Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  The Simenons felt at home in Paris, where Georges began to submit stories to literary journals and magazines. In 1923, he sent his work to the fiction editor of the daily newspaper Le Matin, who happened to be Colette, already famous for her novel Chéri. She rejected his work again and again, but one day, she encouraged him by saying that he was close to being published, just not quite there. And she offered some unforgettable advice: “You’re too literary. No literature! Get rid of all the literature, and you’ve got it.” He finally did; he was published in Le Matin, and felt eternally grateful to Colette for transforming his approach to writing. (He went on to become a regular contributor.) His less-is-more style limited the use of adverbs and adjectives and favored short, clear sentences and brief paragraphs:

  There is not a single light on Quai de l’Aiguillon. Everything is closed. Everyone is asleep. Only the three windows of the Admiral Hotel, on the square where it meets the quay, are still lighted.

  Over the next several years, Simenon obsessively honed his craft, trying out different themes and developing his voice. He churned out an absurd number of novels and more than a thousand short stories—all pseudonymously, all pulp fiction—with astonishing economy and efficiency. He would watch movies at night, sleep for a few hours, drink wine, and write and write. Any fear of being “too literary” was gone. These short novels were messy, even incoherent, but they were still good stories—lowbrow page-turners intended for popular consumption. (He was thinking in “chick lit” terms long before that genre ever existed, describing his early works as “novels for secretaries.”) They were not works of art, but he had no illusions about that.

  In an interview Simenon gave to the New Yorker in 1945, he described the rigorous routine of his early career: “Every day was like a prizefight,” he said. “My schedule was two hours of work, typing at high speed, followed by an hour of rest or physical exercise. Often my wife would give me a rubdown. Then I would return for another two hours of writing. When evening came, I was depleted.”

  He admitted that by 1924 he was engaged in “the careful manufacture of semi-luxurious literary products. I became successful. I had a yellow Chrysler Imperial sedan and a chauffeur who delivered my manuscripts to the publishers and collected my checks. Also, I had a servant to fill my pipes for me. Every morning she would place forty filled pipes on my desk, enough to last me for two hours. I did not have to stop to fill my pipes myself and lose valuable time. After a while I worked more slowly, spending as much as two weeks on a single book.” Another luxury he enjoyed was what he claimed to be the first private bar in Paris, in his own apartment. He later recalled that after one of his frequent raucous parties, with friends passed out on the floor, “dawn would find me stepping over the cadavers and making my way to the typewriter.”

  Simenon often boasted about the ease with which he produced books. If he was not ashamed of what he’d written, why had he chosen to write them using multiple pseudonyms? The roster included his old friend Georges Sim; Christian Brulls, a combination of his younger brother’s name and his mother’s maiden surname; Georges-Martin Georges; Gom Gut; Jean du Perry; Georges d’Isly; Bobette; Plick et Plock; Jacques Dersonne; Germain d’Antibes; and Poum et Zette.

  He may have been a pulp fiction factory, but he didn’t necessarily want everyone to know. (As in The Wizard of Oz, the idea was to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”) Perhaps using so many names allowed him to skip from crime novels to steamy romance novels to adventure novels, and so on, employing as many clichés and hackneyed plots as he wished, freely and often hilariously, with no fear of criticism to slow him down. He could write eighty pages a day without breaking a sweat. Because he was in disguise, nothing (nor any dismissive critic) could stop him from exploring his imagination in whatever form or direction he wished. And even here, in what would not unreasonably be called dreck, there were seeds of the glorious Simenon novels to come—including the acclaimed Maigret detective series, which made him one of the best-selling writers in the world—and hints of the author whom André Gide called “the greatest French novelist of our times.”

  If his writing life was orderly and productive, his personal life was a mess. In 1925, he and Tigy vacationed in Normandy, where he met Henriette Liberge, a local fisherman’s daughter whom the Simenons hired as their maid. Just as he’d renamed his wife, Georges started calling Henriette “Boule.” His wealth grew along with his writing output, and although he remained as disciplined as ever in his work—Boule woke him at four o’clock each morning with a cup of coffee, and he immediately went to work at his typewriter—his libido was about to wreak havoc.

  Boule became Simenon’s mistress. But that same year, he saw a nineteen-year-old African-American singer and dancer, Josephine Baker, perform in the show La revue nègre. He fell in love. Baker was the toast of Paris, and Simenon was but one of her many lovers and admirers. He was so preoccupied with her that in 1927, his typically manic productivity nearly ceased. His wife seems to have had no inkling of his affair with Baker, even though it consumed his attention. (He and Baker remained lifelong friends.) The following year, he was able to break away from his obsession, at least enough to resume almost his usual output—forty-four novels in 1928. A sense of frustration was beginning to set in; he wanted something more than journalism and pulp novels written under pseudonyms. He had plenty of money now, enough to buy a boat, and then an even larger boat that he had custom-built. Still, he was dissatisfied, maybe because his greatest creation, Inspector Jules Maigret, had yet to be born.

