The Widow

GEORGES SIMENON (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. He went to work as a reporter at the age of fifteen and in 1923 moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful and prolific author of pulp fiction while leading a dazzling social life. In the early 1930s, Simenon emerged as a writer under his own name, gaining renown for his detective stories featuring Inspector Maigret. He also began to write his psychological novels, or
romans durs
—books in which he displays a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Having written nearly two hundred books under his own name and become the best-selling author in the world, Simenon retired as a novelist in 1973, devoting himself instead to dictating several volumes of memoirs.

PAUL THEROUX is a novelist and travel writer who divides his time between Cape Cod and Hawaii. Among his books are the novels
The Mosquito Coast, Millroy the Magician
, and
My Secret History
and the travel memoirs
Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster
, and
The Great Railway Bazaar
. He has edited
The Best American Travel Writing
and in 2007 published three novellas collected as
The Elephanta Suite
.

THE WIDOW

GEORGES SIMENON

Translated from the French by

JOHN PETRIE

Introduction by

PAUL THEROUX

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

The Widow

 
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Copyright and More Information

T
WO STARTLINGLY
similar short novels appeared in France in 1942, at the center of each narrative, a conscienceless and slightly creepy young man, unattached and adrift, perpetrator of a meaningless murder. One was Camus'
L'Étranger
, the other Simenon's
La veuve Couderc
. Camus' novel rose to become part of the literary firmament, and is still glittering, intensely studied, and praised—to my mind, overpraised. Simenon's novel did not drop but settled, so to speak, went the way of the rest of his work—rattled along with decent sales, the occasional reprint, and was even resurrected as a 1950s pulp-fiction paperback with a come-on tag line (“A surging novel of torment and desire”) and a lurid cover: busty peasant girl pouting in a barn, her skirt hiked over her knees, while a hunky guy lurks at the door—price twenty-five cents.

Camus had labored for years on his novel of alienation; his
Carnets
record his frustration and false starts. “The fewer novels or plays you write—because of other parasitic interests—the fewer you will have the ability to write,” V. S. Pritchett once wrote, lamenting his own small fictional output. “The law ruling the arts is that they must be pursued to excess.” Simenon had published three other novels in 1942, and six the previous year.
La veuve Couderc
(in English variously
The Widow
and
Ticket of Leave
) became another title on the extremely long list of Simenon works; none of them regarded as a subject for scholarship.

If reading Camus represents duty, Simenon represents indulgence, a lavishness that seems frivolous, inspiring a greedy satisfaction that shows as self-consciousness in even the most well-intentioned introductions to his work, the critic's awkwardness over a pleasurable text, together with a shiver of snooty superfluity and the palpable cringe, common to many introducers of a Simenon novel, What am I doing here?

Simenon takes some sorting out, because at first glance he seems easily classified and on second thought (after you have read fifty or sixty of his books) unclassifiable. The Camus comparison is not gratuitous—Simenon often made it himself, and André Gide brought the same subject up a few years after
L'Étranger
appeared, favoring Simenon's work, especially this novel. And (in a 1947 letter to Albert Guerard) he went further, calling Simenon “
notre plus grand romancier aujourd'hui, vrai romancier
.”

Born ten years apart, both Camus and Simenon had arrived raw and youthful in metropolitan France from the distant margins of literary Francophonia—Camus a French Algerian and polemical journalist with a philosophical bent, Simenon a self-educated Belgian who began his writing life as a cub reporter with a taste for crime stories; the pedant and the punk, both with an eye for the ladies. Camus seems to have taken no notice of Simenon (no mention at all in any Camus biography), though we know that Simenon was watchful and somewhat competitive with the decade-younger Camus, whose complete works (he must have noted) can be accommodated between the covers of one modest-sized volume. The indefatigable Simenon, confident of winning the Nobel Prize, predicted in 1937 that he would win it in within ten years. The literature prize went to others—Pearl S. Buck, F. E. Sillanpää, Winston S. Churchill. Hearing the news in 1957 that Camus had won it, Simenon (so his wife reported) became enraged. “Can you believe that asshole got it and not me?”

What to make of the gifted and unstoppable writer who has a rarified existential streak but also a nose for what the public wants? The universities are seldom any help—no one is less welcome in the literature departments than the accomplished filler of multiple shelves of books. Like many self-educated people, Simenon tended to be anti-intellectual in a defiant and mocking way, despising literary critics and giving literature departments a wide berth. The universities returned the compliment, rubbishing him and belittling or ignoring his work. The academy is uncommonly fond of the struggler and the sufferer; scratch even the most severe academic and you find an underdogger. How can (so the argument seems to run) a prolific and popular writer be any good? Usually, like Ford Madox Ford or Trollope, they are nailed as graphomaniacs and subjected to cruel simplification, represented by one book, not always their best.

