Simenon-sur-Mer. Simenon-on-Sea. You will not, try as you may, find it in your Guide Michelin, nor yet on Google, but it is there. It is probably in France. It may be in the sunny south, on the offshore holiday island of Porquerolles or further down the coast, in one of the Riviera towns – Nice, Cannes, Antibes – awash with trout pouts, floating gin palaces and tucked-away bars off the tourist routes where crew and crims can and do foregather. It may be on the French side of what the British, practically, term The Channel and the French, more imagistic, call The Sleeve (La manche1). Fishing ports like Concarneau (Le Chien Jaune 1931), Ouistreham (Au Rendezvous des terres neuvas 1931, Le Port des Brumes 1932, with a minor role for neighbouring Caen) or the transatlantic gateway, Le Havre (Le Bilan Malétras 1948). Or there is Port-en-Bessin in Normandy, scene of La Marie du port (1937). More bars, crammed with sailors or fishermen, windows half-obscured by condensation, barroom misty with tabac gris, redolent of calva or petits blancs, of unspoken tensions, unauthenticated agreements. Or it might be on the Atlantic Coast, especially around la Rochelle, emblematic of those old provincial French towns, trawling wealth from the western deeps and erecting a social order as rigidly stratified as anything out of Balzac’s Paris.
It may be even further afield: amongst the seagoing fishing fleets scouring the Grand Banks off Newfoundland (Terre-neuve for the French) or setting out towards Scandinavia or on the long-lost commercial routes with paquebots plying between France and her north and central African colonies, taking dewy-eyed neophyte civil servants out and bringing their older, more cynical but even yet no wiser predecessors home. (It does not, however, take in Indochine, where the author’s brother, a foreign legionnaire, died in 1947). Or, through the Panama Canal (Quartier nègre 1935), to the real-life Cockaigne of Tahiti (Le passager clandestin (1947) which also sets off in the Canal Zone, and Le Long Cours (1936), which incorporates a transatlantic voyage on a vessel filled with contraband arms and much melodrama), where a man might start off with high hopes, only to find himself seduced, in mind and flesh, and thus self-marooned, what the slang termed a ‘touriste des bananes’, out of luck, employment and income, encanaqué (‘gone native’, from slang’s derisive kanaka, a Pacific islander) and with no choice but to go ‘back to nature’ among the local flora. There is usually a crime, sometimes murder (typically Le Passager du Polarys (1932) which was originally entitled Un crime à bord and for which Simenon used the real Norwegian coaster the Polarys, on which he had taken a voyage to Scandinavia in early 1930), but equally often some form of lesser malfeasance, linked to money or sex. Running from the land, one seeks the anonymity of the ocean. On occasion life, or rather death, can touch the extreme: the mysteries of Le Pitard (1935) and Les Réscapes de Telemaque (1938) both hinge on a hidden, near unspeakable crime: the cannibalism that could follow a shipwreck or a sinking.
Simenon-sur-mer. A fictional place, to be sure, amorphous, rootless, but like so much of its author’s invention, underpinned by a lived reality.
Georges Simenon (1903-89) was a literary phenomenon. He remains so. And like many superstars he is best explained by statistics. A lifetime rollcall of 200 novels and 150 short stories (not to mention reams of journalism that began at age 16); the 850 million copies sold (translated into 55 languages); the 187 films based on his work; the 80 pages of new text per day (which meant his almost invariably short novels – sized for reading, he suggested, on the train from Paris to Lyon – took just eight days to create); the 25 books of memoirs, the 24 registered noms de plume (Gom Gut, La Déshabilleuse, Plick et Plock or, most famously, Georges Sim). The range of international TV series: British readers may recall Rupert Davies’s evocation of Maigret (the author’s favourite incarnation) and later Michael Gambon’s. And of course the 10,000 (or was it ‘tens of thousands’ as he revised the claim in conversation with his friend Federico Fellini?) of sexual conquests. Above all, of course, is a single creation: Commissaire Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciare.
