Tag: Georges Simenon

In the Scales

On 25 August 1773, in an indifferent inn at Banff, James Boswell watched Samuel Johnson pen a long letter to Mrs Thrale. ‘I wondered to see him write so much so easily. He verified his own doctrine that “a man may always write when he will set himself doggedly to it.”’[1]

Dogged, yes: ‘sullen’ I don’t quite see but ‘pertinacious’, holding obstinately to an opinion or a purpose, unyielding, we can certainly settle for. So that

Writing of April in the Scotland uplands, of mainly grey days, cold and snow, the 20-year-old John Buchan remarked: ‘Nor have we any of the common associations of spring, like the singing of birds. A mavis or a blackbird may on occasion break into a few notes, and there is, for certain, an increasing twitter among the trees. But the clear note of the lark as yet is not; the linnet does not pipe; the many named finches are still silent.’[2]

We have also been in the hills this April, though further south, with not a hint of snow. A few days in the Black Mountains, the border country, with its panoramic vistas and the River Wye looking sleek and animated and glossy, and where, on some roads, you move from England to Wales and back again with dizzying ease and frequency. That was in a foreign country. . .

As for birds. . . . In a few days and in a limited area, we saw or heard (frequently both), skylark, chaffinch, blackbird, robin, blackcap, sparrow, wood pigeon, linnet,  chiffchaff, wren, dunnock, crow, goldfinch and song thrush (Buchan’s ‘mavis’).[3] Many of these in the trees and the grass outside the living-room or kitchen windows of the farmhouse we were renting, others on walks through fields and woods.

Birds we had, then, in abundance. Space and grass and sheep and silence also. Wi-Fi, broadband, not so much. ‘I’ve rebooted it and logged on several times, it seems fine now’, the housekeeper said before leaving. The blue light lasted for at least a minute. The Librarian tried resetting it a few times, quite a few times, over the next few days with the same result. But we had food, wine, books and packs of cards. There were mobile phones too, in the event of an emergency. We survived. And what lengths would we go to, should we go to, for the latest news? After all, given the current state of things, should you not warm to neo-fascist extremism or the aggressive erasure of history or the continuing mass murder of civilians or the vicious suppression of non-violent protest, there’s little in daily bulletins to lift the spirits. Some people, though—and I have it on the best authority—can find it oddly cheering to see, as they cross a field from stile to stile, a pheasant strolling to and fro in that field, apparently without a care in the world.

So Inspector Jules Maigret sweltered in August heat or remained on edge when ‘no one had ever known such a damp, cold gloomy March.’[4] Virginia Woolf did not go to the party at Gordon Square where the d’Aranyi sisters, Adila, Hortense and Jelly (‘great-nieces of the renowned Hungarian violinist Joachim’) would be playing, because Leonard arrived home too late, ‘& it rained, & really, we didn’t want to go.’[5] And I was glad to learn about the Society of Dilettanti, concerned with practical patronage of the arts, whose members included Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick and Charles James Fox, and to be told of Horace Walpole’s writing that, while the nominal qualification for membership of the Society was having been to Italy, the real one was being drunk.[6]

After the diversions of fictional Paris and historical Brighton, I am now with James Boswell, young Boswell on his Grand Tour, after Holland, currently in Germany, soon to be in Switzerland. He is still often preposterous, still wholly irresistible—and still battling with the Black Dog (‘The fiend laid hold of me’). But he finds diversions enough: ‘I must not forget to mark that I fell in love with the beauteous Princess Elizabeth. I talked of carrying her off from the Prince of Prussia, and so occasioning a second Trojan War.’[7]

We are back, then, via taxi and train among Good Friday crowds, walking again in the park amidst hurtling spaniels rather than quietly to and fro along a secluded lane with teeming hedgerows, remarkable trees and glimpses of an unfamiliar breed of sheep, which gave rise to a good deal of highly technical agricultural vocabulary: ‘God, they’re chunky!’ Too far away for a convincing photograph but, scanning various sheep breeders’ websites, we agree that they were probably Zwartbles.

As confirmed by such remarks, we are now returned to what E. M. Forster termed the world of ‘telegrams and anger’—minus the telegrams, of course, and seemingly with many times the anger. We are also back, that is to say, in the firm grip of the internet. Does that warrant one cheer or two?

Notes

[1] James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., edited by Ian McGowan (1785; Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1996), 234-235.

[2] John Buchan, ‘April in the Hills’, in Scholar-Gipsies (1896; London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1927), 28.

