An Auto-Roman Policier

GEORGES SIMENON is the most prolific writer living, the famed mystery story-teller of over 400 novels and creator of the diffident Commissaire Maigret of the Quai des Orfevres Criminal Brigade. His first novel, which appeared in 1923, was written in one week to meet a publisher's deadline, and in succeeding years he has never deviated from that schedule, nor from the plot format he first laid down. This methodical grinding out of thrillers has made him the best-selling French author ever, a kind of freak of technique in the publishing world, and has earned him millions. But, quite unexpectedly in 1973, he announced he would retire from fiction to work, as he put it, on "autobiographical and confessional reminiscences."

This was hardly the passing of a literary giant, though at various times Jean Cocteau, Henry Miller, C.P. Snow, and Andre Gide each admired Simenon's slick perfection of the roman policier genre. Yet it was a curious change for a man in his seventies, a change made still more curious in the next year by the sale of his estates, the disruption of his supremely sedate life, and the abandoning of his ordered creative habits. Something new in his writing seemed to be in the offing; like one of those inconsistencies that pop up so frequently in his novels, his turn of interest piqued our curiosity and expectations.

Letter to My Mother, one of the products of this new labor, has appeared in English, so that we can now begin to assess the "new Simenon." Actually, it is a question of reassessing the old hackneyed Simenon, for nothing has really changed. Letter to My Mother is a new sort of detective story, a kind of confessional mystery, predicated on the notion that human relationships are indeed hard to understand, that they take time to decipher, are full of profound feelings, etc. Unfortunately, this new kind of puzzle isn't nearly as interesting as a good murder mystery, nor is Simenon, the musing son, nearly as captivating as Commissaire Maigret, the plodding detective.

AN AGED Mme. Simenon lies dying in a hospital. Her son, the author, comes to her side, and discovers that in spite of his 70 years he doesn't understand her. In the week that passes before death arrives, he tries to penetrate to the "truth" of his mother and of their bond, to "solve" that cliched jigsaw puzzle of filial love. Sitting silently across from her, he tortures himself with questions: "Why did my mother distrust me?"; "Why did she marry my father?"; "What was her youth like?"; "What did she think when...?"

Three years pass before the answers arrive, and at this point Letters to My Mother is commenced.

Dear Mama,

It has been close to three and a half years since you died, at the age of ninety-one, and perhaps it's only now that I'm beginning to understand you. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I lived under one roof with you. I lived with you, but when I left for Paris at the age of about nineteen, you were still a stranger to me.

However, what Simenon understands to be answers are actually more questions. He relates an anecdote, but concludes it interrogatively,

I can imagine the life you led when you worked for them. You were a poor little maid of all work, who never dared to protest. I don't doubt for a moment that you cried a good deal.

How did you summon up the courage to walk out and go live by yourself? Where did you spend your nights? Who gave you the idea of asking Monsieur Bernheim for a job?

Such questions would be revealing if, like the chiaroscuro in a portrait, the answers would illuminate her character; instead, they reiterate the obvious or spurious. Simenon continues laboriously to try to understand his mother.

Still more irksome is the often complete triviality of this cycle of anecdote and self-interrogation. In one instance, switching the tense so as to appear in the presence of his mother, he is reminded of himself as a youth when attending mass. The chapel, he recalls,

...was built several centuries ago by a certain Ernest of Bavaria. Who was he? A count, a duke, a prince, an emperor? It doesn't matter much.

Yes, who was he, and what does it matter? Why even include it? Nevertheless this starts him off on a long reverie of nostalgia for his days as a chapel boy, from which he awakes a few pages later, and returns to thoughts of his mother. In fact, the book seems more like a letter to himself; he is quite fond of discreetly recounting the dinners and accolades he has amassed.

Liege had arranged an unexpected welcome for me, consisting of official receptions and no less official luncheons and dinners.

I found myself in a large, comfortable, not to say luxurious, villa. A sumptuous dinner had been prepared for me.

Even when we are graced with a straightforward assessment of his mother, it is imprecise: she is "highstrung," or "willful," or "impressionable." Once he goes so far as to describe her as the "cat's canary" of the family. This murky cliche is repeated several times, as if to emphasize that it is a "key" to solving the mystery of Mme. Simenon. By page 90 (the book is 91 pages), Simenon is ready to terminate his garbled investigation, now thoroughly redundant, and give us his solution. It seems, finally, that she "needs to be good", in spite and in face of the world, and this is the reason she acted as she did, this is the "truth" of her person. But this person, do we understand her yet? Simenon seems to have forgotten his own question.

Simenon's failure here is due to the lack of any coherent understanding of the craft of writing--or in this case, dictating, which only resembles real writing insofar as it is printed. Simenon starts with only the vaguest notions of what he will do and after a certain prescribed period of time (in the case of Letters to My Mother, one day), finishes. In that time a simple story-line emerges, sustained by the most elementary event-to-event, casual thinking. Ironically this dearth of complexity is the peculiar strength of his roman policier: the name Maigret itself connotes a kind of thinness, a stylistic baldness. Unlike the elegant Sherlock Holmes, Commissaire Maigret is a bourgeois hero, a symbol of the unpretentious common man; he uses no complicated forensics, no tricks of reason, his habits are ordinary--his only asset is a persistent, though mediocre intellect. Judging from the 300 million copies Simenon's works have sold in 43 languages (excepting Lenin, the most translated oeuvre in all literature), Maigret is a phenomenon worth considering.

UNFORTUNATELY, neither thinness of intellect nor haste in production are suitable to the treatment of the human psyche. Human beings are not constructible puzzles. The great disappointment with Letters to My Mother lies in its unfulfilled potential. After all, Mme. Simenon seems to be a genuinely mysterious personage: a woman who could live with her husband for years and never speak a word to him so intense was her hatred; a woman so distrustful that even as she lay dying, she could doubt her son's motives and ask, "Georges, why have you come?"

Through the entire book, there is the elusive suggestion of momentous questions, of Oedipal relations, of age, of the child's world, of death. We should take a clue from Gide: to be able to read Simenon with interest is to read between the lines, to make a creative extrapolation. By itself, Letter to My Mother is the maudlin nostalgia of an old man; however, with a bit of imagination on the reader's part, the roman policier mentality can be the catalyst to other, more serious reflections.