Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

A judge, handed the Simenon file, would certainly be puzzled by the flagrant discrepancies between the cheeky self-confidence of the accused and the harrowing evidence of his characters. But didn’t Maigret himself warn us never to trust judges? Judges understand nothing. If they understood, how could they still judge?

Once, however, as if by inadvertence, Simenon made a genuine confession. A writer may sometimes speak most truthfully about himself when he thinks he is merely commenting on another writer whom he particularly likes. In 1960, in a radio broadcast devoted to Balzac, Simenon said things far more revealing than the lengthy, embarrassing and superfluous memoirs he dictated at the end of his life. In this portrait of Balzac, some statements carry a singular weight: “The need to create other men, to draw out of oneself a crowd of different characters, could hardly arise in a man who finds himself harmoniously adjusted to his own little world. Why should anyone obstinately endeavour to live out other people’s lives, if he is himself self-confident and without revolt?”

It can hardly be doubted that Simenon was utterly and irretrievably “ill-at-ease in his own skin,” that he never recovered from having been deprived of his mother’s affection, that his whole life was a long and impossible attempt to get even for all the humiliations of his mean and narrow childhood; yet, in the end, these matters should only concern professional psychologists. Let us return to literature.

The urge to create characters, to invent other beings, reaches in Simenon the proportions of an obsession so exclusive and devouring that one could use his case to make a clinical analysis of the physiology and pathology of literary creation. Indeed, it is this very compulsion that injects his novels with a sense of inescapable necessity. Reading his works, one verifies the truth of Julien Green’s observation: “The only books that matter are those of which it could be said that their author would have suffocated had he not written them.” Few writers were ever so purely and totally novelists ; good connoisseurs such as Gide and Mauriac noticed this very soon — and their admiration for Simenon’s phenomenal ability was tinged with a shade of envy: how did he manage — this uncouth and commonplace Belgian shopkeeper — to outclass them so bedazzlingly on their own home ground?

Conversely, as soon as Simenon stopped writing novels, it was as if he ceased to exist. He had nothing to say, or when he insisted on speaking he would utter platitudes, or display an embarrassing caddishness with cold insensitivity. Never mind! To an acrobat who had just walked across the Niagara Falls on a wire, who would think to ask what he can do besides ? Even though Simenon at rest could sometimes provoke the perplexity of his admirers, these unfortunate impressions never detracted from the superior powers of his art. Open any of his major novels: at once, a magic takes effect. From the first paragraph, you are gripped as if by the jaws of a steel trap that will not release its hold until the final full stop of the last page; and, even then, after you have shut the book, you remain stunned, and it takes quite a while to re-enter your own familiar little world, having glimpsed while you were reading its dark and vertiginous reverse side.

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 essential: 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!