  Always self-mythologizing, Simenon claimed that Maigret came to him a fully formed character one day as he sat in a café. “I began to picture the powerful, impassive bulk of a gentleman I thought would make a passable inspector,” he told an interviewer decades later. “I added various accessories as the day wore on: a pipe, a bowler hat, a thick overcoat with a velvet collar.” Maigret made his first appearance in 1929’s Une ombre dans la nuit (A Shadow in the Night), written under the pseudonym Georges-Martin Georges. In this novel, Maigret is a doctor, and he has only a minor role. It is interesting that Simenon gave the early Maigret a medical profession, as the author frequently mentioned that he might have become a doctor if his writing career had failed.

  Simenon published other pulp novels (under different names) that year, some of which featured police inspectors who were essentially composites of the author himself.

  The Maigret character was fleshed out over the course of four novels. It was almost as if Simenon was getting to know his signature character, experimenting with his creation before committing an entire novel to the hard-drinking, pipe-smoking detective. Simenon was starting to realize that he could produce higher-quality fiction, but the slow emergence of Maigret was caused by stubborn resistance from publishers, who weren’t sold on the character. They viewed Simenon as a reliable cash cow—and if it ain’t broke, why fix it? They didn’t want to tamper with a successful formula and had little regard for the author’s wish to take his career in a different direction. Nor did they see any need for him to publish under his own name, which he was keen to do. It wasn’t enough to be a lucrative and prolific author. Simenon yearned to be admired—and moreover, to take credit for his work.

  Even several editors he worked with didn’t know his real name. In fact, some believed that “Georges Simenon” was Georges Sim’s pseudonym. Frustrated by the confusion for which he was responsible, Simenon announced dramatically to a journalist that his days of alter egos were about to end: “From now on I’m going back to my real name, and I’ll sign my books as Georges Simenon.”

  He was taking a huge risk by exposing his true name and attempting a more ambitious, nuanced writing style—placing greater emphasis on character development and shedding the hackneyed plots of his pulp novels. His Maigret series would tweak the detective genre so that the answer to “Whodunit?” was not always wholly resolved, and the unorthodox detective could b
e counted on for his eccentric, highly unscientific investigative methods and empathy toward criminals. There were no obvious heroes or villains.

  Ever fond of excess, Simenon decided that he needed a proper party to introduce his new, improved, more literary self. For someone who had worked pseudonymously for so long, he knew how to win publicity when he needed it. “It’s not enough to have talent,” he told a friend. “You have to make it known.” He was hardly shy. In February 1931, he hosted a decadent society ball in his own honor at a Montparnasse nightclub. The savvy Simenon even hired a company to film his guests as they arrived, just like a Hollywood red-carpet premiere. He invited the most glamorous people in Paris—a mix of high-society types, celebrities, journalists, and artists—ensuring that it would be a much-talked-about event. Nearly a thousand people came. The party lasted all night and, like most other things Simenon attempted, it was a smashing success. Although some critics dismissed him as a publicity whore, he now had all the validation he needed to write under his own name. (He did continue publishing other novels under his nom de plume Christian Brulls for the next few years, but then he retired his alter egos.)

  Writing as himself did not slow his output; Simenon could easily complete a book a month, or even every few weeks. A New York Times piece once noted that Simenon was a man who “can write a good novel in the time it takes a fallible human to turn out a passable book review.” And a Life magazine article by Henry Grunwald pointed out that “Simenon turns out a book in about the time the average writer needs to draft a single chapter.”

  “I write fast, because I haven’t the brains to write slow,” Simenon once said.

  For him, writing provided an equilibrium that kept a darker side under control. He couldn’t stand being between books. He took long walks, sometimes for hours on end, as ideas percolated in his mind.

  His second wife, Denyse, described the difficulty of living with him during the gestation of each new work: “Normally a happy person, full of vitality and strength, [he] would suddenly look and act strange, become short-tempered and even morose,” she said. “I used to think that I had done something to hurt him. The answer usually came three or four days later, when he would announce to me, ‘I am going to start a new book!”

  Simenon did not seek approval from his fellow writers, which was lucky, since he had offended so many by behaving like a pompous ass in his interviews. After all, he was only twenty-nine years old in 1932, and he displayed an arrogance that people felt he had not earned. He boasted about never creating outlines for his manuscripts but simply sitting down at his typewriter and essentially allowing the entire story and all its characters to unfold before him. His muse, it seemed, never took a vacation day or called in sick. Further, he didn’t hesitate to reveal that all his novels were written “in one take,” with no revisions and “no touchups or modifications.”

  One journalist recounted an irritating interview with Simenon. “I wish I could be anonymous again, walk around unrecognized,” he told her, rather disingenuously. “It’s terrible, you know, not to be able to go into a bar or restaurant without people elbowing each other and whispering, ‘Look! It’s Georges Simenon!’ They read my books all over the world, you know.” He also insisted that he had no taste for the great wealth he’d worked so hard to accumulate, even suggesting that he found money tedious. “If I spend half a million francs a year,” he said, “it’s only because I have to see the world. I have to know how it feels to lose a fortune in Monte Carlo, or to own a yacht and have a chauffeur. But as soon as I’ve amassed the material I need, it’ll be over with, and I’ll go back to a quiet, peaceful, life.” Never mind that Simenon enjoyed Savile Row suits, custom-made silk shirts, and expensive wines.

