Hazel Martha Paton BA (Hons); Grad Dip Ed; Grad Dip Hum; Dip Mod Lang Research Master of Philosophy April 2014

Georges Simenon and the Terrain vague: Indirect Representations of War

Statement of Originality

The thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to the final version of my thesis being made available worldwide when deposited in the University’s Digital Repository, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.

Signed:______Date: ______

© Hazel Paton

2

Acknowledgements I wish to thank my supervisors, Associate Professor Alistair Rolls and Doctor Jesper Gulddal Sorensen for their assistance and encouragement in the preparation of this thesis.

Cover photograph taken by author at Châtel-Montagne, in the Allier department in central France.

3 Table of Contents

Introduction a) Overview of thesis 6 b) Narrowing the focus 18 i. War remembrances from childhood 20 ii. War experiences as novels 21 iii. Empathetic war experiences 28 iv. War through filters of time, space, historical and geographical terrains vagues 29

Chapter One: Background and Methodology 34 a) The Golden Age of detective and crime genres 34 b) Change of Pace 40 c) Allegory 45 d) Hygiene and Épuration 51 e) Simenon’s Political Biases 54 f) Ambivalence about France and the United States 60 g) The oblique approach 62 h) Terrain vague i. Defining liminal spaces 63 ii. Simenon’s terrains vagues 71 iii. Silence as terrain vague 77

Chapter Two: Il pleut, bergère 82 a) Creating a real terrain vague 84 b) Historic montage 87 c) Multiple perspectives 89 d) Innocence vs awareness 93 e) Message of hope 96 f) Marianne 100 g) Rain as imagery for war 103

Chapter Three: La Neige était sale 112 a) Definition of noir 117 b) Location as ‘terrain vague’ 127 c) Badge of (dis)honour 131 d) Stages of decline 138 e) Nadir of degradation 141 f) Hope of redemption 143 g) Snow as a geographical terrain vague 144

Chapter Four: Maigret et le corps sans tête 149 a) Subliminal history 150 b) Politicisation of imagery 157 c) Narrative confession 162 d) Nettoyage 166 e) Marianne 172 f) Americanisation 177 g) Anomaly of ‘l’été de la Saint-Martin and war 179

Bibliography 184

4

Abstract

This thesis examines works of Belgian-born author, Georges Simenon, in particular those published in the two decades from France’s 1939 declaration of war. Themes of occupation and war—especially as they relate to Paris—and political biases about Franco-American relationships are prevalent in these works. The approaches of contemporary authors and Simenon’s own serious writings, memoirs and correspondence are cross-referenced to show how he approaches these issues. In this way, the popular belief that Simenon ignored the existence of world conflict in all but a handful of novels will be shown to be misleading.

By simultaneous production of the Maigret novels, typically seen as apolitical and dyssynchronous, and what he called his romans durs, Simenon sought to meet the needs of a wide variety of readers. The Maigrets perpetuated the Golden Age of crime fiction, where to a certain degree a detective maintained order in an indistinctly defined and nostalgic era into which world events did not consciously intrude. In the roman durs, which have been compared with Duhamel’s Série noire, a dysfunctional protagonist, unresolved storylines and pessimistic outcomes served as more realistic representations of the postwar period. In both of these formats, the author’s own opinion about contemporary and retrospective political and world events is expressed through the subliminal history of suburbs of Paris, the names of characters, symbols, allegory and a complex system of terrains vagues.

Finally, novels from three different genres are discussed to show how Simenon’s recapture of weather conditions of the drôle de guerre and of his childhood experiences of German occupation in Liège add substance, imagery and occult meaning to his novels. In particular, a snowbound landscape blurs the boundaries between participants to isolate the issues of occupation and conflict in a work which can be read as a comment upon the morality of war. All create a subliminal space from which to negotiate an uncertain future.

5 Introduction

“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” - Ernest Hemingway

This research will focus primarily on the works of Georges Simenon. In particular, it will seek to position him in his specific historical context as a French- based writer whose work spans the periods before and after the Second World

War. The approach taken will be comparative, seeking to tease out generic trends in French literary output before, during and immediately after the war. Simenon’s memoirs and semi-autobiographical writings will be used to show that despite his reputation for being apolitical, he in fact avidly followed French political events in all areas of the realm. As well, this research will demonstrate how he reflected this interest through imagery, the attitudes or speech of his protagonists and by his use of rhetorical questions put by the omniscient narrator to indicate points of view divergent to that of his principal characters. For Simenon, there was not simply one perspective from which to view world events.

For the most part, Simenon’s biographers and literary critics are in agreement that his writings ignore or fail to mirror the political issues or world events of his time. While conceding that the author uses a World War II setting for two obvious novels, Le Train (1961) and Le Clan des Ostendais (1947), critics typically adjudge them simply novels that happened to appear in that context rather than as products of that specific era. His biographers, who include Fenton

Bresler, Pierre Assouline, Stanley Eskin and Patrick Marnham, have sought to analyse the author himself in an attempt to understand what has been interpreted as his non-involvement with important issues. From this predominance of biographical readings of Simenon’s works, a mythology grew and was reinforced

6 that he was in fact apolitical and refused to engage in opinions regarding world events. This thesis will posit that the answer to Simenon’s worldview lies not in the author as a person, nor in what he had to say in interviews or memoirs, as he is in many ways an unreliable advocate for himself, but in his fiction. Of particular relevance are what he often referred to as the romans durs, which serve as a prototype for the later roman noir. His Maigret series, however, can be seen to present a more consistent and developing insight into his agenda. The selection of novels discussed will demonstrate an acute awareness of the contemporary world and a desire to rewrite the past and negotiate the future by allegorical representations. As such, his novels deserve a greater esteem in the literary spectrum.

One of the strategies Simenon employs is his considered and powerful use of the terrain vague, which is defined and discussed at length in Chapter One.

Briefly, this technique has many applications and the term, which will be used interchangeably with liminal space, is deemed for the purpose of the exercise to consist of several interconnected aspects. For scholars like Valerie Henitiuk (2007:

15-18) liminal spaces are crucial to any forays into comparative literature. As well as its urban studies concept as defined by Rubió (1995: 119), it will be considered in the sense of wasteland of crime as outlined by Andrea Goulet (2009). A third dimension will discuss Simenon’s practice of setting his novels within another time and place, as in Il pleut, bergère, to attain objectivity via both locational and temporal distance. Another way he added a degree of separation to his work was his practice of writing from a distance, for example, writing about Paris from the

US; as a neutral country, Switzerland was the ultimate terrain vague from which to

7 write about politically charged subjects.1 Pierre Assouline (1997: 256) describes this practice thus: “Distance in space and time [are] necessary for the strange alchemical process he call[s] the decantation of memory”. This removal or dislocation can be seen as a means of obtaining the objectivity “necessary for successful allegory” (Rolls and Walker 2009: 201-203n). The complexity of this strategy and the many facets of the terrain vague, including the relationship between locale and writing location, is explored more fully in Chapter One to reflect how it is interpreted for the purposes of this thesis.

Of interest here, given the increasing scholarly preoccupation with French crime and detective fiction (for example Mullen and O’Beirne 2000 and David

Platten 2006: 44), is the opposition evident between these novels, with their ‘hard- boiled’ edge, and Simenon’s Maigret series, which are typically understood to function as counterpoints to the thrillers of Marcel Duhamel’s famous Série noire2

(which was inaugurated in 1945, and which consisted for the first three years entirely of Anglo-Saxon novels translated into French). Authors of the Golden Age of crime fiction are generally recognised by critics to have met the needs of their readership at the time by offering protagonists who restored order in a parallel universe—somewhere around the 1920s or 30s, but with the nostalgic stability and order of a pre-World War I world, where a perceived prelapsarian innocence reigned. Crimes were contrary to the norm of the fictive milieu, although a new crime sullied the atmosphere in each new work, and the solution of the crime by a competent detective restored order and a sense of security underpinning the

1 Switzerland’s role as a neutral space, and thus as a counterpoint to France, and especially to Americanised France, is developed significantly in such famous films of the nouvelle vague as Jean- Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960) 2 “What stands between Maigret and Mike Hammer is World War II and the Cold War bellicosity that followed […]. Maigret came out of a genteel tradition of civil servants; the pulp detectives came out of a tradition of marginalized violence” (Charles Brownson 2014: 85-86). 8 events of the novel. This reassuring idyllic realm assisted readers to cope with their sense of loss and dislocation by substituting contemporary violence with a more ethereal kind, one which they were reasonably sure was outside the jurisdiction of their everyday life. The swift solution to the mystery and/or crime and apprehension of the perpetrator restored the utopian setting to a deliberately anachronistic, mythologised and therefore benign state. However, this simplistic view of the Golden Age writers has come under considerable criticism in recent commentary by, for example Alison Light (1991) and Merja Makinen (2006). The divergent opinions of Eskin (1987), Brunsdale (2010) and Page Dubois (2005) will be briefly contrasted with Light, Makinen and Gill Plain (2001), as a deeper investigation on the genre potentially impacts on readings of Simenon, especially the Maigret series.

Simenon’s Maigret novels continued the Golden Age tradition, but in the manner of Grahame Greene he developed a complementary classification by expanding the production of his romans durs (Brownson 2014: 85). He tended to regard the Maigrets, which typically follow the detective tradition of opening in chaos and ending in closure (Becker 1999: 62), as practice runs for his darker novels, experimenting with a particular scenario in the Maigret and later developing the issues as it were from the perspective of the criminal (Marnham

1992: 256, 276). Being composed directly onto the typewriter, the detective novels required less effort while the others were written in pencil then revised on the typewriter (Brownson 2014: 85). Just as Maigret’s aim is to understand and not condemn, the narrator of the roman dur takes the psychoanalytical role, inviting the reader to participate by means of a series of rhetorical questions. By articulating the motives and rationale of the protagonist (Becker 1999: 62), the

9 narrator—omniscient or first person—shows the reader that the protagonist acted in the only possible, albeit flawed and defeatist, manner. He uses his past and his significant relationships, often with his mother, as justification for his actions. The dichotomy of the carefully constructed ‘everyman’ that was Inspector Maigret, standing in calculated opposition to the anti-heroes in his romans durs and the works of Dashiell Hammett, Peter Cheyney and others of that era, met the varying needs of a wide readership. This thesis will aim to show how this opposition— between classic, or whodunit, detective fiction and hard-boiled crime thrillers—is at work within Simenon’s œuvre.

The author lived a comfortable existence due to the early success of his

Maigret series (Jane E. Keller 2002: 456-57). Unlike many other authors, he continued to prosper during the Occupation, with a backlog of novels continuing to be published by Gallimard3 as well as having nine of his novels made into films by

Albert Greven’s Continental.4 This does not mean, however, that he was not greatly affected by the war. The era was fraught with memories of the occupation of Liège during his childhood and adolescence. As an alien, he had to report daily to authorities during the 1940-44 Occupation, a situation that irked him in the light of his recent successes as an author in France (Denis, Correspondance 1999: 54). His house at La Rochelle was requisitioned by German officers, forcing him to move some distance away (Becker 1999: 29-30). In the aftermath of Liberation in 1944 his brother, Christian, a collaborator, was condemned to death in his absence by

3 “But if Simenon’s production rate fell slightly, Gallimard’s publication rate did not. There was a backlog to draw on, and despite the war-time restrictions on paper Gallimard published two Simenons in 1940, six in 1941, five in 1942, two in 1943 and three in 1944. So Simenon’s name remained before the public and his income remained high.” (Marnham 1992: 202). 4 “Before the outbreak of the war Simenon had sold film rights in only three of his books, and none of them was much of a success. During the four years of the occupation, nine of his books were filmed, more than any other French writer, including Balzac. The majority of these films, five of them, were produced by Continental” (Marnham: 207). 10 Belgian authorities for his part in a civilian massacre (Assouline 1997: 224). His presence in the Foreign Legion was due at least in part to his acceptance of

Georges’ suggestion that he choose this as one of three flawed alternatives. His subsequent death in Indo-China in 1949 under an assumed name coincided with

Georges’ own judgement by the French authorities for his stance during the

Occupation (Marnham 1992: 331).

Simenon’s use of water, light and darkness as tropes in his novels can be profitably compared to the techniques of the post-war film noir, where experimentation with the elements added perspective to the storyline. His rereading of the French classics during the Occupation5 polished his usage of allegory and symbolism to enhance his writing, although the Goncourt and Nobel literature prizes remained elusive, and many of his biographers have ignored the allegorical potential of his work. Without obvious markers to place the story in its historical perspective, his works are timeless, which accounts for their popularity even today. However, they can be read as allegorical comments on his time and, as such, are valuable contributions to today’s academic studies of French crime and detective fiction.

Simenon’s idealism is evident in his writing, and he uses his tortured relationship with his mother to deal allegorically with the spirit of France. The majority of his women characters are morally compromised, as prostitutes, as ex- prostitutes redeemed by marriage to the protagonist (who in many ways is as compromised as the person he seeks to redeem) and as manipulative, emasculating mothers who drive sons to sinister crimes (Becker 1999: 47). The

5 Quand j’étais vieux, Tome 2 (1970: 92 ) [NB : One of Simenon’s memoirs, Quand j’étais vieux, consists of three tomes, so for convenience, these will be referenced as QJV and the appropriate tome, followed by the page reference, eg "QJV Tome 1: 73”]. 11 author’s ambivalent attitude reflects his idealistic expectations of France, both as his adopted country and as a player on the world scene. The redemption of women by weak protagonists is a theme used by Simenon to rewrite and negotiate his own attitude to the Republic and to Marianne. His sense of betrayal when, upon the declaration of war, he was relegated to Commissioner of Belgian

Refugees in La Rochelle (effectively making him an alien looking after the interests of other aliens) (Assouline 1997: 174), finds its voice in protagonists who are

‘other’—Jewish, eastern European, Italianate or southern French, among others

(Page Dubois 2005: 111). The ‘otherness’ of these protagonists can be seen to mirror the author’s sense of alienation, and their potential redemption symbolises his attempt to redeem his own situation and justify his attitude to France.

At the end of the war Simenon, along with many other writers and artists of the time, came under the scrutiny of purge committees charged with purifying

France. His iconic use of water can be read as a powerful allegory of this épuration, with torrential downpours sweeping good and bad before them. Choosing to flee to the US rather than risk his career and freedom before a purge trial, Simenon took his idealism with him to the new country. His bitterness at de Gaulle and the

Free French found its voice in his writing from this terrain vague, and finally, after a brief respite in what he called “an illusion of belonging” at Shadow Rock Farm

(Eskin 1987: 172), he was again disillusioned. Just as untrue as the mice’s song from the famously allegorical film, An American Tail (Don Bluth, 1986), according to which there are “no cats in America”, was his illusion that there was no disturbing racism in his new homeland. Discrimination against Jews in Miami and the infamous McCarthy hearings of the 1950s upset his dream of an ideal world, prompting him to write Le Petit homme d’Arkhangelsk (QJV Tome 2: 62), in which

12 the Jewish protagonist redeems the local flirt by marrying her, only to be betrayed by her and ostracised by the locals, even though he had thought his position in the society secure. The suicide of the protagonist demonstrates Simenon’s despair that the situation could ultimately change.

The author’s final novel from Shadow Rock Farm, Maigret et le corps sans tête is significant both for its grieving for a lost France and its spark of hope for the future. Through the novel, Simenon negotiates his anger at the years when

France’s leader was absent in England, leaving the country symbolically dismembered as the victim Maigret investigates is dismembered in a physical sense. His brief period of belonging in a foreign land over, Simenon and his family relocated to Paris in 1958 to face the full impact of Americanisation, literal and symbolic cleanliness and a milieu in which he no longer belonged (Ross 1999).

After a short time in Cannes, he made one final move to Switzerland and continued to set most of his novels in France. Following recent readings of ‘French’ crime fiction as an objective allegory of the French wartime and immediate post-war condition, Simenon’s exiles from Paris (first in the US and later Switzerland) will be analysed in terms of their own allegorical potential. As Alistair Rolls has demonstrated (2006; Rolls & Walker 2009), Paris is most effectively represented indirectly, with the allegorising power of distance.

As well as showing how Simenon’s own romans durs can be reconciled with the translated thrillers of the Série noire, this thesis will reconsider the Maigret series, whose own police procedural construction will also be seen as a rich source of allegory (and hence, not unlike the thrillers to which its novels are typically opposed). The development of Inspector Maigret, an amalgam of Simenon’s maternal great-grandfather, his paternal grandfather and his beloved father

13 (Brunsdale 2010: 495; Ely 2010: 459), became the voice through which the author examined his own ambivalence and helped others to negotiate a new order under the yoke of America’s capital hegemony (see Kuisel 1993). Over his 75 or so

Maigret novels, by using flashback and a trail of unanswered questions, as well as an autobiography purportedly written by the detective (Les Mémoires de Maigret,

1950), in which he fills in those gaps he wishes to be filled, Simenon honed his character to a powerful literary weapon. Fragmented descriptions in the early books of the series drew the detective with broad brushstrokes to give the impression of a tour de force while never describing his face. Explained by William

W. Stowe (1989: 332) as fundamentally normal by the qualities he lacks— criminality, drug addiction, homosexuality, lower class status, alien-ness or femininity—he belongs to the “central, ideologically unmarked category of white, middle-class French[ness]”. Because even the Frenchness is not overt, he can be seen in some respects as a M. Tout-le-Monde, which explains his attraction to readers worldwide.6 A better way of viewing his role is that of a deliberately blank canvas onto which Frenchness can be projected by the reader, without having been over-shaped by the writer. However, we should keep in mind the insight of Erik

Routley, who states that the “sensitive, courageous, whimsical Maigret has things to say which could only have been said by a Frenchman, and therefore fills many needs that are left open by English stylists” (1972: 186). It is ironic that Simenon, who was Belgian, chose to champion Frenchness as the essence of bourgeouis values. Maigret is French, his past “firmly situated in the history of rural French society in the pre- and post-Great War periods” (Alder 2013: 63).

6 Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot has also been read both as an Everyman (for example, Bellos 1999) and as an allegory of an Americanised France (for example, Pratt and Rolls 2011: 36). 14 Other authors will be drawn on for comparison, including Ernest

Hemingway, David Guterson, Erich Maria Remarque, Elsa Triolet and Irène

Némirovsky, as well as Vercors, Léo Malet, Robert Sabatier and official records and documentation. It will be shown how the works of other novelists, while dealing with many of the same subjects, employ radically different strategies while eerily reflecting the emotions and motifs of Simenon’s literary world. It will be argued that Georges Simenon deserves to take his place with the recognised greats of his genre and time. Indeed, his consistent symbolic dealing with issues of betrayal, disruption, confusion, helplessness and despair of the Occupation years is as effective as, and certainly more insidiously powerful than, the sometimes brutally realistic historical remakes of other writers.

