The Widow (2 page)

Though he claimed that none of his books was autobiographical, his work is a chronicle of his life—his young self is vivid in
Pedigree
and
The Nightclub
, his mother looms in
The Lodger
and
The Cat
, his daughter in
The Disappearance of Odile
, his second marriage in
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
, his ménage a trios in
In Case of Emergency
, his travels in the novels with foreign settings—
Tropic Moon, Aboard the Aquitaine, Banana Tourist, The Bottom of the Bottle, Red Lights, The Brothers Rico
, and many others—and in all of them the particularities of his fantasies and obsessions. Feeling that he was an outsider, he had a gift for depicting aliens—the nameless African in
The Negro
, the immigrant in
The Little Man from Arkangel
, the Malous (in fact the Malowskis) in
The Fate of the Malous
, and Kachoudas in
The Hatter's Phantoms
. By contrast, in Camus'
The Plague
you'd hardly know you were in a foreign country—all the characters are Frenchmen, and incidentally
The Plague
is a world without women.

“You know you have a beautiful sentence, cut it,” Simenon said. “Every time I find such a thing in one my novels it is to be cut.” Simenon is exaggerating, he sometimes lets slip a pretty sentence, but generally his writing is so textureless as to be transparent and never calls attention to itself (“It's written as if by a child”). No love of language is ever obvious, he remains anti-lapidary. The only new words one is likely to find in Simenon are the occasional technical terms, like the medical jargon in
The Patient
with its medical terms,
The Premier
with its particularities of French governance, and some bridge-playing episodes elsewhere. You will never learn a new word in a Simenon. And you will never laugh. Comedy is absent, humor is rare. A bleak vision and relentless seriousness earned his non-Maigrets the appellation
romans durs
because
dur
is not just hard but implies weight, seriousness, not only a stony quality but density and complexity—a kind of challenge and even a certain tedium. (A
dur
is a bore in some contexts.) Simenon's characters read newspapers, usually bad news or crimes; they plot, lie, cheat, steal, sweat, have sex; frequently they commit murder, and just as often they commit suicide. They never read books or quote from them. They don't study (as Simenon did, to mug up on detail). They are generally fussing at the margins of the working world, coming apart, hurtling downward, toward oblivion.

For any writer, it is not possible to be productive without being possessed by a strict sense of order and guided by discipline. One of Simenon's shrewdest French biographers, Pierre Assouline, sees the clock as his dominant metaphor. His novels are full of timepieces and clock-watching. Simenon himself timed all his movements, not just his writing, clocking in, clocking out; even meals were timed to the minute. He famously made calendars chronicling his novel writing—usually eight or nine days of furious composition, a chapter a day.

His sexuality, too, involved the stopwatch. Simenon was anything but a sensualist. A sex act in his books usually takes a few lines at most. In
The Bells of Bicetre
: “They stayed a long time almost motionless, like certain insects you see mating.”
The Man on the Bench in the Barn
: “I literally dived into her, suddenly, violently, there was fear in her eyes”—and then it's over.
The Nightclub
: “She looked at him in astonishment. It was over already. He couldn't even have said how he set about it.”

These hair-trigger instances echo the love life Simenon recorded in his
Intimate Memoirs
. One day, he approaches his wife in her office as she is speaking with her English secretary, Joyce Aitken. His wife asks him what he wants.

The Widow
is exceptional in depicting several seductions that go on for a few pages. A sentence that repeats so often in a Simenon as to be a signature line is: “She wore a dress and it was obvious that she had nothing on underneath.”
The Widow
also contains a variation of this sentence: “Still wearing her blue smock, with next to nothing beneath it …”

Unlike most of his characters, Simenon was someone whose self-esteem was in good repair. His personal world seemed complete. He moved from grand house to grand house—and they were self-contained, holding his family, his lovers, his library, his recreations; his appetites, his pipes, his pencils, his fancy cars. He lived the life of a seigneur, the lord of his own principality, where everything was ordered to his own specifications. The completeness of Simenon's life is impressive: the man who lives with his ex-wife, his present wife, and his loyal servant, all of whom he sleeps with, while still finding time to be unfaithful to all three with prostitutes, and keeps writing. That was what thrilled Henry Miller. Well, what philanderer wouldn't be thrilled? And Miller didn't know the half of it. One day (according to Marnham), seeing a young serving girl on all fours dusting a low table, Simenon on an impulse took her from behind. The girl told Madame Simenon, who laughed it off as being typically Georges. Witnessing this drollery, another serving girl wondered aloud, “
On passe toutes a la casserole?
” (“So everyone has a go at this pot?”)