[3] Apparently derived from the French mauvis (though, confusingly, this seems to mean ‘redwing’, turdus iliacus rather than turdus philomelos). ‘It is still used for the bird in Orkney and survives elsewhere in Scotland’: Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Birds Britannica (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005),  358-359.

[4] Georges Simenon, Maigret’s Failure, translated by William Hobson (Penguin Books, 2025), 1; August heat in Maigret Sets a Trap, translated by Siân Reynolds (London: Penguin Books, 2017).

[5] The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1915-19, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (with the Asheham Diary, London: Granta, 2023), 11-12.

[6] Venetia Murray, High Society in the Regency Period: 1780-1830 (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 165.

[7] Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland 1764, edited by Frederick A. Pottle (London: William Heinemann, 1953), 12, 67.

Corner posts and lucky beans


‘When he finally left, his eyes blurry from having stared at printed papers for so long, he felt that something was different’, Georges Simenon (or his translator) wrote of Inspector Jules Maigret. ‘It took a while to dawn on him that it had stopped raining. It felt like a void.’[1]

It has hardly stopped raining here, has barely drawn breath, in fact. No relief. None either in the news, with its daily litany of continuing atrocities, grotesque historical ironies and politicians soiling themselves to degrees remarkable even in our Golden Age of Hypocrisy.

But here the work continues, the ordinary processes of living which, more fortunate than some others, we are able to pursue: in my case, transcribing letters, reading Simenon, William Faulkner, Mary Butts – and feeding the cat.


(Harry the Cat)

When their meals are imminent, some cats have a habit of displaying affection to their owners (their staff) and, often, to the corners of cupboards, the legs of chairs, the edges of tables. Harry rubs his face against various fixtures and fittings but, particularly, the corners of a low table in front of the living-room sofa, where I sit to take off my outdoor shoes after a walk. Several times I’ve watched him work his way around the table – but always nudging three corners and missing one, though the missed one varies.

I mention to the vacant room that, when Doctor Johnson missed touching a post, he had to turn back to remedy the situation before continuing on his way, as reported by a man named Samuel Whyte:

I perceived him at a good distance working along with a peculiar solemnity of deportment, and an awkward sort of measured step…. Upon every post as he passed along, I could observe he deliberately laid his hand; but missing one of them, when he had got at some distance, he seemed suddenly to recollect himself, and immediately returning back, carefully performed the accustomed ceremony, and resuming his former course, not omitting one till he gained the crossing. This, Mr. Sheridan assured me … was his constant practice.[2]


(Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, National Trust: Knole)

Superstitions. Black cats, lucky beans, touching iron, meeting pigs, replacing chairs after dining, turnips, umbrellas and snails – throwing and divination. I realise that I have not one but two relevant reference books: Steve Roud, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland (London: Penguin, 2003), and Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, editors, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Iona Opie, with her husband Peter, wrote the classic The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, containing a chapter, ‘Half-Belief’, which assembles an astonishing array of ‘ancient apprehensions’ that, ‘even if only half-believed in, continue to infiltrate their minds’. These range from the likely bad effects of seeing a white horse (and omitting to spit) through the madness resulting from moonlight shining on a sleeping person’s face, screeching owls, dropped photograph frames, the perils of stepping on black beetles, walking under bridges as trains cross them, glimpses of funerals, chimney sweeps, spotted dogs, haycarts, sailors’ collars, nuns and wooden legs.[3]

(Georges Simenon: via Discovering Belgium)

Simenon again:

“Good luck, boys!”
“Break a leg,” grunted Torrence, touching wood.
Lucas, who claimed not to be superstitious, repeated in an almost reluctant whisper, “Break a leg!”[4]

Lucas claiming not to be superstitious but following suit anyway is a sly version of Pascal’s wager: bet on God’s existence and, if you’re wrong, nothing lost; if you bet on his non-existence and he then rolls up at your front door with a couple of heavies, you’re in trouble. I have vague memories of paying childhood lip service to one or two superstitions, just in case, then vigorously reversing. My avoidance of walking under ladders was succeeded by my determinedly walking under every ladder in sight (to demonstrate that I was not superstitious) and I recall an enthusiastic embracing of the number 13 on every possible occasion. Black cats I greeted warmly, was never overly concerned with sneezes or snowdrops, and may have looked askance at pairs of crows or ravens only because of the ballad of ‘The Twa Corbies’.

“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I’ll pike out his bonny blue e’en:
Wie ae lock o’ his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.”

