In common with Picasso and Simenon’s friends Henry Miller and Charlie Chaplin, he was neither a full-time bourgeois nor a committed bohemian, and felt he fitted into neither milieu. He liked women, he liked to be married, he liked sex – once, when his wife was packing for a family holiday, he invited four ‘professionals’ to visit him – and he liked danger and risk. Every book for him was a risk, because when you started a new one you never knew if it would work out. Like a lot of writers, he became depressed when he finished something, and this was when he would haunt the red-light districts of the cities he was staying in, putting himself in danger.
Trains feature in many of Simenon’s works, and you could say that the train is a compelling metaphor for the regularity and compulsiveness of his schedule and the scale of his incredible productivity. Simenon never wanted to be considered a Don Juan, but reading accounts of his sexuality in his notebooks I couldn’t help but be reminded of the famous ‘catalogue aria’ from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, where the servant Leporello explains to Elvira the nature of his master’s classification of women, and the pleasure of adding another name to the account. The list itself is, of course, a niche or specialised form of sexual intensity, and one which often appeals to men.
The excess of libido, the hyperactivity and the counting – the number of women, of novels, of days it took to write them – are notable throughout his life. They were clearly crucial to Simenon, whose father was an accountant, after all. So, among other things, Simenon spent his life counting, and anyone who writes about Simenon is also obliged to take part in the counting and accounting, though clearly it doesn’t matter a damn to the reader whether it took the writer days or years to finish a book. (You should know there were around four hundred novels, of which seventy-five were Maigrets. Sometimes he wrote only four novels a year; on other occasions there were eight, or even ten. Rarely none.) It is as if Simenon believed that if he stopped counting, stopped writing or stopped having sex – if there were to be a gap – something catastrophic or, more likely, too desirable would occur. There would be little time for reverie, dream states or uncertainty.
Freud calls libido ‘demonic’. Driven by constant pressure, it never rests. When it came to sex, it seems that Simenon was quick but efficient. He describes his thousands of encounters as ‘hygienic’, and he preferred prostitutes. ‘A professional often gives me more pleasure than anyone. Just because she does not force me to pretend.’
He may have required ‘two women a day’ and felt like ‘a dog in rut’, but as a writer Simenon played the other part, that of the ‘professional’. Like Chaplin or Hitchcock, who was sly and similarly able to make commercial art for a popular audience, Simenon knew what he was doing. Everything he wrote is dramatic. He was a serious and experienced coquette, the master of withholding. It is both a trick and an art, deferment, knowing how to make the other wait, hang on and want to return. A good writer, from this point of view, is one who creates hope and fascination, using gaps – an absence of knowledge – to trap the reader, playing with his frustration, but never too much. This kind of writing will stimulate anxiety in the reader and then relieve him by providing that which is missing. A plot is a promise delivered, and Simenon knew how to deliver such satisfactions. It always works, and always will.
His books might appear to run like clockwork, and Maigret – that measured and intelligent sensualist – might have healed the world over and over again, but in the romans durs there’s no easy redemption. These novels are too engaging and compelling to be cold or mechanical. The Train isn’t like any other book by Simenon or anyone else. Not only is it one of his best, but it is one of the great novellas of the twentieth century.
The Widow
I must have been about twenty-one when my father took me to the widow’s house for the first time.
I wasn’t keen to hang out with my father, but I guess he was being kind, thinking I should meet people, probably because, mostly, I just sat in his flat trying to write plays and listening to German bands like Amon Düül.
I had imagined, of course, that the widow would be an old woman. And Stella was older, probably around forty to my twenty-one.
Her husband, who had once been a colleague of my father’s, had died, I guess, about a year earlier. He’d been a lecturer like Dad, but became a well-known and controversial figure, writing some sort of book about sexual liberation, and then marrying Stella, this very wealthy and beautiful bohemian woman, who’d had a fine time in the sixties. Stella’s mother had been a painter, and the siblings all looked like film stars. While we were at home in Orpington watching I Love Lucy, they’d lived in Italy and France, sunbathing around pools, sleeping with friends, hanging out with bands and acting in Italian movies.
