MAIGRET'S RETURN

Imagine a husband and wife having breakfast in their kitchen without looking at each other or exchanging a word, each with their own stock of food in a separate cupboard, under lock and key to prevent poisoning by “the other;” imagine fathers murdering their children or children murdering their parents. These are the stuff of Georges Simenon’s 400 novels, the first half written under eighteen pseudonyms. But his fame derives from the Inspector Maigret policiers, 76 novels of detection starring that pipe-smoking, slow-moving, grumpy, cerebral hulk. The inspector’s focus is on psychology rather than on physical clues; the books are less whodunnits than whydunnits. Maigret often sympathizes more with the criminals than with their victims.

Maigret is now enjoying a worldwide revival. New translations of Simenon’s classics are once more filling the Western world’s bookshops. In England, Penguin has been re-issuing the Maigrets in fresh translations, about a dozen each year, while Simenon’s non-Maigret novels, mostly psychological studies of complex family relationships, usually ending in suicide or homicide, are also enjoying a renaissance. In Israel, his bitter memoir Letter to my Mother, has just appeared alongside The Cat, which portrays, in fiction form, the memoir’s cold mother-son relationship and the mother’s hate-filled relations with her second husband. Simenon was probably the 20^th century’s most popular novelist and his books, in 55 translations, have, over the years, sold more than 500 million copies. Hundreds of his novels, mostly Maigrets, have been translated into full-length films and TV serials. In the latest, in French in 2022, Maigret is portrayed by Gerard Depardieu.

But Simenon aimed beyond popularity and, by his 40s, dreamed of the Nobel Prize. He often compared himself, not only on the basis of his prolific output and sales, to Balzac and Dickens, and many “serious” writers, including Andre Gide (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1947) and Francois Mauriac (Nobel, 1952), agreed.

Simenon was born in 1903 in Liege, Belgium, to a poor family. Forced to leave school and seek a job at 15 due to his father’s ailing health, Simenon brazenly walked into a local newspaper office and landed a job as a reporter. He soon covered crime and criminals. He was later to write that the years of brutal German occupation and privation during World War One had conditioned the occupied population to crime, lying and cheating. And, of course, there was the proverbial skeleton in the cupboard: one of Simenon’s Flemish ancestors, Gabriel Brull, was hanged for robbery and murder in 1743. Before being hanged Brull was burnt at the stake; afterwards, he was disembowelled). Alongside reporting, Simenon began writing pulp fiction, short stories and eventually novels, under a variety of pen names. He married and moved to Paris in 1922 and soon soared to national stardom, his novels bestsellers. In 1931, years before Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe roamed the “mean streets” of southern California, Simenon launched Maigret, with the smells, sounds and dirt of Paris’s nether quarters and the claustrophobic, often deadly entanglements of France’s provincial towns. The Maigret series was to encompass four decades, each new instalment a bestseller; the last Maigret appeared in 1972. Simenon early on became a multimillionaire, living a life of luxury, large villas, fast cars, champagne and caviar galore . At 69 Simenon stopped writing fiction but he went on to churn out a series of autobiographical works filled with contradictory facts and anecdotes. He passed in 1989.

Was he happy? he was asked by a succession of interviewers. Mostly not, it seems.

His childhood was badly scarred by Henriette, his mother, who did not love him. She herself had had an awful childhood – her father died when she was five – and grew up in poverty, also, apparently, unloved. Several of her siblings prospered (for years she worked as a nanny in one of their households) but none of their gold dust settled on her. She spent most of her adulthood trying to attain financial security, at last marrying someone with – and for - a pension. But wihin months their match dissolved into mutual hatred. Henriette remained tightfisted, manipulative, neurotically self-sufficient. Once rich, Georges sent her monthly subsidies. But she hated owing anyone anything. She saved every centime he sent her and one day,visiting him in Connecticut, she handed him an envelope containing everything he had ever given her. And, along with the envelope, she handed him a fistful of gold coins, money that she had saved, centime by centime, from her meager earnings and pension – to be delivered to her grandchildren upon her death.

Georges had no memory of ever sitting on her lap. He recalled that she constantly berated him as a liar and malefactor and occasionally, in wild frenzies, beat him. At one point, as he tells us in Letter, she more or less told him that it were better that he rather than his brother, Christian, had died in 1947 (Christian was killed by Communist gurrillas in Vietnam while serving in the Foreign Legion, which he had joined for fear of prosecution as a Nazi collaborator in the chaotic wake in France of World War II). From the age of two Georges sleepwalked and he continued to do so periodically as an adult.

Simenon’s continual search for ‘home’ – over the years he shuffled between palatial estates, houses and apartments in France (Paris, La Rochelle, the Vendee, Orleans, Provence), Canada, England, the United States (Arizona, California, Connecticut), yachts and houseboats of various sizes, and Switzerland – and his gargantuan sexual appetite both appear to have been, at least in part, products of the tribulations of that childhood. “I was born in the dark and in the rain,” he told an interviewer, [but] I got away. I am one of the lucky ones.” He meant that he had never turned to crime.

