Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (15 page)

The rise of the super-spanker began in Liège in 1903. He had an indulgent, invalid father and a dominant, unsatisfiable mother: Henriette, a woman who “found unhappiness where no one else had suspected its existence.” As a child he knew the morally unsignposted world of a country first occupied, then liberated. He escaped quickly, through journalism and through marriage, to Paris, where he learned the local rules: “I now understand everything one has to do to win success in Paris. And I will do it. But I am appalled at what I will have to do.” Pulp fiction brought him money, the Maigret series world fame, and the
romans durs
serious critical acclaim and the sometimes embarrassing admiration of Gide, Cocteau, Thornton Wilder, and so on. Cars, houses, boats, parties, booze, snobbery, posh friends, and bucketsful of women: prostitutes, dancers (up to Josephine Baker), occasionally mistresses—though he did not like the involvement—and always the housemaid. One new employee enquired of another girl, as if checking the job description,
“On passe toutes à la casserole?,”
whose pungency is rather lost in the English “Do we all get laid?”

Late in life, and bubbling with senile sexual pride, he told John Mortimer in a
Sunday Times
interview about the 8,000 prostitutes he had known: “I treated them with consideration and like a gentleman. I always let them have their pleasure first. And of course I was enough of a connoisseur to know if their pleasure was faked.” The connoisseur, the gentleman: elsewhere he presents himself as the big-game hunter, and the tourist among women. Naturally, though, Simenon didn't exceed the number of Casanova's conquests merely out of sport, or even a pure love of sex. As he told Fellini in an interview: “It wasn't at all a vice. I have not the slightest sexual vice, but I have the need to communicate.” Later, he elaborated: he did it “because I wanted to learn the truth … I do not know these women any longer, I have forgotten them … but with these 10,000 women I am beginning to know ‘the’ woman.”

Here is a typical sexual encounter from the Twenties, at the time of the writer's engagement to his first wife:

With Simenon, early one morning, lying awake in the Hotel Berthe, the need was so great that when he heard a chambermaid outside in the hallway cleaning the guests' shoes, he got up, opened the door, lifted the girl's skirt and possessed her on the spot—while she was brushing away. She did not even stop what she was doing but merely said: “Oh Monsieur!”

Now skip two marriages, forty years, and nine thousand-odd other women, and catch the truth-seeker's first sexual encounter with Teresa, his final housekeeper-companion:

A month after she started work at Echandens, I unexpectedly walked into a room and found her bending over a table that she was polishing. The sight was too much for me. I advanced upon her, feverishly pulled down her knickers and penetrated her … Teresa did not play the coquette. She had an orgasm as violent as mine, still bent over the table, with a duster or chamois leather in her hand … We did not even look at each other. I just walked out of the room and locked myself in my office.

Simenon doesn't elaborate on which particular truth he was confirming on this latter occasion—perhaps that the conscientiousness of domestic staff had not declined over a period of forty years. But the encounters are typical of Simenon's vaunted manner: the sudden pounce, the rapid penetration, the unfailing female orgasm, and the retreat into the study. There his technique was not all that different: literature's pouncer, he wrote each novel in a swift, uninterruptible burst. For once, psychobiography provides the perfect fit.

A whirl, a riot, a debauch, but also a controlled one, marked by regular, driven work. Marnham quotes Bernard Pivot as saying that for most writers sex is a distraction from work, and adds that with Simenon it was the other way round, work being a distraction from sex. This is neat, but does not seem to fit the facts: Simenon had enviably more than enough time for both activities. By the late 1930s his life was a display-case of literary, financial, and sexual success. The spanker had triumphed, and spanked everyone: professionally, by bossing his publishers, even up to a 50-50 split on gross profits; domestically, by running his home and his sex life on his own uniquely favourable terms. His marriage survived his being busted in mid-siesta with the maid: Simenon's way of discouraging his wife Tigy from sacking the woman was to tell her he had already been unfaithful hundreds of other times, “frequently with people she knew, including her friends.” Tigy, a robust and impressive figure, agreed to continue in marriage and motherhood. Simenon, blaming the victim, later wrote: “A man never forgives a woman who forces him to tell lies.”

