Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Simenon submerged himself completely while writing at his feverish pace, refusing to see anyone or speak on the phone. It was the only way he could work. There is a well-known story (perhaps a joke?) that goes like this:

  Alfred Hitchcock once called to speak with the author. Simenon’s secretary apologized, explaining that her boss couldn’t come to the telephone because he had just started writing a new novel. “That’s all right,” Hitchcock replied. “I’ll wait.”

  Between books, Simenon was fully engaged with the people around him. “I’m a bit like a sponge,” he once said. “When I’m not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little—and out it comes, not water but ink.”

  He would produce twenty-six novels during his five years in Lakeville.

  It was there, in 1955, that a reporter from the Paris Review came to interview Simenon. The subject was described as “cheerful, efficient, hospitable, controlled,” which seemed to be Simenon’s manner at all times, unless he was in bed with a woman. In the interview, Simenon provided insight into his revision process, which was brutally efficient and, he claimed, never involved changing the plot in any way. Asked what kinds of cuts he made to his work, he replied, “Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it.”

  He was just as unsentimental about word choice in general. “[M]ost of the time I use concrete words,” he said. “I try to avoid abstract words, or poetical words, you know, like ‘crepuscule,’ for example. It is very nice, but it gives nothing.”

  Simenon never had any interest in participating in the “literary life,” or even reading the work of his contemporaries. His own masters were dead. “I should tell any young man who wanted to follow in my footsteps to read the novels of Dickens, Stevenson, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Daniel Defoe,” Simenon once told an English journalist. “Then—forget them. He must stop reading and start living. He mustn’t be like Zola, who cross-examined a carpenter in his workshop about the tricks of his trade, then sat down to hammer out a book on the life of a carpenter.”

  Yet he did admire a few of his contemporaries, including John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, and especially William Faulkner. He once said in an interview that he wished he could have been Faulkner, because “he was able to contain the whole of humanity in a small county in the south of the United States.” Faulkner was also greatly admired by Simenon’s contemporary Henry Green. They may have had this in common, but Green couldn’t stand Simenon’s work.

  Simenon regarded Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels as insipid, but Fleming was a huge fan of Simenon. So was T. S. Eliot. The film directors Federico Fellini and François Truffaut were admirers, too.

  He met Dashiell Hammett and James Thurber, and formed friendships with Thornton Wilder and Henry Miller, both of whom he corresponded with. “For us Americans who have just discovered you in translation,” Miller wrote to him in 1954, “it is like a new star rising on the horizon.” And in his longtime friendship with André Gide, Simenon opened up about aspects of his personal life that he shared with no one else. But when it came to his writing he was like a magician; he knew better than to reveal too much about how his tricks worked. So when Gide, always awestruck by his friend’s extraordinary output, once pressed him in a letter about his creative process, Simenon replied, “It’s a form of self-deception, nothing more.”

  Simenon was flattered by Gide’s attention, but he admitted later that he found Gide’s work unreadable.

  One fan of Simenon (whom he never met) was the British author John Cowper Powys, who described Simenon as “my new favorite writer” and considered him superior to Arthur Conan Doyle. “I never thought I’d live to see the day that I’d be reading detective stories,” Powys wrote to a friend, “but the detective element of Simenon’s books is their weakest aspect, generally rather unconvincing. All the rest—atmosphere, composition, narration, and characters—is wonderful, at least for me. It’s been years since I’ve come upon an author who has so pleased me, with so many books, all equally charming.”

  The novelist, critic, and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller (who was married to the author Shirley Hazzard) was an occasional user of pseudonyms in his own novels. Steegmuller wrote that when Simenon was at his best, he

  is an all-round master craftsman—ironic, disciplined, highly intelligent, with fine descriptive power. His themes are timeless in their preoccupation with the interrelation of evil, guilt and good; contemporary in their fidelity to the modern context and Gallic in precision, logic and a certain emanation of pain or disquiet. His fluency is of course astonishing. His life is itself a work by Simenon.