Richard Ellmann writes that Paul Ruggiero, whom James Joyce had known in Zurich during the First World War and with whom he renewed acquaintance on returning there following the outbreak of the Second, had the habit of dropping in to see Joyce after work and laying his hat on the bed. Joyce ‘reproved him each time’, believing in the superstition that it meant somebody was going to die.[5]  This one seems connected particularly to cowboys and Italians. Bad luck to anyone that sleeps in the bed, evil spirits spilling out of it – in past times, I gather, priests and doctors would sometimes lay their hat on the bed if the patient in it was on the way out. Joyce, of course, subscribed to a mass of superstitions, ranging from thunder through colours, numbers, months, the arrangement of cutlery and a rat running downstairs.

He also shared Ford Madox Ford’s dismal view of years which added up to 13,[6] and a superstition about numbers must be one of the commonest. Edmund de Goncourt recalled a dinner at the Charpentiers, attended also by Emile Zola and his wife. Zola ‘spoke about his superstitions, saying that he added up the figures of the carriages he noticed, that 7 was his favourite number, and that he tapped the doors and windows a given number of times before going to bed.’[7]

‘I have always been superstitious myself and so remain—impenitently’, Ford wrote in 1931. ‘I cannot bear to sit in a room with three candles or to bring snowdrops, may or marigolds indoors.’ He claimed that, when the Daily Mail requested him to write a sonnet on Samuel Johnson, ‘All I could remember about Johnson at the moment was that he had kept pieces of orange peel and patted corner posts when he walked down Fleet Street.’[8]

Superstitions, the word and the idea, are endlessly malleable, able to fit occasion, character or context. Herman Melville, he of the White Whale, whose dealings with William Shakespeare were complex and extensive, nevertheless asserted that ‘this absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be a part of our Anglo-Saxon superstitions. The Thirty-Nine Articles are now Forty. Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country.’[9] Wyndham Lewis remarked that, ‘One of our greatest superstitions is that the plain man, being so “near to life,” is a great “realist.”’[10] Graham Greene presented it, in the case of his Assistant Commissioner, more as a matter of conscious selection, albeit a necessary one, like diet or wardrobe: ‘One had to choose certain superstitions by which to live; they were the nails in the shoes with which one gripped the rock. This was what a war threw up: a habit, a superstition, one more trick by which one got through the day.’[11]

But I like this, what might be termed intelligent tolerance, another threatened species – Dervla Murphy, in another age and another country, noting a traffic policeman in Kabul, abandoning his post to pray at the appointed time: ‘This frank devotion is for me one of the most impressive features of Islamic culture. If we accept that it is more than a superstition then there is something very wonderful indeed about mixing one’s daily deeds and one’s daily prayers in such an unselfconscious fashion, instead of keeping each in an airtight compartment.’[12]

Notes

[1] Georges Simenon Maigret and the Man on the Bench (1953; translated by David Watson, London: Penguin Books, 2017), 108.

[2] Samuel Whyte, Miscellanea Nova (Dublin, 1801), 49: James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, revised and enlarged by L. F. Powell (Oxford, the Clarendon Press, 1934), I, 485 n1. This and a great deal more is referred to and discussed by Lawrence C. McHenry, Jr., in an article, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Tics and Gesticulations’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 22 (April 1967), 152-168.

[3] Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959; New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 206-231.

[4] Georges Simenon, Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters (1952; translated by William Hobson, London: Penguin Books, 2017), 140.

[5] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 739.

[6] Stuart Gilbert, editor, Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber, 1957), 161, n.

[7] Entry for 8 December 1891: Edmund and Jules de Goncourt, Pages From the Goncourt Journal, edited and translated by Robert Baldick (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 369.

[8] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 254-255 and 271; 299.

[9] Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorn and His Mosses’ (1850; in The Portable Melville, edited by Jay Leyda, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 409.

[10] Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, edited by Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), 102. 

[11] Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield (1934; London: Penguin Books, 1980), 170.

[12] Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965; London: Century Publishing, 1985), 63.

Definite and indefinite gardeners


The man standing at the front door of the house we were renting in East Devon said: ‘I’m the gardener.’ We’d seen him from the living-room window a few days earlier, standing amidst the sea of fallen leaves, spending a while raking up enough of them to fill a couple of wheelbarrows. Now he wanted to do about fifteen minutes’ strimming: pretty noisy but not for long. Was that okay? Of course, I said.

