Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

People are often surprised when they realise that, in life, great writers do not bear much resemblance to the image they had formed of them while reading their works. For instance, with naïve astonishment they may discover that a fierce polemicist, whose fire and violence had filled them with awe, actually is a quiet, shy and retiring man; or again, the orgiastic prophet of burning passion, who had stirred their sensual imagination, proves in fact to be a eunuch; or the famous adventurer, who set their minds dreaming of exotic horizons, wears slippers and never leaves his cosy fireside; or the aesthete from whose exquisite visions they drew so much inspiration eats from plastic plates and wears hideous neckties. They should have known better. Quite frequently, an artist creates in order to compensate for a deficiency; his creation is not the joyous and exuberant outpouring of an overflow — it is more often a pathetic attempt to answer a want, to bridge a gap, to hide a wound.

Hilaire Belloc admirably described this divorce between the writer and his writing:

I never knew a man yet who was consonant to his work. Either he was clearly much greater and better than his work, or clearly much less and worse… In point of fact it is not the mere man who does the thing: it is the man inspired. And the reason we are shocked by the vanity of artists is that, more or less consciously, we consider the contrast between what God has done through them, and their own disgusting selves… When the work is of genius, he is far below it: he is on a different plane. No man is himself a genius. His genius is lent him from outside.

Simenon granted countless journalistic interviews. In his free time (that is, when he was not writing novels) he would entertain journalists sometimes as often as twice or three times a week. The media found him to be a golden topic. With apparent good will, but not without shrewdness, he complied with their many requests; in front of television cameras, he performed his old routine with well-oiled smoothness; he deftly fed his numerous visitors all the humbug they wished to swallow, in the same fashion as, at the zoo, one throws peanuts to the monkeys.

He enjoyed worldwide celebrity. His fame can be conveniently encapsulated in a series of figures which, though often quoted, never cease to amaze: his books have been translated into fifty-seven languages and published in forty countries; he wrote some 450 novels — the exact figure, which may possibly constitute a world record of fecundity in the history of literature, still escapes the investigations of the most diligent researchers, as in his youth he produced countless pot-boilers (adventure stories, soft pornography watered down with sentimental romance) that were issued in cheap, obscure and short-lived serial publications, under twenty-seven different pen-names. In his early period, he would sometimes turn out one or two novels in the course of a single day. As success came, he began to travel restlessly; at the same time, he became a compulsive landlord, setting up for himself thirty-two successive residences. And also, naturally, let us not forget the 10,000 women with whom, according to his own computations, he managed over the years to have sexual intercourse.

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.