Author: Graeme Macrae Burnet

The Strange Cases of Maeder and Braithwaite

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The crimes of psychiatry are legion, but they can mostly be attributed to a single cause: the idea that the therapist knows more than the patient.

— A. Collins Braithwaite, Untherapy

I have been fascinated by psychiatric case studies since I came across a copy of Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour thirty-odd years ago. ‘I am a psychoanalyst. I meet and work with murderers, sadists—people at the edge of violence—and some who have passed that edge,’ proclaims the lurid cover. What teenager could resist? Later on, though, when I started reading the case histories of Freud, Breuer and others, I came to see each case as a novel-in-waiting, not because of the extraordinary characters who are often the subjects of such studies, but because of the relationship played out between therapist and patient.

 By their very nature, case studies present only one point of view. It is the therapist who selects what material to include and exclude, and the interpretation of this material is inevitably viewed through the lens of whatever theory he or she happens to espouse. I came to see these ‘studies’ less as factual accounts of an interaction between medical practitioner and patient, than as skewed encounters between a pseudo-objective ‘expert’ and a voiceless other. How different, I wondered, would these encounters appear if related from the other side of the consulting room?[*]

My interest in this stuff was rekindled by a couple of obscure volumes I recently unearthed in Glasgow’s chaotic Voltaire & Rousseau bookshop: Ways to Psychic Health (1944) by Alphonse Maeder and Untherapy (1965) by A. Collins Braithwaite.

Alphonse Maeder (1882-1971) was a Swiss psychoanalyst, who trained under Jung. Maeder recognises that the personality and belief system of the therapist plays a role in the interaction with the patient; that it is not a wholly objective, scientific process. In addition to his medical and psychiatric training, however, he is a practising Christian. ‘Only a humble self-surrender to God,’ he writes, ‘can really bring about a liberation and transformation…Man’s spiritual and mental being must be firmly anchored in religion…The Bible can, in fact, once again become the decisive experience for modern man.’

I was curious to discover the extent to which this bizarre doctrine would shape Maeder’s interactions with his clients.

Ways to Psychic Health consists of fifteen case histories, mostly drawn from the Viennese upper- and middle-classes: ‘The patients themselves must be suitable’, ie. neither lacking in education nor too mad and institutionalised. Maeder is attentive to his patients’ mannerisms and quirks; the gaps between what they say and how they say it. He stresses the importance of not passing judgement, although his language at times betrays him.

A couple of his studies are of particular interest.

Max is a seventeen year old high school student, whose chief sin appears to be an enthusiasm for jazz. The problem with this inclination is that his father disapproves: his son will never make a living as a jazz musician. For Maeder, Max’s attitude to jazz is never considered a legitimate interest, but is instead both a ‘defiant self-assertion and rejection of his father’ and a pursuit ‘which offers sensual and aesthetic gratification’. After some questioning about Max’s religious beliefs (he declares himself an atheist) and masturbation (which he at first denies practising). Maeder declares Max to be suffering from what he calls ‘defiance neurosis’.

It is reported that Max has started taking an interest in some religious quotations. Max then contacts Maeder: he has given up jazz and now admits to feeling guilty about masturbation and having ‘dirty thoughts about girls’. Maeder seizes his chance, telling him that a ‘road exists which leads from a positive relationship to his father and acceptance of authority to the affirmation of a personal God.’ For Maeder, the positive trajectory is for Max to suppress his egocentric urges and submit to authority. In this he triumphs: ‘Jazz no longer appeals to him, although classical music does.’ The young man’s struggle assert himself as an individual has been quashed. Order – and conformity – is restored. This is presented as a wholly positive conclusion to Max’s case.

Martha, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is suffering from anxiety, insomnia and fainting. Maeder labels her as a ‘hyperthyroid’ or ‘pseudo-hyperthyroid’. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen she had been abused (fondled beneath her dress) by a schoolteacher, and had previously, from the age of five, been fondled by an older farm boy. On her second visit, she ‘realize[s]… that she had felt a secret attraction’ to her abusive teacher, this accompanied by the ‘insight’ that she was ‘a participant and shared in the complicity.’ The suppression of this realization results in feelings of guilt and ‘pathogenic effects’. The abusive incidents with the teacher have also led to Martha losing her faith. It is only through ‘confession’ of her feelings of arousal and complicity that she can be liberated. Maeder makes explicit the parallel between confession to a psychoanalyst and confession to a priest, an analogy in which the patient is cast in the role of ‘sinner’. Similarly, Maeder’s instinct to pathologize Max and Martha makes it clear that there is ‘something wrong’ with them: they are offenders, somehow to blame for their own difficulties.

Unlike Maeder, Collins Braithwaite seems to spend most of his time telling his patients (or ‘visitors’ as he prefers to call them) that there is nothing wrong with them. ‘Everyone want to be mad these days,’ he writes, ‘but hardly anyone is. Not properly mad at any rate.’ Also in contrast to Maeder, Braithwaite makes no pretence of being either objective or non-judgemental. Clients are gleefully dismissed as perverts, dimwits, cry-babies and ‘raving nymphos’ among other things. Of one, he writes, ‘Here we have a man so spineless that, just as a worm does not recognise it does not have a backbone, nor does he: John’s problems are never due to his own failings, but to the universe conspiring against him. Boo-hoo!’

Subjecting oneself to therapy from Braithwaite must have been terrifying. Reading about it is tremendously entertaining.

