Grove Koger
There are an impressive number of great twentieth century writers who didn’t win the Nobel Prize—the list is more impressive, in fact, than the list of those who did. Just think: Lawrence Durrell, Colette, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov … None got the nod from the Swedish Academy. The list could go on and on, but toward the top I’d unhesitatingly include the man who was probably the most prolific novelist of the century: Georges Simenon.
Simenon was born in Belgium in 1903 and died on September 4, 1989, in Switzerland. While he spent most of his adult life in France, and is famed for his many treatments of Paris, he remained a Belgian citizen.
How many books did Simenon write? Britannica says about 425, with translations into about fifty languages. The number of novels? Eighty-four featuring his famed detective Maigret, plus another 136 “psychological novels.” (But then all the Maigrets were “psychological.”) Trudee Young’s Georges Simenon (Scarecrow P, 1976) mentions “over 200 novels and short stories (detective as well as ‘serious’ novels), plus an additional 208 books written early in his career under pseudonyms.” (But then all the Maigrets were “serious.”) On another page: “It has been estimated that [Simenon] produced 208 popular novels, most of which were published in pulp magazines, and he also used at least seventeen different pen names.” Britannica adds that his total sales amounted to “more than 600 million copies.”
So much for the numbers. How about quality? Every one of the Simenons I’ve read has been good, and at least a dozen great. The latter include The Window over the Way (1933), The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (1938), Stain on the Snow (1948), The Burial of Monsieur Bouvet (1950), The Premier (1958), The Train (1961), and The Little Saint, (1965). Among that tiny fraction of Simenon’s output, Stain on the Snow is most often named as his masterpiece, and I’d pair it with The Little Saint, one of his few optimistic novels. But the truth is that his works as a whole form a vast, multifaceted panorama of ordinary twentieth century life in France, with glimpses of Belgium, French colonial Africa, Tahiti, what is now the nation of Georgia, and the United States (where he lived for several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s ). “Ordinary” in this case means the lives of ordinary, generally undistinguished men and women, but not what we would think of as ordinary events, for Simenon nearly always pushes his decidedly unheroic characters to the breaking point. What’s more, he does it in crisp, unsentimental prose (at least in English translation). Most of his novels are short and can be read in an evening or two.
The 1929 novel Pietr-le-Letton (Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett) marked two firsts: the first novel Simenon published under his own name, and the first featuring Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris. Maigret encounters the same desperate lives that Simenon wrote about elsewhere, but his gentle, compassionate disposition spares the reader. He brings his murderers to justice, but, like his creator, he seldom passes judgement on them.
Maigret has been portrayed in motion pictures and on television by a number of distinguished actors, including Bruno Cremer, Michael Gambon, and, most recently, Rowan Atkinson. The last (if you aren’t familiar with him) is an English actor best known for his comic roles, and when I heard that he had been picked to play Maigret, I was sure that it was a case of miscasting. But—he’s proved to be a brilliant Maigret, bringing a gravity to the part that I hadn’t realized he had in him. It’s worth noting, by the way, that today’s Paris is no longer scruffy enough to match the mood of the novels; as a result, most of the exterior scenes in the Gambon and Atkinson episodes were filmed in Budapest, Hungary!
As I suggested in my first paragraph, Simenon deserved the Nobel Prize, and he was incensed when Albert Camus won it in 1957. But Simenon’s novels lack the moral dimension that the members of the Swedish Academy prefer. Nor did he lead a particularly honorable life. A tireless philanderer, he behaved in what can only be called an “opportunistic” manner during the Occupation. One of his biographies, Patrick Marnham, titled his book The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret (Farrar, 1962).
Simenon gave up writing novels in 1973 and turned to autobiographical reflections, explaining that “all my life, I was preoccupied with others and trying to understand them. Now, I am trying to understand myself.”
If you’d like to know more about Simenon, Pierre Assoulne’s exhaustive Simenon: A Biography (Knopf, 1997), which I had the pleasure of reviewing for Magill’s Literary Annual 1998 (Salem P.), is your best choice.
World Enough 