In the traditional story, settled, conveyor-belt love may be disturbed by the ferocious intrusion of sex; with Simenon, settled, conveyor-belt sex was disturbed by the ferocious intrusion of love. Yet at first, when he exchanged Tigy for Denise, a 25-year-old French-Canadian he met in New York in 1945, it must have seemed to him that he was trading up. For whereas Tigy reluctantly permitted a
ménage à trois,
Denise gleefully encouraged a
ménage à quatre;
where previously his brothel visits had to be hidden from Tigy, Denise now came along as companion and cheer-leader, even packing the novelist back upstairs for a second bash if she hadn't finished her conversation downstairs. Two of her powerful attractions for him were that she smoked with an American pout and had a “vaginal voice.” But by loving Denise, by finding the only woman in his life with whom “love and sex were merged,” Simenon gave her power; he became a potential spankee. She was more than his match at drinking, hitting, quarrelling, and lying. He got what he wanted; also, if you are feeling briefly moralistic, what he deserved.

In this second part of his life, with Denise and their three children, the disappointments and the embitterments slowly arrived. The professional ones were trivial—like the failure of “the cretins” in Stockholm to give him the Nobel Prize, or his inability to reciprocate the lavish praise offered him by Gide, Wilder, Henry Miller and others (better, after all, to have it this way round). But the personal ones wrought real damage. Denise, after years of mocking inertia during sex
(“Fais vite!”
she would instruct, and not as a turn-on), finally announced that “I no longer enjoyed making love to him. And that I think was the end of him.” Their marriage collapsed, much aided by drink and jealousy; Denise had a nervous breakdown, they separated, but the battle continued. She attacked him in her pointedly-titled memoir
Un oiseau pour le chat;
he replied with the 250,000-word
Mémoires Intimes
—like using a neutron bomb in a cold war. He would never permit a divorce, and for a quarter of a century, as she put it, “he hated me as
possessively
as he loved me.” Their daughter, Marie-Jo, caught in the crossfire, also had a breakdown (which the novelist typically used as material for a novel) and then shot herself through the heart with a rifle. Finally, implacably, like some terrifying Shakespearean mother returning to curse her boy who has usurped the neighbouring throne, Henriette made her reappearance. On a visit to his Swiss fortress, she cried poor, daring him to be ashamed of her; she handed back all the money he had ever sent her throughout the previous forty years and embarrassingly quizzed the servants about whether the house was really paid for. When his brother died in Indochina, Henriette grieved thus: “What a pity, Georges, that it's Christian who had to die.” In 1970 she herself lay dying back in Belgium; her first words to him were, “Why did you come, son?” She declined to be impressed right up to the end—to his face, at least—and those attracted to the theory that artists are driven by the hope of securing approval from their unloving or at least outwardly unimpressable parents will find support in the story of Georges and Henriette. Perhaps her implacability sparked both his frenetic fiction-writing (each book saying to her: “Like me! Like me!”) and his frenetic philandering (each conquest saying to him: “She likes me! She likes me!”). Within a year of her death he had abandoned fiction altogether and thereafter wrote nothing but look-at-me memoirs.
*

The spanker spanked? Proper punishment for a career of self-gratification? Even if we resist this line, there is something very poignant and pathetic (not tragic—the tragedy belongs to Marie-Jo) about the elderly Simenon pottering through the Swiss streets on the arm of his final maid, his wealth irrelevant, his paintings all in the bank, his home a bare apartment with no carpets or bookcases and overlooked by a supermarket car park. The erotic communicator had failed the key female member of three separate generations: he had failed to please his mother, failed to satisfy his wife, failed to protect his sole daughter from her demons. The only communication he had achieved was that deeply intimate yet deeply indirect one, with the readers of his books, telling them about obsession, jealousy, dark thoughts, alcoholism, marital pain, violence, and crime in a direct, easy, spare, swift, rich manner.