The primary myth of Simenon is the myth of Paris: Paris with its ever-atmospheric weather and its irresistible shifts of light, its omni-present river Seine; its cafes and its restaurants; its haute bourgeoisie, its petits gens and its criminal milieu. As for Maigret, like so many fictional immortals he is an assemblage of illustrative tics: the eternal pipe stuffed with army-strength tobacco (known as ‘grey’ from its packaging); the rides on old-style buses, still boasting open platforms; the domestic life with Madame Maigret midway between the symbolically named squares: Republique and Bastille. The succession of dishes, whether in restaurants or from Mme Maigret’s inexhaustible kitchen, And always the drink: beer to lubricate interrogations, and otherwise vins blanc and rouge, eaux de vie, Calvados, Cognac, Pernod, Ricard...
Yet as with most myths the truth was otherwise. At its simplest, Simenon, so quintessentially ‘French’ was, like that other ‘typical French detective’, Agatha Christie’s fictitious Hercule Poirot, in fact Belgian, in his case born in Liege, on the river Meuse. Maigret, seemingly the metropolis of stereotype made flesh, pursued as many cases beyond the city limits as ever he did within its 20 arrondissements. And while Simenon’s best known preoccupations render him at first glance so culturally land-locked, the sea, and on a smaller scale France’s network of canals, especially those of the north-east and leading towards his native Belgium, play a central role in his work.
Liege, the town of his birth, his youth and his pre-Parisian adolescence, was a port, albeit of the river variety. In this ‘ville pluvieuse’ (rainy town) an aunt (each parent boasted a dozen siblings) ran a marine supplies shop on one of the commercial wharves. And although there is no apparent ‘boyhood of Simenon’, with the embryonic superstar held spellbound by the reminiscences of Jack ashore, one senses that the passing vessels must have impinged. Simenon, it was said, wrote fast because even as the author, he wanted to find out what happened next. Perhaps he felt the same of the vessels that steamed away from his local quays.
Certainly, when in the 1920s his freelance work ensured that the money started flowing in, among his first demonstrations of newfound wealth was the purchase in 1928 of a small boat, the five-metre sloop (properly ‘canot de sauvetage’) Ginette, and its use to cruise the French rivers and canals; his aim ‘to discover France between two banks’. A year later, keen to go further and thus see more, he took the necessary exams for captaincy (his wife Tigy spent time in a garage learning the complementary engineering skills) and swapped the Ginette for a larger fishing boat, the Ostrogoth. Their course was followed by the author’s Serbian chauffeur, Yarko, piloting a bright red Chrysler, ready for the occasional trip to Paris or off into the un-navigable countryside. And when Ostrogoth’s calking began to leak, she was put into dry dock in the Dutch-German border port of Delfzijl. He continued to sleep on board but even his prodigious literary production could not continue within earshot of the men who were working on the boat. He found a half-submerged barge, wholly deserted barring its complement of rats. He brought three boxes; one to support the typewriter, one for a chair and one on which he stood a bottle of red wine. There, or so another myth goes, Maigret, his ‘mender of destinies’ in a police inspector’s velvet collared overcoat and bowler hat, was born.
Maigret rendered him famous and ever wealthier, but Simenon remained in thrall to the sea. As the 1930s passed he cruised the Mediterranean for four months and took a lengthy trip, as a passenger, to Lofoten, taking in a visit to Lapland. He kept the Ostrogoth, using it, among other things, for an all-night book-signing session. He lived, at times, in some of the seaside towns on which, often citing real-life topography and town-plans, he drew as backdrops for his novels. In time, even more famous, he would start to cross the Atlantic, but those trips were in the luxury of the first-class saloon.
