Issue 9, Summer 1955
André Gide, who was writing a study of Georges Simenon’s fiction at the end of his life, called Simenon “perhaps the greatest novelist” of contemporary France.
Simenon published his first novel, Au Pont des Arches, at seventeen, and by writing it in ten days began at once his phenomenal practice of rapid production. Using at least sixteen pen-names ranging from Christian Brulls to Gom Gut, he began writing scores of commercial novels—one of them in exactly twenty-five hours—with the intention of training himself for more serious works. He shortened the period of training in commercial novels when he began to write a transitional fiction—his series of books about the detective Maigret. From the Maigrets he moved on rapidly to the tense psychological novel of less than two hundred pages—known to his thousands of European readers as “a simenon”—and of which he has now written more than seventy-five.
Today, except for an infrequent Maigret, he publishes only serious novels. These books, which he writes in French, are not only translated widely but continually used for movies and television—in adaptations which Simenon does not supervise, for dramas which he does not see.
Among his novels currently available in English translation are The Heart of a Man, The Snow Was Black, Four Days in a Lifetime, I Take this Woman, The Girl in His Past, The Brothers Rico, and most recently, in a combined volume, The Magician and The Widow.
Simenon was born in Belgium in 1903, spent much of his life in France, and came to live in the United States ten years ago.
SCENE:
Mr. Simenon’s study in his rambling white house on the edge of Lakeville, Connecticut, after lunch on a January day of bright sun. The room reflects its owner: cheerful, efficient, hospitable, controlled. On its walls are books of law and medicine, two fields in which he has made himself an expert; the telephone directories from many parts of the world to which he turns in naming his characters; the map of a town where he has just set his forty-ninth Maigret novel; and the calendar on which he has X-ed out in heavy crayon the days spent writing the Maigret—one day to a chapter—and the three days spent revising it, a labor which he has generously interrupted for this interview.
In the adjoining office, having seen that everything is arranged comfortably for her husband and the interviewer, Mrs. Simenon returns her attention to the business affairs of a writer whose novels appear six a year and whose contracts for books, adaptations, and translations are in more than twenty languages.
With great courtesy and in a rich voice which gives to his statements nuances of meaning much beyond the ordinary range, Mr. Simenon continues a discussion begun in the dining room.
GEORGES SIMENON
Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?
SIMENON
Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
INTERVIEWER
Is that the nature of most of your revision?
SIMENON
Almost all of it.
INTERVIEWER
It’s not revising the plot pattern?
SIMENON
Oh, I never touch anything of that kind. Sometimes I’ve changed the names while writing: a woman will be Helen in the first chapter and Charlotte in the second, you know; so in revising I straighten this out. And then, cut, cut, cut.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything else you can say to beginning writers?
SIMENON
Writing is considered a profession, and I don’t think it is a profession. I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else. Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
SIMENON
Because, first, I think that if a man has the urge to be an artist, it is because he needs to find himself. Every writer tries to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.
INTERVIEWER
He is writing for himself?
SIMENON
Yes. Certainly.
INTERVIEWER
Are you conscious there will be readers of the novel?
SIMENON
I know that there are many men who have more or less the same problems I have, with more or less intensity, and who will be happy to read the book to find the answer—if the answer can possibly be found.
INTERVIEWER
Even when the author can’t find the answer do the readers profit because the author is meaningfully fumbling for it?
SIMENON
That’s it. Certainly. I don’t remember whether I have ever spoken to you about the feeling I have had for several years. Because society today is without a very strong religion, without a firm hierarchy of social classes, and people are afraid of the big organization in which they are just a little part, for them reading certain novels is a little like looking through the keyhole to learn what the neighbor is doing and thinking—does he have the same inferiority complex, the same vices, the same temptations? This is what they are looking for in the work of art. I think many more people today are insecure and are in search of themselves.
There are now so few literary works of the kind Anatole France wrote, for example, you know—very quiet and elegant and reassuring. On the contrary, what people today want are the most complex books, trying to go into every corner of human nature. Do you understand what I mean?