A child protagonist in Il pleut, bergère (1941), the first novel written following France’s declaration of war on Germany, will show how Simenon draws upon images of the French Revolution to create an historical terrain vague from which to consider the impact of further Franco-German conflict. La Neige était sale

(1948), a roman dur written from the US, in which the author deliberately blurs the lines between conqueror and vanquished, acts as a spotlight upon the issue of occupation itself, while the setting serves as a geographical non-lieu. Maigret et le corps sans tête (1955), almost universally accepted as apolitical (Fabre 1981: 29), will show how allegorical distance is brought to play to afford a hiatus from which the reader can deal with changes wrought by post-war alliances with the US. As well, it helps to deal with retrospective reactions to French leadership decisions during World War II. Each of these novels also, in keeping with the ethos of the

Inspector Maigret series according to which the detective separates the crime from the criminal by seeking to understand the motive rather than allocate blame

15 (Bertrand 1994: 17), explores alternative ways to view the situation, both implicit and explicit.

Simenon makes effective use of weather conditions as atmosphere but also for symbolic impact. In Il pleut, bergère, he recalls the prevailing weather conditions in Liège during his childhood there under the German occupation; in La

Neige était sale, a blanket of snow renders the location unrecognisable while the names of characters confuse the issue of nationality, thus encouraging a study of the issue of occupation itself (Assouline 1997: 244); in Maigret et le corps sans tête, he recreates the anomalous balmy weather of the drôle de guerre period, remarked upon by contemporary observers and novelists alike. Each of these approaches brings facets of war to the discussion by highlighting issues for their moral valuation rather than as politically or racially charged matters.

This research is timely because in many ways the works of Georges

Simenon have been relegated, by dint of their sheer quantity, to the unhelpful category of pulp fiction.7 The publication of editions printed on inferior quality paper manufactured from wood pulp, from which this classification takes its name,8 and the lurid covers of those novels, published chiefly by Fayard in the

1930s, tend to work against serious reading. As a result, Simenon criticism has tended to be too narrowly focused. This research will aim to prove that there is much value in Simenon’s novels, which reflect the coping mechanisms not only of their author but also of a great number of contemporary French, authors and

7 Gorrara (2001: 1) explains that roman noir, including detective fiction, in which she includes science fiction, romances and Gallimard’s Série noire, can be seen to have been “marginalized by the literary establishment” and as occupying the ambivalent position of paralittérature. She of course goes on to justify the emerging value of the genre. Becker (1999: 35) uses the term “potboiler” to delineate Simenon’s earlier works, especially those published by Fayard. 8 Dictionary.com on http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pulp+fiction. 16 readers alike, or for that matter, citizens of any country involved in a similar situation.

The authors to whom Simenon is most commonly compared are Joseph

Conrad and Honoré de Balzac (Assouline 1997: 143). Brunsdale avers that his works, particularly the Maigrets, both “look backward to the great French novelist

[…] Balzac and forward to French existentialism” (2010: 500). Simenon, on the other hand, when invited in a 1955 radio interview to choose sponsorship for his own literature, responded that he would choose Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov, the former because of his manner of recreating the world and the latter because “il souffrait de voir souffrir et voulait réparer les destinées” (Vigerie 1973: 267). He also felt that the “long period of introspection forced on him by the war” was not wasted because it helped him write from a fresh perspective (Marnham: 217), a conclusion also drawn by Eskin (1987: 147).

Except in terms of volume of output and possibly sales, his writing at the time never seemed to quite measure up to the greats. However, Brunsdale (2010:

499) says that time has been in Simenon’s favour, and today his works enjoy the fame that he so long sought; he remains to this day one of the world’s most widely- read crime writers. Becker avers that “the cultural importance of Simenon's œuvre derives not from its success in terms of financial ratings or of records established, but from its success in conveying to the reader insights into the human condition”

(1999: viii). Because of the timelessness of his prose, those perceptions are just as relevant for today’s readership. Contemporary Australian crime writer Barry

Maitland (2013: 168) names him among his favourite crime writers. David Platten states that Simenon “epitomizes French crime writing. He has sold substantially more books than any other writer of the French language, living or dead” (2006:

17 21). Elsewhere he describes him as “the most commercially successful French- language author of any era” (2011: 18).

Whatever the perceived gaps in his 1939-45 novels, Simenon certainly dared to address the war years in his later works. As this research will show, while seeming to avoid the issue of war in the Maigret series, Simenon does in fact write overtly as well as metaphorically about war, both the Great War of his childhood and World War II, which stirred up memories of the past and brought new conflicts into play. His sympathetic handling of a Jewish protagonist in Le

Petit homme d'Arkhangelsk, (1956), which Bresler (1983: 142) later critiques to

“prove” that Simenon is not racist, refers to the 1917 Russian Revolution and refugee families divided in the confusion, as well as mentioning anniversaries of the October Revolution, the formation of the Soviet Union and so on. A short story,

“Les Mains pleines” (1945), represents his attempt to penetrate the mind of a resistance fighter. With the Maigret series released for publication during the

Occupation, his protagonist serves as a distraction to the war, while allegory and symbolism are used in later writings to assist him and the reader to come to terms with the events of war. Careful reading of the Maigrets via what we learn about the author's political opinions will demonstrate that the series is not so benign as would first appear.

Narrowing the focus

It is necessary at this stage to set the guidelines of the thesis by explaining broadly the manner in which Simenon approaches the subject of war, then intentionally narrowing the focus. Because the biographers have set themselves up as literary critics, and because their judgements colour the way other critics

18 view the novels, the biographers will be quoted in the first instance, while more recent authors and the sources from which they verify their opinions will be quoted as substantiation. The biographers have helped create the myth of the man, and it is against this myth that his novels have been read by later analysts.

Some of his critics, including Lacassin, admit to reading the novels in bulk—thirty or even fifty at a time. On the one hand, this helps to keep Simenon’s work in the category of pulp fiction. On the other, it seems to preclude close reading of individual texts to locate or isolate particular themes. This thesis will be limited to a series of novels which, it will be shown, deal either directly or implicitly with events of war as they affected Simenon. The last point is important, as it will be argued that the reality of war can only be the reality of the author. Thus, if his life has not been substantially changed by the occupation, through deprivation, loss of liberty or loved ones, or through control beyond his capacity to bear, then his more or less normal life becomes the template for the settings of his novels.

Aside from the Maigrets, Simenon’s romans durs can be roughly grouped into categories that can be explored for their potential as commentaries on issues relating to war:

a) several, as well as memoirs, revisiting his experiences in occupied Liège;

b) a handful recognised as either dealing with the war or being set in a

recognisably wartime setting;

c) a series that can be seen as an attempt on Simenon’s part to come to

terms with the defection of his brother within the context of war, and

perhaps also an attempt to explain—to himself as well as the reader—

19 his own untenable situation in regard to the novels made into films by

Continental;9 and

d) those, including the ones examined in this thesis, which utilise literary

strategies such as terrain vague, allegory and representation in order to

discuss issues relating to politics, occupation and war in a manner that

renders them palatable to the reader.

Some of Simenon’s journalistic-style works, which rather unusually have an omniscient narrator, include those which deal most closely with events of the

Occupation and his experiences of World War II. Richard Rayner (2012) describes his approach to writing and his relationship with his own creations thus:

“[Simenon] tends either to inhabit his characters in full-blown first person, or else sit on their shoulders in deftly close third.” Simenon’s realistic depictions match works by other authors dealing with the same era, including Léo Malet, Robert

Sabatier, Simone de Beauvoir, Margeurite Duras, Irène Némirovsky, and the various contributors to Marcel Ophül’s documentary film, Le Chagrin et la pitié

(1969). However, his pragmatic journalistic approach serves as a distancing technique, with the crisp, stark descriptions emphasising rather than taking away from the poignancy of the situation.

War remembrances from childhood

A thinly disguised autobiography called Pedigree (1948) and an autobiographical narration called Les Trois crimes de mes amis (1938) both deal with events during or resulting from World War I. While they both include his memories of a childhood spent in occupied Belgium, the former is transparently

9 Marcel Aymé was found guilty by the 1946 purge committee and sentenced to “non-public reprimand” for selling a screenplay to Continental, which alerts us to the precarious situation in which Simenon found himself after the Liberation (Anne Simonin 2000: p.24). 20 cloaked as fiction to ‘protect the innocent’. Although by definition it is impossible that the work be objective because the events are seen through the filter of the author’s memory, for the purposes of this thesis Trois crimes will function more as a reference text than a work of fiction. Because it deals with reminiscences of

Simenon’s life from around 1915 to shortly after World War I, it helps to put some of the other, more openly fictional, writing into context. He had already experimented with the particular events described in Trois crimes in one of the first Maigret novels, Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien (1931), which indicates the importance of the incidents in his own mind. The repetition of an event from

Simenon’s own life—one of many—also clearly denies his claim that one can search in vain for part of him in his writings.

War experiences as novels

Next comes a small collection of narratives based on actual events. Because the author was essentially involved in many of the events and certainly in the milieu, his voice can be heard in the narrator and his doubts through the rhetorical questions with which the narrator introduces alternative viewpoints. Although of course they are viewed through the lens of fiction and literary licence, Le Clan des

Ostendais and Le Train can be seen to represent a war zone in the drôle de guerre and the early days of World War II. As the texts are widely recognised (by Bresler,

Assouline, Eskin, Becker, etc) as being set in 1940s France, they will be used to reinforce the argument in examining others about which there is contention. La

Neige était sale is also recognised by his biographers as being about the

Occupation, albeit in a heavily disguised setting, and by some as an attempt by

21 Simenon to purge himself of wartime guilt,10 which links it to other novels on the same theme. However, as critics have overlooked some particularly vital aspects of this novel, it will be examined in detail to tease out other interpretations.

Bresler (1983: 122) agrees that the Second World War “hardly enters the writings of Simenon” and cites Le Train and Le Clan as being the only ones “set against a background of wartime events”. Following a brief synopsis of Le Train, which he admits is powerful, the biographer notes that Simenon seems only to

“feel or relate to individual tragedy, particular experience, not that of the crowd”

(his emphasis). He goes on to say that:

[a]lthough he continued to live in France throughout the war, one would never know from reading the many novels that he wrote at the time that Hitler existed or that there was such a thing as the German occupation. There were no concentration camps, no aerial bombings, no fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night (1983: 123).

And yet, even a superficial reading of Le Clan will confirm that it uses the rich background of wartime—of air-raid warnings, repercussions of the

Occupation of Paris, including the progress of the German troops along the

Champs-Elysées, their arrival in La Rochelle and surrounding districts, requisitioning of houses, stables and other facilities, the fraternisation of young women with the occupiers and fishing trawlers being blown up by mines floating in the Bay of Biscay. It also provides a window through which the reader can view the attitude of French locals towards refugees, and how cultural differences served as stumbling blocks to effective communication in an emotionally-fraught time.

This shows us that the myths spawned by the biographers have been self-

10 Assouline (1997: 243) describes La Neige as the first part of a process in which Simenon seeks to “exorcise his demon” by first creating “an abject, cynical hero devoid of all moral centre” then redeeming him as a “weaker, more vulnerable and excusable character” in Le Fond de la bouteille. Marnham (1992: 246) links La Neige it with other novels as three retakes on the same theme of a cathartic process of “fraternal guilt”. 22 perpetuating, as the biographers quote each other and are in turn quoted in the press.11 This has the effect of discouraging the reader from forming an opinion based on interpretation of the novels in which Simenon reveals, both directly and subliminally, that he has strong thoughts and opinions regarding political events.

The historical vignette, Le Train, is one of the very few Simenon novels written from a first person perspective. Set in the spring of 1940 at the beginning of the Second World War, it deals with the confusion of refugees fleeing south through France from Fumay in the Ardennes. It speaks of bullet-ridden cars, refugees with handcarts, people crowded onto goods or cattle wagons, hospitals being evacuated, families separated in the confusion of carriages shunted into sidings and reconnected to another locomotive, detours, deaths of passengers,

Liège falling into German hands, boats and tankers being blown up by mines,

German motorbike patrols, clandestine love that has no viable future, and fear of helping Jewish people or resistants lest one endanger one’s own life. British novelist and critic Brigid Brophy greeted the 1964 English translation of Le Train as “the novel his admirers had been expecting all along from Simenon”, declaring that until this novel, the novelist had been “a master without a masterpiece” (1966:

145).

In Bresler’s opinion, Simenon uses the German invasion only as a catalyst provoking the events of a storyline. In regard to aerial bombings in the quote above, these comments are confusing because Bresler had just analysed Le Train but appears to have missed the aerial strafing of the train, the guard having to bring the locomotive into the siding because the driver had suffered a direct hit (Le

11 A classic example is the proliferation of the myth about Simenon writing a novel in a glass cage. The nearest element of truth in this was his publication of a novel entitled La Cage de verre (Presses de la cité, 1971). 23 Train, 70). When planning the novel, the incident was in the forefront of Simenon’s mind; he describes the story as being of a refugee separated from his wife and daughter by “le bombardement d’un train (coupé ainsi en deux, chaque moitié allant plus tard de son côté)” (QJV Tome 1: 66-67). Similarly, Bresler makes only passing mention of Le Clan, overlooking ships in La Pallice being sunk as they drift onto bombs dropped into the harbour. While conceding that Le Clan is set against the backdrop of war, he deems Le Train to be the “more successful of the two” novels using the war as a milieu (1983: 122).

Assouline does not write separately about Le Clan and Le Train but categorises them as coming from the same pool of experience. While acknowledging the integrity of the era and the experiences dealt with in these novels based on real events, Assouline dispenses with them in a mere two paragraphs (1997: 177-78). He rates Le Train among “some of his most important novels” (305) and comments on Simenon’s need to put time and space between himself and the emotion-charged period. After two attempts in 1940 to commit the events to his literary memory, Simenon puts it aside, finally being able to write about it from the terrain vague of Switzerland twenty-one years after the events

(1997: 179). Assouline confirms that the events of the novel are inspired directly by the author’s own experiences as the Commissioner of Belgian Refugees, saying that whatever material was not used in Le Clan was used in Le Train (1997: 177-

78). Hutton (2013: 18-19) warmly supports Simenon’s right to have these novels plus Les Autres (1962) read as comments upon war.

Assouline recalls that the author conducted much preliminary research, nearly a year before writing Le Train, into the dates of specific war events (1997:

348). Although this would seem to indicate his intention of getting the details of

24 the novel correct, he is later accused by Vinen of only using a couple of dates, ending with the day France is occupied. In Assouline’s opinion, which is worth quoting in detail because of the way it showcases the biographer’s judgement of the novelist, the most noteworthy fact about the novel is how much it reveals of the author’s personal view of the events of war. The author, he tells us, sees:

war as a personal encounter between man and his destiny; the cowardly relief manifested at the announcement of the armistice; the way life changes in a city in turmoil; the satisfaction of finding food and the anger of going hungry; and finally, the abolition of time, collapse of social conventions, and eclipsing of egotism in circumstances in which nothing occurs on a merely individual scale (1997: 178).

This aspect could be compared with Irène Némirovski’s novels, whose characters’ reactions are revealed via an omniscient narrator in a similar fashion.

Both of these writers depict their characters as viewing the circumstances from too close a distance to understand the bigger picture, reacting only to events that personally impact them on a day-to-day basis. The discerning narrator’s perspective is given as the overview the person is unable to see, attributing to him or her whatever motives seem appropriate within the context of their actions.

Eskin (1987: 142), without reference to the author’s earlier attempt to write of the events of 1940, tells us that after the Cannes film festival in 1960,

Simenon announced a plan to write a novel “full of sunshine”, but abandoned it after three pages. Identifying this abortive “sunshine novel” as Le Train, Eskin goes on to say that, after putting it aside for weeks because of problems with the central character, Simenon succeeds in writing a novel in which the protagonist is

“liberated from despair by an encounter with a group of refugees at the outbreak of World War II” (191). Eskin pairs Le Clan des Ostendais and Le Train as

Simenon’s “only two war novels”, but comments that the former:

25 suffers from not being clearly enough constructed around its central theme, which is—or should have been—the almost epic will of the clan’s leader, Omer, to lead his people to escape both the Germans and the inhospitable French townspeople (161).

Eskin pays tribute to the fact that the author had observed well the group of

Ostend fishermen and “memorialized them six years later” when he wrote the book (142), describing its theme as the miraculous emergence of endurance (253).

He also criticises the novel for the author’s “propensity for sudden lumps of authorial explicitness, for explaining rather than dramatizing”, seeing this as one of the casualties of Simenon’s rapid writing style and his penchant for casting the reader into the role of amateur psychologist (242-43). Becker labels Simenon’s earlier novels as “pseudonymous potboilers” (1999: 35), especially those published under Fayard, which include, for instance, La Maison du canal (1933).

While stylistic clumsiness such as explanations of self-evident words and actions of the characters diminished as his writing style developed, the ubiquitous rhetorical questions that so irritated André Gide remain more or less constant, being particularly evident in Le Clan. In a comment not meant to be seen by Simenon,

Gide writes:

Quelques fâcheuses manies. La plus irritante sans doute est l’abus du point d’interrogation. Simenon ne dit pas: “X. se demanda si…”, mais “Pourquoi X. se demanda-t-il alors si…” ou: “Y. se souvint alors…”, mais “Pourquoi Y. se souvint-il, à ce moment, de…”. Et plus le livre est bon, plus cela me gêne (209).