In great contrast to the apparent coherence, the fatness, of his own life are the insufficiencies in the lives of his characters, who are usually strong enough to kill but seldom resourceful enough to survive. And it must be said that having spent many decades vigorously writing and living in style, his last years, twenty-three of them—after the suicide of his beloved daughter—were spent in a kind of solitary confinement and protracted depression in a poky house with his housekeeper, sitting in plastic chairs because, among his phobias, he held the belief that wooden furniture harbored insects.

A number of Simenon's novels, among them
The Venice Train, Belle, Sunday
, and
The Negro
, can be grouped around the general theme
malentendu
or cross-purposes—the title of the Camus play that is Simenonesque in its cruelty.
The Widow
is firmly in this category, though its descriptions of violence and sexuality are unusually graphic for Simenon; and it is one of the few Simenons with a strong woman character in it. The woman in
Betty
and the woman narrator of
November
are similarly strong. But his women tend to be one-dimensional, guileful, opportunistic, coldly practical, unsentimental, or else easy prey. Tati the widow is a peasant who knows her own mind and possesses an ability to size up strangers.

The action takes place in the Bourbonnais, the dead center of France, in a hamlet by the canal that joins St. Amande with Montluçon—apart from omitting the “e” from Amande, Simenon is very specific in his provincial geography.

An odd solecism occurs in the first paragraph of the novel. A man is walking down a road that is “cut slantwise every ten yards by the shadow of a tree trunk”—Simenon at his most economical in precise description. It is noontime, at the end of May. The man strides across these shadows. Then his own shadow is described: “a short, ridiculously squat shadow—his own—slid in front of him.” The sun seems to be shining from different angles in the space of two sentences, creating two sorts of shadow. It is perhaps not a riddle. Simenon hated to rewrite.

The young man boards the bus outside St. Amande, bound for Montluçon. He has nothing on him, no impedimenta, no obvious identity. “No luggage, no packages, no walking stick, not even a switch cut from the hedge. His arms swung freely.” Among the women returning from the market he is a stranger, though for the reader of Simenon he is so familiar as to be an old friend: the naked man, someone at a crossroads, a bit lost, a bit guilty, on the verge of making a fatal decision.

The widow Couderc sizes him up, seeing something in him no one else sees. Later we understand why: he somewhat resembles her son, a waster and ex-con who is in the Foreign Legion. She sees that this bus passenger is going nowhere, that he has nothing; she understands him and she wants him.

In this beautifully constructed first chapter, with a subtle building of effects, the young man notices the woman, too, and in the midst of the nosy chattering market women, the two “recognized each other.” He also needs her.

The woman, Tati, gets off the bus, and soon afterward the young man, Jean, does the same. Jean asks if he can give her a hand with her bundles, a gesture she had been expecting ever since their eyes met. He moves in with her. A few days later, on a Sunday, after she returns from church—a nice touch—she pours him a few drinks and they end up in bed.

She is not beautiful, but she is tough, even fearless, the sort of indestructible peasant who would feel at home at the table in van Gogh's
The Potato Eaters
. Unloved and frumpy, even slatternly, in an old ragged coat, her slip showing, and with a hairy mole on her cheek, she is at forty-five more than twenty years older than Jean. She gives Jean to understand that he can expect occasional sex but that she must also sleep with her abusive father-in-law from time to time, because she is living in his farmhouse.

Belying Tati's rumpled clothes, and precarious existence among her quarrelsome in-laws, is her animal alertness, a peasant shrewdness, especially as regards her niece. The teenaged mother Felicie lives nearby; the effect of this pretty young woman on Jean disturbs Tati. Her suspicions of Jean's past are quickly borne out after a visit by the gendarmes: Jean has recently been released from five years in prison (thus the
Ticket of Leave
title) and his precariousness resembles hers. She had taken him for a foreigner—he seems foreign throughout, a true outsider—but in fact he is from a distinguished family in Montluçon, son of a wealthy womanizing distiller. Estranged from his family, he is “free as air … a man utterly without ties.” And “he was free … like a child.”

