The Hard Stuff

The beginning of my teens came ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. I regard it as highly appropriate that Larkin made the first of those milestones a novel, because it wasn’t only sex and rock and roll that had begun. Penguin Modern Classics, in their distinctive slate-grey livery, had also arrived, providing us hungry young readers with a list of books to grow up by. In due course PMC introduced me to Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway and Camus – and, later, Gide, Hesse and Sartre – offering the chance to luxuriate in amoral existential disgust, in contemplation of the meaning of mean­inglessness.

But, looking back, it appears the PMC editors missed a trick. Alongside Gide, Camus and Sartre there was another French-language writer serving up huge portions of the Uncaring Universe and the Desperation of Choice. He was Georges Simenon, much better known as the creator of Jules Maigret (see SF no. 80). The story goes that Simenon invented Maigret in the early 1930s merely to earn a name for himself while he developed his stand-alone fiction. Writing at an extraordinary rate he produced eighteen Maigrets in four years and did indeed grow famous. Thinking ‘job done’, he retired the Commissaire in 1934 to concentrate fully on what he called romans durs, or ‘hard novels’: spare, unsentimental tales with a dark underside, unflinching about human cruelty in a universe with no conscience. Working at his usual scorching speed, he produced no less than twenty-nine of these in the next eight years and, even though he returned to Maigret in 1942 – seemingly unable to quite manage without the big man and his pipe – he alternated these new Maigrets with a continued and equal supply of romans durs. This pattern continued unabated until he abandoned fiction altogether in 1972. While American writers were obsessed with the idea of redemp­tion, French novelists, from Flaubert onwards, generally took a harder, more tragic line. In the case of Simenon, a writer greatly interested in tragedy and its mechanisms, the battered lives of his characters almost invariably end with the acceptance of a cold, un-relenting fate. These novels, then, are indeed dur – and often dour – and they have firmly cemented his place in the canon of French literature, symbolized by his consecration as one of Gallimard’s Pléiade edition authors in 2009. He is seen in French culture as an existential realist to rank with Gide and Camus. In his 1942 novel The Widow Couderc a convict, Jean, is out on licence and, by a stroke of apparent good luck, is hired by the eponymous widow to work on her farm, as well as occasionally to warm her bed. But Jean is haunted by the senseless murder he committed, and by the lies he told to escape the guillotine. In his heart he knows he can never finally evade that fate and must therefore commit another murder to make sure he suffers it. Similarly The Hand (1968), a Hitchcockian tale set in Massachusetts, is drenched in fatal dread. It is told in the first person by an unhap­pily married hometown lawyer in the throes of a soul-crushing mid-life crisis. When his best friend, a successful Madison Avenue ad-man, accidentally freezes to death in a snowstorm, two decades of resentment come to the surface, against his dead friend, his own wife and their entire social circle. He convinces himself of his responsibil­ity for the friend’s death and is certain that, despite feeling no regret, he will ultimately have to pay for it. He then doubles down by start­ing an affair with the dead man’s wife. Step by step, like Jean in The Widow Couderc, he pushes himself towards a second crime, this time a real one, to affirm the reality of his imagined one. In much of his dur fiction Simenon plays variations on similarly Flaubertian themes, as he does in many of the Maigret books. One of his major novels, Act of Passion (1947), is set in the household of a married provincial doctor who takes up with a woman younger and sexier than his wife. So far, so very like the first marriage of Dr Bovary. But Simenon quickly takes the reader off in quite an-other direction, into unreliable narration and an almost clinical case- history of murderous coercive control. These explorations of hidden bourgeois neuroses, and the crimes that come from them, are compelling. But in my eyes Simenon’s great­est novel is rooted elsewhere. The Snow Was Dirty (1948), which he wrote having lived through the aftermath of France’s defeat in 1940, is given a deliberately nihilist frame. This is a scene in which bourgeois norms and middle-class morality are irrelevant from the outset. The entire story is told through the eyes of Frank Friedmaier, a teenage anti-hero to rank with Pinkie in Brighton Rock and Alex in A Clockwork Orange. He lives with his mother in an unnamed city under occupation by a foreign power, and it is winter. Fuel and food, not to mention social comforts, are scarce, so that the life of the people is a daily