Simenon’s appeal for the reader’s opinion demonstrates both the author’s inclusion of the reader in whatever issues are at stake and a reluctance for him, even as an invisible narrator, to make a definitive statement about difficult topics: racism, misunderstanding, being judgemental, lack of cultural understanding, being found wanting or simply missing the point. One reason for this stylistic

26 fence-sitting in this instance is the fact that Le Clan obliquely involves the author as it most accurately records, via a semi-fictive approach, the field of Simenon’s own war effort. Although acting mostly behind the scenes, the official who in this novel has to allocate housing and collate transport for refugees is Simenon himself. In correspondence with publisher Sven Nielsen, Simenon identifies both “the gentleman in the barracks in La Rochelle” and the person responsible for shuffling the refugee trains about the countryside as himself (Assouline 1997: 347-38). The rhetorical question attempts to offer alternatives or make a plea for a more charitable view for what, at the time, could have been perceived by Simenon as irritating attitudes by the refugees, but to which hindsight lends more understanding. One example of this would be the group of Jewish diamond dealers who appear in Le Clan (132) as unreasonably demanding to be taken to England and offering an indefinite sum of money for passage or, alternately, to buy the boats.12

Marnham does not mention Le Train, and refers only to Le Clan des

Ostendais in passing as “the first of his three ‘war’ novels” (1992: 236). As he has already emphatically stated that none of Simenon’s novels “took war as a theme”, this can be seen as contradictory. Becker (1999: 30) emphasises that the author’s role was on the periphery of war, as he had been living out the occupation far from either Vichy or Paris, in La Rochelle, on the western coast of France. It should be noted, however, that La Rochelle came within the occupied zone and that some

German soldiers were stationed there. By the time it became a German submarine

12 The group at the heart of this fictitious transaction had caused him so much grief that he mentions them at least twice in his memoirs (MI, 77, 524). The origins of the story relate to Simenon’s refusal to deal with a large group of refugees from Antwerp until ordered to do so by Ministre de l’Intérieur Georges Mandel. His objections were based on the fact that the group, some “1200 diamond merchants from Antwerp”, were “almost exclusively stateless Israelites” (Assouline 1997: 176). 27 base, from 1941 to 1945, the Germans had requisitioned the Simenon house and

Simenon had moved some distance away. Becker acknowledges that the two novels, Le Clan and Le Train, effectively encapsulate Simenon’s wartime experiences—he was too young in the Great War and his experiences during

World War II involved being Commissioner for Belgian Refugees (1999: 30). She only mentions Le Clan again to demonstrate the way Simenon’s prose captures the climate of La Rochelle (111-12).

Empathetic war experiences

Another category of novels, including Le Fond de la bouteille (1949), Les

Frères Rico (1952) and Les Quatre jours du pauvre homme (1949), can be read as allegories of Simenon’s personal experience of war. What is so special about these particular novels is the insight they give into the fateful meeting of the two

Simenon brothers in Paris at the end of the war. Georges’ confusion and grief at the resultant outcome of advice he reluctantly gave Christian, and the blame their mother laid firmly at Georges’ door, make compelling reading (Bresler 1983: 170;

Assouline 1997: 335). While ostensibly those of the protagonist, these feelings, taken within the framework of the present thesis, can be seen as honest representations of shame, guilt, jealousy, confused loyalties and attempts to justify and also to rectify impossible situations. Simenon’s biographers mention these three novels in tandem with the other novels under discussion, if only to deny that they in any way address the issue of war.

There is a consensus of opinion that this trio explores the issue of

Simenon’s confused and tortured relationship with his brother, but only Assouline recognises the novels’ potential for allegorical significance. Simenon has, he says,

28 created a series in which he uses the “mask of fiction to settle accounts with the other Simenon”, adding that whenever Simenon introduces a brother into a novel, it is hard not to think immediately of Christian (1997: 223). He includes La Neige

était sale in this category, asserting that it and the trio above all deal with the author’s brother; as such, they are “marked by his internal turmoil” (1997: 243).

Marnham makes the same link, which is surprising because there is no brother in

La Neige (246).

Becker (1999: 14) recognises Le Fond as the novel in which Simenon

“expiate[s] his guilt… provid[ing] remarkable insight into [his] attitude towards his brother”, noting that his fictional creation “does what the author could not do—he saves his brother”. Eskin, Marnham and Becker each recognise Simenon’s anguish over his brother while Becker alone appears to see that the novels project alternative endings if not an attempt to rewrite the story in its entirety. The oblique nature of his approach, and the fact that the subject matters personally relate to Simenon rather than society in general, has resulted in the significance of these three novels being largely overlooked as representations of wartime.

War through filters of time, space, historical and geographical terrains vagues

Vinen (2006: 44) records that Simenon mentions several strategic dates of

World War I and the early stages of World War II in Le Train. However, the last date mentioned is 10 May 1940, the day the exode began following the German entry to Belgium. Vinen then goes on to quote other dates that the author could have mentioned, but did not.13 Platten (2006: 21) compares Simenon’s novels of

13 Roth (2007: 5) points out that, “Vinen observes that Simenon’s postwar novels almost never mention the war, certainly never the Holocaust. This omission would be less striking if Simenon hadn’t sent his characters to some of the landmarks of the occupation, including the train station 29 the time harshly with the roman noir, a genre exemplified by the novels of Jean-

Claude Izzo in France, Manuel Vasquez Montalban in Spain, and Ian Rankin in

Britain. Platten explains that these “aggressively referential and often interventionist” writers:

engage, to a greater or lesser degree, with the political and social debates of their time, and, as in the cases of Jean Amila, Jean-Patrick Manchette, and more recently Didier Daeninckx14 and Thierry Jonquet, they respond to the events of history. Simenon, on the other hand, repudiated such notions (2011: 45).

For his part, Frederic Spotts (2008: 164) quotes Daniel-Henri Kanweiler as asking whether a work is lacking in “almost imperceptible ways” if the impact of the war is not in some way present. This thesis will address this ambiguous critical response by showing that Simenon’s works reflect a vital and personal involvement in politics and war; he was not a bystander but someone deeply scarred by the Occupation. Using a selection of works which will then be more extensively analysed, this thesis will explore some of the ways he communicated his concerns regarding decisions of the drôle de guerre, the Occupation and political alliances of the post-war period.

What we will find is that Simenon chose to approach the events of history in a less direct manner, which is more fully explored in Chapter One. His repudiation was not to ignore the subject, but to cloak it in symbolism or allegory, and by using terrain vague of various types to render it less confrontational. The dearth of comment from the biographers and critics here becomes crucial. Il pleut, bergère,

La Neige était sale and Maigret et le corps sans tête, which, it is our contention, are

where Paris’s Jews were deported and the town of Vichy itself” [for example, Maigret à Vichy (1968) does not live up to its promise]. 14 Margaret-Anne Hutton (2012: 495) explains that his Meurtres pour mémoire (1984) is a “not- very-veiled [allusion] to Maurice Papon” and Ethique en toc (2000) offers “an alternative narrative to the high-profile negationism scandal at Université Lyon”; Gorrara (2005) analyses Meurtres pour mémoire to show how it can be read as an allegory of the Holocaust. 30 rich in representation of war, have been chosen as examples of how Simenon’s repertoire of literary strategies appeals to a wide range of readers.

***

To place the works of Simenon within their context, Chapter One will provide background information about the era, coupled with an overview of

Franco-American relationships. It will outline some of the ways Simenon expressed opinions on French politics and international relationships in his memoirs and interviews, which in turn will serve to highlight the reflection of these views in his fiction. Because an understanding of the concepts of both allegory and terrain vague is so crucial to this analysis of Simenon’s work, these will be defined and Simenon’s use of the techniques within his œuvre explained.

His application will be compared to modern allegorical representations, to Jacques

Tati, Boris Vian, Ernest Hemingway and Vercors. Analysis by modern critics, including Rolls, Goulet and Horsley will be consulted to demonstrate the complexity of Simenon’s use of these distancing techniques.

Chapter Two will examine Il pleut, bergère, the first novel written after the

1939 declaration of war by France. Here, Simenon makes use of Revolution imagery, faits divers as a distraction from challenging international events and the viewpoint of a child protagonist (but with the tempering influence of later recall by the adult having the advantage of hindsight) to make a statement about global unrest. An historical montage of eras as diverse as the French Revolution, pre-

World War I and a projected future forms an effective multiple perspective of ongoing events.

Chapter Three will examine La Neige était sale, recognised perhaps erroneously by most critics as being about France under German occupation. In

31 this novel, the parameters of crime have become warped by the perspective of those in power, so that the protagonist is charged for a crime he has not committed while murder, rape by proxy and betrayal are disregarded. Disguising of the identity of the oppressed by use of Germanic or Slavic names and that of the oppressors by use of sobriquets forces the reader to examine issues of warfare itself rather than react predictably to a known enemy. Self-conscious tropes of fire, a laissez passer, a tin lunch box, a brass ruler and shabby homemade shoes constantly bring the reader back to themes of passion, corruption, poverty, misuse of power and persistence of integrity against all odds.

The final chapter will analyse Maigret et le corps sans tête to show how

Simenon uses actual physical distance, historical memories of the locale and symbolism of Marianne as a terrain vague to reflect upon France’s fractured internal relationships and ambivalence towards American hegemony in the post- war years. Tati, Ross, Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Bonte, Léo Malet, Gorrara, Ruth

Kitchen, Peter Ely and others will be consulted to elucidate Simenon’s representations of Marianne, the essence of hygiene and épuration as practised by the FFI following Liberation and other themes within this novel.

It is not the intention of this thesis to indicate that the three novels extensively analysed are in any way the only ones in which Simenon addresses the subject of war, hence the narrowing of the field in the Introduction. Choice of which novels to evaluate is based upon the fact that together they encompass a wide range of literary tools, approaches and strategies, so that together they showcase the skills of the writer. They include novels written in France at the declaration of war and in the United States after the war, to address issues as widely divergent as protest at France’s decision to enter the war, a treatise on how

32 living under occupation brutalises the occupied people and disquiet at post-war

Franco-American alliances. The three novels encompass historical, geographical and allegorical terrains vagues. Remembered weather patterns from the drôle de guerre and from occupied Liège are used effectively to lend atmosphere and substance to the storyline, as has a snowbound cityscape. By analysing the novels in chronological order, progression and development of Simenon’s thinking and technique can be demonstrated. The scant coverage by critics of the core novels indicates that their significance has been overlooked and the reading of them limited to the surface story rather than how Simenon has used them to express strong political views. This thesis aims to address that oversight.

33 Chapter One: Background and Methodology

“Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away.” ― Ian Frazier

Simenon had prophesised as early as 1922, while still working for the

Gazette de Liège, that detective stories would shortly be recognised “as a respectable genre of literature” (Marnham, 102). During his early career, he published novels while contributing to Détective (David H. Walker: 34). Julian

Symons in fact credits Simenon with “triumphantly reviv[ing]” the detective novel after the genre had “been quiescent for years” (1985: 123). Because they represented a finite situation in the midst of international uncertainty, detective novels became established as the perfect vehicle to negotiate conflicting and perilous times: by the end of the novel, the crime is solved, the perpetrator brought to account for his deeds and order is once more restored. Each novel, even those of a series, represents a situation complete in and of itself, not part of the ongoing world conflict. This, when placed in opposition to international events to which there seems no resolution, can be seen as the situation of choice.

The Golden Age of detective and crime genres

Brunsdale helps to plot the progression of crime literature by showing that during the “shaky postwar years” of the 1920s and 1930s, the genre “helped reassure readers that Right, as defended by White Knight detectives, could and would prevail”. She quotes Bruce Murphy (1999) as saying that British writers of the category “wrote as if World War I had never happened, about upper-class people insulated from the disastrous postwar recession” (2010: 485). In fact, use was made of the “happy-ever-after” mode on a global scale during World War II.

Valerie Holman records that British libraries collected second-hand novels to send

34 as part of comfort parcels for troops in the field, and that during the severe winter of 1940-41, in England as in the rest of Europe, “people turned to book reading for comfort and oblivion” (2008: 28-29). Readership of books was observed to have skyrocketed during that time. Platten quotes Julian Symons and Arthur Conan

Doyle as both suggesting that crime fiction “possesses some generic quality, possibly the guarantee of narrative closure, which makes it particularly addictive”

(2011: 46n). According to Dubois, readers enjoyed:

an atmosphere, an ambience, a setting, usually in Paris but sometimes in provincial localities, in which there is a rich descriptive texture, an exploration of neighborhoods, houses, apartments, with decors, class hierarchies, all set in an indeterminate past, some time in the thirties, the forties, the fifties, but with no historical markers or indications of any larger political circumstances (2005: 108-109).

Deliberate avoidance of scenarios that could have a disturbing influence on soldiers far from home and in straitened circumstances was seen as offering a buffer against prevailing conditions, as one would expect from a comfort parcel.

For his part, Eskin shows us that Simenon’s novels, especially those of the Maigret series, were in keeping with a genre written to satisfy a market for people who wanted to be entertained, to delve into sombre, gripping stories that did not involve the war, and thus to forget for a time. Because of the way he encapsulates the essence of the attraction of the detection novel, Eskin merits a long quotation:

It has been noted many times that the world of the classical detective story is a dream world. The stories are written in the 20’s, the 30’s and later, but most often take place in a stable, rural, aristocratic world that reflects—if it reflects anything real at all—a society that disappeared forever with the First World War. It is a world of prelapsarian innocence; there is a crime, to be sure, but everything is safe, nothing has really changed, and the godlike detective restores an innocence we knew all along was never really lost. These stories were written during the Great Depression, during the coming to power of Fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism, during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War: none of that ever enters into the secure, privileged world of the classic detective story (1987: 83-84).

35 However, this comfortable conclusion does not necessarily tell the whole story. Alison Light reveals a deeper significance to the Golden Age novels, especially those of Agatha Christie, seeing the bloodless murders and calm acceptance of death in a more analytical light. “[T]he anaemia can be seen as a revolt against the sanguinary rhetoric of 1914” or, in other words, Christie’s seemingly casual treatment of corpses is a deliberate counter-approach to the glut of anonymous death resulting from World War I (1991: 74-75). Gill Plain comments upon this aspect, explaining that not all of Christie’s works relate to tidy, bloodless murder (2001: 29-31). Those she terms “ritual” or “sacrificial” bodies are presented whole, the “dismembered bodies of the battlefield

[becoming] the tidily reassembled corpses of Christie’s fiction” (33).

Jean Duperray (1973: 101) comments that Simenon is seen not so much as an author but as an illusionist. While his biographers are scornful that none of his

Maigrets mentions the war, those more au fait with crime and/or detective fiction affirm that it was the norm to be entertaining rather than descriptive, to be reassuring rather than factual.

Bresler (1983: 82) states that no full-length Maigret novels were written between 1933 and 1946, but Eskin (1987: 137) clarifies that ten were published from a backlog of works, many representing experimentation with the character of the detective, from 1938 to 1941. These, originally distributed by the pulp publisher Offenstadt and dated from 1936, were collected by Gallimard in the early

1940s along with other detective stories. A possible reason that Simenon chose not to use the Occupation as the setting of his Maigret novels is because of his self- imposed demand for accuracy in his novels. He attended Criminology seminars in order to keep up to date with current trends of analysis and procedure (QJV Tome

36 2: 52). During the Occupation years, the usual markers had been moved and obviously he would have been limited in his ability to research and accurately reflect police procedure during this time. Marnham records that:

[d]uring nearly six years of hostilities in Europe Simenon wrote twenty-two books and twenty-one short stories. None of them took the war as a theme or even mentioned its existence with the exception of the [at that time] unpublished Je me souviens. But since Simenon was writing for immediate publication this is hardly surprising. French interest in literature during the war, like people’s interest in the cinema, was primarily escapist (1992: 199).

The apolitical stance of Maigret, “sa méfiance pour tout le politique” and the fact that he does not concern himself with common law crimes has, by implication, been attributed to the author by those who analyse and discuss the Maigret novels

(Fabre 1981: 29). Platten makes the statement that the narrative voice of the series “eschews political commentary” (2006: 27). Fabre (230) links Maigret’s apolitical viewpoint with what he perceives to be that of the author, while Maurice

Dubourg (1973: 143) lists a non-Maigret, Le Président (1958) and Maigret chez le minister (1955) as the only works in which Simenon addresses politics.

The only indication of Maigret’s involvement in any war appears in the short story “Tempête sur la Manche” (1938), in which Maigret and his wife Louise are waiting in the port of Dieppe to cross the Channel for a holiday in England.

Maigret expresses the wish to look up colleagues with whom he had worked at

Scotland Yard during the (unspecified) war.15 David F. Drake on Trussel, the website devoted entirely to all things Maigret, quotes this to place Maigret’s wartime activities on record, but the date of publication would rule out World War

II. Fabre shows that the action of Simenon’s fiction “[se] déroule devant une toile de fond historique à peu près totalement blanche, anti-balzacienne: un paysage

15 This short story was filmed in 1989, directed by Edouard Logereau and with a screenplay by Francis Lacassin. 37 (Paris notamment) dont les édifices publics non fonctionnels (autres que le Quai des Orfèvres ou La Morgue) ne sont à peu près jamais décrits ni même évoqués”

(1981 : 30). He observes that Maigret seems not to have taken part in World War I or at least never speaks of it, the lack of specific time and place plus the avoidance of mentioning the war being “un véritable phénomène de dyschronie” in the

Maigret series. However, as Bill Alder argues, Fabre is relying on the lack of explicit references to historical events rather than taking as given that, in describing the social background of his characters, Simenon is acknowledging implicitly that certain events have taken place. Alder poses the question:

Does an author’s stated disregard of history inevitably mean the latter is absent from his writing? If Simenon is acutely aware of the social backgrounds of individuals, these cannot be in some abstract sense: must they not exist within a definite, historically determined class society? (2013: 16).

Developing his discussion, Alder quotes Arnold Kettle (1977) as saying that it would be foolish to suggest that in not mentioning the Battle of Waterloo or the

French Revolution, author Jane Austen could be said to have ignored the importance of these political events; the presence of “so many eligible young officers moving around the garrison towns of southern England” presupposes the

Napoleonic Wars (2013: 181). Alder goes on to point out that both Austen and

Simenon wrote for contemporary readers who would be “familiar with current events and would not therefore need them to be explicitly referenced as a means of providing historical context” (181). Lynn Higgins illustrates this by saying that

Alain Resnais’ production of the Marguerite Duras classic Hiroshima mon amour

(1959) “is not ‘about’ World War II, nor is it set during the war”, but quotes reviewer Frédéric de Towarnicki as describing it as “an overwhelmingly anti-war work” (1996: 1-3). Thus, just as not mentioning the Eiffel Tower does not equate

38 with the novels being set somewhere other than Paris, failure to reference the war specifically does not necessarily mean that the novels of Simenon—or other novelists—are not historically relevant.

Assouline assures us that Simenon himself was aware that he avoided writing about history as it happened, quoting a speech in 1938 when the author called himself a “blind insect, sublime cretin” for expecting his readers to read his

“little stories of other people, everyday and everytime people, people who come and go with their second-rate feelings and petty hope, as though they were not participants, whether they like it or not, in the most prodigious of adventures”

(1997: 168-169). He goes on to note that Simenon copes by reassuring himself that “people do not live History with a capital H, but their own histories” (169).

Simone de Beauvoir uses the same analogy when she has the protagonist Hélène reflect that the Occupation made her feel “comme si je n’existais pas […] Je ne compte pas. […] Je regardais passer l’Histoire! C’était mon histoire. Tout ça m’arrive à moi” (1945: 296-97). However, careful analysis of themes, especially of the later Maigrets, will show that Simenon uses symbolism, paratextual inferences and sustained themes to alert the reader to occult historical significance in his works.