Braithwaite was born in Darlington in 1925 and, from the scant information available, appears to have had a brief period of celebrity in the mid-1960s. This was a moment when many of the certainties of psychiatry were being challenged by the likes of RD Laing, Erving Goffman and Thomas Szasz. Braithwaite eschews anything that might be described as a doctrine. ‘All psychiatric theories are lies,’ he declares, ‘nothing more than the projections of the egotists who concoct them.’ Nevertheless, he is clearly influenced by Laing whose The Divided Self had been published four years before, both in his suspicion of the psychiatric establishment’s rush to diagnosis, and in finding a certain ‘truth’ in what what previously been dismissed as psychotic or schizophrenic experiences.

Braithwaite’s clients, or at least the ones he chooses to write about, are mostly drawn from the ‘swinging’ London scene of the time. There is ‘Jane’ the ‘nymphomaniac starlet’ who still lives with her middle-class parents in ‘a suburban house full of brown furniture’; there is Milly the fifteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do (white) solicitor, who believes she is a ‘negress’; there is ‘John’ a successful theatre director who sleeps at home in a cot surrounded by his childhood toys; ‘Alec’ a fifty-something thespian who lives in fear of being exposed as a homosexual, and so on.

Braithwaite treats them all with uncompromising candour:

“My whole life is act,” Alec tells him.

“Well, it’s not much of an act,” Braithwaite retorts. “I could tell you were queer the moment you walked through that door.”

Most of Braithwaite’s therapy appears to consist of telling his clients that there is nothing wrong with them. You want to sleep with your childhood teddy? Go ahead. You feel the need to masturbate ten or twelve times a day – what’s the problem? You think you’re a negress? Maybe you are. And, at least in Braithwaite’s (admittedly endlessly self-aggrandising) account, it seems to work. His clients do not want to be diagnosed. They mostly want to be reassured that other people are just as weird as they are.

If there is a recurring theme through the cases he presents though, it is that his clients are traumatised not by their eccentricities themselves, but by the stress of concealing them; of being forced to present different personae to different audiences. Braithwaite’s remedy is to embrace the idea of ‘being several’ (a phrase he uses repeatedly): to give up the idea that one persona is any ‘truer’ than any of the others. Once one has thrown off the idea of a ‘hierarchy of selves’ one can happily be whoever one wants, whenever ones wants.

With such a credo, it’s easy to see why the Bohemian set of the era appears to have beaten a path to his door. It’s intoxicating stuff.

Braithwaite also goes out of his way to debunk the idea of the therapist as kind of guru with access to truths unavailable to his clients. ‘The only reason my visitors listen to anything I tell them,’ he writes, ‘is because they’ve paid me fives guineas an hour to hear it. Likewise, dear Reader, the only reason you might believe anything in this tawdry little book is because you’ve paid 12/6 for the privilege of reading it.’

And thus he signs off. This reader, for one, will be seeking out more of his tawdry little books.

© GMB, April 2019

[*] Freud’s famous account of the so-called Wolf-Man provides a case in point. Freud bases his entire analysis of his patient on his (somewhat preposterous) interpretation of a childhood dream of his patient. Yet when the Wolf-Man—actually a Russian aristocrat called Sergei Pankejeff—came to write a 300-page account of his life, this dream upon which his psychoanalyst had placed such crucial importance merits not a single mention.

https://archive.org/details/fiftyminutehourclind

https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/maeder-alphonse-e-1882-1971

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ways_to_Psychic_Health.html?id=d8sUAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/arthur-collins-braithwaite-e-1925-1972

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Untherapy.html?id=k0u46iq2-eQC&redir_esc=y

Aunt Jeanne

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Aunt Jeanne belonAunt Jeannegs to the subset of Simenon’s dysfunctional family novels, among which can be counted The Others, The Fate of the Malous, Strange Inheritance and Uncle Charles, to name but a few.

The novel opens with the return, after an absence of 36 years, of overweight, alcoholic, world-weary Jeanne to her childhood home. The Martineaus are, or were, a family of wealthy wine merchants in small town near Poitiers. But all is not well. The family business is ruined and on her arrival Jeanne finds her brother Robert hanging from the rafters of the loft. While the rest of the clan go to pieces, Jeanne assumes control of the household, adopting the role of cook, housemaid, nanny and confidante to the various members of the family: the dissolute teenagers Henri and Mad, the alcoholic widow, and the depressed daughter-in-law.

It falls to the aging notary who is winding up the Martineau estate to sum up the family in a way that is emblematic of all Simenon families:

People live in the same house, sleep in the same bed or in neighbouring rooms, sit down for meals together three times a day, and are then surprised to discover, one fine day, that they know nothing whatsoever  about each other.

Which is all very well, except that Aunt Jeanne has one fundamental flaw: there is too much dialogue. Page upon page upon page of it. Of course, there is nothing wrong with dialogue per se, but much of the speechifying does not consist of characters talking to each other, but rather describing events which have already taken place. The problem is accentuated when Jeanne (whose point-of-view is maintained throughout) takes to her bed with swollen legs – the events unfolding in the house have to be related to her by various characters. Jeanne is at one remove from the action, and so, as readers, are we. As a result there is little engagement with anything that occurs. All the action takes place off stage.

The most intriguing relationship in the book is between Jeanne and seventeen-year-old Mad. Since her early teens, Mad has (in her own eyes) debased herself with men, not out of sexual desire, but out of a desire to show off, to ‘go one better’ than her friends and to rebel against the strict regime of her father. Her exploits have led her, among other things, to an affair with a married man in Paris and a nasty back-street abortion. In Jeanne, who it turns out has worked as a madam in an Istanbul brothel (she’s been around a bit, has Jeanne), Mad finds a non-judgemental and understanding confidante.