Stella had a lovely house full of books, paintings and sculpture in Holland Park, where the park, to my amazement, had actual peacocks. But Dad and I were on the other side of the roundabout, down in Shepherd’s Bush, after my parents had sold the family house and separated. The Bush was like the 1940s then, with its second-hand furniture shops and old-fashioned restaurants with aged men and women eating alone, served by ancient waitresses in black skirts. There was even an eel-pie shop, which is still open.
I was sleeping on Dad’s couch, having dropped out – or rather, fallen out – of university. I felt unnoticed, invisible, and was paralysed with depression.
But one afternoon Dad and I sat across the table from her, the widow who never wore anything but black, and who even had ‘widow-black’ dyed hair. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She acknowledged me with a Mona Lisa smile, but had too much taste to look at me twice. Except, as we left, she said to my father, ‘He’s an interesting young man.’
‘He is?’ said Dad, rather surprised, standing back and looking me over as if he’d never seen me before.
The next day I called on her and we became lovers.
It was mostly her beauty which appealed to me. But always willing to be of use, perhaps I hoped I might cure her of some of her sadness.
My enthusiasm might have also been because my dad idealised the sixties. He’d tell me how lucky I was to have been born after the ‘revolution’, as if, before it, there was only air raids and tinned fruit. But by the middle of the 1970s the sixties had gone, and London, as the Clash were informing us, was pretty bleak, even if you were on the dole, as I was.
I thought Stella might educate me. And she did play music constantly, but only the saddest. Mahler, and Verdi’s Requiem Mass, over and over, and pianists like Richter and Rubinstein, until I knew every note. And she lay in bed reading Baudelaire, Huysmans and Genet in French, and Proust in English, because, apparently, it had become better written in the Scott Moncrieff translation. As she finished each volume, she’d fling it over to me. I had no choice but to read for the first time in my life. She liked to talk about the characters – Swann and Odette in particular – as if we knew them.
These days my idea of bliss is to go to my local café at the end of the afternoon, order a bottle of wine, and read. I can get through a book a day. Reading is something you don’t need a woman for.
But there was something I liked and needed then.
‘Come and see to me, darling,’ Stella would purr, as soon as I turned up.
In my fantasy the person she resembled was Charlotte Rampling – thin, upper-class and wildly superior, with her languages, taste and ability in the world.
After Bowie moved to Berlin, my mates and I, who were beginning to form bands, watched The Night Porter, Cabaret and The Damned. I particularly liked anything with Helmut Berger in it. I’m ashamed to say I kept a picture of Helmut Berger in my wallet. Can you imagine, I also saw The Romantic Englishwoman several times.
It seems improbable now, but in those days, if you wanted pornography, you went to art. And, for me, cinema was the form which best dealt with perversion. In those days I believed perverts had the most enjoyment, and for my crowd that meant brothels, uniforms, prisons, Venus in Furs and pe
roxide hair.
And Stella, I was discovering, was a lovely perplexity. Her husband’s cigarettes and glasses were on his desk, his jacket was on the back of his chair, his shaving stuff in the bathroom. There were photographs of him in every room.
I saw that the two of them had travelled, and he’d lectured to big crowds on fashionable subjects.
I had walked in on a death. But now she was with this kid – me. She was my girlfriend.
‘Do you like cunnilingus?’ she had said on the first day.
Now that is a question you’re not often asked, I find. And one you could profitably hear with more frequency, in my opinion.
‘I love the lingus, lots of it,’ she announced.
I was to put my face at her cunt and lap away, a licking, salivating love puppy, for a long time, while at the other end, as it were, she smoked roll-ups, sipped whisky and sang. ‘You doing that,’ she said, ‘is like having a Bach fugue played on one’s body.’