Thus it can be seen that Simenon was not alone in presenting to the public novels which at least superficially allowed the reader to practise escapism. He and other writers tailored their subjects to the needs of the time, avoiding war novels that would exacerbate anxiety and, perhaps more importantly, render the author liable to prosecution or punishment. This would interfere with their ability to earn a living by their chosen profession. Because the reality of lived experience was

39 accepted as being universal, they did not explicitly use that reality as the background of their novels.

A change of pace

Simenon’s Maigret novels were from the “Golden Age” of detective fiction; as public awareness of the horrifying realities of World War I grew, detective literature changed to echo the disillusionment and cynicism of a new generation

(Brunsdale 2010: 547). To retain their currency following World War II, detective novels had to evolve to accommodate new needs. Dysfunctional protagonists, amoral detectives and private eyes, unresolved storylines and pessimistic outcomes served as more realistic representations of that period of time.

American hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1930s had been banned in France during the Occupation but had circulated in pastiche collections in Les Éditions de

Minuit. These works, ghost-written by French writers and depicting an imaginary

America, served as a counter-foil to the scarcities and restrictions of France

(Gorrara 2003a: 13). The evolution of this new genre is linked to the Série noire, with its French translations of the hardboiled detectives of Raymond Chandler and

Dashiell Hammett and others, and to no small degree to Georges Simenon, who began to focus more strongly on what he called his romans durs. This is where the dichotomy of his prose becomes evident. He continued the Maigret series reluctantly—in a novel called simply Maigret (1934), he had attempted to retire the inspector, but under pressure of public demand had had to resurrect him. The protagonist formulated and refined in the Golden Age still had a role to play, but the focus changed from 1945, when the city of Paris assumed a role to the point where it could be described as the “second protagonist” of the Maigret series

40 (Becker 1999: 58) or the “le second personnage de Simenon” (Maurice Piron, cited in Michel Lemoine 2000: 7). Rolls and Walker explain the significance of this focalisation in the post-war years, quoting Teresa Bridgeman (1998) as saying,

“Paris itself ceases to be a somewhat superficial backdrop to the action of the narrative, and becomes instead the central cohesive element of the text” (2009:

18). Inspector Maigret, while retaining his gentle, psychoanalytic approach to crime, has more to say about the psychological needs of the French public and to readers in general.

As Gorrara postulates, “the novels in the Série noire did more than passively reflect their times. They were often a critical engagement with the institutions and power structures that regulated Western societies” (2003b: 597). Somewhat in the manner of the protest music movement of the 1960s opposing the war in

Vietnam and American hegemony, the noir movement in all its aspects was not simply a reaction to prevailing trends, but set the tone for a more realistic view of crime and the world that spawned and nurtured the criminals—they could be read as critical comments upon the institutions and organisations regulating Western society (597). Effectively, crime had been taken out of the English country house drawing room and dumped into the urban jungle (592). Subjective narrators revealed, rather than acted as buffers against, the shortcomings of the contemporary world, while the amoral stance of the hard-boiled protagonist was, to quote Jean-Paul Sartre, a way of viewing the alienation and disruption of humanity, suited to “the imperfections of our time” (cited by Gorrara 2003b: 593).

A profound change in focus and adjustment to a new reality, both physical and psychological, was required of the French person on the street during four years of occupation. Without a precedent to indicate an acceptable protocol, each

41 had to effectively negotiate his/her own path through the moral maze. Conflicting loyalties involved walking a tightrope between coexistence with the enemy and collaboration in order to pursue a career path. The defining line between that cooperation and collaboration was at times difficult to determine with the result that, in attempting to restore control following the 1944 Liberation, the Forces

Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI) practised an enthusiasm to rival German brutality.

But above all there was a crying need to rid the nation of tainting experiences of the Occupation years. Christopher Lloyd encapsulates the enthusiasm with which the French applied cleansing measures to their own people by a translated quote from José Giovanni’s novel, Mon ami le traître (1997):

Within every Frenchman there is a sleeping gendarme. And the Liberation had awoken those gendarmes. Schools, town halls, village halls were turned into concentration camps. As Marcel Aymé wrote later: ‘ . . . In 1944 I looked like a collaborator. . . ’ During the preceding years it had not been good either to have a nose that was too long or slightly hooked (Lloyd 2003: 189).

This épuration, or bid to purify the soul of France, saw women publicly shamed as a symbolic reaction to perceived moral compromise while men became scapegoats for political misalliance. Simenon perpetuates this through his romans durs, portraying females in these novels as manipulating, emasculating women who drive men to crime, or who cover for them, who lead the lives of prostitutes or as prostitutes redeemed by the love of men who reform them. For Maigret, they are the wives or mothers of the criminals with whom he deals, one of the many layers of causation that initiate or disguise, often for many years, the lives of crime of the dark world he seeks to control. Seldom does he describe them in the erotic terms of the femme fatale of the noir novels, however. Keller tells us that Simenon has “an image of Woman as some nature goddess with an apron, some essence of

42 femaleness that he associate[s] with simplicity and deference” (2002: 489).

Madame Maigret stands as representative of the “archetypal ideal woman” (Becker

1999: 32). The “orderly, comfortable domesticity” of Simenon’s childhood home has been transform[ed]… into Inspector Maigret’s cozy casserole-scented home”

(Brunsdale 2010: 487). As the ideal feminine being, she is symbolic of the myth of ideal Paris as a woman; the antithesis of this is Paris the whore, an enduring theme in Simenon’s work.

Purge committees judged alike those authors and intellectuals considered to have failed to speak out against the Vichy regime or Nazi influence and those who had published under German guidelines or contributed to Nazi organs such as

Je suis partout, La Nouvelliste or Aujourd’hui. To quote Jean-Paul Sartre,

“Everything we did was equivocal. We never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong. A subtle poison corrupted even our best actions” (cited in Spotts

2008: 4). Along with other writers of the era, Simenon was called upon to give account for his literary output, with the burden on the accused to prove that creative production had addressed issues of the conflict or given purpose to the masses. The Ministère des Arts et des Lettres on rue Saint-Dominique determined that Simenon had a case to answer in regard to his wartime activities (Assouline

1997: 247). Like Colette and countless others, he had naïvely contributed to “some of the most repellent organs of the pro-Vichy and pro-German press” including

Gringoire (Spotts: 534-54), although Jacques Charles Lemaire (2002: 23) disagrees with Spotts about which periodicals received his contributions.

Although Platten has reservations about the “suspicions that have never been substantiated regarding [Simenon’s] activities during the Occupation” (2011:

40-41), Assouline provides compelling evidence that the writer was in fact charged

43 in 1949 in relation to his wartime activities. Assouline quotes French National

Archives (File 21-13, Dossier 5) and letters between Simenon and his lawyer,

Maurice Garçon, in October and November 1949 to show that Simenon was declared “subject to the totality of the temporary interdictions of Article 3 of the decree of May 30, 1945, for a term of two years from the present date” (1997:

247). Only Garçon was privy to this information, which addressed correspondence with Continental, in some of which Simenon seems to show support for convicted collaborationist Jean Luchaire and sympathy towards Goebbels’ official Reich representative in Belgium, France and the Netherlands, Alfred Greven.16 As well, he was charged regarding an ill-considered expression of annoyance at being confined to Fontenay-le-Compte “while any Gaullist can circulate freely” (Assouline

1997: 248).17 By pleading ignorant to knowledge that Continental was a German company until it was too late to change his contract, by withdrawing his grumble about Gaullists, and by claiming to have hidden Allied paratroopers at his house,

Simenon managed to avoid public censure. He also reminded the committee that he had been investigated as a Jew and allowed his lawyer to intercede on his behalf, claiming pressing engagements in the US (1997: 248-49). Marnham (1992:

219) adds to this information that charges had been initiated by English journalist and short story writer Maurice Richardson. Assouline’s “proof” notwithstanding,

Marnham argues persuasively that Simenon left of his own accord due to his dismay at the left-wing atmosphere of post-war France (218-19). Simenon appears to attempt to justify the dilemma of being called upon to act as translator

16 This is unsurprising as three of his books, Cécile est morte (1942), Maigret (1934), and La Maison du juge (1942) were optioned to Greven (Pierre Murat, 29 May 2010). 17 Maurice Garçon’s archives. 44 because of his ability to speak German18 by reflecting upon the misunderstandings created by a parallel situation in Le Clan des Ostendais (151).

The judgement brought against him had little impact upon Simenon’s career as the charge was not levelled against him until 1949. His prudent relocation to the US four years before had softened the impact of the consequences for his actions. Within this framework, however, his biographers and both contemporary and modern analysts alike have continued to perpetuate the belief that he ignored the issues of war in his writing. The goal of this thesis is to disprove this imputation by a close analysis of several of his novels while alluding to supporting evidence in other novels written within two decades from 1939.

Allegory

Part of the re-education of the French public following Liberation was attempted via the press, and the medium of comic books was judged to be the best way to approach youth. Desexualised figures and elimination of violence from the bandes dessinées would set a good example for the young people, while chaste female characters would avoid inflaming rampant sexual appetites (Richard Jobs

2007: 267). This propaganda usage of bandes dessinées following the Liberation in the summer of 1944 is epitomised by the almost overnight appearance of a beautifully illustrated publication entitled La Bête est morte! In this celebration of victory, de Gaulle is represented as a great white stork wearing the Lorraine Cross,

Hitler as the “big bad wolf”, Mussolini as a hyena, and the Japanese as yellow monkeys; French citizens, for their part, are docile rabbits and industrious

18 This is detailed in Bresler (1983: 153). 45 squirrels. As the mood is celebratory, the subject of collaboration is not mentioned, nor is the épuration, which would have already commenced.19

This of course makes use of allegory, a popular literary strategy used to good effect in many works dealing with war and persecution. Allegory has been central to French Studies criticism of crime fiction in recent years, and especially in the context of the crisis of identity that followed the end of World War II (see in particular Gorrara 2012 and Rolls and Walker 2009). The wounded psyche of a post-war audience required a veil to be placed between the reader or viewer and painful events of the past, making allegory the perfect vehicle for negotiating both the compromised past and an uncertain future. Contemporary examples are An

American Tail (Don Bluth, 1986), in which mice represent the Russian Jewish refugees trying to re-establish themselves in America, and Chicken Run (Peter

Lord, 2000), in which the concentration camp is a chicken run (complete with numbers on the gables) and the inmates are inventive, highly-motivated chickens.

While the latter could fit several war scenarios, it can be seen as telling essentially the same story as The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963) in a different manner. In each instance, the film can be viewed on various levels—as a simple story for children or as a comment upon world events. Other forms of allegory make use of two stories with a similar plotline or sequence of events, while yet others substitute known and familiar people, places or events for the situation it wishes to allegorise.20

19 Professor Clare Tufts, Student exhibit, La Bande Dessinée et la Propagande France: 1939-1944 in the Bostock Library http://library.duke.edu/apps/locationguide/areamap/41/. 20 The Encyclopaedia Britannica explains the complexity thus: “The range of allegorical literature is so wide that to consider allegory as a fixed literary genre is less useful than to regard it as a dimension, or mode, of controlled indirectness and double meaning (which, in fact, all literature possesses to some degree). Critics usually reserve the term allegory itself for works of considerable 46 The term allegory, or sustained metaphor permeating the entire work, comes down through old French via Latin from the Greek allos (other) and agoreuein (to speak openly, to speak in the assembly or market). In this dimension or mode, the extended meaning of agoreuein, with its connotation of public, open, declarative speech, inverted by the addition of the prefix allos, best applies to a situation where free and open speech is for various reasons contraindicated and undesirable. So, too, does the implied political meaning of agoreuein “insofar as censorship may produce devious, ironical ways of speaking” (Fletcher 1964: 2n1).

While one of the attractions of allegory is that the surface narrative—and crime and detective fiction make an ideal environment for its application (Platten 2011:

46n)—can be read without the benefit of the deeper sub-stratum of meaning, its secondary significance is of particular interest to scholars (Fletcher 1964: 7).

Nancy E. Virtue quotes Ishmael Xavier, however, to demonstrate the most effective occurrence of the technique:

the most interesting instances of allegory are those in which the surface of the text either gives unsatisfactory answers to readers’ interrogations or remains overly enigmatic, thus inducing a sense of recognition of the opacity of language and mandating the search for the concealed meaning (Virtue 2013: 129).

Order of words, or the sequence in which actions and characters are presented, can signal the existence of allegory, as can “patently meaningful names” of people or places (Harman and Holman 2006: 12). Another signal can be the inclusion of dates, an example being Boris Vian’s unremarked use of the date 10

March 1946 in the avant-propos of his novel L’Écume des jours (1947). A similar mise en scène in An American Tail identifies the Russian householders as

length, complexity, or unique shape.” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1457283/fable-parable-and-allegory. 47 Moskowitz and the nearby mouse colony as Mousekewitz, while a subtitle of

“Shostka, Russia, 1885” ushers in scenes of a pogrom against the locals, who flee in terror before horses and then cats. Later as the mice board a ship, the port of departure is identified as Hamburg, Germany. This linking of a seemingly fictive representation with specific places and known historical events—or a date with significance to the author or reader—are clues to the purpose of the fiction.

Susanne Sklar clarifies the term to refer to imagination, eg, Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28:10-17), while acknowledging that the accepted understanding of an allegory is “a narrative or description which refers beyond itself to some other structure or web of meaning” (2005: 2). She argues that authors of allegorical texts are in fact training their readers, encouraging them to seek a moral or hidden message behind the narrative, which in turn suggests an elite or initiate group who have the ability to read “correctly”. Here she quotes the apostle Paul’s analogy of Abraham’s sons Ishmael (born in bondage) and Isaac

(born free) as an allegory of God’s old and new covenants with the Israelites.21 In the New American Standard translation, the wording “allegorically speaking” is used in verse 24. The parables of Jesus are recognised as a form of allegory in which he used everyday events familiar to his hearers to explain moral or spiritual principles. The manner of presentation made the message accessible to those who wanted to learn while at the same time, by creating a calculated obscurity, avoiding premature consequences from the Pharisees and other religious leaders of the day

(Matt 13:10-16). Jesus added to his disciples’ development by explaining to them his intended meaning of individual parables, hidden in varying degrees from the masses (eg, Matt 13:18-23); in the parable of the sower, each kind of soil

21 Paul’s Letter to the Galatians 4:21-31, New American Standard Bible. 48 corresponds to a particular type of hearer. Jesus showed that the hearer must want to know the meaning in order to find it in his parables (v.17). Maureen

Quilligan recognises this double-edged aspect of allegory, stating that “[b]oth authors and readers must share the knowledge in order for the allegory to be read coherently as allegory” (1979: 80). In other words, without some knowledge of the issues involved, plus a desire to interpret the narrative in light of that knowledge, the surface story remains the only story, or perhaps the predominant story with tantalising undercurrents of something glimpsed but not yet internalised.

Ross Chambers sees allegory or “speaking other” as a means of giving voice to the unspeakable, with “the recognition of its object being left to the reader, who may well discover it to be infinitely elusive” (2010: 40). During the Occupation, prudence and censorship defined the “unspeakable”, while in the post-war period reasons went deeper—guilt, shame and reticence, coupled with the desire to avoid repercussions for wartime behaviour, were some of the reasons for obliqueness of approach. Allegory allowed the reader to take from fiction what he or she required without the threat of undue confrontation. Henry Geiger (1969) affirms that one of the essentials of allegory making is that the allegory “must never compel agreement […], its logic has to have holes in it” or always be open to alternate readings. One of the necessities of an allegory, he affirms, is that it “risk[s] the hazard of the learning process in human beings”. Fletcher adds to this by claiming that the fact that the allegory does not make a seamless fit with the inferred narrative is not a problem: “the silences […] mean as much as the filled-in spaces because by bridging the gaps between the oddly unrelated images we reach the sunken understructure of thought” (1964: 107). For a traumatised readership not

49 yet ready or ambivalent about facing the past, the existing choice in the manner of reading is an attractive alternative. Simenon was astute enough to foster the use of allegory in both his romans durs and the Maigrets, a practice allowing more freedom of expression for his own demons as well as an invitation to the reader to participate in the exercise.

Gorrara demonstrates how Léo Malet makes use of allegory in his novel

120, rue de la gare (1943) by drawing attention to significant details. The arch- villain, Jo Tour Eiffel, or George Parry, is shown to mirror the events of June 1940: his gangster lifestyle and subsequent downfall “epitomizes the defeat of a nation and the negation of its glorious past” (2003a: 32). She points out that “Parry” can be read as “Paris”, while the fate of Nestor Burma’s pre-war colleagues mirrors the ignoble defeat of the drôle de guerre. Burma’s triumph in the finale of the work is shown to be “a victory over wartime prejudices that had dismissed a generation of

Frenchmen as historical losers” (33). She goes on to link the central themes of

Boris Vian’s J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946) as “drawing on wider Cold War paranoia about the ‘enemy within’” (36). In her analysis of Didier Daeninckx’s

Meurtres pour mémoires (1984), Gorrara clarifies a key scene, that of the gravediggers’ strike for higher wages for the unpleasant task of exhumations of bodies from the 1960s, via an allegorical reading. She shows that the ambivalent feelings of the gravediggers can be linked with the 1980s resurgence of interest in

World War II and attempts to reconcile Holocaust memories with emerging documentation revealing French complicity in German atrocities (85-86). No matter how one approaches the Holocaust and the shared guilt, the experience has to be painful and unpleasant. Rolls (2006: 38) shows how, for example, Peter

Cheyney’s novels were translated into French for the Série noire in a manner

50 consistent with them becoming allegories of the Occupation and Liberation. This emphasis transcended the original text in order to render the works more meaningful for French readers.

Hygiene and Épuration

A new era of re-education of the masses resulted for many in disillusionment and mistrust of their own government. Coupled with this was an irksome reliance upon American aid, a new dependence upon the US for modern cars, technology and white goods and a need to rethink national identity within these criteria.

Anyone whose Occupation activities had been brought into question by the authorities, by informants or word of mouth was submitted to questioning, censure or worse. Those with something to hide hastened to divert attention away from themselves and towards others, and fervent crowds joined in the often unfounded and usually brutal punishments meted out to the perpetrators. Women zealously castigated those of their sex who were found guilty, often by kangaroo courts, of collaboration.

Women responded because it was made incumbent upon them to set the standard for other women and for their menfolk, and it addressed their need to be found adequate in an ideal world. An example of this is found in Jacques Tati’s film, Mon Oncle (1958), where, as Ross argues, the Arpel’s gate and high fence, each avenue of access regulated by the use of the remote control, act as an “instrument of exclusion” (Ross: 195). “Mme Arpel’s compulsive flurry of hygienic activity at the moment of entry and exit from the home: dusting the briefcase, the car bumpers, and so forth” represents the security one must exercise in order to keep

51 out the elements that would disturb the completeness of the world. By performing the cleansing rituals, Mme Arpel is ensuring that everything is complete, thus excluding anything extraneous in the form of “history, context, event” or anything else “non-discursive” from entering (Ross: 195). The fact that Tati has caricaturised modernity does not make the experience less real, and clever advertising sought to play into the fears and anxieties of women.