The sea arrived early in Simenon’s fiction. In the pseudonymous days came such pulp delights as Se Ma Tsien: Sacrificateur (1926), opening in the China Seas where we find a drifting yacht, empty of all but beheaded corpses and a single, inevitably beautiful living girl; there was Le Roi du Pacific (1929), basically a pirate story set in the waters around Tahiti. The title of Three Hearts in a Storm (1928), in this case on board a storm-wracked millionaire’s yacht off St Tropez, says it all.
But this was pulp fiction. The backdrops were consciously exotic – no grey North Sea or choppy Channel, no greasy lock where corpses, both animal and human, might bob as yet – and if some used the sea, then Simenon was just as capable of conjuring up deserts, mountains, jungles and icy wastes as and when required.
Thereafter, when the last pseudonym was ditched, and Georges Sim became Georges Simenon, things would change. The sea is no longer exotic, but another atmospheric backdrop, whether in its ports, its shipping or its voyages, for the writer’s plots. It is a constant in Maigret, but while he visits, he rarely ascends the gangplank. It is equally present in what were called the ‘romans durs’, the ‘tough stories’, many of which also play out against a background of criminality but which offer no detective in search of a villain, rather the author’s pursuit of human failings, of what Simenon termed ‘l’homme nu’, the ‘naked man’. Given that so many of his stories centre on a man on the run – from himself or from the authorities – it is unsurprising that a number saw their best escape to be by water.
And before the sea, and echoing the initial dipping of Simenon’s own toe into the water, the canals. Or more specifically the locks, way-stations regularly cast as ripe for criminality. Le charretier de la Providence (1931) offers a canal-cruising English milord, a femme fatale, a number of corpses, one of them, to use a term that seems uncharacteristically expansive from an author who is usually so concise, a Levantine, nine letters when three would usually do. And lurking among them the charretier, ex-doctor, ex-gaolbird, and now a vengeful, homicidal drunkard, tasked with guiding the horses that still drew northern France’s barges.
For those who wish to essay Simenon in the original French – until recently the ideal approach since he was notoriously badly translated; fortunately Penguin and the New York Review of Books are both issuing a series of new translations – there are relatively few challenges. We are not fighting our way through the arcane swells of Patrick O’Brian’s word-perfect naval jargon as offered by Jack Aubrey and his crews but amassing a core vocabulary of basic seafaring terms. We need learn up various boats, typically the chalutier, a trawler, (from chalut, its ‘pocket’-shaped trawl), péniche, a barge, goelette, schooner, pacquebot, a passenger boat; some necessary if quotidian parts of the ship’s architecture (typically passerelle, gangplank, pont, deck, écoutille, hatch, hublot, porthole, grue, crane). But there is not a great deal. Simenon claimed to restrict himself to a written vocabulary of just 2,000 words. He does not expand it for the sea. One might add a couple of ‘local’ terms. Armateur, something of a false friend, and meaning not armourer but shipowner, i.e. one who ‘arms’ or ‘fits out’ a boat (orignally Latin armator) and mousse, the cabin-boy or apprentice sailor. This comes from Spanish mozo, a young man and ultimately from late Latin muttiu, referring to the shaving of such apprentice’s heads.
It is the world of armateurs, the great ship-building and ship-owning families of towns such as la Rochelle, which Atlantic port appeared in a number of guises as the author’s epitome of such sea-facing centres, that gives us Simenon’s main sea-going dynasty: the Donadieus, who appear in three romans durs: 45 degrées à l'ombre (1936), Touriste de bananes (1938), and, one of Simenon’s longest books, Le Testament Donadieux (The Donadieu Will, 1937), which starts with a death of the family patriarch when he falls (was he pushed?) from his own dock. The three books offer three of Simenon’s versions of the sea: The Testament focusses on the fisheries of La Rochelle and the monied society they generate, 45 degrees is set onboard a ship plying the Bordeaux-Matadi route between France and the then Belgian Congo, among its passengers a sea captain who is under arrest, after murdering a rival in love; the Touriste tracing the gradual decline of Oscar Donadieu from ambitious young man to aimless Pacific beachcomber.