I was happy every day with my work as an ‘erotic linguist’, but I spent the night with her only twice. That was enough, as she drifted around the house in a black kimono, weeping loudly and smashing her fists and bumping her head on the walls. I’d never heard anything so stricken and had no idea how to comfort her.
But Dad, who had begun to consider me a hopeless case and referred to me at home as the ‘invalid’, was impressed and furious that a woman like her would want to bang me.
‘Jesus, son,’ he said, when I came back one morning. ‘What are you playing at? I was planning on getting in there myself, but thought I’d leave a tasteful interval.’
‘That was a bit slow of you then, wasn’t it, Dad?’ I said.
He said, ‘But you can’t really satisfy a woman like that, can you?’
‘It seems I can, Dad,’ I replied. ‘She gave me a first edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn.’
‘I’ll have that in lieu of rent,’ he said.
Dad became keen that I move in on Stella, with a view to a quick marriage. He seemed to think I might get my hands on some of her fortune, as his friend had, the dead husband. Dad considered money – since he didn’t have any – to be far more important than sex or love. He was also sure that I’d annoy this grand lady so much that in a couple of years she’d pay me to get out.
But I was becoming disillusioned. She had seduced me but I had not seduced her. And although in my love work I had learned to use a side-to-side motion, as executed, apparently, by virtuoso Romanian folk musicians, my tongue had become blistered and swollen, as worn and spoiled as a pub carpet. No one could understand anything I said.
I complained to Stella, and one evening we got dressed up and she took me to a first night at Covent Garden. After, we went to a party, where she introduced me to a young man, around the same age and height as me. He said, ‘Are you seeing Stella too?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And so’s he.’ He pointed to another little guy.
It turned out there were several other ‘brothers of the tongue’. I wondered if we lickers worked in shifts. I’d go to the house in the afternoon sometimes and she wouldn’t open the door. I was put out, but cheered up by the fact that I had, as the other kid put it, ‘priority’; though when he asked if I ‘exercised’ my Stradivarius of a tongue at all, I thought things had gone too far.
I was beginning to see what her decadence meant – lethargy, an inability to grasp what others’ lives might be like. This was not only her mourning, but her class.
But, because of her, I had begun to know something about fulfilment, or mutuality. After all, I’d been fascinated by her, and loved her beauty and her history, the stories about her mother and nights in Soho with the artists. But she had no interest in me, apart from as a functionary in a perverse scene, repeated over and over, a photograph rather than a film.
One afternoon she was asleep after a drinking session. I needed to write a review of the Slashed Curtains gig for Time Out, who were employing me a bit.
Stella woke up and burst in on me sitting at her husband’s desk, hitting his typewriter, scratching away with one of his Mont Blancs, his ink open. I was smoking one of his Gitanes and cheerfully humming along to his copy of ‘So Long, Marianne’.
She screamed, ‘I was dreaming and I thought it was him, returned to me, sitting there! And it was just you! Only you!’
Underneath she was a violent madwoman, and she began to kick and punch me. She chased me around the table, up the hall and through the front door. I ran away with a bruised face.
Dad, as insatiable as the widow and more vulgar, was smug and contemptuous when he cleaned me up. ‘Thank God it happened to you rather than me,’ he said. Then he said he thought I was so daft I’d amount to nothing more than a journalist.
‘That’s what I will be,’ I said. ‘And one day I’ll write about that poor woman, and the idea that if the living are a pain, the dead can be a damn nuisance.’
Travelling to Find Out
One night, my friend Stephen Frears and I went on a boat trip down the Bosporus with about a dozen models, several transvestites, someone who appeared to be wearing a beekeeper’s outfit as a form of daily wear, the editor of Dazed and Confused, Jefferson Hack, and Franca Sozzani, the late editor of Italian Vogue, plus other fashionistas. We were in the European capital of culture, but it was like a fabulous night at the London club Kinky Gerlinky transferred to Istanbul and financed by the Turkish Ministry of Culture.
