THE WIDOW, and TROPIC MOON, by George Simenon
mark beyer
GEORGE SIMENON’S GOOD BOOKS
GEORGE SIMENON BECAME world famous as a novelist for his genre work, fast little novels that sold well to the masses because the masses wanted fast little novels they could drop into, get their pleasure, then leave behind on a park bench or toss in the dustbin. Simenon didn’t mind; he proverbially laughed all the way to the bank, and while on his way came up with a dozen ideas for more novels. To say this modern French author was prodigious in his output would be like saying McDonald’s sells a few hamburgers.
Again, Simenon didn’t care about the equations between output and quality for the genre work that made him wealthy and well known. He had a sideline gig: writing penetrating stories of rough-born characters living at society’s edges, set in exotic places, where pressure surrounds people like a yet-discovered lump of coal at the bottom of the deepest ocean. In these stories — roman durs he called them, or “hard novels” for their course look at humanity — people’s lives life rests on a knife edge, stands before the blunt tip of a bullet, where harmony comes from birds heard singing on telephone wires from inside a cramped, dirty house, where humans contrive, conspire, and connive to get their due. Here, Simenon catalogues life as many, perhaps most, humans experience it — even if they never live to understand their life.
The Widow and Tropic Moon have been reissued in English translation — along with another handful of his hard novels — by New York Review Books. They are stunning portrayals of existentialism and the literalness such a term has created in our minds of a dog-eat-dog society. What they are not are simple, violent romps through the underbelly of society cast by sewer rat mentalities, á la Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, or Hammet and Chandler’s detective fiction, all noir novels of impeccable worth but little substantive, deeply rendered character portrayals. Simenon instead employs characters who bare worth in studying how they live so heavily weighted on earth seemingly made of wet paper, as though they are always waiting to fall through the ground into some netherworld.
In Tropic Moon, Joseph Timar travels to equatorial Africa in the early 1930s to earn his fortune. This is colonial Gabon, where whites rule blacks, are used to reaping the harvest of resource exploitation. The land of opportunity. Timar meets at the hotel and is seduced by Adéle, a pathetic creature who, with her husband and hotel-owner Eugéne, hold sinister pasts. French colonialist loggers frequent the hotel bar, play billiards, listen to music, get drunk, act stupidly. Timar doesn’t seem terribly surprised by all this; he has come for adventure and that is the only game in town, apparently. Here is where Simenon excels in his narrative. The small points of tropical Africa and dirty towns, the edgy appearances of and looks caste by desperate characters:
And that first attack of gnawing unease pursued him tenaciously, like a cloud of insects. At night, with his candle out, he could see the pale mosquito netting around him like a cage in the dark. Above, he sensed an immense void broken by rustlings, half-audible noises, fragile creatures—was it a scorpion, a mosquito, a spider?—that sometimes settled on the transparent gauze.
….
Had Timar already drained an entire bottle? He’d been given another and his glass was full again. He could see partway into the kitchen. Just then Adéle hit Thomas in the face with her fist. What? The black didn’t flinch; he took the blow without moving, his eyes staring straight ahead.
They played the same tunes ten times over. A few couples danced. Most people had taken their jackets off. Outside the silent throng of blacks went on watching the whites at play.
Adéle’s husband sat by the gramophone. His features were drawn. His stare was so hard that his face looked like a tragic mask.
….
They were holding a market in the middle of a clearing. Five women, four of them very old, were squatting in front of the mats with some goods on display. Here, too, there was an absolute calm, while the natural hierarchy of things and beings, along with their natural proportions, seemed to have been reversed.
The trees were a hundred and fifty feet tall; at their feet, in middle of this limitless wilderness, a few handfuls of cassava, a couple of bananas, and five or six little smoked fish were displayed on mats. Two of the women were smoking a pipe. A third was breast-feeding a baby of about two, who from time to time turned to look curiously at the whites.
No contact between them and the natives, not even a greeting. Adéle went first, glancing at the little piles of merchandise and craning her neck to see into the huts. She leaned down and took a banana; she didn’t bother to pay.
No hostility, either. They were whites, and they did whatever they wanted to—because they were whites.
