I think the idea is that these are unedited, handwritten and dated jottings in cheap notebooks (cahiers). Neither reread nor revised after the event. A record of what was in his mind, for good or bad, at the time. A record made at the time, in the way of a policeman’s notebook.
But I think his (second) wife Denyse reads at least some of them and I think another idea is that they will interest his second son, Johnny, in due course. Signs of trouble with Denyse surface towards their end and he finally separated from her in 1964. She was replaced by the housekeeper Teresa, acquired in 1961, who stayed with him until his death, at 84, in 1989.
Despite the talk of their being private, the jottings were published in 1971 or so. My guess is that there will have been at least some editing, not least because Simenon did have some regard for the feelings of his friends – and libel. My feeling, having read elsewhere that Simenon was an energetic manager of the image which reached and circulated in the world, is that these jottings are a complicated blend of fact and fiction. A man who seems to have liked to confuse things by telling various different tales about himself at various different times. Nonetheless, these jottings remain a record of sorts of his shifting moods and fancies.
I came across them quite by chance, in the margins of the purchase which completed my set of the Maigret novels, the Roman numbered Vol.XXVII and Vol.XXVIII of the collected works, noticed at reference 2. These came with Vol.1, Vol.43 and Vol.44 of the other half of the collected works, the Arabic numbered non-Maigret half, with Vol.43 being the subject of this post, reference 1. I first read the book around October last year, but have recently been turning the pages again. With what follows now being a collection of odds and ends, with no attempt to turn them into an essay with a beginning and an end, the sort of thing we got marks for at school. Mainly drawn from my notes of last year – and it remains to be seen whether there is a second read and a new line to take.
A book written at a time when Simenon was very much aware of a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, particularly in Algeria, in the Congo (which Simenon, as an expatriate Belgian, would notice) and, to a lesser extent, in Cuba (the fleshpots of which Simenon had quite possibly visited and sampled in the course of his travels).
The book opens with Simenon’s lifelong fascination with the tools of his trade, with paper, notebooks, pens and pencils. With the office in which one used such things. With a particular sort of students’ notebook with cloth covers, a red ‘tranche’ and ‘papier quadrillé’. Of his having the tools years before he started using them in earnest - a fascination with the tools rather than the substance that I can relate to. Of his haunting of the shops which sold such stuff – shops which still existed in Via San Gallo in Florence when we visited back in 2008, when the Florentines seemingly still went in for sending billets-doux on fancy paper. Possibly scented. All this despite the fact that much of Simenon’s novel writing was done on a typewriter.
Aside: T. E. Lawrence talks of something similar. Of generals who like all the apparatus, all the machinery of high rank. Of Syrians who love to talk of building an elaborate bureaucracy to run their about to be independent country, but who are pretty useless at actually doing anything.
By way of contrast, Simenon says that he dislikes gongs of all sorts. Which did not stop him being rather annoyed that he was not given the Nobel prize for literature.
A great reader, particularly when young. Inter alia, the French, German, Russian and English classics. The Russian, presumably, in translation. But lots of other stuff as well.
Simenon comes across as being very concerned about his relations with his wife and with his children. To keep private time and space in which to be with them, apart from all his social and public activities. This at a time, as noted above, when his second marriage was drawing towards its close. They all get a fair amount of space in these jottings.
And very concerned about the decline of his creative powers as the years crept on. Of his dropping down from ten books a year to five. He writes about how it no longer just happens, how it has become something of a chore, something which has to be worked at. Are more and more rituals, more self conscious rituals being added to buttress up that process in the face of failing powers, of an increased desire, an increased tendency to put the writing off until another day? And something which was not really necessary, as it had been in the past, to provide the dibs to support his fairly extravagant life style.
All that said, in broad terms, the process for the popular novels had always been much the same. First an idea. Then some days thinking himself into the emerging story. The people and places in it. Perhaps the tone of the thing. Then, apart from the occasional misfire, the burst of writing activity, a steady 10 days or so of it, so many chapters a day, usually first thing in the morning. An activity with its own rhythms and rituals. Then a pause. Then an editing phase, maybe half the time of the original writing. Then photocopying and off to his typist – a postal contact rather than a face to face contact – although there is also talk of Denyse doing the typing. And when were photocopiers invented? Off to his publisher. He did not like re-reading his work once it had gone cold, as it were, so not much correction in proof. And then we are away. Denyse could worry about all the editions, translations and adaptations.
I associate to old Bidlake, an eminent artist in Huxley’s ‘Point Counter Point’ who hated the way art trade journalists talked about the decline of his once great powers. Where I can well see how the subject might well hate such talk. Maybe athletes can wind down more easily, more gracefully, with their physical powers going into decline years before their mental powers – whereas with writers it is the mental powers that are the problem.