La Rochelle also plays a central role in Le Clan des Ostendais (1947). Here a ‘fleet’ of five Belgian trawlers, escaping from the German occupation of Ostend, arrives in the harbour. Tight-knit, unyielding, self-sufficient to a fault, the Ostendais alienate the locals, already under pressure from floods of landborne refugees. The book reflected Simenon’s view of his fellow Belgians, of his respect for seafarers, and, more immediately, his wartime role as a liaison between the Rochelais and the refugees to whom they not over-enthusiastically played host.
We do not, it is generally accepted, read Simenon for his plots. The Cercle des Mahé (1946) tells the story of Dr Mahé, like so many Simenon heroes a man tortured by the very uneventfulness of his existence, who becomes obsessed by a girl whom he encounters briefly on a holiday trip to the island of Porquerolles and even as he decries the island cannot keep away. One of his best-known romans durs, it will end up with the doctor’s suicide, slipping willingly from his rowing-boat into the sea. But it is the atmosphere, not the hapless doctor, that counts. Dull, predictable family life in Paris; the exotic, colour-saturated, sexy south. The Mediterranean, with all its seductions, has won.
Not, perhaps, on a par with Zola, but Simenon always offers something of a painterly eye. He revels in the variations on the sea’s differing tones (the blue of a flag, of a postcard, or even ‘red and blue, shading through orange...’) It can be misty, menacing, storm-lashed and impenetrable. In the colonial context it is perhaps one more component of the wider exoticism. On the Riviera, playground of yachties, it provides a corrupting background.
We may leave the last words to Simenon. If the sea, in all its guises, ultimately plays second fiddle to the stories he sets against it, its power over the author remains a constant. Writing in le Figaro illustré in May 1932, and still filled with the delights of his earliest waterborne excursions, he penned this meditation [1], ‘Au fil de l’eau’ (‘Over the water’).
At first there was a period when the sea rendered you drunk, wiped you out, took over the fibre of your being, stained your skin and your lungs, made the blood run faster in your veins and made crazy images dance in your brain
I am talking of the real sea, onto which we throw ourselves carelessly, in a little boat, chest tight, temples throbbing.
You buy maps, a compass and guides, tidal tables, sometimes a sophisticated sextant. And night, in port, is a tangled nightmare: the anchor chains unwinding endlessly, the compass which has gone crazy, the lighthouse that hides itself away; you take a glance West, North and South, you take a glance everywhere and nowhere at the same time
You get up ten, twenty times to check the moorings and give a distrustful glance at the black water of the docks, at the other boats which are lifting the backwash and which are perhaps going to swamp you. You think about other things too.
The sea has many faces, more powerful than the strongest liquor. You will live for weeks with a fire in your cheeks and this emptiness which leaves in your chest the eternal movement of the waves.
A fever, a sickness.
The sea enters your blood like a serum. The sea with everything that goes to make it up: the crack of the sails, the ropes that tear our hands, the pulleys that get stuck, and the strange fishes, unknown in the market, which make your fingers swell; the violet-coloured horizon that signals a storm, the angry pounding of the waves that threatens to smash everything; this stubborn current which carries you away.
Weeks, months! And suddenly, it’s over. You sleep without dreaming. You watch the horizon serenely. Nothing burns your hands. You kill fish coldly without pricking yourself, without retching. And you don’t blanch any more if, in a fistful of water, you bring out strange little worms that crawl.
Your apprenticeship is over.
[1] author’s translation
The word also means a newspaper headline, thus the writer Doug Headline, whose father was the godfather of modern French noir, Jean-Patrick Manchette
I have managed, in French, of which I just about have enough. I don’t think chronological order mattered to GS, however. The story of M's first case came a good few years after his 'first case' in literary terms. Do you, btw, know this site: https://www.trussel.com/f_maig.htm ? Great for obsessives.
I've tried/am trying to read all the Maigret books in order -- something more difficult than it sounds, but a pleasure to attempt.