As a contradiction to this purging and whitening, adult literature of the time introduced an element of black, or noir, in order to create a homogenising greyness. Rolls notes in his analysis of Vian’s L'Écume des jours the attraction for the French of the new genre:

The shades of grey […] typify the tension inherent in the relationship between the United States and France. The contrary pulls of the narrative —the move from light into darkness—can be read allegorically as the shifting attitudes of a people thankful to the Americans for having liberated them from Nazi occupation into just another shade of occupation (2009: 38).

Ross quotes François Giroud for a glimpse of the difficulties facing the newly liberated population, showing that it was not only appliances, but fashion and cars as well:

[A]nyone who wasn’t in France in those days cannot understand what it means to be hungry for consumer goods, from nylon stockings to refrigerators, from records to automobiles—to buy a car back then you had to get a purchase permit and then wait a year […] It’s very simple: in 1946 in France there was literally nothing (Ross 1999: 72).

Coca-Cola company’s president, Robert Woodruff, pledged commitment to the ideal that every man in uniform would be entitled to a bottle of Coca-Cola, which he termed “the essence of capitalism”, for a dime, irrespective of its price in real terms, and regardless of his deployment. Simultaneously, American Secretary of State George Marshall was introducing a plan by which economic support for

52 European countries would help to slow the spread of communism (Kuisel 1991:

98-99). Thus the presence of American personnel automatically included the existence of their favourite drink, Coca-Cola, which ostensibly became the symbol of Western and especially American civilisation:

[It] was not simply a product, it was an image: that of the consumer society, on the wings of mass advertising, […] a weapon in the global ideological battle against Communism (Gildea 1997: 9-10).

Simenon and his family, resident since the end of the war in America, embraced the consumer society. For him, comfortable living had merely been interrupted by the Occupation, his means enabling him to live without being subject to the privation faced by the French or even that imposed upon American citizens of the era. Assouline facetiously refers to this as Simenon’s “Coca-Cola period”, where he not only took to drinking the beverage in an attempt to address his growing addiction to alcohol (André Parinaud 1955: 90-95), but absorbed like blotting paper the culture and ambience of his adopted country (Assouline 1997:

240). Simenon continued to prosper:

[T]he success of the Maigret novels gave Simenon the means to live in luxury, and from the 1930s until the 1980s he usually did […]. In the United States, whose abundance was all the more marvelous and enjoyable after four years in war-stricken France, Simenon saw no reason to change his ways (Keller 2002: 457).

Simenon’s embracing of modern conveniences and his choice of comfortable living does not automatically mean he is to be judged as impervious to the conflict of those less privileged than himself. His novels reflect a nostalgia and acute awareness of the political, social and cultural vagaries of his adopted country; from wherever his prosperity allowed him to live, he continued to view

France—and Paris in particular—through the prism of his strong political beliefs.

53 He uses his novels as an avenue to explore contemporary events and to consider alternative solutions to world problems.

Simenon’s political biases

While Simenon’s biographers mostly agree on the paucity of novels dealing openly with war, they disagree upon which do, and which do not, involve wartime settings or refer to events within the milieu of war. Dubourg quotes an incident in which he feels Simenon speaks uncharacteristically of politics in his memoirs

(1973: 145). He in fact speaks openly in writings other than novels—for example in his memoirs and in contributions as a journalist and foreign correspondent—of his exasperation with political issues. Ernest Mandel quotes an interview with Jürg

Altwegg in which Simenon declares categorically that:

[n]inety per cent of the population […] are slaves […] including the higher and even the top-most grades of the employed, are slaves who do not notice that they are exploited by a tiny minority (Mandel 1984: 121).22

It is a common misapprehension that Simenon was apolitical—Becker

(1999: 4) refers to this, Marco Roth (2007: 4) accepts it, Alder (2013: 15) acknowledges critical acceptance of the idea. Bresler quotes Denis Tillinac as saying that “[Simenon’s] indifference to ‘great events’ is that of a man of the street.

One can read all of the hundreds of novels of Simenon without knowing that in

1917 the Russia of the Tsars became the USSR… One can read his novels without knowing who in 1939, declared war upon whom” (1983: 123-24) Bresler asserts that this goes deeper than being a-historical: “There is almost a refusal by Simenon to accept the reality, in his writing, of the Second World War”. He emphasises his point by quoting from several novels, both Maigret and others, written from 1939

22 Mandel quotes here from an interview called “Der Goethe der schweigenden Mehrheit: Georges Simenon: Ein Romancier auf der Suche nach dem nackten Menschen”, Die Zeit, 2 April 1976. 54 to 1945, as well as refuting Simenon’s excuses for not having produced an insider’s aspect of the conflict—that he had not written much during the war years. Platten seems to support the view of biographers that Simenon is apolitical and that he has chosen to ignore the war, stating that

In his fiction, real time lapses. There are no dates, few allusions to historical events […]. This refusal to connive with any kind of historical narrative was apparently motivated by his vehement dislike of the world of politics, which he saw as contaminated by dishonest ideologues and corrupt chancers (2011, 45).

Platten makes reference elsewhere to Simenon’s own circumstances, saying that one of the reasons Simenon is “treated contemptuously in histories of the modern crime novel in France” is on account of his “indifference to politics” (2011:

40-41). Assouline avers that Simenon continued being Simenon, “a novelist involved in his own work” rather than changing the rhythm of his life to accommodate the “pace of the events shaking Europe” during the war years (1997:

166). He would no doubt agree with Roth’s judgement (2007: 2) that Simenon was

“the man who lived a comfortable war in an aristocrat’s château, hosting dinners for German officers while the Nazi-run film industry adapted nine of his novels”.

According to Gavin Lambert:

[S]ince he sees the world outside his novels as an artificial creation of politics, Simenon never 'dates' his fiction. Only a few scattered internal clues locate the action in the 1930s or later. Only a light handful of his 214 books acknowledges the Second World War. A private theatre of fear and greed and anger exists within its own time continuum, and history is what happens in people's minds every day (1976: 177).

While still a teenager, Simenon had covered the post-WWI trial of Liège’s collaborators in his capacity as reporter (Brunsdale 2010: 488). Eskin labels the

Gazette de Liège, in which Simenon worked as a reporter for three and a half years, as a “reactionary, antisemitec, protofascistic paper”, going on to say that Simenon

55 accepted without question the paper’s “ideological line” (1987: 37). He assisted a

“conservative squire” to a resounding victory in the legislative elections of 16

November 1919 by writing persuasive political articles on the candidate’s behalf

(Lemaire 2002: 100). Assouline sees his political sentiments as “remarkably consistent” from that time to his final years, defining his politics as “populist and conservative rather than reactionary” (1997: 167). As a foreign correspondent,

Simenon had interviewed Leon Trotsky, who reportedly had just finished reading one of his novels, on the island of Prinkipo. He allegedly saw Hitler ten times at the

Kaiserhof (Paris-Soir, June 16-17, 1933). Becker links one of his romans durs with

Soviet injustices in the Stalin era (1999: 100).

Simenon’s later lack of interest in political debates and party-political machinations do not equate, therefore, to a retreat from the political sphere or an active role in history. As he comments: “Je ne m’occupe pas de politique. Je n’en reste pas moins intrigué par un problème qu’elle pose: celui de la sincérité et de la non-sincérité” (QJV Tome 1: 115). Indeed, Simenon bore such ill-will towards de

Gaulle that he openly admits, with a disclaimer that he feels ashamed of doing so, to hoping for the failure of French policy, not necessarily because it is unworkable, but because it is initiated by de Gaulle (QJV Tome 2: 44). The degree of his disenchantment can be seen in his irritable comments on the failed coup d’état against de Gaulle in 1961, followed by his claim that, were he French, he would be unable to resist writing a new “J’accuse” (QJV Tome 3: 92).

Simenon goes so far as to compare Hitler’s obsession with the Jews with de

Gaulle’s claims of French greatness, saying:

Hitler a dû parler de juifs […] parce qu’on lui demandait de parler et que, en apparence, c’était un bon sujet [...] de Gaulle a parlé, lui, de la grandeur de la France parce que le Français aime qu’on lui parle de sa grandeur. Où cela le

56 mènera-t-il? Il n’en sait rien lui-même. C’est sa légende, maintenant, qui prend sa place et qui gouverne (QJV Tome 1: 115).

In a journal entry dated June 1960, he discusses articles he has written in the past on the subject of the Congo, on world hunger, his predictions in 1933 for the future of Europe, and on other politically charged topics. He then meditates that, in order to avoid an unwanted partisan bias in his novels, he has instinctively developed a “règle d’hygiène” in which “je me débarrassais d’avance de ce que je ne voulais pas mettre dans mes romans, du pittoresque, justement, et aussi des considérations plus ou moins philosophiques ou politiques” (QJV Tome 1: 91—his emphasis). This interesting application of the idea of hygiene in his work can be directly compared with the frenetic state preoccupation with political hygiene.

The cartoon in Ross (108), involving a bathtub and washing powder as tools of torture, can be seen in the same light. Simenon clarifies his prioritisation by explaining that, rejecting “au fur et à mesure” he uses in the form of articles “ce qui ne pouvait pas me servir et qui risquait de m’encombrer" (QJV Tome 1: 91-92).

Alder (2013: 135) comments upon Simenon’s parallel outputs during the 1930s, during which the author produced novels at the same time as he analysed developments in France for contribution to newspapers and magazines. This suggests not only that Simenon does have a political opinion but that, if his political articles were to be read in parallel with novels from the same period, the former would serve to make explicit certain aspects left implicit in the latter.

Simenon likes, however, to be mysterious and to avoid categorisation and definition as far as possible. Jacques Tati similarly insists that he “had nothing to say” in movies such as Les Vacances de M. Hulot and Mon Oncle (1999: 205), whereas a close study of the works themselves would indicate otherwise. As well,

57 Lloyd quotes Roger Vaillard in the novel Drôle de jeu (1945), deemed to have been

“very clearly linked to his resistance activities”, but in the preface of which he sees fit to make a disclaimer; he “insists somewhat dubiously on the purely imaginary qualities of his book, denying that it is a ‘historical novel’ or a ‘novel about resistance’” (2003: 157). Aware that critics, at least, would seek hidden significance in his works, Simenon comments in his memoirs regarding works completed in 1954:

J’écris beaucoup de romans mais on cherchait in vain, même en les “lisant entre les lignes”, comme certains critiques, un reflet de mon état d’esprit du moment.23

Later, he explains in more detail that:

[d]epuis longtemps des psychologues, des psychanalystes, des biographes de différents pays qui, pour la plupart, ne m’ont jamais rencontré, dont quelques-uns seulement m’ont écrit, se sont attachés à “découvrir ma vérité” à travers mes romans et mes personnages. Or, je me connais assez pour affirmer qu’ils se sont tous trompés et qu’un ou deux d’entre eux seulement sont arrivés à une demi-vérité (MI : 421).

Obviously enjoying a game of cat and mouse, Simenon at once invites and rejects reading for non-explicit or allegorical meaning while taunting his readers, informing them they are doubtless on the wrong track. He disingenuously claims that he is not consciously aware of there being a theme in his novels (MI: 252). On the other hand, after assuring the reader that he recounts neither his life story nor anecdotes about people he knows, he tells the reader with mock severity: “Je n’ai pas l’intention non plus d’exposer mes idées. Si j’en ai, je suppose qu’elles sont dans mes romans et, dans ce cas, on finira bien par les y dénicher” (QJV Tome 1:

23-24). This, of course, directly contradicts the quote above and reveals the treachery of relying on an isolated quote in order to determine his focus.

23 Georges Simenon, Mémoires intimes (Paris: Presses de la cité, 1981) p.364 [hereafter MI in text references]. 58 Duperray (1973: 100) is convinced that Simenon’s writings are not just speaking for those who have no voice, but accurately reflect the author’s interior life and his own memories. Alder (2013: 189) quotes two occasions in the 1980s during which Simenon claims to have intentionally set out to experience life for the express purpose of communicating his encounters to his readers via his novels.

Becker recalls a candid comment by Simenon in a documentary on the Galapagos

Isles, in which he declares categorically that, lacking imagination, he draws upon lived experiences for inspiration for his novels (1999: 2). Francis Lacassin judges the author to be a moralist who, under the pretext of a novel “nous met à l’épreuve avec des incidents puisés dans la vie” (1973 : 183), while Astier de la Vigerie sees him as “aussi l’expression de la petite bourgeoisie française du Nord” and that “[i]l a pourtant un signe particulier: il ne parle jamais de l’armée, ni de la guerre, ni du prestige du drapeau” (1973: 265). Becker states that “all of his protagonists are incarnations of the author at different stages of his life” (1999: 21). Keller’s opinion is that he is fooling himself by his denial that his novels contain any part of himself or deal with events which impact upon his life, saying that:

whatever deep truths Simenon has to tell about himself are to be found in his novels. The screen of fiction freed him to explore emotions and ideas and responses that in the memoirs and other autobiographical writings, all invaluable in other ways, seem flat and more in the nature of self- justification than self-revelation (2002: 467).

These quotes reveal the reluctance with which novelists admit to using real- life experiences in their novels, either from reticence or from a need to be above the everyday world in their private lives. On the one hand, there is a secret pride that they have conveyed part of themselves anonymously, and on the other a craving to be seen as having an imagination which does not have to rely upon reality to create a story.

59 As has been discussed, Simenon can be seen to harbour strong political viewpoints and bias, and those views can be seen to be clearly discernible in his novels. He does not try to write the big picture, but concentrates on the reactions of one, usually male, person. Evelyne Sullerot groups his protagonists as “les jeunes”, “les solitaires de cinquante or soixante ans”, “les veufs ou les cocus”, “les grands patrons” or other predictable categories. She goes on to explain that

Simenon’s characters are prisoners of things, of objects, of smells, of housework and the kitchen—everyday confines that can neither be mastered nor forgotten

(1973: 94-95). Through the struggles of the protagonist, Simenon examines the impact of the world on the ordinary person. Bresler quotes Régine, Simenon’s first wife, as saying that because his focus was on the “naked man”, Simenon did not evince an interest in the contemporary world. Acknowledging that the author suffered much on a personal level during the war, his wife explains that:

[h]e doesn’t study man in the frame of political events. He studies man for his desires, his illusions, his sorrows, his joys. And whether there is a war or not, doesn’t reflect on what he writes (1983: 128).

The examination of three of Simenon’s novels and cross-referencing of some details with his memoirs and those novels dealing with wartime situations reveal that, if not separately, certainly together his writings expose much of

Simenon’s political beliefs and his frame of mind in relation to world events.

Ambivalence about France and the United States

Simenon was full of admiration for the American method of allowing a person to retain his/her origins while being an American citizen, quoting the example of his long-time friend who became known as the “French born director,

Jean Renoir” (MI: 311). Early in 1951, with his son at school in the US, he thought

60 seriously of joining what he called the “club” of American citizenship, despite his annoyance that L'Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique had asked him to delay this step until after the said academy could bestow an honour upon him in his homeland. A further attraction was the lack of an identity card in the US (312).

Had he not become involved in watching a televised commentary on the hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy at the time, he would have realised a dream by becoming the “Belgian born George Simenon” (MI: 311). Instead, the events at that time so horrified him that he changed his mind. After his “illustre confrère”

Dashiell Hammett was imprisoned for refusing to appear before the hearings, which Simenon quotes as “tristement célèbre sous le nom de ‘chasse aux sorcières’”(MI: 312-13), Simenon began to see a huge gap between reality and the

American Constitution which he claims to know almost by heart. Reminded of the reasons for which he had fled France in 1945, he decided that, although he was happy in his own circle and his love for the country itself had not abated, there was an unfortunate similarity between this country and discrimination in France,

Belgium, Spain and Germany (313). Worried about friends who lived in fear of being denounced and afraid to discuss it with anyone lest he himself become compromised, he, like the majority of Americans, stayed silent. Although he remained for three more years, having counted the cost he renounced his desire to become an American citizen, remarking sadly, “J’en voulais à McCarthy et à ses pareils de salir ‘mon’ Amérique”(MI: 313). On a 1952 voyage to Paris and car trip to Cannes, he discovered quite by accident that his friends Charlie and Oona

Chaplin had definitively left the US a couple of days before the Simenons left on their trip (374).

61 The oblique approach

Higgins (1996: 1-3) describes the process of approaching forbidden topics such as political bias, disagreement with government decisions and so on by relating a story of the film director, Henri Langlois, who is said as a young boy to have devised a system enabling him to see more films. By mingling with the theatre-goers exiting after a showing, but working his way backwards through the crowd into the theatre, he positioned himself to watch the new show without paying. Higgins’s thesis explores the works of Truffaut, Duras, Malle, Godard and others to demonstrate that they use the essence of the “Langlois manoeuvre” to give the impression of ignoring the “political events and ideas of the era” as they concentrate on the “innovative strategies of representation” (2). While Simenon, in spite of leaving Gallimard in 1946, deals with nostalgia more in line with the

Série noire24 than with the Nouveau Roman that Higgins is discussing, it can be shown that in many cases he uses the same “Langlois manoeuvre”, ostensibly omitting all reference to the war while allowing his writings to reflect the

“depersonalisation and alienation of postwar capitalism” (Higgins: 3).

In explaining the difference between a realistic depiction of war and occupation as opposed to a literary approach, Margaret Atack has quoted Maurice

Nadeau as concluding that “[the realistic representations] are valuable, and often very moving, as documents. Literary works need to step back, to ‘disengage’ themselves from the event” (1989: 18). Crime literature—whether the roman noir,

Simenon’s roman dur or the Série noire—served to offer both the writer and the reader “a highly codified format in which to remember the past” (Gorrara: 2005:

24 Here I quote Alistair Rolls: “Nostalgia is the point at which memory and fantasy are entwined and appear to be one” from unpublished work of Alistair Rolls, “Venus and the Motley Marianne: A Prose Reading of Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma contre C.Q.F.D.” (University of Newcastle, 2007, 1). 62 134). Their very obliquity allowed the reader to absorb the content at his or her own level as well as providing a liminal space from which to observe with some degree of objectivity the issues at play. Rolls and Walker, in a critique of works by

Baudelaire and others, describe this disengagement in terms of disavowal: “in order to contemplate the harsh reality of the prosaic Paris of the present, the fetishist poet invents a utopian vision of the past—the myth of old Paris” (2009: 8).