All this links to his very ambivalent relations to his book trade journalists. He clearly spend a lot of time with them, hosting parties and inviting small groups of them to his house for several days at a time. But he finds that despite sounding intelligent and interested, they mostly have not bothered to read much of his work, they mostly all ask the same questions and end up writing stuff which Simenon feels is all wrong. I think that he felt that he was wrong to bother about what they wrote – but he did. He also wrote about the extent he had become what it was that journalists made of him. The interaction between what he was and what his public wanted him to be. And about his dead friend Gide having once suggested to him that writers, and no doubt other public figures, to some large extent chose the person, the image they wanted the world to have of them, quite early on in their careers – and usually stick to them.
In the margins, he tells us that in his view all men – and presumably all women – are at root pretty much the same, whatever their background and social class. Particularly when they are naked. And one should not judge. He points to the example of a wannabee academician of his acquaintance – academicians being big cheeses in France – who stooped to rather childish, rather low subterfuges to further his candidacy. Simenon was also in the habit of quietly introducing naked women into his late night parties, as he found that the way that men reacted to them was very revealing.
At one point, Simenon tells us that he has very few real friends. At another, that he spends a lot of time with medical acquaintances, medical books and journals. Of which the fact that Maigret’s one real friend is his doctor, Pardon, living a few streets away, within dining range, is perhaps one result. Another being that Maigret is a doctor manqué, having had to give up his medical studies shortly after he started. On the other hand, Maigret was not a skirt chaser, which Simenon clearly was.
There are a lot of Parisian streets in the Maigret stories and nearly all of the ones that I have checked (in my handy Paris Plan from Michelin) are really there, are still there. One might have been renamed for a hero of the resistance. One of them is the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, where Maigret lives for most of the stories. Then towards the end of the present book, there is a sentimental passage about the Canal Saint Martin of between the wars, and the very Buffet lithograph reproduced above. A canal which runs north from the Pont d’Austerlitz, loops round to the east and eventually gets mixed up with the Marne – and part of which appears to have been covered over, at some point, by said Boulevard Richard Lenoir. All testimony to Simenon’s love of canals and canal life, still horse drawn when he was young. According to Wikipedia: ‘Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, running from the Bastille to the Avenue de la République, is one of the wide tree-lined boulevards driven through Paris by Baron Haussmann during the Second French Empire of Napoleon III. The Boulevard is named after François Richard and Joseph Lenoir-Dufresne, industrialists who brought the cotton industry to Paris in the 18th and 19th century. It is the site of a weekly art market and of a bi-weekly fruit and vegetable market that is one of the largest in Paris’ – but no mention of the canal, of whether it lives on underground. Which does seem unlikely. Must try and find a London street which is named after two people, rather than just one. William & Mary Street? Derby & Joan Street?
In sum, most of the time an interesting read. Just occasionally irritating when Simenon bangs on a bit, or protests too much in the words of the Bard. In which connection, it is worth noting that Simenon feels strongly that a writer of novels should not intrude his own, often boring or incorrect views, into his novels. The writer’s business, the writer’s craft, is stories not sermons. Which may be what Simenon tried to do, but it also seems to me that many characters in the Maigret stories include traits of character drawn from Simenon himself, or at least traits which he liked to think he shared, traits which he admired.
And it is also the case that many novels of Simenon’s time are more a vehicle for the views of the author than stories. The stories are just pegs on which to hang views, or mouths into which to put views. War and Peace, to take just one example, is rather marred by Tolstoy banging about the inevitable march of Russian history, without much regard to the antics of individuals. Kutusov succeeded because he just went with the flow.
Also that this can be a book for dipping. One usually comes across something of interest.
PS: I had been quite sure the line about the lady protesting too much came from Juliet’s garrulous nurse in Romeo and Juliet, but actually it turns out to come from Gertrude in Hamlet. Most odd, most irritating.
References
Reference 1: Quand j’étais vieux – Simenon – 1970. Collected works, Vol.43.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/breaking-news.html.
Reference 3: Canal St. Martin - Bernard Buffet - 1956. Lithograph. 22.5 by 14 inches. The snap above.
Reference 4: http://www.trussel.com/f_maig.htm. A site built for those fascinated by Simenon and Maigret. With Steve Trussel clearly being an energetic gentleman, although I have not yet found out anything else about him.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Simenon.
Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=simenon. Mostly stray mentions, some from over a decade ago. But including some more substantial notices. No doubt plenty more in the blogs that followed this one.
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