It’s at this point that novel comes alive, yet the same problem persists – all this good stuff is related after the event. Criticising a novel for not being something it’s not trying to be is a pretty pointless exercise, but there’s a frustration here, as a novel telling the story of Mad’s descent into dissolution and her relationship with her worldly aunt could have been enthralling. As it is this episode occupies a single chapter of Aunt Jeanne.

A final point of interest is that this is one of Simenon’s relatively rare novels with a female protagonist, and in which the strongest relationship are between women. It is not unusual in Simenon’s books for female characters to be portrayed quite passively and to be constantly available for the sexual gratification of the male protagonists. But here the tables are turned. The male characters  are portrayed as animalistic, salivating brutes. Jeanne speaks of her shock as a thirteen-year-old of finding her father in the cellar fucking the maid and of her disgust at the men in the Istanbul brothel at the men who prodded the girls on offer ‘as if they’d been cattle in the market.’ Mad for her part describes her experiences with men in unflattering terms:

They kiss you, breathing stertorously, their breath stinking of alcohol, and, in the end, trembling like dogs when they get up on their hind legs, they up-end you in some shoddy little hotel bedroom, if it isn’t by the roadside or on the back seat of the car.

You can imagine such sentiments being expressed by any number of female characters who, due to Simenon’s rigorous adherence the point-of-view of his protagonists, are deprived of a voice. But it serves as a momentary insight into the author’s grasp of the unattractiveness of his often lecherous protagonists’ behaviour.

As Robert Burns put it: O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us.

*  * * * *

Tante Jeanne first published 1951. Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, 1953. Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury.

The Mahé Circle

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MaheCircle3In The Mahé Circle, Simenon presents us with François Mahé, an overweight, thirty-five-year-old doctor, who lives with his wife, two children, and his mother, who still wakes him in the morning and tells him ‘when to change his underwear.’ The novel is mainly set on Porquerolles, a small island in the Mediterranean, where the Mahés are on vacation. Holidays occur quite frequently in Simenon. They offer an opportunity for the author to wrench his characters out of their familiar surroundings. But, perhaps for precisely this reason, nobody much enjoys themselves on a Simenon holiday and the Mahés are no different.[1]

As the novel opens, Dr Mahé is fishing. He surreptitiously watches a local pulling fish after fish from the water, but Mahé cannot catch a thing. He observes the fish in the clear water below the boat as they approach his bait before turning away. Mahé suspects that by refusing to reveal their angling secrets, the locals are conspiring against him, but of course they are doing no such thing. What is clear, however, is that Mahé is a fish out of water. He does not fit in here. It is too hot; the food is different; his children get upset stomachs; he gets sunburn; his wife is miserable.

Mahé is entirely alienated. When his friend, Dr Péchade, is talking to him, he is unable to concentrate on what he is saying, and becomes fixated on his moving lips. ‘It was extraordinary, almost repulsive, to see the rolls of fat with pink inside, parting, closing, stretching, uncovering the little yellowish bones, that were his teeth.’

Later, when watching his ten-year-old daughter, he observes that:

One could already see some inborn vulgarity’ […] her skin was coarse-grained, her face too wide, her mouth without shape. He felt no disappointment. He didn’t feel anything. Everything around him left him quite cold.

The ‘circle’ of the novel’s title refers to Mahé’s friends and family. But Mahé does not perceive this circle as a benevolent, supportive network; rather it is more akin to a noose, slowly strangling him. In a dream, Mahé sees his family surround him, but suddenly they are not men and women, ‘but tombstones standing in a circle.’ It is this circle into which Mahé is locked.

Then, in Porquerolles, something changes. Mahé is called to attend the death of an impoverished woman, who has been squatting in abandoned military accommodation with her family. As Mahé surveys the dismal scene he catches sight of a little girl, eleven or twelve years old, in a red dress. At first, the incident appears to be of little significance, but over time the little girl develops into an obsession.

For the next three years, the family return to Porquerolles. Slowly, Mahé begins to fit in. He is greeted in local bars, learns how to fish, and joins the local men in a daily game of boules. But it is not for this that he returns. It is because of the girl in the red dress:

He wasn’t in love, it wasn’t that. […] No, it was an obsession, that was the word, a haunting obsession. And it had started that very first day, but faintly, insidiously, like those incurable illnesses that you only become aware of when it is too late for treatment.

The nature of Mahé’s obsession is enigmatic. It is not overtly sexual, although, in an unsavoury episode, he persuades his teenage nephew to force himself on the girl and then makes him describe what has occurred. Nor does he wish to ‘save’ her from deprivation. It is rather that she is something ‘other’: ‘the disavowal of his own life, of everything his life had been.’ Towards the end of the book, Mahé calls on the tiny apartment where the girl lives. He is invited in by her younger sister, but the girl, Elisabeth, is out working. We do not know what Mahé intends to do. As he waits, his attention is drawn to the quilt on the bed, ‘a white counterpane with a honeycomb weave, exactly like the one on his bed when he was twelve years old.’ And that in turn reminds him of the counterpane in the boarding house when he studied in Paris. In Simenon, through such associations, the past is always encroaching on the present, reminding his characters of where they have come from; crippling their ability to act decisively. Mahé lingers a while in the apartment; then, unsure or embarrassed of his reasons for being there, leaves.