Two numerical afterthoughts. 1) Women: the second Mme Simenon thought the figure of 10,000 grossly engorged, and detumesced it to 1,200. 2) Cutlets: I have consulted more than one butcher on the Lucan calculation. There are indeed seven, or occasionally eight, cutlets to be had off a decent sheep, but this is seven or eight from
each side
of the beast. So Lucan would have despatched only half the estimated number of sheep.

*
Truffaut greatly admired Simenon's twice-yearly confessional effluvia, and wrote to tell him so, adding that Jean Renoir “adored” them too. Truffaut also judged
L'Etranger
inferior to every single one of Simenon's novels. But then he also preferred Charles Trenet and Boby Lapointe to Georges Brassens.

(8)
French Letters

Not an Ultimate Peasant but a sophisticated poet: Stéphane Mallarmé

(a) Baudelaire

Which famous nineteenth-century French writer am I describing?

Born 1821, into a professional family. Expelled from school. In young manhood went on a voyage to exotic places which shaped his sensibility. A keen frequenter of prostitutes, he contracted syphilis and for much of his life was in a precarious state of health; one doctor he consulted pronounced him a hysteric, a judgement he considered sound. His widowed mother held a key psychological place in his life—a mother he always sought to placate, and who always remained insufficiently impressed by his writing. She was also unimpressed by his handling of money: he appalled her with his tailors' bills, and ended his life financially ruined. In his writing he sought only Beauty, and believed that Art should not have a moral goal. In matters of politics, he was suspicious of democracy, loathed the mob, and often expressed a hatred for contemporary life. His first and most famous work was prosecuted for obscenity by State Attorney Ernest Pinard in 1857, a trial which brought useful publicity. For many years he was torn between living quietly in Normandy with his mother and living more vibrantly in Paris. He described himself as an Old Romantic, considered he was old at forty, and greatly disliked steel-nibbed pens.

Are zebras cream animals with black stripes, or black animals with cream stripes? This rough grid of a life, which sounds so much as if it belongs to Flaubert, also turns out to fit Baudelaire. At times the parallels are eerie; at times, you almost feel sorry for Ernest Pinard, now remembered only for shooting himself in the foot twice in the same year.

But the lives of Flaubert and Baudelaire diverge sharply as soon as it comes to practical literary matters: the process of composition, the relationship between character and work, the matter of career politics. In composition, Flaubert (despite ritual protests) worked hard and fluently—he was like the camel, he observed, and once started was very hard to stop; Baudelaire was more like an old jalopy on a winter's morning, always whirring and coughing into feigned life, and likely to be started in the end only by a sharp kick, either from its owner or from an irritated passer-by. In matters of character, Flaubert sought to subdue the neurotic side; Baudelaire, looking back on his life in his private notebooks, commented: “I cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”

In literary politics, Flaubert observed the writer's proper pride. His attitude is mainly: here is my work, take it or leave it; his letters catch him out in ostentatious careerism only when he tries to become a dramatist. Baudelaire, even by the low standards of nineteenth-century French literary life—and despite having as high a concept of Art as Flaubert—is a fawner and a wheedler, a calculator and an operator. There are pages in his letters which, even if you allow for the gap in time and culture, and for French epistolary style, make you embarrassed on Baudelaire's behalf, make you blush for literature. When Sainte-Beuve patronizes his art, calling it “a bizarre kiosk which the poet has built for himself at the tip of the Kamchatka of Romanticism,” Baudelaire grovels in reply (to the subsequent double distaste of Proust). When Vigny receives the poet during his hopeless attempt to get elected to the Académie Française, Baudelaire writes in thanks: “You are yet another proof that a vast talent always involves great kindness and exquisite indulgence.” The fact that Baudelaire turns out to be a bad and often counterproductive literary operator, that his attempt to become an Academician is disastrous, that he is beaten down by publishers, that he chooses the wrong man as his agent, that his assiduous cultivation of Sainte-Beuve never produces the major article Baudelaire anticipates, makes it all the more pathetic.