The Escape Artist: John Banville on Georges Simenon

Comments (0) By John Banville Wednesday, May 28 2008

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists. Sometimes, a successful writer is rejuvenated by the works of another. A few years ago, the Irish novelist John Banville was introduced by a friend to the works of the late French auteur Georges Simenon, whose absurdly prolific output included the Inspector Maigret novels, for which he is best known. Banville, himself the author of 16 novels, including the 2005 Man Booker Prize–winning The Sea, is a writer of serious literary intent, but not long after reading Simenon, he began to write mystery novels (Christine Falls, The Silver Swan) under the name Benjamin Black. As he told the Weekly last year, “I was really blown away by this extraordinary writer. I had never known this kind of thing was possible, to create such work in that kind of simple — well, apparently simple — direct style. ... Looking back, I think it was very much a transition. It was a way of breaking free from the books I had been writing for the last 20 years, these first-person narratives of obsessed, half-demented men going on and on and on and on. “I had to break out of that. And I see now in retrospect that Christine Falls was part of that process. Because it’s a completely different process than writing as John Banville. It’s completely action-driven, and it’s dialogue-driven, and it’s character-driven. Which none of my Banville books are.” Banville, then, on his rejuvenator:

Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan

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Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan

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As one contemplates the life and work of Georges Simenon, the question inevitably arises: Was he human? In his energies, creative and erotic, he was certainly extraordinary. He wrote some 400 novels, under a variety of pseudonyms, as well as countless short stories and film scripts, and toward the end of his life, having supposedly given up writing, he dictated thousands of pages of memoirs. He could knock off a novel in a week or 10 days of manic typing — he never revised, as the work sometimes shows — and in Paris in the 1920s he is said to have broken off an affair with Josephine Baker, the expatriate American chanteuse and star of La Revue Nègre, because in the year he was with her, he was so distracted by his passion for her that he had managed to write only three or four books.

He put himself in the way of many such distractions. In 1976, when he was in his 70s, he told his friend Federico Fellini in an interview in L’Express that over the course of his life he had slept with 10,000 women. True, he was an early starter. He lost his virginity at the age of 12 to a girl three years his senior, who got him to change schools so that they could continue to see each other and then promptly threw him over for another sweetheart. Young Georges had received his first lesson in the school of hard knocks.

He was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903, the son of a kindly but ineffectual accountant and a fearsome mother with whom, throughout her long life, he had an intense love-hate relationship. When he was 16, he left school and went to work as a reporter on the Gazette de Liège, and joined La Caque, a group of young dandies and bohemians under the spiritual leadership of the painter Luc Lafnet. Later, Simenon described the Sunday in June 1919 when he first met Lafnet as “probably one of the most important days of my adolescence.”

La Caque were a wild bunch, indulging in drink, drugs and free love. “We were an elite,” Simenon later wrote. “A little group of geniuses thrown together by chance.” They were also dangerous and, in at least one case, self-destructive. Early one winter morning, after a night of heavy drinking, a member of the group, Joseph Kleine, “le petit Kleine,” a would-be artist and cocaine addict who lived up, or down, to his name, being slight of build and delicate of constitution, was found hanging by his neck from the door of the church of Saint-Pholien in Liège.

Suicide was suspected, or murder made to look like suicide. Next morning, however, the Liège Gazette confidently reported that the young man had killed himself. Many years were to pass before Simenon admitted that he was the author of that convenient report, which appeared before police inquiries had properly begun. “I plead not guilty on our behalf,” Simenon wrote in his memoirs. “Or rather, I plead lack of premeditation. ... We did not know the true state of ‘le petit Kleine.’ But in the last resort, wasn’t it us who killed him?”

The image of the hanged man remained a powerful one for Simenon — his second Maigret tale was called Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien— and in one of his finest novels, The Strangers in the House, published in 1940, there is a wild and self-destructive gang of young people, obviously modeled on La Caque, whose escapades culminate in murder. Simenon the novelist knew whereof he wrote.