The perceived need to cling to a mythical past “in order to anchor firmly the seemingly vertiginous present, everyday life and mentalities” creates a terrain vague from which to negotiate the present and set a path for the future (Susan

Weiner 2000: 2-3). Regarding realistic portrayals, for many readers an account such as that of Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (1985), in which the protagonist forms a relationship with an enemy operative in an attempt to extract information only to be complicit in his execution, can be very confrontational. When a tangible crime such as murder is substituted for a war scenario, and an impartial judge dispenses objective justice, readers can assimilate the consequences of the misdemeanour because the situation is not one in which they can easily imagine finding themselves.

Terrain vague

Those familiar with the Maigret novels will know that Inspector Maigret’s focus in investigating crime is to understand the motive and the person rather than solve the crime, so by removing the recognisable emotional triggers from a situation, one can more clearly understand the issue itself. Like many writers,

Simenon demands the objectivity of time (recoil) and location to enable him to address matters which have affected him personally. One of the consequences of

63 this is that uninformed readers think mistakenly that he ignores the entire issue of war. He is not oblivious to the outside world but needs all the components of distance—temporal, physical and psychological—to deal with backgrounds and storylines involving the Occupation. This deliberate ploy allows him to bring objectivity to his subject, which writers of the time, including Vercors, Léo Malet and others, using different approaches, were able to achieve.

In a literal sense, a terrain vague is an abandoned site such as vacant land, a wreckers’ yard, an industrial zone or a graffiti-covered railway yard. While Henrik

Gustafsson (2013: 58) states that the term itself originated from the Surrealist movement, coined by Man Ray as the title of his 1932 pictorial representation of the concept, this may refer to the literal sense, which of course is only one of the many nuances of the term. Goulet (2009: 6) quotes from Emile Gaboriau’s 1868

Monsieur Lecoq25 to show that the crime novelist uses the phrase, as modern crime writers including Simenon do, to designate a sinister, isolated area where crimes are committed. Patrick Barron (2014: 3-4) references many alternate terms and concepts for terrain vague, demonstrating the complexity of it even from architectural, landscape or urban perspectives. This of course lends it to inventive literary interpretations that mirror its practical applications.

For the purposes of this thesis, the term terrain vague represents a complex buffer zone incorporating elements of no man’s land, marginality, exclusion, temporal and geographic space as well as a blank page upon which to project meaning. It will be used interchangeably with liminal space as a transitional state between two processes, paralleling Henitiuk’s linking of life

25 This gives more weight to Simenon’s intentional use of the phrase if we consider that in 1919, in his capacity as a reporter, the young journalist entitled his regular column “Hors du Poulailler” and signed it M. le Coq (Marnham 1992: 58). 64 crises and rites of passage with liminality (2007: 15). It can be seen as a psychological liminal space or threshold when an individual or society has consciously left, or been forced to leave, that which is familiar and trusted but has not yet fully crossed into the alternative. A literary terrain vague creates a zone across which contentious subjects, in this case the recent events of the Occupation and other disturbing contemporary political developments, can be observed through the filters of dislocation and allegory (Rolls and Walker 2009: 201). This is where literature of the period has a part to play by providing an alternative to historical reality. While substituting situations which ostensibly occur in a parallel universe, the novels are in fact, as scholars such as Gorrara (2003, 2005, 2012) have shown, allegories of the prevailing climate. This tactic allows the reader to absorb the situation by osmosis, to take ownership of his or her reactions and feelings, and thereby to negotiate a stance with which he or she feels comfortable.

A terrain vague created by the tension of distance and proximity, either spatial or temporal, allows the work to function as an allegory providing a buffer zone. The attraction of this technique is that it makes available a choice to deny reality or to accept and to assimilate.

To many French people and commentators, the phenomenal rise of the

French standard of living during the nineteen-fifties and sixties represented the corruption of French culture as a result of Americanisation. The end of Empire and loss of colonies such as Algeria meant an adjustment to a new reality—France had to be modern, because if not, it would be equated with the ex-colonies. A perceivable distance had to be observed and modern, well-run, clean households could be seen as a national asset by reflecting the nation’s welfare. By reinventing the home, one reflected the reinvention of the nation (Ross 1999: 78). While

65 denouncing the “civilisation du gadget and the Coca-colonisation of France”, people in fact actively sought progress and modernisation for the comforts this advancement brought (Laurence Wylie 1977: 380). The market was flooded with

Belgian cars or unwieldy second-hand imports bought from US servicemen stationed in France. These large, decorative, impractical vehicles were more of a liability than an asset in a post-war economy with their high fuel consumption, and

Paris and the nation had to be remodelled to accommodate them (Bellos 1999:

199). However, like all progress, advancement brought an unexpected sense of personal cost. Patrice Higonnet (2002: 1) describes how the myth of the ‘good old days’ became synonymous with their mythological remembrance: Paris represents the height of modernity, mystery and tradition, and rules the world in art, fashion, social revolution and even in pleasure, crime, sex and science, and so on. By claiming this, the French were able to justify the civilising benefits of colonisation on, for example, the African continent, because this would improve the lives of the indigenous people (Higonnet: 4). Only when this myth has outlived its usefulness can it begin to be replaced by a new one, while the falling trajectory of one myth crossing the rise of the new creates the liminal space of a people overawed by the future but now unable to return to old ways.

Television, which was becoming a part of life in France, had created fear and distrust as a “suspect” medium because of the circumstances of its origins in that country. Prototype transmitters on the Eiffel Tower had been sabotaged before the entry of the Wehrmacht in June 1940, meaning that French people saw the medium from the outset in 1943 as part of the German Propaganda machine.

From 1945, it was used as the tool of the provisional government’s Ministry of

Information. This ambivalence towards new, alienating modernity can best be

66 illustrated by the fact that the same people who flocked to the movies to see

Hollywood films also marched down the streets chanting “US go home!”(Bellos,

1999: 203). The wealth and power of America threatened to change forever the unique quality the people claimed represented true Frenchness (post 1789) in a way the brutality and invasive force of Germany had not been able to (Bellos: 137).

Germany was an enemy to which France was opposed or could offer opposition— even if this was severely compromised by the Vichy regime. The conflicting loyalties of post-Liberation France meant an inability to be neatly opposed to the

US, hence the severity of the épuration in which, as we have seen, men became scapegoats for political frustration and women bore the brunt of the moral compromise.

In his film Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953), Jacques Tati captures this ambivalence through the attitudes of two guests at a seaside resort. The old couple who are always at the dinner table before everyone else, and who wander around “sightseeing”, are at once the connecting element and the contrast between old and new. Murray Pratt and Alistair Rolls explain that this behaviour can be read as:

exemplary of singular plurality or hexagonality. Although the couple walk in the same direction, and to all intents and purposes together, they continually face in opposite directions. She looks forward, with a constantly happy and optimistic appraisal of the world that she finds before her; he, on the other hand, walks behind her, looking forever backwards (2011: 36).

The wife sometimes loses sight of her husband, and constantly urges him to catch up by saying peremptorily, “Dépêche-toi, Henri!” When she gives him seashells she has collected, he petulantly throws them over his shoulder. Like a

French citizen reluctant to leave his image of Old France, he is suspicious and unwilling to embrace the modernity that America has to offer, while obediently

67 following his wife’s progression towards the future. Pratt and Rolls show that this scene can be read as depicting either “the French love-hate stance towards

Americanization or [...] as a culturally non-specific attitude towards modernity”

(2011: 36), the latter reading being supported by the Hulot-as-Everyman analysis favoured by Bellos, for example. For the purposes of this thesis, this double meaning is sustained and promoted by Simenon’s use of the figure of the terrain vague.

There is also a good visual example of a terrain vague in the Tati movie Mon

Oncle. In the opening scenes we see a pack of happy, scavenging dogs wandering around the town square—which can be seen as terrain d’entente or common ground—scrounging rubbish, greeting each other and appearing to have fun in a similar manner to the children following the tractor-drawn vehicle in Tati’s earlier film Jour de Fête (1949). It has been othered by the fact that the title of the film appears as graffiti on a brick wall. Throughout the film, the director avoids jump cuts, or instantaneous cuts between seemingly unrelated worlds, by interposing either a neutral ground or a particular terrain vague (described below). This obviates the need for establishing shots with each change of location, while allowing the viewer to adjust to the transition through the medium of liminal space.

M. Hulot’s sister, Mme Arpel, whose husband has an allocated parking space outside his modern plastics factory, lives in one of the new, American-style suburbs of Paris in which, as she is fond of saying, “tout communique”. Bellos notes that when designing the set for Mon Oncle, Tati gave no details as to the exact layout of the Arpel’s house other than that it had to be “a magnificent factory of cleanliness” (1999: 207). While his sister presumably has her origins in the world

68 in which the protagonist dwells, she has apparently moved up to better times and graduated to the “other side”. Her house is a dream of ultra-modernity, with wall- to-wall white goods in the kitchen, air-conditioning, a remotely controlled gate, and acres of shining, sterile surfaces to be constantly dusted, vacuumed and adjusted. On the other hand, the protagonist M. Hulot’s apartment is a hotchpotch of old and even older styles added onto each other in the “traditional cramped and twisted ‘old quarter’ of Paris” (Bellos 1999: 206). A maze of stairs leads this way and that, enabling Hulot to be seen from outside on several different staircases as he ascends to his upper-level dwelling. The filming of M. Hulot’s residence was done at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a seventh-century region recognised in antiquity as a bastion against the Roman persecution of Christians, so the contrast between this and the modern film set is very marked (Bellos 1999: 213-14). What Tati is attempting to show is the contradiction of an era that Ross describes as “one Paris intersecting and colliding with another in the process of demolition and reconstruction—a reconstruction that […] like the Haussmannian transformation of the previous century, was completely given over to traffic” (1999: 23).

Prosaically, Bellos (1999: 206) agrees that Tati may have conceived the scenario, either consciously or unconsciously, from the post-war construction booms to accommodate the influx of automobiles.

As Ross (1999: 5) points out, the appliances are symbolic in that their introduction within a disproportionately short space of time brought confusion and disruption to the lifestyle of French housewives. The unfamiliar objects tended to dictate how the owners would move and interact with them, forcing consumers to turn to American television in order to learn appropriate responses.

M. Hulot, happy to maintain the status quo, has become a slightly disgraceful misfit

69 in his sister’s world, and is only completely happy when he crosses the terrain vague to his own domain. M. Arpel is jealous of the relationship shared by his son,

Gérard, who sees the falseness of his parents’ existence, and M. Hulot, who is frankly uneasy and out of place in his sister’s world. M. Hulot acts as a conduit, along with the rag and bone men who collect recyclable goods with which the factory makes its plastic hoses, as all freely circulate in the French quarter, the nouvelle banlieue and the factory. Hulot and Gérard communicate by dividing their time between two diametrically opposed worlds, while the family dog, Dackie, parallels the escapades with the pack of scruffy dogs in the town square (Bellos

1999: 209).

Whenever he visits his sister, M. Hulot goes to her house via the narrow, weed-covered terrain vague, filmed at Créteil, a commune in the south-eastern suburbs of Paris. On this vacant lot, a stall-holder sells dubious but irresistible wares, and small boys play in happy abandonment, much like the pack of dogs.

This is the physical place where the protagonist recovers his equilibrium after his encounters with the unpalatable “other side”, or braces himself before leaving his comfort zone. Bellos explains that M. Hulot is the inversion of l’oncle d’Amérique, a

French phrase to describe “a rich relative who swims in from out of the blue, distributing largesse, or who acts as a kindly lender of last resort”. Instead, this uncle has “no money, no job, no capacity for anything much apart from warmth, conviviality, tolerance and (fairly mild) fun” (1999: 205—author’s parentheses).

Mon Oncle displays the conflict of New France/Old France—a France beginning to show gaps so wide as to create different countries—as well as the ambivalence of

French people wanting to follow American modernising trends while retaining what they perceive as being truly French.

70 Simenon’s terrains vagues

Simenon almost exclusively chooses a locale that is distant geographically and/or temporally from the location in which he physically composes the work.

This prerequisite to his “decantation of memory” quoted by Assouline (1997: 256) adds a freedom to his expression and forms a buffer between creator and creation.

Some of the terrains vagues from which he composes include: writing about Paris when he is elsewhere, including the Vendée; writing about the provinces while in

Paris; moving to the US for a season and finally, moving to Switzerland, from where he continues to write about France. This mirrors the ethos of Ernest

Hemingway, whose character, planning to leave Paris, notes, “Maybe away from

Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan” (1964: 6).

When Simenon discovered that the FFI were showing more than a passing interest in his activities towards the end of the war, he hid at La Roche-Gautreau, the

“smallest, quietest, most isolated spot in the region at that time” (Assouline 1997:

212). His flight to the US, counter to the cultural climate of the time, fits the same category, creating both a haven from which he could investigate various ways of expressing his concerns about the situation in Paris and the time lapse of ten years allowing him to achieve symbolic objectivity. As is evident in the novel Maigret et le corps sans tête, (Chapter Four, below) it was easier to be dispassionate from the other side of the Atlantic. Part of his flight, a theme in so many of his romans durs, was his immediate relocation to Cannes when he could not cope with what Paris had become during his exile in the US, and his ultimate move to Switzerland, which no doubt had both financial and emotional benefits (Bresler 1983: 90).

Rolls and Walker describe the emotional and psychological situation of

French citizens of the post-war years in the following way:

71 The French identity had been squeezed out of the picture, lost somewhere between de Gaulle’s London-based Free French rebellion and the culture of collaboration fostered under Pétain’s Vichy government. In 1944 the signification of French patriotism shifted from the latter condition to the former, bringing with it a cathartic period that vacillated between euphoria and revenge (2009: 33).

The author’s move to the US at the exact moment that US forces were pouring into France and the country was being flooded with American goods, values and influence under the Marshall Plan creates an opposition that adds tension to those novels set in France but written in the distant location. This notwithstanding, the “headlong, dramatic, and breathless” transformation of

French society from a “rural, empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized, decolonized, and urban one”, with its “almost cargo-cult-like households and streets” would have affected Simenon less than the average French person, as he had lived—and continued to live in the US—in the comparative luxury which his profession brought him (Ross 1999: 4).

He is very much aware of his own need for a distancing technique whilst composing, mentioning it in his memoirs as a personal necessity. In order to write, he deliberately isolates himself from family and friends, creating a neutral space in which he can give rein to his creative talent:

Hier, vers 3h 45, je me suis installé à ce même bureau, le "Do not Disturb" aux deux portes, le café à côté de moi, quatre douzaines de crayons neufs fraîchement taillés, un bloc neuf aussi, de papier jaunâtre, et l’enveloppe de papier bulle avec les noms, âge, adresse, de mes personnages (QJV Tome 2: 72).

One way Simenon deploys the terrain vague in his work is to set his stories or plots in other countries, where he ostensibly does not deal with the events of

France. However, the imagery and symbolism tell us he has simply moved the events to another place, allowing himself to discuss them more freely. Some

72 examples of this appear in Crime impuni, set in Liège, and in La Neige était sale, set in an unidentified country (Chapter Three, below). This distancing, paralleling

Bellos’s reading of Tati’s films, evokes both France and everywhere else at the same time, the protagonist being not only culture-specific but, paradoxically, also

M. Tout-le-Monde or Everyman at the same time.

A second usage of the terrain vague is Simenon’s deliberate mention of that state of location or emotional separation, which occurs especially in the novels of the Occupation and post-war years. Platten (2006: 26) highlights Simenon’s use of a courtyard bench in Les Anneaux de Bicêtre (1963) as an example of this kind of liminal space. Fabre explains that the description “étranger” generates three different avatars: geographical or ethnic, social and metaphysical. He shows us how Simenon constantly claims for the protagonist “son coin”, “son terroir”, “sa place”, “son trou”, “son alvéole”, “sa niche” and so on (1981: 112). This need for one’s own corner leads to what he calls an obsessional theme of the author of a disenfranchised people constantly seeking restoration to its own place. Fabre

(114-15) highlights Simenon’s Jewish protagonists in Les Fiançailles de M. Hire

(1933) and Le Petit homme d'Arkhangelsk, a young Frenchman in La Cage de Verre

(1971) and the everyday American in La Boule Noire (1955) to show the separation of the character from the known and understood milieu and the constant quest for closure. Writing a preface for Arthur Omré's Traqué (1944),

Simenon (1973: 370) acknowledges his own obsession with conceiving and animating his characters from his isolated corner. This self-conscious use of the concept of a character’s unique place demonstrates the author’s awareness of the importance of separation, if only as an emotional space.

73 In L’Écume des jours, in which Vian implies that he is writing from America, the author creates a similar distancing effect. Vian’s references to American jazz, ethereal characters and a surrealist storyline addresses the uncertainty of the post-war years by creating a parallel universe in which the characters’ actions allow both an escape and a space in which to negotiate a new posture. Vian acknowledges that he is deliberately creating a terrain vague by telling us in the avant-propos that “l’histoire est entièrement vraie, puisque je l’ai imaginée d’un bout à l’autre”. To compensate for his love for the fair and unattainable Elise, the protagonist Colin invents the surrogate Chloé, who is the music of Duke Ellington

(L’Écume: 67). Never having been to the US, Vian nevertheless sets the tone by mentioning Ellington’s music in the avant-propos in a memorandum purporting to come from New Orleans (the home of jazz music) and dated 10 March 1946. Vian has already presaged that the novel is an allegory by explaining that the material realisation of his story “consiste essentiellement en une projection de la réalité, en atmosphère biaise et chauffée, sur un plan de référence irrégulièrement ondulé et présentant de la distorsion” (L’Écume: 17-18). This illustrates how a narrative can be shaped by the reader in order to fulfil the reader’s needs. Rolls explains that

L’Écume des jours deals with the contradiction of that era by “its embrace of jazz culture and its loathing of mechanisation and industrialisation”, including the paradox presented by the title (2004: 104). Elise, inaccessible because she is the lover of Colin’s friend Chick, can be seen to represent French tradition, while Chloé,

“attractive and fashionable ersatz”, signifies the hunger of French women for modern developments in clothing, materials and preoccupation with high fashion

(Rolls 2004: 108).