struggle to eat and keep warm. Frank, though, has it easy because his mother keeps a brothel, which serves officers of the occupying military. She gives him enough money to do nothing except hang about on the fringes of crime and the black market, with no particular object in life beyond the desire to prove himself to the fraternity through acts of wanton criminality. One night, he ambushes and stabs to death a drunken officer of the occupying army. He then worries in case this murder be mistaken for an act of political resistance, rather than the pure nihilism that he’d intended. So, in a clear echo of Raskolnikov’s crime, he murders an old woman and steals her late husband’s hoard of vintage watches, which he sells to an officer of the occupation. Frank hardly bothers to hide his responsibility for these acts but, unlike the police in Crime and Punishment and the prosecutors of Mersault in The Outsider, no one takes much interest. That is, until he is picked up for handling marked currency, of a kind reserved for the use of the occupiers, and the story lurches sickeningly, but bril­liantly, into a different register. The last third of The Snow Was Dirty, the story of Frank’s imprisonment and interrogation, is an astonish­ing achievement. It may possibly be tinged with the influence of another PMC title from my youth, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But Simenon’s handling of it is uniquely tense and vivid. Frank, as a prisoner, has been reborn into an altogether other way of being, and with an unexpected resolve that might even be seen as heroic. He is held in isolation, called down for questioning at unpre­dictable intervals, sleep-deprived. At first he keeps track of the days by making marks on the wall, but he soon learns that, for a prisoner under interrogation, with no prospect of a trial or any kind of due process, timekeeping no longer matters. For Frank, a thief of watches, time itself now hardly exists. Meanwhile prisoners are being daily marched out into the courtyard below his cell to be shot, yet he remains unperturbed. He knows that ultimately he too will be shot and, though death may be close, he trusts in the thought that it can be indefinitely postponed as long as he holds out against the interro­gations. In these, the ‘hard-man-soft-man’ approach is used. The hard one is an officer who brutally beats Frank about the face; the soft one, a civilian-suited bureaucrat with an unshakeable capacity to persist, who never rises from his desk or raises his voice. It emerges that the interrogators’ real interest is not in whoever had given Frank the marked banknotes but in the details of officers visiting the brothel, and the likelihood that the girls have been pass­ing on pillow-talk to the underground resistance. Frank knows nothing whatsoever about this, but he tries to keep the questioner guessing. Having nothing to hide, Frank tries to hide it anyway. Resisting, whatever the cost, has become the only thing that matters. Yet it is not quite the only thing. As I’ve mentioned, redemption is rare for any of Simenon’s wrongdoers, and yet in a way Frank finds it. His greatest, most defining sin is not his murders and his thefts. It is the fact that he callously pimped Sissy, an innocent girl who is in love with him, to one of his low-life accomplices. Sissy, virginal and trusting, agrees to sleep with Frank after a peremptory courtship but he has been planning all along to send this friend into the dark bed­room in his place. It is only gradually that he later feels any shame over this act, which is seemingly motiveless, since he secretly holds the friend in contempt. Yet the subtle growth of guilt, and the man­ner of his release from it, is one of the most surprising turns in the strange and compelling course of the story. Simenon is rightly praised and enjoyed for his ability to build his stories through the evocation of France, particularly that of the 1930s and 1940s. If The Snow Was Dirty had been set during the actual Nazi occupation, and/or the collaborationist Vichy regime, it would still have been a great book. Why, then, is a specific location avoided? There is little doubt that page by page the atmosphere and detail are informed by lived experience: rationing and shortages, the black market, the secret police, random arrests, the trade-off between prin­ciples and survival. But just by mentioning these I have answered the question, because those are the conditions that always trail war and oppression. Simenon wanted to underscore this universality. When the Modern Classics were first launched, Simenon had already been relegated to another part of the Penguin list, the green-jacketed murder mysteries. He was just a crime writer, if a very singular one. Today, along with Act of Passion and other romans durs, The Snow Was Dirty has been reborn in Howard Curtis’s beautiful new translation as a Penguin Classic. And about time too.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Robin Blake 2024