Very little happens in The Mahé Circle. There is no tension. It is austere and unfathomable. Certainly it is not the work of a populist. There are few concessions to entertainment: the characters are unlikeable; the narrative is unexciting; the dénouement, when it comes, is enigmatic. It has more in common with Camus or even Robbe-Grillet than with Agatha Christie, to whom, on the basis of her prodigious generic output, Simenon is sometimes compared. It is less overtly philosophical than Camus, less experimental than Robbe-Grillet (whose first novel, The Erasers is a kind of deconstruction of a Maigret mystery[2]), but in its portrayal of a character who is entirely indifferent to the people around him, it bears some resemblance to The Outsider, which had been published two years before. Indeed, in what seems an overt attempt to differentiate Mahé from Mersault, Simenon’s protagonist is deeply moved by his mother’s death. However, while Simenon was not given to pontificating about the philosophical content of his work, that does not mean it is shallow or superficial. Especially given that the novel is so lacking in narrative pleasures, it is perfectly possible to view it as a meditation on the struggle of the individual to exert control over his or her life. Mahé is a character whose life is not his own; his course in life has been entirely determined by others, primarily his mother. He realises that, ‘Until this point, one could almost say that other people had been living his life for him’:

He found that at thirty-five, here he was […] with a wife and two children and an existence all laid out for him, a fixed schedule worked out for every day of the week. He followed it […] because he could see no other solution, because he refused to admit there could be one, but he was floating inside this world that had been arranged for him as if in a suit of clothes that didn’t fit.

The real story of the novel is Mahé’s journey towards this realisation and what he does in order to attempt to exert a degree of free will over his fate.

———–

Le Cercle Mahé, first published 1946. Penguin edition, 2015, translated by Siân Reynolds

[1] This is an edited version of a longer article Monsieur Simenon Has Locked Himself in which first appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books. You can read the full piece here.

[2] Curiously, Robbe-Grillet’s later novel The Voyeur (1955), in which a travelling salesman is unable to leave a small island on which a young girl has been killed, also bears some resemblance to The Mahé Case.

 

The Man with the Little Dog

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manwithlittledog (2)aWhen you read two or three Simenon novels in quick succession, the author’s oft-quoted statement that his “big novel is the mosaic of all [his] small novels” takes on greater resonance. Viewed together his romans durs map out of universe of drab, unremarkable lives; of little people going about their business, tortured by petty resentments, regrets and feelings of worthlessness. His characters are most often those people who you would not give a second glance to in the street. The man in the shabby suit standing alone at the end of a bar; the secretary who silently tolerates her boss’s sexual advances; the clerical worker too afraid to ask for a pay rise. These are the bit part players in life, but Simenon takes them from the wings, invests them with a rich history and inner life, and places them centre stage.

Félix Allard, the protagonist of The Man with the Little Dog is an archetypal Simenon nobody:

I am just an ordinary man amongst the countless others who are alive, who are being born or are dying, as I write these words.

Allard is 48 years old and works in an antiquarian bookshop owned by a bedridden former brothel-keeper, Mme Annelet. He lives in a small apartment in Rue des Arquebusiers in Paris with his only companion, his dog Bib. His life is one of dreary routine and as we meet him, he is contemplating ending his life:

All these movements performed every day at the same time, mean nothing at all, I know, to most people; they take on the gravity of a ritual for a man living alone with his dog, particularly if that man, after weighing the pros and cons and after mature consideration, has decided to pack it up.

The novel consists of two notebooks in which he has decided to write an account of his life. We learn that he has been in prison for an (until the final pages) unspecified crime and is estranged from his wife. He observes his wife and children from a distance, taking some sort of vicarious pleasure from seeing them, but this habit only emphasises his status as an outcast. He is no longer someone who takes part in life; he is a mere onlooker. He describes his experience of the world on leaving prison:

 I understood [that] I no longer looked at things and people in the same way . . . I saw men and women, faces and hands, trolleys, luggage, trucks standing on the lines, lilacs in bloom in a garden; I heard sounds and voices; I recognised the smell of sandwiches, of beer drawn from the barrel, of wine and alcohol. But I stayed detached from it all. It was all something outside me and it did not concern me.

All this – the present tense of the novel – is described in with Simenon’s customary observational skill. Allard’s relationship with Bib is uncharacteristically sentimental and touching. If the novel has a fault it is that Allard’s past life – he was the head of a successful building firm, mixing in high society – does not quite gel with the man he has become. That said the ending achieves a certain poignancy, managing to be both sad and vaguely optimistic. The Man with the Little Dog is, in itself, a minor novel, but seen as part of Simenon great mosaic, it achieves a certain profundity. Félix Allard is the kind of character most writers would pass over in a couple of lines, but Simenon invests him with a degree of dignity and pathos which is deeply humane.

——————————–

L’homme au petit chien was first published 1964. Hamish Hamilton edition published 1965. Translated by Jean Stewart. Also included in the Fourth Simenon Omnibus (Penguin 1971)

 

The Cat

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the cat2The premise of The Cat might have come from a Samuel Beckett play. A septuagenarian couple, Emile and Marguerite Bouin pass their days in their Paris apartment waiting for each other to die. They have not spoken to each other for years, instead exchanging unpleasant little notes written on scraps of paper. Emile accuses his wife of poisoning his beloved cat (we never find out if she did), while she reminds him of how he killed her parrot, which, now stuffed, presides over the dismal proceedings of their life together. They sit silently in their respective chairs; they shop for their own food; they cook separate meals; they sleep in separate beds. Their existence is one of unrelieved routine and stagnation. They are like Hamm and Clov, only less affectionate:

Hamm: Why do you stay with me?