Simenon usually provides his protagonist with a place where he goes to

74 regroup when he feels threatened or needs solitude. An example in his work Crime impuni, which can be read allegorically as a comment on the Franco-German conflict through two World Wars, is the icy bed to which Elie retreats when he needs to process developments with which he feels uncomfortable (Crime impuni:

53-54); later on, it is a reception booth, tainted like an animal lair with his body odour (136, 140). Another fragmentation of reality is created by the separation of space into discrete zones of light and darkness; both the initial perceived injustice and consequent crime occur on a vacant block not far from where Elie boards: “Il existait un terrain vague, un peu plus loin, avec, légèrement en retrait des maisons, une palissade qui en interdisait l’accès. C’était juste à la limite d’une zone obscure et d’une zone de lumière” (64). This self-conscious juxtaposition of illumination and obscurity is not surprising considering Simenon’s apprenticeship with

Continental Films. Lloyd, in discussing one of Continental’s most celebrated films,

Le Corbeau, notes the “chiaroscuro symbolism” of conflicting good and evil portrayed by a swaying electric light bulb alternately casting shadow and light onto the characters (2003: 210). Paul Schrader explains how the noir mood is signalled cinematically in film noir: “Ceiling lights are hung low and floor lamps are seldom more than five feet high. One always has the suspicion that if the lights were suddenly flipped on the characters would shriek and shrink from the scene like Count Dracula at sunrise” (2003: 57). The tension produced by the light reflects the internal tension of the characters, emphasising the liminal aspect of the scene.

This can be compared with the tension of colliding cultures as seen in Vian’s tender evocation of Colin and Chloé listening to music together:

75 À l’endroit où les fleuves se jettent dans la mer, il se forme une barre difficile à franchir, et de grands remous écumeux où dansent les épaves. Entre la nuit du dehors et la lumière de la lampe, les souvenirs refluaient de l’obscurité, se heurtaient à la clarté et, tantôt immergés, tantôt apparents, montraient leur ventre blanc et leurs dos argenté (L’Écume: 156).

Here, the gravity of the shipwrecks is contrasted to memories that leap like playful sea-creatures against the opposing darkness and lamplight, alternately hiding and revealing white fronts and silver backs. The convergence of the inflowing river and the incoming waves has created a terrain vague where a sandbar impedes the way. The foaming eddies where fresh water meets salt can be read as a powerful allegory of the confusion and contradiction of the Cold War period. Memories of a mythological better past, alternately desired and eschewed, break against the desire for modernity. This in turn can be compared to a particular post-war novel of Simenon’s, Feux Rouges (1955), in which the protagonist’s fascination with a casual acquaintance leads to the brutal rape of the protagonist’s wife. Again, the alternating suspicion and enchantment of Maigret towards Madame Calas in Maigret et le corps sans tête (see Chapter Four) reveals a similar fluctuation of recall and rebuff, and can be read in the same context as Vian.

All can be mapped onto the post-war emotional and mental dilemmas of French citizens because they serve as mental images of the abstract concept of their confusion.

By intentionally mentioning terrains vagues while writing from that perspective, Simenon’s texts function as a mise en abyme of his own isolation. Like a person standing between two mirrors with the images infinitely reflecting each other, the concept replicates and reinforces itself until it is inextricably woven into the fabric of the story. We can see two examples of the use of mirrors to create a terrain vague in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms (152). He constructs a liminal

76 space between the idyllic hospital stay and Frederic’s return to the front, when the couple books into a hotel room. Catherine sits on the bed and remarks sadly that she feels like a whore. While she can see herself in one mirror, Frederic sees her reflected and re-reflected between three mirrors. The same effect is recalled just before Catherine’s disastrous birthing experience, when he again sees her reflected in three mirrors in the hairdresser’s (292). A similar technique is used in Robert

Sabatier’s La Souris verte) to highlight the liminoid preceding the consummation of their love. In the interval of a rendition of Jean Cocteau’s Renaud et Armide, the interval itself forming a hiatus, they find themselves “placés entre deux miroirs qui répétaient notre couple à l’infini” (1990: 137. The terrain vague as location therefore acts in each of these texts as an allegory: of terrain vague as literary conceit and thus as an allegory of itself. This is evident in Simenon’s war or occupation novels, where he specifically mentions vacant blocks of land, alleyways, swamps or other threatening, haunted or haunting spaces as a means of building tension or depersonalising the peripheral characters. For example, in Les frères

Rico the protagonist looks from the porthole of the aeroplane on his way to Miami for an unnerving interview which he knows has the potential to change life as he knows it—if not life itself—forever. The scene below him, which can be seen as an allegory of his life at that time, is a stagnant irrigation canal inhabited by alligators,

“une jungle brûlante livrée aux bêtes innommables” (1952: 60).

Silence as terrain vague

The Occupation not only meant a loss of national sovereignty for the French but also a loss of democratic rights, such as the freedom of expression, a right greatly prized by the French (Gorrara 2003a: 22). As a reaction to the tight

77 German control of publishing and its collaborationist contributors, the Resistance issued its own publication, Les Éditions de Minuit. First appearing in the spring of

1943 as an underground avenue of expression for anti-German and anti-Vichy writers, Minuit had as one of its first contributions Le Silence de la mer. The novel was also the first work in occupied France not to bear Hitler’s stamp of approval.

However, because the writer Vercors (the pen-name of Jean Marcel Bruller), did not offer a brutal Nazi protagonist, Le Silence was criticised at the time by Arthur

Koestler in London as “psychologically phoney” with an inadequate message, and by the communists for the same reason. Vercors, like all other French writers of the time, had the dilemma of not knowing when the Occupation would end. He shared with Jean Cassou in 1940 his fear that it could very well last a hundred years (cited in Jackson 2001: 442). Le Silence was made into a movie by Jean-

Pierre Melville in 1947 and became an exemplary of the stance recommended for the French under the yoke of German occupation (by the FFI), who emphasised that the enemy need not necessarily be brutish and oppressive, but could instead be cultured and seemingly innocent (Milton Dank 1974: 178-79).

The theme of silence is of course explicit in Le Silence de la mer. Gorrara describes this vignette of French resistance as “perhaps the most [emblematic] […], an allegory of passive resistance in which an uncle and niece oppose the seductive monologue […] with an implacable silence” (2012: 24). James W. Brown, in his introduction to a dual-language edition, discusses the “ostensibly paradoxical nature of calm surfaces and tumultuous depths” while explaining that the theme of silence is one exploited by French writers (1992: 25-26). It has three aspects: the historical significance of silence as resistance; the literary significance of silence as sign; and its significance as a form of opposition, especially during the Occupation

78 (Brown: 26-27). Vercors himself tells us in the prelude to La Bataille du silence, originally published in 1967, that “[q]uand, après la défaite de 1940, les Nazis occupèrent la France, les écrivains français se trouvèrent aussitôt réduits, soit à collaborer, soit à se taire” (1992: 11). As well as practising silence as a means of resistance, French people were advised to avoid meeting the eyes of Germans

(Vinen 2006: 113).

As the first novel published by Minuit, Le Silence must be seen as reflexive to some degree, presented by the publishers as a suggestion of how to conduct oneself, not only as a citizen but as a writer, towards the enemy. It was to be interpreted as well as an injunction to maintain silence about resistance activities.

Thus, the significance of silence in the time of the Occupation is also that of writers, who could be—and were—prosecuted for what they wrote and castigated for what they did not write.

We can say in retrospect that all novelists were morally obliged to write about the shameful events of their everyday experience, but the reality is that they would have made themselves targets by doing so. The degree of censorship meant that some writers chose not to publish, others thoughtfully considered what they produced for publication, and the rest were embarrassed that they continued to compromise themselves by submitting manuscripts. “So artificiality was also a product of silence—the silence of books and films and plays never born”; in other words, society is the poorer for what writers were too afraid or prudent to publish

(Spotts 2008: 24). For Simenon, survival during the Occupation meant that, while he continued producing novels for entertainment, those works dealing with wartime events or his support for Jews would come at a much later date and from a safe, neutral haven.

79 By writing from the terrain vague of another country and culture far removed from his adopted homeland, Simenon is able to agree with Vercors’s thesis of silence through the theme of prisoners claiming the right of silence, especially in Maigret et le corps sans tête (p.161-62, 168) and La Neige était sale

(p.190-93). The combination of physical distance, the inclusion of terrains vagues in the text and the protagonists’ practice of silence combine as a powerful allegory of Occupation and wartime ‘best practice’. It also addresses the silent generation of children who are urged to remain mute about the activities of their elders, their own disconcerting experiences and who, in many cases, were then unable to break that silence.

Thus Simenon uses a variety of strategies to address issues of war—telling his stories sometimes in a clinical, almost journalistic writing style; conveying his messages autobiographically; obliquely hiding them in symbolism; disguising through allegories and setting the novels in another timeframe where they are seemingly not connected with contemporary situations. He broaches socially unacceptable subjects by cloaking them in a manner that renders them palatable while not excluding an allegorical interpretation. In the ‘timeless’ backgrounds and placement of his novels, the protagonist finds a solution, diminishing the threat—a comforting concept for readers facing situations for which there is no solution and from which there is no escape. The multiple distancing devices of a time warp, the cloaking of facts within myths or folklore and disguising them as an allegorical representation all allow the reader to view the events from the outside if he or she so chooses. Concentration on details of the character, surroundings and lifestyle of another era creates an environment that encourages preoccupation with a parallel universe, if only for a time. The decision to read allegorically being

80 optional, the reader makes a choice on whether to expend the extra effort to explore the enlightening potential of the work.

81 Chapter Two: Il pleut, bergère

“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”—Ray Bradbury

It seems logical to commence a study of Simenon’s ways of dealing with war by analysing the novel that can be shown to record his reaction to the announcement that France was—for the second time in twenty-five years—at war with Germany. Il pleut, bergère (1941) is not a crime novel but represents the memories of an older man of a specific time in his childhood. It is unique among his novels in that Simenon has intentionally chosen a time sequence that is not the vague 1930s era of most of his Maigret novels and many of his romans durs, nor is it contemporary to the outbreak of World War II. Bresler forms the impression that the earlier time setting automatically rules out symbolic dealing with the war, stating that the writer “put the international situation out of his mind and, in his regulation ten days, wrote [the novel], a tale in which war and thoughts of mass destruction figure not at all” (1983: 122). Assouline, while linking the novel with an event in Simenon’s life in 1919, agrees that it was written simply to “ease his nervousness and fill the time” while anxiously awaiting revelation of how the war would shape his career (1997: 166). Marnham notes rather prosaically that in Il pleut, bergère “a mob drives a hunted man on to a roof (again)” (1992: 176), which indicates that he misses the significance of Simenon’s initial mention of the ‘man on the roof’ as a memory of his childhood in occupied Liège (see below). Eskin sees the novel as a “remarkable variation in the tyrannical female and flight motifs” and “sympathetic to thirties political turmoil” (1987: 128). He pays tribute to the extent to which the storyline reflects the author’s childhood without recognising

82 the links to the Revolution, and the Anarchist Scourge. He does not comment upon the way analepsis and prolepsis are used to link repetitive historical themes to illustrate the cyclical nature of conflict or the implied prophecy that the looming confrontations will be a war of misunderstanding. Simenon’s own memories of his reaction will be recorded below.

Simenon’s previous experience of war was the 1914-1918 occupation of

Belgium, where life had gone on more or less as usual, especially from the standpoint of the child that he was (he was born in 1903). On this theme,

Brunsdale says that the arrival of the first German unit, twelve days after the

Belgian declaration of war, “choked out the innocence of Georges Simenon and his generation” (2010: 487). In his autobiographical account Les Trois crimes de mes amis (1938), we learn that at the age of 11, he had been hidden in the cellar while

German soldiers shot 200 civilians against the house walls in reprisals (421. As an adolescent, he ran wild, like many other youths of the era—this was a time of rebellion for him, coming home at three in the morning or later (370), competing with German soldiers for the favours of young teenage girls, learning vices from the soldiers that would follow him throughout his life (352-56). As a measure of the dislocation of reason, Marnham records that in an interview with Roger

Stephane, when asked if he had been humiliated by the presence of German soldiers, Simenon’s surprising reply was that he remembered “the perfect happiness” of those years. He simply stated that Belgium was continually under occupation by one army or another (1992: 40-41).

Simenon does admit that the years had an impact on his development, however. Speaking of his period of association with other indolent youths between 18 and 24, in a radical group known as le Caque, he asks, “[é]tait-ce la

83 faute à Dostoïevsky et à Verlaine [that we were rootless and amoral]? N’était-ce pas plutôt la faute à cette guerre que, enfants, nous avions vécue sans la comprendre et qui nous avait marqués à notre insu?”(Trois crimes: 419). For

Simenon, one of the more damaging influences of the German occupation of

Belgium in World War I had been, not the presence of soldiers, but what he perceived as his parents’ “cheating” (Marnham 1992: 40). Normal rules of behaviour had been suspended for the duration of the occupation of Liège, and a warped perspective brought to the issue of survival. One example of this was the way his relatives obtained black market food, using him as a decoy so they could smuggle goods past the German sentry (40-41). Reared in this milieu, Simenon absorbed the ambivalence of the time and reiterated it in his romans durs.

Creating a real terrain vague

Simenon’s first instinct regarding the unrest in late 1930s Europe, according to Lemaire, had been to remove himself as far as possible from the scene of conflict:

Dès l’époque de la crise de Munich (fin septembre 1938), alors que les menaces de guerre vont se précisant, il quitte le centre de la France pour s’installer dans une des régions le plus éloignées de la frontière allemande. Il achète, “presque par hasard”, une maison à Nieul-sur-Mer (Charente- Maritime), où le surprend le début des hostilités (2002: 108).

While monitoring proceedings from his coastal refuge, he was vigilant for the outbreak of war, avidly listening to the radio and reading the newspapers. He was already alert to the dangers of Hitler, to whom he refers contemptuously as

“un monsieur à la voix rauque et catégorique [qui] hurlait à la radio dans une langue qu’aucun de nous ne comprenait, sans doute en tapant du poing sur la table” (MI: 41, 63). When he and his first wife Tigy attempted to travel from La

84 Rochelle to Alsace-Lorraine in August 1939 for the birth of their first child, they had just crossed the Loire when:

nous devions rencontrer une véritable procession d’autos aussi chargées que la nôtre mais que se dirigeaient vers le Sud. On nous regardait sans comprendre pourquoi nous étions les seuls à gagner le Nord, que l’ennemi risquait d’envahir d’un jour à l’autre. Sur les toits de certaines voitures, j’ai vu pour la première fois des matelas maintenus pas des cordes (42).

After the announcement of war, Simenon tried to be philosophical, at least in retrospect, remarking that “[à] cause de la première guerre, j’avais une certaine expérience de ce qui pourrait arriver, alors que les Français croyaient encore à une guerre assez brève” (MI: 87). His refuge was also a limitation because he was not, then or later, a French citizen. In a letter to André Gide, he explains his instinct to flee from Paris to the perceived safety of Vendée because, as well as being the father of a very young son, “[j]’ai horreur de la violence sous toutes ses formes, de la force brutale” (QJV Tome 1: 47). Of course, later in the war the Bay of Biscay was to become a strategic area, with La Rochelle harbour mined and British and

German warplanes bombing ships in nearby La Pallice, as Simenon depicts in his war novel Le Clan des Ostendais.

Simenon himself tells us of his feelings upon hearing the declaration of war while on a routine visit to the town hall. Seated at a table in a cafe at La Rochelle with one of his employees, Annette de Bretagne, he heard the news over the static on a radio:

C’était la guerre, bon! Le lendemain, je ne prétendrais pas qu’on s’y résignait. Il y avait eu d’abord de la stupeur, de l’indignation, parfois des sursauts de colère et quelques poings serrés, des visages s’étaient durcis tant chez les gens de la campagne que chez ceux de la ville (MI: 64).

85 Days of anxiously listening to the radio and reading newspapers were followed by provisioning for what everyone believed would be a short conflict, because as he elaborates in another volume of memoirs:

Deux guerres, plus exactement deux occupations, m’ont appris la vraie valeur des denrées, la satisfaction de les posséder quand c’est presque une question de survie. Du sucre, par exemple [...], quelques litres de pétrole parce qu’on ne pouvait pas compter sur l’électricité. Du carbure aussi. Le riz, les pâtes […, du] fil de fer barbelé (QJV Tome 1: 136).26

Having stocked the larder, as it were, he then turned his mind to a novel which, it will be argued, is deeply significant in its representation of war as he understood it at that moment in time. While expressing in his memoirs a sense of uselessness in the prevailing circumstances, he sought to take his mind off disturbing developments by dealing symbolically with war on his own terms:

“Ainsi, pendant une dizaine de jours, penché sur ma machine [...] pouvais-je détourner mon esprit de la guerre qui ne resterait pas longtemps la drôle de guerre” (QJV Tome 1: 69). What Bresler and Assouline omit in recording this comment is that Simenon had already made all practical preparations, and that he sought to convey through the simple story an alternative way to deal with world events.

As well as being viewed through multiple perspectives, the orientation of this novel creates a liminal space by its imagery of the French Revolution and the

Anarchist scourge. This manner of approach serves as a removal from the uncertainty for the future accompanying the declaration of war. The fact that

Simenon proactively made provision for the advent of war while creating a story seemingly not about contemporary circumstances served for him as much as for

26 The latter incongruous necessity is because of the livestock he kept at that time. 86 the reader as a distraction from world events. The resultant allegory shows that war was very much on the author’s mind.

Historic montage

To place the novel in its historical context and demonstrate its connection with war, it is necessary first to give a précis of the storyline and its setting.

Simenon uses several distancing techniques: first, the creation of a terrain vague by moving the story from a contemporary timeframe back to the first or early second decade of the twentieth century; second, by his use of a child protagonist and third, his use of strong imagery from the French Revolution. As an extension of the terrain-vague theme defined in Chapter One, the events take place in a small

Basse-Normandie village in the vicinity of Caen, where horse-drawn vehicles provide transport and the buildings and streets are lit by gas. Simenon also makes use of continuous rain in a way reminiscent of Hemingway as an effective backdrop to conflict and the threat of war. This can also be linked to the fact that his previous experience of occupation occurred in Liège, where the high annual rainfall would have been part of the remembered experience. The way in which the weather forms part of the atmosphere of war will be discussed below.

The orientation is probably the most complicated of any of Simenon’s novels. The sequence of events is clearly linked to the time known as the

“Anarchist scourge” of Paris in the late nineteenth century, including the Dreyfus

Affair (Horne 2012: 263-64). News discussed by the adults and confusing to the child, but which can be referenced to historical texts, include the execution of the

Spanish revolutionary, Francisco Ferrer in 1909 (Il Pleut: 25), which is followed by strikes (48) and an assassination attempt (59). The latter could refer to one of two

87 historical events. One possibility is Auguste Vaillant’s 1893 act of terrorism in the

Chamber of Deputies and the subsequent bombing in 1894 of the Café Terminus of the Gare Saint-Lazare (Horne 2004: 284). A second, perhaps more likely, possibility is 31 May 1905, when Alexander Farras, Charles Malato and others tossed a bomb into a procession headed by French President Émile François

Loubet and King Alphonse XIII of Spain. Four anarchists were arrested on 27

November, tried and acquitted of participation in the attack. Simenon’s protagonist remembers the intended victim as the King of Romania (Il Pleut: 59), but what is important is the atmosphere of anarchism, lynch mobs and industrial unrest in which “on devinait qu’il faudrait peu de chose...”[Simenon creates suspense by simply completing the sentence with ellipses], and the obvious symbolic link with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo, which served as the final straw in the lead-up to World War I (169). The boy’s request for a Norfolk suit or costume chasseur, fashionable around 1911, helps to narrow the timeframe to the perceived ‘prelapsarian innocence’ of pre-World War I (Il

Pleut: 22).