  Simenon might have acted nonchalant about how others perceived him, but he soaked up the glory. To his credit, he harbored a degree of humility that lingered from childhood. “I like plain people,” he explained in a 1953 interview with Look magazine, “people who are not all the time thinking about the impression they make and taking notes on themselves. The best thing is for the writer to know the garbage collector.”

  Even after conquering the world with his Maigret novels, he could not succeed in shaking his mother’s critical attitude. When Henriette was well into her seventies, her disapproval had not diminished. “Why don’t you ever write a book about nice people and good Catholics,” she said to her son, “instead of all these criminals?”

  In 1961 Simenon’s career was still going strong. His work had been (lucratively) adapted for television and film, and he was deep into another affair, with Teresa Sburelin, the family’s Italian housekeeper, who was twenty-three years younger than he. Years later, Denyse offered her opinion of her husband’s incorrigible ways. “We made love three times a day every day, before breakfast, after an afternoon nap, and before going to sleep,” she said. “Sometimes I wondered whether he didn’t think of me as a prostitute. . . . He had contempt for women, but I’m the only one he respected while still showing that contempt. You want to know why he felt the need to cheat on me when he was getting what he needed at home? Definitely to reassure himself. He overdid everything: speaking, writing, publishing, and making love. This was a reflection of his temperament.”

  Supposedly, one afternoon Simenon enjoyed a marathon session of sex with four women in a row while Denyse packed their suitcases in the adjoining room.

  He once said that he viewed sex as “the only possible form of communication with women.” Because he had no memory of tenderness from his mother—he claimed that she had never even held him in her lap—his attitude is not surprising. He spent a lifetime trying to move beyond that early abandonment.

  “I have no sexual vices,” he told Fellini, “just a need to communicate.”

  Although the author’s name was worth a fortune—he was a one-man celebrity brand—his personal life fell apart in middle age. For a man who never met a brothel he didn’t like, his sexual fervor remained strong as ever, but it started to take its toll. He went through bouts of depression, and even he recognized that his life was in disarray.

  His malaise did not go unnoticed by a French journalist who visited him in 1963, surprised by how grouchy and anxious his interview subject seemed. (Simenon had abruptly moved his family to Switzerland, having enjoyed his time in America but unable to resist his nomadic impulse.) Recalling the interview later, the journalist said he had not come away with a favorable impression. He took a jab at Simenon, describing him as “an industrialist of literature. He produced, and he sold what he produced.” Even more damning were his observations of the author’s paranoia:

  Simenon dreaded a world war or some other catastrophe; hence the enormous laundry and operating room at his home, driven by a generator ready to go at a moment’s notice. The house was replete with microphones, supposedly installed so that Simenon would know if one of his children was calling or crying, but I think he also used them to eavesdrop on what others besides
his children might be saying about him. And finally, he detested wood, in which any number of undesirable beasts might find shelter. The furniture was of glass, leather, and metal. A curious impression: I listened to Georges Simenon for hours but never really got to know him.

  Whether Simenon’s decline had to do with his desperately unhappy marriage is unclear, but it is likely. There were violent incidents between him and Denyse. “He’s afraid of her,” one of his editors said of the couple’s relationship. “She’s mad.”

  Perhaps in denial about how bad things were, Simenon made the reckless decision to custom-build a grand home in Epalinges. In the beginning, Simenon claimed that the house was so immense he did not know the exact number of rooms. It was a fortress designed to accommodate his large staff of servants, nannies, and secretaries, and his paintings by Matisse and Picasso. It provided ample space to park his fleet of luxury cars—including a Mercedes, a Jaguar, and a Bentley. Dollar signs were built into the front gates of the grounds. The house had (depending on the source) either eleven or twenty-one telephones; a vast library of his own works, translated into several languages; a service elevator installed specifically to deliver Simenon’s meals; and a pool, among other extravagances. Charlie Chaplin and his family were frequent guests.