Clov: Why do you keep me?

Hamm: There’s no one else.

Clov: There’s nowhere else. (Endgame)

But unlike Beckett’s duo, Emile and Marguerite’s marriage is a prison of their own making. There is nothing to stop either of them leaving, neither has the will to do so. Simenon rarely shows marriage in a positive light, but this is perhaps his most bitter portrait. If there is humour it is (again like Beckett) of the blackest sort:

‘Would I be unhappy if she died?’                                                                                                                               No! Not sad. Not unhappy. Perhaps he would miss her. He did not like people to die. It was not because he liked them, but rather because he dreaded death.

But this is not Beckett. It is Simenon, and as such we gradually learn more about how the wretched couple have come to be together (the past always bears down upon the present). Marguerite comes from a wealthy family and was previously married to a renowned musician. She owns property and has the airs to go with it. Emile, by contrast, was a builder, whose previous marriage was to the happy-go-lucky Angèle. Both are widowed and they have re-married only out fear of being alone. The marriage has never even been properly consummated:

Things had not worked out. They were both intimidated and had the impression that at their age the gestures that they made so awkwardly were ridiculous, that they were a kind of parody.

And indeed, their whole marriage is a  dismal parody of a relationship. As things deteriorate, Emile begins to return to his old builder’s habits. He visits Nelly, an obliging café owner, who is always happy to take a customer into her kitchen for a quick knee-trembler. There he can relax. Nelly does not judge him. Eventually he packs a suitcase and moves into a room above the café. It is a brief taste of happiness. Emile is reaching for a lifeline, but it is obvious he will never quite get hold of it. Marguerite begins to appear, like a ghost, on the pavement outside the café. After a couple of weeks’ resistance, he returns home, ‘walking mechanically, with his head down, like an old horse returning to stable.’

Even by Simenon’s standards The Cat is short, about 130 pages. Nevertheless, it is not without its longueurs, something that would probably be hard avoid when delineating such tedious lives. But it is worth persevering. As the novel opens out from the claustrophobia of the Bouins’ apartment, we are offered the prospect of some kind of redemption, at least for Emile. It is this glimpsed possibility that makes the denouement as bleak as anything in Beckett, or elsewhere in Simenon. No matter, it seems, how grim one’s marriage, the alternative of facing life alone is worse.

—————–

Le Chat was first published in 1967. Translated by Bernard Frechtman, included in the Ninth Simenon Omnibus (Penguin 1976)

 

 

The Bottom of the Bottle

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The best part of The Bottom of the Bottle is the opening chapter in which we meet PM Ashbridge, a wealthy New Mexico rancher. He is drinking in a bar and the subtle complicity between drinker and bartender is well described:

BottomoftheBottle

Everything seems accidental, your gestures are the most casual in the world . . . It’s a secret order, with signs understood by the initiated throughout the country . . . With the first glass, for instance, when PM asks for whisky, or, more exactly, lets the word whisky escape from his lips with a kind of lassitude, or as if inadvertently, what does Bill do? He murmurs:

‘Double?’

It’s scarcely a question. It’s taken for granted that a gentleman doesn’t come into the Montezuma to drink a single whisky.

PM goes to the washroom to check his appearance before deciding whether to have a final whisky. He is a man concerned about how he looks; a man in control of himself. Yet a few minutes, later he driving across the Mexican border into the ‘swarming, mysterious world’ of Nogales; a place where ‘furtive figures prowled’, ‘naked arms beckoned and women, half-dressed, walked confidently towards the cars.’

We assume that PM takes advantage of the services on offer, because as he drives home he is filled with self-loathing, so much so that he holds ‘the steering wheel in a special way, as if afraid of contaminating it.’

In these opening five pages Simenon sets up an intriguing premise: a wealthy, respectable man whose is unable to resist the urge to visit the ‘other’ side – symbolised very literally by the crossing of the border. The problem, with the novel, however, is that it doesn’t really follow through on this premise. It never really goes to the bottom of the bottle. PM never again visits the Montezuma bar, or crosses the border, either literally or symbolically. The urges he seems unable are never really explored.

Instead when he returns to his ranch, he finds his escaped convict brother, Donald, waiting for him. Donald needs PM’s help to get to Mexico where his wife and children are waiting, but this can no longer be achieved because the annual rains have come and the river they need to cross is in spate. So PM is forced to introduce his brother into the micro-society of wealthy ranchers, who spend their days dropping into each other houses and drinking until they pass out. The fact that this scenario is, to put it mildly, contrived is not the problem. While there is the odd well-drawn pen portrait (Ashbridge’s wife, Lil Noland), the scenes at the ranches never really come to life.

Donald is a forceful, unpleasant character, whom PM has always resented, and it is unclear why the reader should care either if he makes it to Mexico or if PM is caught harbouring a fugitive. Simenon uses his scenario to explore the rivalry between the two brothers (a quite common theme in his work). Donald is the younger, but acts in a domineering, aggressive way towards PM. PM feels inadequate because he has married into his wealth, while Donald has tried to make his own way in life, scraping a living from menial jobs. If PM wants to help his brother, it not out of fraternal feelings, but to alleviate his own guilt, both for the unwarranted luxury of his surroundings and for the fact that he has not shared any of his advantages with his family.