Professorial philistinism dogged Simenon; so did snobbery. And it was after all a bitter, provincial university librarian who wrote of

Simenon was the living intimidating embodiment of Philip Larkin's envious lines, plenty of booze and birds available, though his daily output in the château was more like 5,000 words.

Simenon considered himself the equal of Balzac. He regarded his novels as a modern-day
Comédie humaine
. His one foray into literary criticism was a long and insightful essay on Balzac, which took the form of mother-blaming. “A novelist is a man who does not like his mother, or who never received mother-love,” words that applied equally to himself and that inform one of his memoirs,
Letter to My Mother
. He was the Balzac of blighted lives, writing out of a suffering that was not obvious until the end of his long career. Material success, one of Balzac's major themes, is not a theme that interested Simenon, who dwelled on failure, in spite of the fact that he himself was a great success and made a point of crowing about it.

Incredibly, for such a productive soul, Simenon was at times afflicted with writer's block, and though in Simenon it seemed almost an affectation, it perturbed him to the extent that he used it as an occasion to keep a diary, to recapture his novel-writing mood. In the diary he recounted his obsessional subjects—money, his family, his mother, the household, and other writers. During the writing of this diary, Henry Miller visited him and extravagantly praised him as someone who lived an enviable life. While Simenon humored him, and anatomized his character, he unblocked himself with this unusual and valuable journal, later published under the title
When I Was Old
.

His many straight detective novels based on the character of Chief Inspector Jules Maigret fit a pattern, as compact case studies, problems of lingering guilt and subtle clues, with a shrewd even lovable detective of settled habits. He came up with the rounded and believable and happily married Maigret in 1930 and did not stop adding to that shelf until 1972, seventy-six volumes later. But what about the rest of the books? The immensity of Simenon's life and letters baffles and defeats the simplifier. How to square the years in Liège as a reporter and an admitted hack with his postwar retreat to rural Connecticut? The trip through the Pacific in 1935, with the year he dropped out to travel by barge through France? The Arizona novels? The many châteaux? The classic cars he collected? The gourmandizing, the womanizing? “Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically. Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work,” writes Patrick Marnham, in
The Man Who Wasn't Maigret
. Simenon lived long enough to have made love to Josephine Baker and to stare priapically into the cleavage of Brigitte Bardot. What of his ability to write a chapter a day and finish an excellent novel in a ten or eleven days, and write another one a few months later?

Simenon's detractors put him down as a compulsive hack; to his admirers, who included not just the hard-to-impress Henry Miller and the sniffily Olympian Gide, as well as the generally aloof Thornton Wilder and the quite remote Jorge Amado, he was the consummate writer. He had no time for his other contemporaries. It wasn't a question of his believing he was better than any of them; he simply took no notice of them. Even at the height of his friendship with Henry Miller, he did not read Miller's work; he suggested it was unreadable, but shrewdly analyzed Miller the man in
When I Was Old
. He claimed in
The Paris Review
to have been inspired by Gogol and Dostoyevsky, but he wrote nothing insightful about them.

Like many other writers he hated anyone probing into his life, and habitually lied, laid false trails, or exaggerated his experiences. In 1932, he traveled through central Africa. Typically, he claimed he had been in Africa a year. The actual time was two months. Never mind, he made the best of it and wrote three novels with African settings. He hid himself, never more than when he was promoting one of his books, as the dapper writer, puffing his pipe, obscuring himself with phenomenal statistics. But the statistics were misleading in the way that record-breaking is misleading, merely the helpless adoration of the exceptional. Simenon trotting out his big numbers sounds to me like a man's mendacious reckoning, not different from the modestly endowed group of islanders in Vanuatu who wear enormous phallocrypts and call themselves Big Nambas.

Yet, though they invite suspicion, the most unlikely figures associated with Simenon are probably true, the roundabout four hundred works of fiction he claimed to have published are verifiable. A hundred and seventeen are serious novels, the rest Maigrets and books written under pseudonyms. He dropped out of school at thirteen to become a reporter. The facts associated with him take such an extravagant form that he seems a victim of his own stupendous statistics—the numerous novels, the 500 million copies sold, the 55 changes of address, and his often quoted boast that he bedded 10,000 women. (His second wife put the figure at “no more than 1,200.”)

It is perhaps not surprising that such a freakish example of creative energy is not seriously studied (though there exists a Centre d'Études Georges Simenon at the University of Liège). Apart from the Nobel omission, Simenon did not feel slighted. He said, “Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” But the consequence is that every new reissue of a Simenon merits an introduction like this, because he seems (like many of his characters) to come from nowhere. Well, he agreed. He said that as a Belgian he was like a man without a country.