Saint Simenon
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
Maigret's Pickpocket Georges Simenon (Hamish Hamilton 18s) The Old Man Dies Georges Simenon (Hamish • Hamilton 18s) Simenon in Court John Raymond (Hamish Hamilton 30s) Of the two new Simenons, the Maigret strikes me as decidedly slight: a conceited young man in the film world shoots his wife and then picks Maigret's, pocket on a bus to pro- voke a confrontation he thinks he is intelligent enough to win. In the non-Maigret, a restaurant proprietor dies suddenly, and two brothers of the decent son hideously dispute the inheri- tance, which turns out to be worthless.
I claim no merit for these two summaries, but each is a mere sentence long. To summarise at the same length each of the 188 titles Mr Raymond lists would give us a total of a mere 5,000 words. Increased by indications of setting (the two present volumes are both set in Paris), of apparent date if relevant (as in Le Train), of the names of characters who recur in other volumes (not many, mainly the Donadieus, apart frorA Surete and Parquet personnel in the Maigrets), perhaps also of the English translator, this would still give us no more than a little handbook or long chapter. Of course, one would like more detailed and elaborate summary, classification, cross-references and so on; or at any rate, I should, and I know I am not alone.
Simenon started appearing in English in 1933. If one cottoned on just before Hitler's war and has remained a desultory addict ever since, how many Maigrets and non- Maigrets has one read? Fifty? A hundred? If I now pick up a Simenon, unless it is hot from the press I can rarely be sure whether I have read it before or not (have even on occa- sion read through to the end and still not been sure; have also, I fancy, not read on, though uncertain, and so perhaps missed what I had not read before). This distressing situation is aggravated by the fact that I can rarely be sure of the title of a book in which such-and- such a vividly recalled moment or situation occurs. Thus to think about Simenon in a coherent way is difficult, and even momentary pleasure is diminished. Things don't click into place. And this might very well lead one to stop reading Simenon altogether, not at all a desirable result.
Of course, Mr Raymond can hardly be ex- pected to do for us, single-handed, what, in regard to Balzac, is done by a combination of the Pleiade analytical index and M Marceau. For one thing, they had a century of Balzac scholarship to start from. For another, Balzac himself established the pattern, with dozens of recurring characters traced through lifetimes in their historical settings. With Simenon, much was done blindly. Probably M Simenon himself couldn't elicit the grand design if he tried, which he seems unlikely to do..lt would clearly not be foolish to argue that no such design exists, even implicitly, even subliminally; that the only underlying structure. is that of the author's personality, modified by -his experi- ence.
There have been ambitious books on Georges Simenon in France. I have not read them. Mr Raymond has. He has also visited Liege and the nresent Simenon house at Epalinges and
writes evocatively of both. In Liege, he talked to M Simenon's mother. He does not claim to have read more than a hundred books by Simenon. He sees very well that, 'given time, application and a substantial research grant from an American university, it would be pos- sible to construct a biographical dictionary of Simenonian characters,' and has in the course of his reading 'jotted down a list of roughly one thousand . . . whose fictional identities are sufficiently individual and personified to merit inclusion in such a volume.' He does not print the list. He offers us nine chapters which are, in effect, eight critical essays, the longest, 'An Impression of Ishmaelia' (in two parts), the most broadly analytical and, I would say, the most deceptively promising; the one with the best if toughest critical approach, subsequently abandoned for a new and more self-indulgent attitude.
But there, it just happens that Mr Raymond's book is not the one I wanted. It may be the one that everybody else wants, though the reader who snatched it from my hands and couldn't put it down also began to wish for sharper reminders in the case of books read and more helpfully elementary accounts of those unread or in doubt. And, certainly, Mr Raymond won't please readers who care only for Maigret. He doesn't mention The Pick- pocket though he thinks very highly of The Old Man Dies.
The happy thought shared by Mr Raymond, me and, I should hope, everyone in his right mind is that there are still no signs of a progressive deterioration in M Simenon's powers. I missed The Little Saint, which it seems the author himself thought a moral `breakthrough.' Mr Raymond whets my appe- tite for Le Chat, not yet translated. Since M Simenon stopped travelling in space, per- haps he will range more widely in time. Perhaps Jules Maigret will retire and write his Memoirs, like such of his illustrious pre- decessors as Francois Vidocq, Louis Canler and Fernard Mace.
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