There’s nothing much wrong with any of this, only that the milieu and characterisation lack depth. Like quite a few of the author’s other American novels, it’s all a bit two-dimensional and you are left wishing Simenon had written the novel he embarked upon in the opening pages.

—————–

Le Fond de la Bouteille, first published 1949. Published by Hamish Hamilton 1977, translated by Cornelia Schaeffer.

© Graeme Macrae Burnet 2015

Strange Inheritance

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StrangeInheritance2A penniless orphan arrives in a small fishing port and finds he is the sole heir to the town’s business empire. A rich young man marries a factory girl, then falls in love with his uncle’s widow. A double-locked safe contains the secrets of a town’s well-heeled families. A woman is arrested on suspicion of poisoning her husband. The bored wife of a wealthy businessman has an affair with the family doctor.

Any one of these plot lines would more than suffice for an entire Simenon novel, yet they are all part of the tapestry of Strange Inheritance. The cast of characters, too, is larger than most of Simenon’s books, but bigger is not necessarily better. Which is not to say that Strange Inheritance is a bad book – it isn’t – but while it is about 25% longer than the average roman dur, the extra length still isn’t sufficient to adequately explore the various narrative strands. It has the feel of a sprawling family saga, but not the stamina. It’s as if Simenon wanted to break free of his single character study formula, but not of his punishing eleven day writing schedule.

But there’s still plenty of good stuff here. Nineteen-year-old, Gilles Mauvoisin, son of travelling entertainers who have asphyxiated due to a faulty stove, arrives as a stowaway in the south-western port of La Rochelle, and it is through his eyes that we are introduced to the milieu and characters of the town: the gargantuan Raoul Babin holding court in a little bar, his whiskers stained into an ‘amber halo’ by the endless cigars he smokes; Jaja, the maternal, bulging café-owner, her stockings secured with red string, who plies everyone with cider and herrings. And there, the horse-faced Veuve Eloi in her ship-chandler’s shop crammed with anchors, rope and barrels of tar, with its ‘agreeable, complicated smell.’

But while Gilles seeks nothing more than a cheap room in the home town he has rarely seen, when it is discovered that he is the sole heir to his Uncle Octave’s fortune, he is quickly drawn into the byzantine world of the well-to-do Mauvoisin clan.

The best thing about Strange Inheritance is its vivid evocation of the sight and sounds of La Rochelle, a town which, according to Pierre Assouline, features in eighteen of Simenon’s works.[1] We are presented not only with a portrait of the a bustling port, but also of a town in the grip of a cabal of wealthy families, yoked together by the information held in Uncle Octave’s safe. Some of the writing is brilliantly precise and shrewd:

[Monsieur Rinquet] was tall and flabby. More than anything else, he was dull. He belonged to . . . the race of men who derive their satisfaction in life – sometimes tinged with bitterness – from the consciousness of their own servitude to others.

And with that, Rinquet’s entire existence is nailed. Simenon’s novel’s are full of such ‘little men’, both subservient and resentful, their lives often disturbed by a chance event or sudden act of rebellion.[2]

And there are fine set pieces. The scene of Gilles’ strained wedding party at a humble country inn seethes with awkwardness:

As a hotel the place had no pretensions at all, but its food had a reputation throughout the district. From the tap room came the voices of fishermen ordering their glasses of white wine. […] On the table were oysters, clams and shrimps, and a warm odour of mouclade drifted in from the kitchen. Yet, the forks were of cheap metal and the crockery chipped.

[…] This solemn day was really quite stupid and commonplace. In the sacristy, when in front of everybody [Gilles] had kissed his wife for the first time, he had hoped for some little quiver of her hand, a tremor of her lips, a sign of moisture in her eyes. Nothing of the sort!

This has all the pathos of a scene from Madame Bovary, and it makes you wish Simenon had placed nothing more than the disintegration of Gilles’ marriage under his microscope, but, as it is, the addition of the multiple storylines only serves to muddy the waters. Taken as whole, then, Strange Inheritance is a little unsatisfying – there’s too much going on, too many characters – but the pleasures to be had along the way make it well worth reading.

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First published as Le voyageur de la Toussaint in 1941. Pan Books edition, translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury, 1958.

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[1] Pierre Assouline, Simenon: A Biography p.165

[2] One thinks, for example, of Emile Virieu in The Glass Cage, Charles Dupeux in Uncle Charles or Kees Popinga in The Man who Watched Trains Go By

© Graeme Macrae Burnet 2015

The Magician

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MagicianThe original title of The Magician was Antoine et Julie. It’s a significant change, shifting the focus from the relationship to the individual, now identified not by name but by profession. But this is very much a novel about a relationship, or rather about two relationships: firstly, that of 55-year-old Antoine to his wife, and, secondly, that of his relationship with alcohol.

The Magician is a novel of tiny incidents, minutely dissected, rather than momentous events. The first fifty pages relate a single night and its aftermath. Antoine performs his hackneyed act at a suburban theatre. During a trick, he catches a whiff of beer on the breath of an audience member. This is the ‘trigger’ for all else that follows:

To be sure, there had been no decision as such. At that moment his firm resolution had been to resist … But there exists another kind of knowledge besides that one, more profound, though harder to express.

After the show, Antoine refuses a glass of Calvados, but his public show of abstemiousness is a sham. He is already, even without admitting it to himself, plotting his binge. It begins with a quick brandy while he waits for his bus. At the moment of paying, he asks for another and gulps it down. Then before he catches the metro home, he decides he needs a beer, something to take away the taste of the brandy. ‘

This was the worst moment … when he was still clear in his mind, when he was still putting up a fight, despising himself for not having more willpower.