  Unfathomably rich and famous, Simenon became jaded about his career. In 1969, despite being the world’s best-selling author, he had grown tired of his beloved detective. “When I first began Maigret I was 26 and he was 45,” he told a reporter that year. “I was his son, he was my father. Now I am 66 and he is only 52, and he is my son and I am his father.”

  A few years later, having written more than eighty Maigret novels, and thousands of pages in multiple genres under various names, he published the final volume and announced that he would never again write fiction in any genre, under any name. His children and friends refused to believe him—they were convinced that he had another surprise in store—but this time he did not. People magazine ran a profile of him accompanied by the headline, “After 500 Novels and 10,000 Women, Georges Simenon Has Earned His Retirement.”

  Unable to let go of storytelling entirely, he spent years dictating twenty-one volumes of his memoirs into a tape recorder. He addressed the public’s immense curiosity about his prolific writing career: “People will speak of a gift. Why not a malediction?” He’d once said that whenever he went to his doctor while suffering from a mysterious illness, his doctor would offer the same prescription: “Write a book.” He always did, and noticed that he felt better instantly. Writing was his affliction and his cure. “I’m happy when I’ve finished,” he told a reporter five years before his death. “But during the time I’m writing, it’s something awful.”

  At seventy, he’d endured years of trauma and heartbreak: the collapse of his marriage to the manic-depressive, alcoholic Denyse; the death of his mother, which left him with complicated feelings of grief and anger. And in 1978, his daughter, Marie-Jo, committed suicide at age twenty-five in her apartment in Paris. She shot herself in the chest with a pistol, and a heartbroken Simenon could not recover from the loss. Less than two months earlier, Denyse had published a spiteful, extensively detailed account of their marriage, Un oiseau pour le chat (A Bird for the Cat). Simenon never forgave her for this betrayal, and refused to say her name aloud.

  In his professional life, too, strains became apparent. He felt that he still hadn’t received the acclaim he deserved, even though he’d flooded the world with hundreds of millions of copies of his books. The self-described “imbecile of genius” could not overcome his spite at being passed over for the Nobel Prize. It had been bad enough when his friend Gide won in 1947, but Simenon felt even more bruised when Albert Camus became the Nobel laureate in 1957. (There had been international rumors that perhaps Simenon would win that year.) The choice of Camus made him furious. “Can you believe that asshole got it and not me?” he had complained to Denyse.

  Having abandoned fiction, he also gave up the house at Epalinges. He and Teresa, now his companion, moved first into a high-rise apartment, then into a small, cramped house in Lausanne. (After his death, his ashes would be scattered under an old cedar tree in their garden.) He placed most of his possessions in storage. He changed the “Occupation” line of his passport from “homme de lettres” to “sans profession.” He took a daily nap after lunch. It was a simple life. He and Teresa were devoted to each other.

  The profile in People magazine described a blissful couple: “[L]ife with Teresa appears serene. They are inseparable. They take a daily promenade together and eat their meals on a precise schedule.”

  As his health declined and he was confined to a wheelchair, he was philosophical about dying: “I don’t fear death, but I fear causing trouble by my death to those who survive me. I would like to die as discreetly as possible.”

  Perhaps because Simenon had so effortlessly inhabited his many pseudonyms and had experienced such huge success, even writing as himself, he was never unduly preoccupied with how others regarded him. “I have a very, very strong will about my writing,” he once said, “and I will go my way. For instance, all the critics for twenty years have said the same thing: ‘It is time for Simenon to give us a big novel, a novel with twenty or thirty characters.’ They do not understand. I will never write a big novel. My big novel is the mosaic of all my small novels. You understand?”

  He had always drawn attention because of his gargantuan appetites, including his sexual escapades, yet in private he was an ordinary man who followed a rigid routine—as cited in a 1969 New York Times profile, just a few years before his final novel was published: “Mr. Simenon lives by order and discipline. Not only does he rise at 6 on the dot, but he also goes to bed at the first stroke of 10, whether he is in the middle of the sentence or watching a drama on one of his seven TV sets. He falls asleep immediately.”

