime he wrote about 400 volumes. World sales amounted to 500 million in more than fifty languages (exceeding Shakespeare and Jules Verne); fifty-five films were made of his books, and no fewer than 280 TV films: they are being hurled on to the screens to this day. That is a pretty good mark-up for a
poor boy with little, if any, education, and a deliberately limited vocabulary of only 2,000 words. This, he insisted, was so that his ‘little people' would be able to read his works. And they did, in their millions.

He had a fuller vocabulary for his personal and private life; just as well, since his sexual demands were voracious (three or four women in a day was not unusual) and his charms cannot possibly have been only in his looks, for he was a stocky little chap, with solid peasant bones and the face of a kind chemist.

His brilliance as a writer, his undoubted charm, drew towards him (quite apart from sexual partners) the cream of the literary world of his time. It ranged all along the line from Anouilh, Cocteau and Colette, to Pagnol, Miller and Thornton Wilder, with all stations in between. His novels, and I must join in the praise here, were compared with those of Balzac and Dickens. His extraordinary insight and full understanding of the
bête humaine,
of the terrible dark corners which seem to lurk within the brightest, most ordinary, lace-windowed, clean and neat existence, are never for one second misplaced, patronizing or false.

He knows the world of which he writes as intimately and thoroughly, and as depressingly, as Van Gogh knew his peasants: the potato-gatherers and eaters, the men and women of the Flanders mud, the wooden-sabot people. Simenon set his people down on paper in print rather than paint, but with the same vibrant passion.

You will see exactly what I mean in two examples I take at random. Both essentially different in place and locale, but both brilliantly evoking – dissecting, even – his
petites gens.
Try
La Veuve Couderc (Ticket of Leave)
or
La Neige était sale (The Stain on the Snow).
These are two of his most perfect novels: I leave his Maigret to others. I simply do not care for detective fiction; neither Simenon's dark sonnets to the bars and cafés of his
quartiers,
nor Agatha Christie's terrible Tweed-Pearls-and-Purdy Froths.

The novels are as richly textured as his life, which was a pretty flamboyant tapestry of booze, women and, from time to time, children, for if his women satisfied his incredible lust they also became pregnant now and again. He spent most of his life in a
ménage à trots,
but it all
seems
to have worked satisfactorily. At least for him. His women all had exceptional patience and were devoted to him. Until …

His first wife, Tigy, took a maid called Boule, a simple fisherman's daughter who rapidly became Simenon's mistress and stayed on for years sharing bed, board and Master. It all appeared to be quite acceptable, and Tigy bore him a son in 1939. Life was rich! Simenon had an heir!

He also had a war. Which caught them all unawares, as indeed it did many Frenchmen (we must now count Simenon as French) at the time. The disastrous defeat of June 1940 threw them into black despair, fear and disbelief. It is impossible for anyone who is not French, or who has not lived closely in that country for a number of years, to comprehend exactly how devastating the Occupation was.

Life was fraught with incredible dangers and terrors, not only for the unhappy Jews, the Communists, the Undesirables wherever and whoever they were, but even for Simenon's adored
petites gens,
the little grey mice of society, who only wanted to keep out of trouble and survive silently. But during the four dreadful years of Occupation a new and vicious word quietly slipped into his sparse vocabulary of 2,000 words: collaborator. A word which, even today, strikes fear into the heart and wrenches at the conscience of men and women in France.

Simenon and his
ménage,
however, managed to survive this period by shifting from place to place and keeping quiet. Accused at one time by the Vichy French of being a Jew – wrongly as it happens – and threatened with immediate deportation, he fled to a tiny village miles away from the cruel world, but not far from Oradour-sur-Glane, a town which was torched by the Germans along with its entire population. He moved on again.

Friends began to disappear, were hauled off on the trains for deportation; others collaborated willingly, and Simenon managed to stick to the resolve that many writers, painters, actors and the rest had forged just before the Fall: to carry on, as far as possible, in a normal manner and keep the culture of their country alive in the face of the greatest disaster it had known in modern times.