This hint of menace surrounds the reader like the sweat we can smell that covers all the characters in this book. We have inhabited a primordial society where strength and violence win out, be it coming from humans or nature: the black Thomas is shot one night, and a few days later Adéle’s husband, Eugéne, dies from a mysterious African disease (aren’t they all?); Timar learns that he is only the latest of Adéle’s long list of paramours; Timar sees his opportunity when he learns the police might implicate Adéle in the deaths. Can he use his knowledge of her as leverage to get them out of town and into the money-drenched forests of wildcat timber harvesting? He thinks so, we aren’t so sure, and Adéle has not survived this long without the guile of a leopard.
There seems a casual quality to Simenon’s story writing, even as its movement runs forward like a locomotive making up for lost time. He leads us through the calm of what we feel (know!) is explosive kinetic energy created by people working the angles. Simenon’s characters are always watching, always working the problem at its frayed edges (often over thinking it, too), and waiting to strike. We know the storm is approaching, but not when it will strike. We guess at when it may happen; we think it’s about to happen and then it doesn’t! Simenon does not let up the tension. He cranks up the tension like a Medieval torturer works his thumb screws. What we know from Simenon, though, is that he will pay us off handsomely.
Simenon bleeds the reader on a river of anticipation, appetite, and desire. The desire is to watch the crash you know will come. All there is left is how it happens, who dies, who survives. This is ugly life at its basest moments; reckless characters in calm turmoil, moving holding waiting to move uttering thrusts & parries, who brandish armor that is mostly brittle, too thin, for staving off the calamity that awaits them.
IN 1919 SIMENON worked as a news reporter at the Gazette de Liege. He covered small beer human interest features for the paper, which taught him tight writing skills and, most importantly, about people. The job gave him a chance to wander through the rough part of town, where he came into contact with politicians, whores, cheap hotel denizens, and seedy bar flies. He would write more than 150 articles on police investigations and crime.
From this milieu Simenon wrote his first novel, Monsieur Le Coq which got published in 1921. At nineteen years old, Simenon had his eye on a slick career as a detective novelist. He continued reporting even as he wrote and made a name for himself, becoming famous for those short novels of intrigue and violence, the focus always on the dark side of life but with the shining knight of crime solving, Commissaire Maigret. The public ate up his books, and Simenon lived a glamorous life.
An extension of this life was Simenon’s passion for travel. In the early 1930s, he traveled through Africa, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, reporting for magazines and newspapers, and taking in the people whom he met. He followed these travels with a trip around the world in 1934-35. What he saw fueled his stories, and fueled a new passion for a different kind of story. He wrote his stories while traveling, resting in hotels, on trains. Simenon did not worry about writer’s block, as his imagination was prodigious and he literally crossed paths with his material.
It was during the 1930s that his important books began to appear, including Le Testament Donadieu, Le Voyageur de la Toussaint, and Le Cercle des Mahé. These were his roman durs, his hard novels, depicting life as most people do not experience it, but have heard about such people, know a cousin, a friend of a friend, or read their stories in the newspapers and novels. Simenon had met such people, and his keen mind used these characters to explore people in desperate places, desperate people in hellish conflict with themselves.
PUBLISHED IN THE SAME year as Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), The Widow did not achieve for Simenon what Camus achieved — fame as the leading French existentialist writer who captured humanity’s essence by exposing its worst, most senseless actions. Yet The Widow has been judged the better book, and by such luminary author-thinkers as André Gide. For its spotlight on intangible action and metaphoric language (poetic, at times), I’ll read Camus with delight every day. Simenon, however, achieved a uniqueness within existential literature when he composed the various characters who populate The Widow. This story canvases violence across that words many forms: from the physical to the emotional, the intellectual to love’s desire, and as analogy of the blackness with which the human heart can act.
The widow features Jean, who has just been let out of prison. Jean is a murderer. He stops at the house of Tati Couderc, outside St. Amand. Tati is the eponymous widow, living in a country house not her own but which she has worked, cared for, and paid for with her own labor nearly all her life, first as a servant girl, then as the wife of the son of old man Couderc, and finally now, with her near-senile, lecherous father-in-law. She tends chickens, rabbits, cows, pigs, and the garden—all whose produce is sold at market so the pair can live. Jean is looking for work after five years in prison, and farmhand is as good a job as any to help repair his life. Tati takes him in because … actually we’re not quite sure why, at first … perhaps she feels she’s getting too old to finally keep the little farm going all alone and so needs the help; or perhaps she does so because, as she made eye contact with Jean on the bus from the village, “It was rather as if, in the midst of all these old women with their nodding heads, the two had recognized each other.”