He resists a second beer, but only because the brasserie he is in is too grand, too public. Instead, he makes for a neighbourhood dive where ‘the counter is still made of zinc, the light a dingy yellow.’ Here the flotsam of the Paris night get shamelessly sozzled. Now there is no pretence. Antoine knows why he is there. He knocks back a couple of brandies and buys a drink for a prostitute. Then the final bar, which has the atmosphere of a railway station waiting room. There is a wire scaffold on the counter, holding hard-boiled eggs. It is this, reflects Antoine, that his wife could never understand, not the hard-boiled egg politely eaten in a salad or on a picnic, but ‘the ones you devour at four o’clock in the morning, your hands blue with cold, your feet sore, after having counted the last coins in your pocket, among people who smell like sick animals.’

Antoine spots a fellow drinker at the bar, well-dressed and of a similar age, his hand trembling as he clutches his glass. On his lapel is the red rosette of the Legion of Honour. The fellow is ashamed to be there and Antoine, by now full of alcohol-induced bonhomie, wishes he could give him a ‘brotherly slap’ on the back and reassure him. Later when he glances back at his cohort, he has surreptitiously removed his rosette.

All this – Antoine’s self-deluding descent into inebriation; the ambience and characters of the seedy bars of the Paris night – is brilliantly evoked. Simenon reveals everything through the delineation of detail (the hard-boiled eggs, the discreet removal of the rosette) without recourse to any narrational commentary. It is writing of the highest order.

Then eventually for Antoine, it is home to embark on a two hour diatribe telling the supine Julie what he really thinks of her, before spending what is left of the night buckled over the toilet bowl. And afterwards, of course, morning, when the self-loathing sets in.

Julie is in poor health and rarely ventures further than the neighbourhood shops. She forgives Antoine his lapse and does what she can (makes soup) to cajole him back to himself. They tiptoe around each waiting for the moment when things are normal between them. Antoine both resents and loves Julie, or at least feels tenderly towards her. Julie for her part (although the novel is told entirely from Antoine’s point-of-view) loves and pities Antoine and is entirely dependent on him.

The remainder of the novel tells the story of Antoine’s struggles to stay off the booze. In the run up to Christmas he manages thirteen dry days, but, ‘All this time he had lived a muted life, without heartbreak and without joy, which he compared to the limbo of his catechism.’ This muffled existence comes to a spectacular end. Of course, we know that Antoine will go off the rails – temptation is everywhere and he never really, truly wants to resist – but when he does so, it is in a cruel and hateful way, made all the more powerful by the fact that the following day Julie, as she always does, forgives him.

Is The Magician a great novel? Certainly it is not the most gripping of Simenon’s works, but the relationship between Antoine and Julie is complex and subtly delineated. And as a novel about the corrosive nature of alcoholism, it is as good as anything I’ve read. It’s also crammed with telling observation (this being the milieu in which Simenon is at his best) and at certain moments achieves real emotional impact. So, yes, a great novel, but a minor one.

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First published in France as Antoine et Julie, 1953. Published in the UK in the Twelfth Simenon Omnibus, 1974. Translated by Helen Sebba

© Graeme Macrae Burnet 2015

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La Femme de Gilles / Madeleine Bourdouxhe

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FemmedeGillesMadeleine Bourdouxhe’s novel opens with her protagonist, Elisa, awaiting her husband’s return from work. As she lays the table for the evening meal, she is transfixed, ‘giddy with tenderness’: ‘Overcome with the thought of his return her body, drowning in sweetness, melting with languor, loses all its strength.’ As the title suggests, Elisa is a character who exists primarily in relation to her husband. She inhales his smell; she runs her fingers over his body; she gazes adoringly at him. This might sound cloying – anti-feminist even – but it’s not. It’s tender. It’s tender because Gilles also loves Elisa. They are content together. The novel is narrated from Elisa’s point-of-view, but in a brief departure into Gilles’ consciousness at the end of the first chapter, Bourdouxhe goes out of her way to establish this. He is entranced by the smell of soup that Elisa has made and the flowers they have planted together in their little garden, and, ‘as he watches Elisa bathing his two little naked daughters in the setting sun, he feels at peace.’

But, of course, marital bliss does not a novel make. So when Gilles begins an affair with his wife’s capricious sister, Victorine, Elisa’s well-ordered life is thrown off kilter. At first she feels a vague sense of unease, but her realisation that something really has changed comes, not from anything tangible, but from an intuition:

This time the anguish was heavier, more acute. One by one she fixed her gaze on some of the objects around her, the things that made up her familiar world, then her eyes lit on her own hands . . . and she saw they were trembling. Precisely at that moment she knew that behind her back was another world, a world that was complicated, threatening, unknown. She felt it to be so and she was certain she was not mistaken.

Elisa tries to dismiss her hunch – perhaps her thoughts have been brought on by her ‘condition’ (she is pregnant), but gradually, her suspicions are borne out by scraps of evidence: Gilles lies; Gilles has a little bruise on his lip; Gilles does not make love to her in the morning.

Elisa’s reaction is not to confront Gilles, for fear of driving him away, reasoning that ‘as long as the drama remains secret, it’s within his power to restore the situation to normal.’ Elisa clings, heartbreakingly, to tiny acts of kindness as proof that Gilles is still hers, that he still loves her. Returning from an assignation with Victorine, he rummages in his pocket for a bag of caramels he has bought her. Then he caresses her breasts and she lays her head on his shoulder.