  He had the luxury of adhering, without interference, to the simple routine he had designed—never having to do a single thing, for work or pleasure, that he did not schedule himself. And on September 4, 1989, he didn’t feel like waking again. With nothing left to say, the great Simenon died serenely in his slumber at 3:30 in the morning.

  He could not have written a better ending.

  She kept snails as pets

  Chapter 15

  Patricia Highsmith & CLAIRE MORGAN

  She was one of the most wretched people you could ever meet, with mood shifts that swung as wildly as the stock market. Patricia Highsmith was born eleven years before Sylvia Plath, and the two women had a similar temperament. Like Plath, Highsmith possessed a legendary cruel streak and harbored feelings of murderous rage that were directed at family members, lovers, and innocent bystanders alike. One friend said that although she appreciated Highsmith’s startlingly direct manner, unaccompanied by tact, she did not care for “the ranting and raving, the nastiness, the hatred which would overflow.” When a biographer of Highsmith was asked why she’d become interested in her subject, she replied, “I have always been interested in women who go too far—and Highsmith went further than anyone.”

  That point is hard to dispute. Highsmith was a heavy smoker (Gauloises), an alcoholic, and sexually promiscuous. She had affairs with both men and women—almost all of these relationships were intense and unhappy—and she compulsively recorded her sexual encounters. She revised her work by retyping her manuscripts in their entirety “two-and-a-half times” on a manual typewriter. She was living proof that not all women have a maternal instinct. She was secretive, misanthropic, gruff, cheap, rude, and generally mean. She had wanderlust. She collected maps. She had an eating disorder and described food as her “bête noire.” She felt disgusted by feminists. She was openly and relentlessly anti-Semitic, and felt that the Holocaust didn’t go far enough. She wrote hateful letters, critical of Israel, to politicians and newspapers, using more than forty pseudonyms (including “Phyllis Cutler” and “Edgar S. Sallich”) and disguised sign
atures. She saved, in her edition of the Holy Bible, an old article with the headline “Archaeologist Finds the Tomb of Caiphus, the Jewish High Priest Who Handed Jesus Christ Over to the Jews.” She said that she refused to sell Israel the rights to publish any of her books, and when the ham sandwiches she liked were no longer served in first class on airline flights, she blamed “the yids” for it. Yet she had Jewish lovers and friends. She had huge hands. She loved cats and owned many books about cats. She was a racist who believed that if black men didn’t have sex many times a month, they became ill. She simultaneously cursed her fame and courted it. She was a compulsive liar. She had a febrile imagination and boasted that she had ideas “as often as rats have orgasms.” One of her editors described her as being like a “child of 10 or 11.” On her left wrist, she had a tattoo of her initials in Greek letters. She enjoyed watching violent scenes in movies, but shielded her eyes during sex scenes, which repelled her. She always wanted to play the harpsichord. She did play the recorder. She kept snails as pets because she enjoyed watching them copulate, liked their indeterminate gender and self-sufficiency, and said they provided a sense of tranquillity—this from someone almost incapable of relaxation. Her fondness for snails was such that she kept three hundred of them in her garden in Suffolk and insisted on traveling with them. When she moved to France in 1967, she smuggled snails into the country by hiding them under her breasts—and she made several trips back and forth to smuggle them all. Her favorite snails were named Hortense and Edgar. Her favorite flower was the carnation. She liked her Scotch neat. She had bad teeth. She was lonely and anxious, ambidextrous, and physically clumsy. She was sensitive to noise and despised it. She was obsessed by routine and repetition in all areas of her life. She believed that her phone was being wiretapped by people who wanted to steal her money. She liked to read the dictionary every evening before dinner. She was known to start drinking screwdrivers at seven o’clock in the morning. She made furniture. She felt that her best quality was perseverance. She was a gifted visual artist and admired the work of Francis Bacon because “he sees mankind throwing up into a toilet.” She was tall, dark, and handsome. She slept with many women named Virginia. She was paranoid and controlling. She contemplated suicide, but rejected the act as too selfish.