At one end of the boat, in his wheelchair, was Gore Vidal. At the other end was V. S. Naipaul. It must have been June 2010 because I remember catching Frank Lampard’s ‘ghost goal’ against Germany on a TV in the hotel lobby just before we dashed out.
As the high-tech drum and bass beat on, and the Ottoman palaces drifted by, we godless, depraved materialists and hooligans became more drunk, stoned and unruly. Vidia, with his entourage, kept to his end of this ship of fools, and Vidal to his. We had been instructed to keep the two aged warriors apart, and I don’t believe they exchanged a single word during the four days we were in Turkey. Vidal was accompanied by two ‘nephews’, strong young men in singlets and shorts who took him everywhere. He was unhappy, usually violently drunk, occasionally witty, but mostly looking for fights and saying vile things.
Vidia, in love and cheerful at last, accompanied by his wife, the magnificent Nadira, remained curious, ever observant and tight-lipped. Earlier, despite his supposed animus against female writers, he had been keen to talk about Agatha Christie and how fortunate she was never to have run out of material. In contrast, from a ‘small place’, he himself had had to go on the road at the end of the 1970s, to explore the ‘Islamic awakening’, as he put it. He had been ‘travelling to find out’.
Nearly thirty years earlier, I had packed Naipaul’s Among the Believers in my suitcase, and turned to it as a kind of guide, when I first went to Pakistan in the early 1980s to stay with one of my uncles in Karachi. I wanted to see my large family and get a glimpse of the hopeful country to which another uncle, Omar – a journalist and cricket commentator – had gone. Like my father and most of his nine brothers, Omar had been born in India; he had been educated in the US with his school friend Zulfikar Bhutto, finally turning up in ‘that geographical oddity’ Pakistan in the early 1950s. He said in his memoir Home to Pakistan, ‘There was in the early Pakistan something of the Pilgrim Fathers who had arrived in America on the Mayflower.’
At night, alone in a backroom of my uncle’s house, I suffered from insomnia, feeling something of a stranger myself. In an attempt to place myself, I began to work on what became My Beautiful Laundrette, writing it out on any odd piece of paper I could find.
In Britain we were worried about Margaret Thatcher and her deconstruction of the welfare state, of which I had been a beneficiary. I wanted to do some kind of satire on her ideas, but in Karachi they barely thought about Thatcher at all, except, to my dismay, as someone who stood for ‘freedom’. My uncles and their circle were more concerned with the
increasing Islamisation of their country. Omar had written in Home to Pakistan, ‘There is an appearance of a government and there is the reality of where real power lies. I had serious doubts that we would become an open society and that democracy would take root.’
Zulfikar Bhutto had been hanged in 1979 and his daughter, Benazir, was under house arrest just up the street, at 70 Clifton Road, a property with a huge wall around it, and policemen on every corner. One thing was for sure: my family, like the nation’s founder Jinnah, had envisaged Pakistan as a democratic home for Muslims, a refuge for those who felt embattled in India, not as an Islamic state or dictatorship of the pious.
Naipaul, who in the late 1970s travelled around Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran and Pakistan, had grasped early on that this distinction no longer held up.
Surprisingly without preconceived ideas, and with a shrewd novelist’s eye for landscape and individuals, in Among the Believers he interviews taxi drivers, students, minor bureaucrats and even a mullah. He writes down what they say and mostly keeps himself out of the frame. As a teenager I had been a fan of what had become known as personal journalism, of fire-cracker writers like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and James Baldwin, imaginative writers who included themselves in the story, and who often, as with Thompson, became the story itself.
Naipaul, in one of the first reports from the ideological revolution, was doing something like this. But he was more modest, this writer of loss and restlessness. From Chaguanas, Trinidad, ‘small, remote, unimportant’, he travels widely now, has an extensive look around and actually listens to people – mostly men, of course. He never interviews anyone as intelligent as he is, but he is genuinely curious, a rigorous questioner and not easily impressed. He even greets one subject, in his hotel room, while wearing ‘Marks and Spencer winceyette pyjamas’, of which he is so proud he mentions them twice.
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