Here he was being as gentle and kind as always, and he’d thought about her, he’d bought her sweets . . . It was all so strange and impenetrable. Perhaps there was nothing wrong after all.

But Gilles changes. He becomes taciturn and morose. He lacks his old vigour and takes no pleasure in his work. He no longer kisses her goodbye in the morning. And eventually Elisa cajoles the truth from him. But not wishing him to know how much she has been suffering, she does not admit that she has known all along, instead granting him ‘the privilege of confessing.’ And when he has expounding for some time about his ‘great fire’, she comforts him.

All this might make Elisa seem like a pitiful sap, lacking all self-esteem, and perhaps there is an element of masochism in her, as if she finds in her suffering something ennobling. But Elisa is not a sap. She is kind and affectionate, and everything that has made her (and Gilles) happy is being laid waste. Her behaviour is not calculated. She simply wants her handsome, cheerful, loving Gilles back. ‘She is a woman without guile, without pride, without a philosophy.’ A kind of female counterpart to poor old Charles Bovary.

All this is told with superb economy, in measured, limpid and flawlessly translated prose. Elisa’s inner life is described without melodrama, although Bourdouxhe allows herself the occasional sentimental flourish (‘Her heart will bear the trace of that bruise longer than his mouth.’). Similar attention is given to the everyday objects – the lampshades, baskets, blankets and chairs – that surround Elisa and to the domestic tasks she so diligently performs; an attention that throws into relief the external ordinariness of Elisa’s life and her inner turmoil.

The ending, when it comes, is quite devastating, and all the more so for the masterful restraint with which it is told. A beautiful, beautiful book, then; sad and exquisite, and the best novel I have read in a very long time.

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First published by Gallimard in 1937. Daunt Books edition, 2014, translated by Faith Evans. You can buy it here.

© Graeme Macrae Burnet 2015

The Brothers Rico

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001The remarkable thing about Simenon’s output is less the huge number of novels and the speed at which they were written, than the consistently high quality of his prose and his seemingly inexhaustible well of characters and observations. Nevertheless, among 185 novels there is bound to be the odd dud and The Brothers Rico is one of those.

There is nothing wrong with the set-up. Eddie Rico is the middle of three brothers, born into the Brooklyn underworld. He has moved to Florida and set himself up as a racketeer, big enough to be a local player, but not powerful enough to ruffle the feathers of the real big-shots. Eddie has a nice house, a nice wife, two nice daughters and craves nothing more than the respectability of being invited to join the local country club. He might as well be a book-keeper or a car salesman, but he has been born into crime, and this being Simenon, he cannot escape his origins.

Eddie’s younger brother Tony has disappeared with his new bride and is suspected of having betrayed the Organization by talking to outsiders about its activities. Eddie is tasked with tracking him down. There is no question of him refusing. His guiding principle is that one must always ‘follow the rule’, by which he means slavishly respecting the hierarchy and diktats of the Organization – even if this means bringing about the demise of his own brother. This is all quite promising, but Eddie is not a character given to introspection and, as such, the moral dilemma in which he finds himself never takes on any real resonance. There is little sense of jeopardy or internal conflict. In Simenon’s best work the narrative unfolds from a single incident, triggered by an action or fatal flaw of the protagonist, but here the events are outwith Eddie’s control and as such he never seems fully involved. He is simply pulled along on a tide of external events.

Similarly, the odyssey Eddie undertakes to find his brother, from Florida to Washington State, New York and then – via a tedious series of flights – to California, never sparks into life. His encounters with the characters he meets along the way are unconvincing, and the descriptions of the various locations are colourless: a neighbourhood restaurant in Brooklyn is ‘a kind of long narrow hallway, with a counter and a few booths, serving hotdogs, hamburgers and spaghetti . . . Behind the counter, two cooks in soiled uniforms were working at the electric stoves. Waitresses in black dresses and white aprons were rushing back and forth.’ At the airport in Tuscon, ‘Most of the men … were wearing light-coloured cowboy hats and tight-fitting pants. Many were of the Mexican type.’

This is the sort of workaday stuff you might find in a tourist brochure, lacking Simenon’s usual eye for the telling detail that brings a scene to life. It’s a problem which crops up quite frequently in Simenon’s American novels, as if, adrift from his native environment, he is unable distinguish between what is mundane and what is noteworthy. It’s hard to imagine him writing such sluggish descriptions of a bar in Liège, Nice or Le Havre.

Following a visit to Simenon at his then home in Connecticut, the publisher Maurice Dumoncel read Les Frères Rico on the train home. It felt, he wrote, ‘like a translation of an American novel.’* While it must be said in mitigation that the Four Square Press edition is ill-served by a very clunky translation, he is spot on. In accordance with the novel’s underworld milieu, Simenon adopts a kind of hard-boiled vernacular which feels contrived and phoney. Lines like, ‘It was now six months since Carmine had stopped those five slugs of lead,’ seem parachuted in from another writer’s work. Similarly, the choice of character names – Boston Phil, Mike La Motte, etc – feel like they are lifted from the corniest pulp novel. Like so much in The Brothers Rico, they just don’t ring true. Simenon himself rated the novel highly, but this, I’m afraid, is one to file under ‘Completionists Only’.

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Les Frères Rico first published in 1952. Four Square Press edition, translated by Ernst Pawel, first published 1957.

* Quoted in Pierre Assouline, Simenon, p.283