  His self-regard was insufferable. “Provide me with a typewriter and this very instant I would be able to get started on a new book,” he once boasted, displaying an ego the size of a small nation. “I am fortunate in that I can write anywhere and under any conditions. I do not need to wait for inspiration. I am always inspired.”

  Simenon argued that he had written his pseudonymous pulp novels to make enough money for writing more “serious” books. Yet he didn’t want to limit his literary efforts to an elite readership. He said that his goal was “to write a novel capable of capturing the interest of all audiences.” Yet he admitted, “This is not as easy as it sounds: not to repulse the learned while remaining comprehensible to simple folk.”

  By 1933, Simenon had written nineteen Maigret novels. He felt that he had entered what he called his “literary period,” but he was not satisfied with his status. “When I am 40 I will publish my first real novel,” he announced in 1937, at the age of thirty-four, “and by the time I am 45 I will have won the Nobel Prize.”

  It is amazing that Simenon found time for writing at all: because Tigy supposedly had little need for sex, he cheated on her several times a week, with Boule and other women. Sometimes he was unfaithful several times a day. Most years, he was able to maintain the frenzied pace of his writing; when his life was consumed with additional distractions, his average output was still four novels a year (more than some writers produce in a lifetime).

  Long after Simenon resolved to publish books openly as himself, the intensity of his writing process caused him to inhabit other selves, in a manner of speaking. Although he was no longer using other names, he adopted the mannerisms, facial expressions, and gaits of his characters, and used sense memory (such as smells, colors, and sounds) to create settings. “[While writing my novels] I shall not be myself,” he once said. “Of course, I will eat with my family, but I will not be Simenon but someone else.”

  Entering into a trancelike state, diving into his subconscious—these were necessary triggers for the act of creation. He was not inventing stories from his imagination, or from an intellectual place. Essentially, he still had to become someone else to write—if not by using a pseudonym, then by allowing a character’s “self” to take shape fully, without the author’s control or intervention. “I’m not an intelligent man and I don’t have an analytical mind,” he told a reporter in 1971. “My books are therefore written by intuition alone. . . . The intuition just comes—on condition that I am, in a sense, completely empty.”

  He would achieve a neutral mind-set in which his subconscious took over, temporarily abandoning Georges Simenon to discover characters that were waiting to rise to the surface. “I actually live the part of my characters,” he said. “It’s no longer I who write, but they.” At one point in the process, the author would pose a question to yield more information, as he revealed in a 1955 interview: “Given this man, where he is, his profession, his family, what can happen which will push him to his limit?”

  The first procedure he used to “empty” himself before writing was cleaning his desk, a perfunctory but necessary ritual. “It’s the character who commands, not me,” he said. His method may have been pretentious (or invented for the sake of a good anecdote), but he claimed that it was the only way his books could be written.

  “All the day I am one of my characters,” he once said. “I feel what he feels. The other characters are always seen by him. So it is in this character’s skin I have to be. And it’s almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons my novels are so short; after eleven days I can’t—it’s impossible. I have to—it’s physical. I am too tired.”

  By 1945, Simenon was still married to his first wife, but the marriage wouldn’t last. (Still, he managed to stay close to Tigy for the rest of his life.) Within weeks of moving his family to the United States, he began an affair with a twenty-five-year-old French-Canadian woman, Denyse Ouimet. His fixation on name changing continued, as he promptly changed the spelling of hers to “Denise.” Because her former lover’s name was Georges, he wanted to be renamed as well, and asked her to call him Jo.

  Four years later, she was pregnant with the first of their three children: Jean, Pierre,
and Marie-Jo. He divorced Tigy in 1950 and immediately married Denyse. They lived for a time in California, where he met and became friends with Charlie Chaplin.

  In the same random fashion in which he did most things, Simenon moved his family to Lakeville, Connecticut, where he bought an eighteenth-century home on fifty acres. He woke at six each morning and went to work in a soundproofed office, the curtains drawn. Denyse would prepare everything for him before he sat down at his IBM typewriter. He placed a “Do Not Disturb” sign—stolen from New York’s Plaza Hotel—on the doorknob. His favorite pipes were filled and ready to be smoked, and his stacks of paper, maps, and dictionaries were by his side, as well as the telephone directories from all over the world that he used for naming his characters. In moments of solitary contemplation, he toyed with a monogrammed solid gold ball that Denyse had ordered from Cartier. His dozens of pencils were pre-sharpened daily, and he would switch on a hot plate to keep coffee brewing. He always began by drafting, on the back of a manila envelope, a list of his characters, their addresses and phone numbers, their ages, and other basic information—including places to which they might travel, and possible medical ailments. If his writing “spell” was ever broken by some interruption from the outside world, he immediately shut down and discarded whatever he had written until that point. (Interruptions were rare.)

  Supposedly he wore the same outfit while writing each novel. For a normal writer, that might seem eccentric, but for Simenon, who could produce a book in a matter of days or a week, wearing the same clothes for the duration wasn’t so odd. And he weighed himself before and after completing each new book, so as to measure how much sweat the project had cost him.