I was reading a Maigret novel that day, Georges Simenon’s 1947 Maigret se fâche, translated by Ros Schwartz as Maigret Gets Angry. Maigret, in retirement with his wife at their house in Meung-sur-Loire, is fighting a battle against the Colorado beetle in defence of his aubergines: in the hot sun, he is ‘barefoot in his wooden clogs, his blue linen trousers riding down his hips, making them look like an elephant’s hindquarters, and a farmer’s shirt with an intricate pattern that was open at the neck, revealing his hairy chest.’ The formidable Madame Bernadette Amorelle marches in through the ‘little green door in the garden wall that led on to the lane and was used only by people they knew’ and, straight away, has ‘mistaken Maigret for the gardener.’[1]

(Georges Simenon: Photograph, Bettmann/CORBIS via The Guardian)

Maigret does, then, look a likely candidate for the role of gardener, at least in Madame Amorelle’s eyes; and, of course, he is a gardener – but not only that. What does a – or the – gardener look like? In Kipling’s story of that title, which has generated a remarkable quantity of commentary, criticism and speculation, the reader isn’t told. The gardener here is defined by what he does rather than how he looks or how he’s dressed: ‘A man knelt behind a line of headstones – evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth.’ When Helen Turrell leaves the war cemetery—still in the making but with more than twenty thousand dead already—she sees. in the distance ‘the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.’[2]

The last half dozen words echo John 20:15, where Mary Magdalene, discovering that the body of Christ has gone from the sepulchre, finds him standing behind her, though she doesn’t immediately recognise that it is him. He asks why she’s weeping and she, ‘supposing him to be the gardener’, asks where the body has been taken. Are we to take Kipling’s gardener to represent Christ? A lot of readings do precisely that but there’s no real need to do so. Just as Helen Turrell and the people around her in the village will believe what they wish to believe and structure their lives around their chosen stories while leaving some things open or unsaid, the reader does also – or can do. He’s gardening, then – but we have moved from ‘evidently’ to ‘supposing’, so is he the gardener?

Here is one version of the meeting between Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, who would collaborate on three books in the next decade:

Conrad stood looking at the view. His hands were in the pockets of his reefer-coat, the thumbs sticking out. His black, torpedo beard pointed at the horizon. He placed a monocle in his eye. Then he caught sight of me.
I was very untidy, in my working clothes. He started back a little. I said: ‘I’m Hueffer.’ He had taken me for the gardener.[3]

Untidy; working clothes; but again, Ford is a gardener and odd-jobman. He just happens to be also—even by 1898—poet, novelist, biographer, art critic and writer of fairy tales.


Kipling’s story was first published in April 1925 and collected in 1926; this autobiographical volume of Ford’s in 1931. An earlier account of the initial meeting between the two writers occurs in Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. There, Conrad is carrying a child—his son Borys had been born eight months earlier—and, while the word ‘gardener’ is not specifically mentioned, Ford recalls that he had been ‘overcome by one of those fits of agricultural enthusiasm that have overwhelmed him every few years, so that such descriptive writers as have attended to him have given you his picture in a startling alternation as a Piccadilly dude in top hat, morning coat and spats, and as an extremely dirty agricultural labourer.’ At the time of his meeting with Conrad, he was ‘trying to make ten lettuces grow where before had been ten thousand nettles and was writing articles for the Outlook on the usage of the potato as an extirpator of thistles, in sand.’[4]

Does ‘extremely dirty’ trump ‘very untidy’? The point is that he’s getting stuck in, as he would do for much of his life: irrigating, planting, growing things, pruning. What might have been ‘experiments’ in 1898 became, at times during the 1930s in Provence, a rather more critical affair: feeding himself and his partner Janice Biala, keeping them alive in those periods when they had, quite literally, no money at all.

We might be prompted to remember the discussions that Ford would recall a quarter of a century later than that first meeting, as he crafted his memoir of Conrad:

Then we would debate: What is the practical, literary difference between ‘Penniless’ and ‘Without a penny’? You wish to give the effect, with the severest economy of words, that the disappearance of the Tremolino had ruined them, permanently, for many years…. Do you say then, penniless, or without a penny? … You say Sans le sou: that is fairly permanent. Un sans le sou is a fellow with no money in the bank, not merely temporarily penniless. But ‘without a penny’ almost always carries with it, ‘in our pockets.’ If we say then ‘without a penny’, that connoting the other, ‘We arrived in Marseilles without a penny in our pockets.’ . . . Well, that would be rather a joke: as if at the end of a continental tour you had got back to town with only enough just to pay your cab-fare home. Then you would go to the bank. So it had better be ‘penniless.’ That indicates more a state than a temporary condition. . . . Or would it be better to spend a word or two more on the exposition? That would make the paragraph rather long and so dull the edge of the story. . . .  (Joseph Conrad 85-86)

 (Stevie Smith, via the BBC)