“He did not walk like other people. He seemed to be going nowhere.” But he has walked into a trap. He does not know it yet, though for him, as for Meursault in
L'Étranger
, there is no future. He lives in a “magnificent present humming with sunshine.”

He tells Tati that he has murdered a man, almost casually and partly by accident. A woman was involved, though he didn't love her. Far from being seriously affected by the crime, the trial, or the years in prison, he “scarcely realized that it was himself it was happening to.” He has been cast adrift by the crime, and after prison nothing mattered: “he was committed to nothing, nothing he did possessed either weight or importance.”

In his lack of remorse, or pity, he resembles the cold-hearted killer Frank Friedmaier in
Dirty Snow
and Popinga in
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
. And of course, he prefigures Meursault, even to the solar imagery, for at a crucial point in the novel, recognizing his desire for Felicie, “At one stroke the sun had taken possession of him. Another world was swallowing them up …”

He succeeds with Felicie, as he succeeded with her aunt, but wordlessly, rutting among the farm buildings. He continues to make love to Tati, and is always abrupt if not brutal: “He undressed her as one skins a rabbit.” And in this ménage, another familiar Simenon situation ensues, that of lovers separated by a physical barrier, the passions of propinquity, jealousy always figuring in the plot. In
The Widow
the lovers in nearby cottages are separated by the canal, in
The Door
a communicating door, in
The Iron Staircase
an iron staircase, and a similar shuttling back and forth in
Act of Passion
. All these novels end in murder.

In this springtime pastoral—conflict in the countryside: fertile farmland, browsing animals, quarreling peasants—Jean slowly goes to pieces, consumed by self-disgust and fatalism. Typically for Simenon, by the subtle building of effects, Jean's condition is suggested rather than analyzed. Feeling possessed by the desperate older woman who won't let him go, by the younger woman who is indifferent to him, Jean realizes that he is at a dead end, that a crime is inevitable, and “he waited for what could not fail to happen.”

The novel becomes implicitly existential, though Simenon would scoff at such a word: there is no philosophical meditation in the narrative. Jean has been put on a road to ruin by Simenon—been set up, indeed. Many if not all Simenon novels describing the occurrence of
malentendu
imply that there is no exit—and the maddening thing is that even though the doomed character does not see a way out, the reader does. It does not occur to Jean that he can just walk away or get back on the bus. He protests that he is indifferent to his crime, but he is damaged, he is guilt-ridden, he is possessed, and when Tati begs him to stay and love her, he is helpless to do anything but smash her skull. “It had been foreordained!”

In describing this lost soul and his desperate act, Simenon was reflecting the fatalism of his time. He wrote the book in a dark period, on the French coast—the name “Nieul sur Mer” is given at the end as its place of composition, a place near La Rochelle. France was at war, German occupation not far off, and doomsday seemed imminent. In this uncertain war, only violence or an act of passion gave meaning to the passage of time. Like Meursault, Jean is headed to certain execution—the notion of it occurs to him throughout the last third of the novel—and he is the author of his fate. He had stumbled into an idyllic setting without at first realizing that it was not idyllic at all but an Eden that has become a snake pit of corruption matching his own loss of innocence.

Rereading the novel, one realizes that (as with most Simenons), Jean had been doomed from the first paragraph, when he walked through the shadows. And we can easily see why Simenon was so angry that Camus won the Swedish lottery—because in novel after novel, Simenon dramatized the same sort of dilemma, the life with narrowing options (but always with subtle differences of plot, tone, location, and effects), the risk-taking of the man with nothing to lose, his vanity, his presumption, his willful self-destruction. Earlier, Jean yearns for commitment and for fate to intervene, but when he meditates on it (and ultimately gets his wish): “He wanted something definite and final, something that offered no prospect of retreat.” Simenon seems to be talking to himself, sending another of his characters to his death in a world without happy endings.