Most students of Simenon’s life have devoted a great deal of attention to his sexuality. He often estimated that he had slept during his lifetime with “10,000” women (he sometimes added: “8,000 of them prostitutest). But his second wife, Denise or Denyse – by then estranged and, perhaps, vindictive - suggested that the real total was closer to “1,200.” Simenon occasionally claimed that there were days he had bedded as many as four different women. Among his better-known sexual partners in the 1920s was the Afro-American singer and dancer, Josephine Baker. Through most of his adult life, Simenon’s households included secretaries, maids and other “help” with all or most of whom he regularly slept (he often spoke of a menage a quatre), and when traveling, he routinely moved into the posh hotels with what he called a “harem” - wife, secretary, maid and nanny (and children), Georges shuffling or striding afternoons and nights between the various rooms. But the mornings, from 6 a.m., were always religiously devoted to writing.

His books are almost all short, the writing atmospheric but concise, the sentences brief and often both opaque and revealing. Simenon apparently used no more than 2,000 different words in all of his novels. He usually wrote each book in a week or fortnight of intense, exhausting concentration, as if in a trance, cut off from the world. He then rested for weeks or months - and then on to the next book. Most years he produced between five and ten books, though in 1931 he published eleven Maigrets and in 1938 eleven non-Maigrets.

The gradual, violent rupture over 1955-1965 with Denise, the only woman he appears to have truly loved (and, eventually, hated), was instrumental in his beloved daughter Marie-Jo’s suicide in Paris in 1978. Over the years she had repeatedly tried to commit suicide. Each parent subsequently, in print, blamed the other. Marie-Jo clearly had a father complex. When she was eight she asked him to buy her a wedding ring, which she wore – repeatedly expanded - until her death and was, at her request, cremated with it.

In his excellent biography of Simenon, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret, A Portrait of Georges Simenon, published in 1992, Patrick Marnham traces both Simenon’s life and how its highlights were reproduced or refashioned in his fiction.

The Jewish problem or anti-Semitism sporadically crops up in Marnham’s biography. In the Letter, Simenon at one point recalls one of Henriette’s East European tenants in the boarding house she ran in Liege just before the outbreak of the First World War, a young student. “I don’t know what became of him. An engineer, no doubt, in Poland. Unless he went to work elsewhere, and I hope he did, because he was a Jew and he would likely have died in the gas chambers,” Simenon recalled.

But the Letter was written in the early 1970s, the Holocaust at the time an almost universally condemned atrocity. In the 1920s, as a columnist in the right-wing Catholic Gazette de Liege (which occasionally referred to Jews as “deicides”), the young Simenon published a series of 17 articles headed Le peril juif. As Marnham puts it, they were “a classic statement of of the intellectual anti-Semitism of the period.” Simenon quoted from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the staple of anti-Jewish vitriol, and equated Judaism with materialism and Bolshevism.

In 1985 Simenon explained that he had been forced by his editors to write the articles and that in “no sense [had they] reflected my opinions either now or then.” Indeed, he added, as a child he had gotten on well with his mother’s boarding house tenants, more than half of whom were Jewish, and that “all my life I have had Jewish friends, including the closest friend of all, [prominent French journalist] Pierre Lazareff.” Simenon’s sympathetic biographer Marnham dismissed the articles as the product of “a politically inexperienced and intellectually naïve young man, uncritical of the anti-Semitic views of his employers and capable of regurgitating pre-Nazi theories with spirit and conviction.”

But twenty years on, during World War Two, Simenon was far from a resistante. Indeed, he went out of his way to obtain an Aryan identity certificate. He never publicly criticized the Nazis and the Occupation, continued churning out novels as if all was well and signed up with Continental Films, a German-financed company that produced anti-Semitic films and banned Jewish actors. The company filmed one of Simenon’s books, Stranger in the House, with a strong anti-Semitic message (which, albeit, was not present in the original novel).

In January 1945, as part of the post-war purge of the French intelligentsia, the post-Vichy authorities investigated Simenon on suspicion of collaboration and placed him under house arrest for three months. He was eventually cleared of wrongdoing. But later that year he abruptly packed and left France and settled in the US. Perhaps he feared a renewed investigation or collaborationist allegations, or, as he later said, it was out of fear of a Communist takeover in France.

But Second World War-era suspicions and allegations aside, Simenon’s literary career over the decades evinces clear signs of anti-Semitic prejudce. In his Madman of Bergerac (1932), Simenon wrote of “people like Samuel …he had dealt with hundreds in his time. And he had always studied them with a curiosity that was mixed with some other feeling – not quite repulsion, as though they belonged to a different species altogether to the one we call human …”

Jews, in disproportionate numbers, appear elsewhere in Simenon’s novels, almost always displaying negative attributes (garlic-eating, overweight, shadiness); in two books the murderers are Jews. As late as 1965, in Maigret’s Patience, there is an anti-Semitic slur. It would appear that Marnham’s dismissal of Simenon’s anti-Semitic essays of the 1920s as youthful excess is misbegotten.

A fine writer and a complex, hard human being.