‘Penniless’ or ‘without a penny’? A garden in which you grow the food to keep your family this side of starvation—it helps if you’re a good cook, which Ford certainly was—or a garden to be maintained, tidied, to please the aesthetic sense and lift the spirits. Stevie Smith’s Pompey Casmilus needs cheering up much of the time; and can appreciate the positive effect of work done: ‘Yesterday the gardener was here, and now the garden, newly prinked and tidied, the paths as neat and formal as a parade, shines beneath this early morning sun that has broken through to break the rain and storm clouds of past months. How very spry the garden looks, like a good child that has a washed face and a clean pinafore.’[5]


We don’t grow our food here, though we did manage some tomatoes a year or two back. We have one gardener; and two other residents that benefit from her efforts. Still, she’s a gardener, rather than the gardener, while Harry is the cat and I – am something other. . .

Notes

[1] Georges Simenon, Maigret Gets Angry (Maigret se fâche, 1947), translated by Ros Schwartz (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 3, 4, 9.

[2] Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Gardener’, in Debits and Credits, (1926; edited by Sandra Kemp, London: Penguin Books, 1987), 287.

[3] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 52.

[4] Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924), 15-16. Conrad would later confirm that ‘The first time I set eyes on you was in your potato-patch’: letter of 15 December 1921, quoted by Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, two volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I, 521n4.

[5] Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier (1938; London: Virago Press, 1980), 115.

Adding a few Maigrets

Davies-Maigret-Sunday-Times

(Rupert Davies as Jules Maigret: via Sunday Times)

I read my first Simenon in translation more than forty years ago – and that wasn’t actually a Maigret but The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. In the 1990s, particularly, I did read a lot of the Maigrets, between thirty and forty, usually in batches of five or six, some of them Penguins but probably at least as many Harcourt Brace paperbacks when the Penguins were out of print. Whenever the bookshop needed to order titles through our American wholesaler, I would add a few Maigrets.

In 2013, Penguin Books, Simenon’s long-time British paperback publisher, began producing a complete edition of the seventy-five Maigret titles, in new translations – and featuring some of the leading contemporary translators. Early volumes in the series are by David Bellos, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale, David Coward and Linda Asher.

These new translations, or the ones I’ve seen, are fresh, clean, brisk: these are qualities often ascribed to Simenon anyway, the shaving off of adjectives, of ‘every word which is there just to make an effect’, of anything ‘literary’, that lesson learned early from Colette, then literary editor of Le Matin: ‘“Pas de littérature!” she said. “Supprimez toute la littérature et ça ira!”’

The first Maigret (not, originally, the first in book-form, since it had appeared as a serial), Pietr the Latvian is, as Julian Barnes observes in a TLS piece of May 2014, reprinted in Maigret and the Penguin Books (London: Penguin Collectors Society, 2015), ‘the most hectic and the most anxiously complicated’, but he adds that the template is established as early as the opening paragraph of the second book. And yes, there are many of the details and much of the texture that readers recognise and rely upon: the office stove, the characteristic exchanges with telephone operators, the endless sandwiches and beer—the endless food and drink in fact (if Maigret hasn’t eaten for a while, that is always commented on), Maigret’s physical characteristics, his height and weight (‘a good hundred kilos’), his solidity, his imperturbability. He can and does talk to anyone, focusing often on those who have felt the rough edge of life. In the series’ first novel, we read that Maigret, ‘worked like any other policeman. [ . . . ] But what he sought, what he waited and watched out for, was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent.’

Maigret-Yellow-Dog

The Yellow Dog has some enlightening exchanges between Maigret and Inspector Leroy (with whom he hasn’t worked before, since he usually teams up with Lucas): ‘But I don’t go in for deductions.’ When Leroy comments that he doesn’t quite understand Maigret’s methods but is beginning to see, Maigret replies: ‘You’re lucky, my friend. Especially in this case, in which my method has actually been not to have one . . . ’

Most readers find a few authors, or series of books, which they’ll happily return to repeatedly. Those resources can seem, and often are, priceless. Mine are hardly controversial: the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle; the novels of P. G. Wodehouse; and Georges Simenon, particularly the Maigret stories.

So, when the series of new translations was nearing completion, I ordered half a dozen and asked for a few more for Christmas, so that I had a reasonable store against the time when winter really kicked in – or the world was unarguably going to hell. I dip into the news a little warily these days but the runes aren’t hard to read: Trump’s America, Modi’s India, my own unfortunate country; Australian bushfires illuminating flat-earthers; coronavirus in China – and in how many other countries by now?

Six Maigrets read in as many days is not so surprising then. But I should probably pause now and keep some in reserve – just on the off-chance that there are still dark days ahead. . .