Yes, two outcasts amid an otherwise stale country life, a life that moves from town to loamy garden to coffee-fragrant kitchen to serene front porch on Sunday’s for a couple of hours—and then the repetition begins all over. So what? This is life to most people in all of history. But Simenon asks himself, Why should it be any different for these two, even if circumstances have made their unusual lives just as usual and casual as everyone else’s unique life? The answer is, Because that is the nature of the human being!
Their lives are different because of who they are and what is about to happen. You see, because Tati does not own the house or farmland, her rival in-laws are about to try and push her out by taking the old man to their small, dilapidated hovel, declaring him insane, and moving themselves in to the big house. Tati knows this potential, and she won’t leave without a fight. Jean, meanwhile, attends the family squabbles, but nonetheless is drawn to Félicie, a slut Couderc-family niece carrying around on her hip a child born out of wedlock.
And so where have we read a story like this before? Name the country, you’ll find it. Where have we heard the story from real life experience? Name the town, and you’ll likely find it there, too; if not, thumb on down the road to the next town. Yes, you know the town I mean.
This is the beauty of Simenon’s story, so real as it sounds, and feels, and moves. Jean, of course, is the wildcard in this tale. His past is always on the reader’s mind: Will he kill again? Why would he, to protect Tati?
Tati has no fear of Jean. She is master and commander of this farm, and orders him around almost as though she were a prison warden. But she falls short of that cloak, because she is kind to Jean. She gives him money to buy tobacco; she buys him a razor so he can begin his return to respectability; she allows him to become part of the household; she sleeps with him to show that she knows he has sexual needs and she wants to be a good sport about that (just as she has needs, of course). Their relationship, and the farm work, quickly becomes a comfortable norm:
Then, with a shove of her stomach against the still-uncleared table, Tati would puch back her chair, its straw bottom groaning as she did so. A sigh would issue from her vast bosom, and her breasts at this hour always seemed to nestle cozily on her swollen belly; her skin was shiny, her eye moist.
Jean had already fallen into the habit of getting the coffee from the fire, and the blue coffeepot had its place right in a sunbeam falling from the window.
Tati would contemplate her glass—she always had her coffee in a glass. The two lumps of sugar would dissolve. She would watch them almost sentimentally, then sip a drop or two of the brown liquid.
It was as though, for miles around, life hung suspended. The bargees on the canal were napping, while the donkeys or mules rested in a patch of shade. There was not a sound to be heard except the cooing of the pigeons, drowned now and then by the crowing of a cock or the banging of the old man’s hammer.
This is vintage Simenon, establishing both place and character in so short a stretch of words, with powerful images, gestures, internalized thought. All are the perfect paving stones over which a charging, unstoppable cart rumbles toward some perfect, awful ending. As found in Tropical Moon, the violence in The Widow begins as kinetic and metaphorical (Jean the murderer, released from prison who rolls into town), moves towards the social (the Couderc clan takes action to steal the farm), then finally the physical with just one sentence to mark its approach: “It might have been foreseen that things would take a turn for the worse one day, but not like this, not on a Sunday morning, in bright sunshine.” There’s too much pressure building for someone not to explode. But who will do so first, Tati, the Coudercs, Jean, or Félicie?
Tension frays the nerves; it also makes pages turn faster. Simenon knew the readers of his good books — the hard books — as well as he knew those of his romans populaires: story lies in the details given in quantities that make you want more, just up to the point where you’re ready to jump ahead. But you don’t want to cheat yourself, so you trust in the author, and time after time, Simenon delivers.
Tropic Moon
by George Simenon
New York Review Book (orig 1933)
133 pages, $12.95
buy this book >>>
The Widow
by George Simenon
New York Review Book (orig 1942)
152 pages, $12.95
buy this book >>>