Simenon remained true to the resolve, writing, as he always did, in a blazing fury. When the war ended he prudently gathered his ‘family' together and managed to get himself – he was always good at having useful friends – to America. Tigy finally put her foot down and Boule remained behind. The family was for once intact, for a short time. Within a few weeks Simenon had met a 24-year-old French-Canadian girl, Denise, started an affair, and would eventually take her as his second wife. For the time being America was home: five fruitful years produced no fewer than fourteen novels and thirteen Maigrets.

Simenon always called himself ‘an instinctive' worker rather than an intellectual. When he wrote he did so as one possessed, cutting off the outside world. When the ‘mechanism' started, the ‘music' just ran and ran. He always insisted that he dared not interfere with the ‘mechanism', could not, nor would, ever alter or introduce something ‘new'. It was a gift which he had received and he was the only person who could use it properly.

In 1973 he announced his retirement. The gift was exhausted, or perhaps had exhausted him. He began to dictate a series of highly unreliable, but naturally entertaining ‘memoirs' which he continued until he died at eighty-six in 1989. His children heard the news on the radio after his cremation; and by the time the press and the family had reached his last home in Lausanne, his ashes had already been scattered beneath a giant cedar tree, as he had requested, by the faithful companion he had taken, Teresa.

A giant, a genius, a glorious storyteller had slipped quietly away, leaving more splendours and riches than any Egyptian king. Glories which were, and always would be, eternally available to his
petites gens,
the people who gave them life, and made his fortune.

Daily Telegraph,
18 April 1992

London Observed: Stories and Sketches
by Doris Lessing (HarperCollins)

This is the first time in four years of contributing to the
Daily Telegraph
that I have had to bring to the typewriter the book I am reviewing – for the simple reason that I do not remember a single thing I have read, including the titles of the stories. They do not hold or entertain me; they merely make me skip with irritation. I do not comprehend how a writer of such intensity and renown could produce so limp a lettuce.

The title is hugely provocative.
London Observed.
London!
My
London? It does not remotely
touch
London. It could happily transfer to
Bombay Observed, Athens Observed, Darlington Observed.
It is correct in only one word:
Observed.
This higgledy-piggledy slew of characters is indeed ‘observed'. None is at any level
understood.

It appears that Doris Lessing has merely pressed her face to the thick glass of an aquarium and worthily recorded the fish she has seen. They dart, drift, skim, turn, move elegantly, roughly, shoot for a fight: all this she has observed, written down, as well as the bright colours, the streaks of light, the ripples of bone and flesh beneath jewelled scales. But she describes these splendours in sepia. Her prose has no colour. I longed for brilliance, for a bit of vulgar passion.

Naturally, the stories are very capably handled. Neat, tidy, set down as motions. In one, a girl of O-level age has a baby on a rough blanket in a back-street shed. A slavering dog is sniffing about. We are awash with sanitary towels, blood and water and filth, but at no time with tears, or anxiety, or sympathy. I, frankly, did not give a tinker's gob for the wretched child or its teenage mother. Nor did I believe one syllable of the dainty dialogue. Who
are
these people?

Later, we have a story about a journey by Underground from St John's Wood to Trafalgar Square. A kind of defence of the Tube. The varied life passes before one from stop to stop. It is, I gather, impressive that at the height of the rush-hour we are likely to see that ‘half the carriage' actually reads! In the morning:

people betray their allegiances: the
Times,
the
Independent,
the
Guardian,
the
Telegraph,
the
Mail.
The bad papers some of us are ashamed of don't seem much in evidence …

Well, strike me pink! There is more. Someone was actually reading
The Iliad.
And across the aisle ‘a woman read
Moby-Dick',
and, as if that were not enough joy, in this ordinary carriage a girl with ‘a new baby asleep on her chest' held up a copy of
Wuthering Heights.
This clearly pleases Mrs Lessing. The unlikeliness, plus the innate snobbery, amaze me.