Proof that Simenon is aware of the significance of the title is that, in explaining the origins in his memoirs, he quotes a verse from “Il Pleut, il pleut, bergère”, a song written by Philippe François Nazaire Fabre d’Eglantine in 1780 for the operetta Laure et Pétrarque,27 and adds the following remark, later to be misrepresented by both Bresler and Assouline:

On annonçait une guerre éclair qui ne durerait que quelques mois au plus [...] Je ne pouvais rien faire de plus et je décidai de commencer un roman, dont le titre fut celui d’une chanson tendre et pastorale composée pourtant pendant la Révolution française (MI: 68).

27 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/199783/Philippe-Fabre-dEglantine. 88 The shepherdess of the song title and—by extension, that of the novel—is

Marie Antoinette who, according to legend, liked to dress in country mode

(Antonia Fraser 2002: 206). Simenon himself reflects upon the link between the song and the French Revolution, mentioning that the poet, having been betrayed by Robespierre, hummed his own creation written “en attendant l’heure de la guillotine” (MI: 68). The impending storm of the refrain mirrors the looming international unrest of the time when Simenon was composing his novel, as well as the political problems leading ultimately to the earlier Revolution. The constant background of rain and storms in the novel makes the Revolution imagery part of the ambience of conflict and confusion of the French people.28 This usage of revolutionary imagery is a common one, says Michael Kelly: “provid[ing] a ready metaphor for contemporary issues, and a recognisable code within which debate

[can] be conducted, albeit at the price of a great deal of historical interpretation”

(2004: 48).

Multiple Perspectives

One way in which Simenon introduces action and substance to his novels is to have the characters reading and discussing items in the newspapers. For example the aunt in Il pleut reads aloud or has the nephew read to her the broadsheets. This usage of “faits divers” as a distraction from French political events or international situations is discussed by David H. Walker (1995: 5) as a recognised literary strategy first explored by the Surrealists. He explains that the sense of outrage about events of the Occupation, the Algerian crisis, the abolition of the guillotine as a tool for capital punishment and other contentious issues can

28 http://www.rtbf.be/info/societe/detail_il-pleut-il-pleut-bergere-chanson- revolutionnaire?id=4972023. 89 be managed by concentrating on controversial front-page news items as a substitute focus. Indignation at local serial killers or brutal murders presents at least in theory the possibility of justice being done whereas the international crisis may not (120). The insurmountable problems of the world situation are offset by the frisson of squalid settings and violent crimes, including those of a political nature (104). As an ex-journalist, Simenon understands the distraction factor of the press, especially the “faits divers”, while seemingly having access to archived copies of the French press to research the events he wishes to use. Dominique

Manotti reflects that the discipline of historical research adapts itself as the

“méthode parfaitement transposable à l’écriture de romans policiers ou noirs”

(cited in Angela Kimyongür 2012: 250). Like so many of his ilk, Simenon makes use of the investigative approach and years of experience at piecing together political, social and cultural aspects of the same crime or social issue, except that in a novel he has the freedom to draw his own conclusions.

Simenon gives a perfect example of the process by which he utilises contemporary events as the inspiration for a novel. In a fascinating case in point, he records that, before writing L’Ours en Peluche (1977), he had read “seize kilos du dossier” regarding the trial in Geneva of prominent lawyer and politician, Pierre

Jaccoud, accused of the brutal murder of a seventy-year-old agricultural machinery dealer, Charles Zumbach. The case, considered to be a second Dreyfus Affair, had far-reaching implications, including the attention of an international gang of criminals and arms dealers led by a former member of the French Foreign Legion known as “Reymond”. After studying the case in depth for a week, Simenon announced triumphantly that he had managed to create for his novel “un personnage qui ne ressemble nullement à Jaccoud” (QJV Tome 2: 81-82). While

90 using a local interest story as a starting point for his novel, he demonstrates that, by taking the essence of the event but disguising the details, how dedicated he is to preserving the myth of his works being pure fiction of his own devising.

Simenon emphasises that in planning Il Pleut he made the decision that his

“personnage principal devait être un petit garçon [...] un garçonnet”(QJV Tome 1:

69). By bringing the events to us through the observations of a guileless, inquisitive seven-year-old but with occasional contrapuntal evaluations by his older self, the narrator shows the events through a dual lens. The child’s appraisal via a filter of naïveté and purity invokes the myth and innocence of a lost past, creating a terrain vague through which the character—and the reader—can process subsequent events. The reminiscences of his older self place the events in a more realistic sequence and suggest that some of his earlier conclusions may have been misguided. A third angle is introduced by the inclusion of an ongoing dispute between the older persona and his mother, in which each contradicts and questions the recollections of the other. Jérôme holds himself responsible for the unfolding events, including the capture of his friend Albert’s anarchist father, exaggerating the influence an innocent child can have on the events of history (Il

Pleut: 173). He accuses his mother of cloaking the past in nostalgia but the imagery of his account has the same effect (9). Since her memory is different to his, they accuse each other of either forgetting the episodes (174) or of attributing the outcomes to reasons quite different to reality (184).

The sequence of events is delivered through the distancing device of memory, in which the protagonist does not necessarily recollect the events in their correct chronological order, nor get every detail correct, as his mother repeatedly points out to him: “Mon Dieu, Jérôme!... [T]u étais trop petit. Il est impossible que

91 tu te souviennes…” (Il Pleut: 10), and at times he has his own doubts as to the veracity of his memories (84-85). Matthew Graves and Elizabeth Rechniewski

(2010: 2) define this as collective memory, in which groups and communities

“oppose their counter-memories to the official narratives” and where verbal histories from multiple respondents are combined with bequeathed memory to become cultural remembrance. Graves and Rechniewski would seem to concur with Mme Lecœur, warning of the “dangers involved in reifying the concept of collective memory”, in which “the ‘same’ events are constantly being represented and commented on from different points of view, exposing the relativity of national perspectives” (2-3). Like the child protagonist, however, they explain that

“[m]emory seems to offer the authenticity that history has lost, one that claims to be based on direct transmission, lived experience or family or community tradition”(1-2).

Simenon uses the same technique of multiple representations in one of his novels in which he deals explicitly with war events, Le Clan des Ostendais. There, however, he juxtaposes viewpoints in a more mechanical or filmic sense; key events are viewed consecutively from, for example, the wharf, the deck of the trawler and a harbour-side dwelling (Le Clan: 132). Simultaneously, the narrator positions him/herself as an entomologist with an omniscient overview, similar to the establishing shot at the beginning of a movie scene, studying the overall activities in the light of world events. A wider stream of refugees, not just those from Belgium but now from Normandy and Paris floods the resources of La

Rochelle, and French soldiers stand helplessly by as the German invaders approach

(191). This objective perspective is mirrored by the enemy planes overhead (188).

The combination of views replicates high angle, low angle, tracking shots, long and

92 extreme-long or establishing shots typical of a film, and demonstrates again

Simenon’s constant pursuit of objectivity by the use of a terrain vague, of which this is yet another manifestation.

Such complexity of viewpoint can be compared with the various contributors of Le Chagrin et la Pitié, the two-part 1969 documentary film directed by Marcel Ophüls. In this evocative work, Germans, Pétainists, resistants, victims and observers each contribute their individual recollections of war experiences so that the final result is a multifaceted review of the events. The same technique is used by Némirovsky in Suite Française and by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Sang des autres (1945), where identical events are seen from the standpoint of several different characters concurrently. The effect of this multiple representation is a blending of perspectives, so that no single interpretation can be placed upon the incidents. It allows for further discussion and analysis and becomes inclusive of divergent opinions and personal applications relating to the experiences. Thus multiple subjective perceptions unify to become an objective world view.

Innocence vs awareness

The protagonist of Il Pleut, Jérôme Lecœur, is the son of a petit bourgeois couple who own a shop in a small Normandy town. The father goes off almost daily to buy goods for the store and for the market which dominates the town, while the mother serves behind the counter, selling cloth, trimmings and other haberdashery items. Imagery to support the limited and, of necessity, uninformed memories of a small child is brought to play in the description of the houses in which the characters live:

Toutes les vieilles maisons de la place, au milieu de laquelle se dressait le marché couvert avec son toit d’ardoises, avaient été bâties à la fois, jadis,

93 sur un modèle unique. Les fenêtres du rez-de-chaussée, où il n’y avait que des boutiques, étaient très hautes, terminées en plein cintre. Par la suite, on les avait coupées en deux dans le sens de la hauteur, et on avait ajouté un plancher, ce qui avait fourni un entresol. Si bien que cet entresol était éclairé par une demi-lune à ras de plancher (Il Pleut : 11-12).

The protagonist repeatedly refers to the duplication of design in the dwellings because that fact helps him to realise later where the wanted man is hidden (Il Pleut: 158-59). Because of the identical layout and structure of the apartments, the children are visible to each other only through the liminal space of the severed top arch of the window, which creates a mise en abyme effect. The floor which bisects the arched window distorts the view of those in the house opposite, as only the lower portion of the adults in the house is visible to either child, and that only from a position on the floor near the window. This is linked with other forms of replication in the novel: the similarity of the two boys and the resemblance of one boy to an historical figure.

Jérôme’s ‘friend’, Albert Rambures (the surname means a ‘French lord’), can be perceived as a cameo of how war affects the innocent, bringing back memories of Simenon’s own experiences in Belgium during World War I. Simenon creates a distancing effect as well as stressing the role of the child by describing a character out of context to the story, an ethereal, illusive being whose very presence is a mystery. Albert is an invalid boy living in the adjacent dwelling, but he is not presented as a possible playmate for Jérôme; he has been made ‘other’ by the fact that he is a replica of the 18th century Dauphin.29 Although the two children have never even spoken to each other, they are bound in mutual fascination (17, 152).

29 Louis XVII, known as the lost Dauphin de Viennois or Louis-Charles, Duke of Normandy. 94 Deliberate similarities of state and appearance exist between Albert and the

‘lost Dauphin’: both are about seven or eight years old and have tuberculosis (Il

Pleut: 43). While the Dauphin was imprisoned, Albert is confined by illness to his room, from which he gazes wistfully across at Jérôme. Albert’s physical appearance mimics closely that of his royal sosie: he has long hair and girlish features (17), and sits in a little armchair upholstered in crimson rep (102).30 His suit of royal blue with a white piqué shirtfront edged with lace (43-44) contrasts with the more bourgeois attire of the rest of the characters, for example, Mme

Lecœur’s “manteau de drap noir, forme jaquette, à godets, avec une étroite fourrure de martre” and Jérôme’s costume chasseur (22-23) and clothes made from his father’s cast-offs (64). Like the Dauphin’s father, King Louis XVI, Albert’s father is hunted by a howling mob (180) and has twice previously been imprisoned (43).

The threat of revolution, the posters and the mob demonstrations (44-45) strengthen the symbolic link, as does Albert’s father’s betrayal by the class- conscious coachman, Urbain (165-66). As a representative of the feudal class, the coachman contrasts with the bourgeois shop-owners by wearing peasant sabots, sleeping in the stable and eating all of his meals from the same dish. He is often drunk (58). Just as Louis-Charles became the object of the revenge and cruelty of the blood-crazed mob seeking Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, the howling crowds of protestors stand below Albert Rambures’s window, confusing and bewildering both of the innocent boys. Dislocation is achieved by cutting up historical events such as the 1789 Revolution, the Anarchist scourge of the late nineteenth century, contemporary events and retrospective memories of the protagonist to create a montage of impending war. The reconfiguring of history

30 Rep is a corded or ribbed fabric of cotton, wool or silk such as velveteen. 95 and present events has the same effect as the arched windows in that the distorted view becomes one of the possible ways to interpret what is happening.

Message of hope

The message inferred throughout the novel is that there is hope beyond present circumstances and that history repeats itself. Simenon makes this explicit, stating that he wrote Il pleut, bergère “juste à la déclaration de guerre de 1939, pour me prouver que la vie continuait. Elle a continué. Pas pour tout le monde, hélas!” He notes further that “les menaces de catastrophes” stimulate him to write as a form of detachment (QJV Tome 3: 152-53). He uses the trope of light throughout the novel as imagery for the hope he attempts to impart. The blurring of objects in dim light signifies how reality becomes distorted in the events of war, while the warm shaft of light up the stairwell is a symbol of the spirit of the people.

Simenon, while abhorring the thought of war, knows from experience that people can and do survive, albeit scarred from the experience. This image recurs at intervals throughout the novel, as well as the “zone de lumiere vive” that shines onto the goods on the pavement outside Wiser’s grocery store (Il Pleut: 21), the joyous red light thrown onto the floor from the table chauffante (37, 65), the radiance of the acetylene flares of the fish stalls (18), a ray of sunshine lighting up the roofs and upper storeys of the houses (123) and so on.

In one particular scene, a beam of light shines through the doorway from the other room while simultaneously the “table chauffante mettait un éclat rouge sur une statue de la cheminée qui représentait la Sainte Vierge”(Il Pleut: 81). The rhythmic purring of an invisible sewing machine acts as a non-diegetic sound effect, coming from a source outside the story space and the boy’s line of vision.

96 Here the religious significance of the Virgin is evocative of the secular Republican icon Marianne, both of which female likenesses were well represented in iconic statues or pictures in Republican households. The convergence of the two kinds of light blends the two ideals into a single entity to symbolise the passion and fervour sustained, in spite of a long and violent history, by France’s people. The significance of this particular vignette is demonstrated when the protagonist, reminiscing years later about when he had heard of the outbreak of World War I, remembers nostalgically the red glow of the oil lamp (76).

As he does in most of his novels dealing either implicitly or explicitly with war, Simenon consciously creates a neutral space not unlike the reception booth in

Crime impuni (136-140). The hidden room in Il Pleut is a cupboard-like space formed by the landing between two apartments, made redundant when separate dwellings were fashioned from the larger building. The door has been wallpapered over and only the keyhole now betrays its presence. As the corresponding apartments mirror each other, Jérôme realises that the fugitive has been hidden there (Il Pleut: 158-59). He fears that triumphant recognition has shown on his face, blaming himself for the betrayal of his friend’s father (160).

Standing in opposition to the innocence of the children is the menacing presence of Aunt Valérie, whom Jérôme perceives as the enemy. Simenon’s awareness of the threat of Hitler and his growing dismay at the rise of the dictator’s star (eg, MI: 41, 63) is revealed here in his depiction of the enemy in the guise of Nazism. Jérôme’s perception of the unwelcome aunt as a spider leering at the prey in its web (49) or as Medusa (161) can be compared with the imagery in

Robert Sabatier’s La Souris verte, whose protagonist describes the swastika symbolically as a black insect (1990: 27). Again, Sabatier’s character comments

97 upon the intimidating manifestation of German embellishment: “Les Allemands, avec leurs rites, leurs symboles, leurs oriflammes, leurs banderoles, ces drapeaux où, dans un cercle blanc sur fond rouge, se dessinait la croix gammée telle une araignée noire” (La Souris verte: 15). The juxtaposition of innocence and menace creates a tension that reflects the anxieties of the time.

The arrival of Aunt Valérie is an infiltration of the enemy from the perspective of the boy (Il Pleut: 16-19). He sees the rearranging of the house to accommodate the ungainly, ungracious visitor as invasion and disruption, the replacement of his cot with a mahogany bed bought at auction as supplantation

(27). He has to move back into his parents’ room while his playroom is now in enemy hands (37); even his father’s wicker chair is taken over by the visitor (33).

His parents impress upon Jérôme that he is not to repeat anything that he hears them say, which may annoy the aunt and prevent their inheritance of the aunt’s house (19, 31, 91). This is symbolic of wartime secrecy and the opposite—of informers who collaborate by reporting to the enemy. It also replicates the silence of children who, forbidden to speak of what they see or hear, develop amnesia of the confusing events (Marie Helen Mercier and J. Louise Despert 1943: 266-272).

Jérôme’s later realisation that his father, at least, had vested interests in allowing the invasion is interpreted by the boy as a form of betrayal (Il Pleut: 54-

55, 91). Having no choice in the decisions, the boy is embarrassed and ashamed when his mother has to dress him in better clothing and make other changes to accommodate the aunt, because her pride is at stake (19-23). The photograph of the aunt, thrown into the dustbin at some time in the past and damaged, is repaired and hung in a place of honour above the statue of the Virgin, just as in later years Hitler and Pétain’s pictures replaced the representations of Marianne

98 (19, 27-28, 91). Although this had not yet happened at the time of the novel’s creation, the situation is uncannily prophetic of the ubiquitous photographs of

Pétain and Hitler and may reflect a parallel situation in Liège in the previous conflict.

Aunt Valérie herself is unlovely, with a moustache, which cannot fail to recall Germany’s dictator (Il Pleut: 32).31 While it could equally be referenced to

Maréchal Pétain, at the time of the writing of this novel, that gentleman was still held in popular opinion as the vaunted “hero of Verdun”, while Simenon had long regarded Hitler as a threat (MI: 41, 63). Aunt Valérie is consumed with hatred, just as Hitler had already demonstrated (Il Pleut: 41). The child realises only when he hears her talking to her lawyer that she is a person of great power (66). She is fighting a legal battle to regain property at Saint-Nicolas, given to her adopted daughter as a dowry with the condition that Valérie can live there for the rest of her life. This can be seen within this interpretation as symbolic of Germany’s attempts, in 1871 and again in 1914-18, to claim France as part of its kingdom, and also of France’s attempts to regain Alsace-Lorraine as French territory (66-78).

When Jérôme reminisces about later learning of the outbreak of war, it is Aunt

Valérie who “domin[e] le désordre, qui l’orchestr[e] en quelque sorte, avec son

épais visage moustachu, sa grande bouche molle, ses yeux noyés d’eau”(76). When the child is trying to conceal his knowledge of the whereabouts of his neighbour’s anarchist father, the implicit imminent threat of exposure comes not from the police, but from the unattractive and unwelcome visitor. Jérôme suspects—rightly, as is later revealed—that the lure of a twenty-thousand-franc reward would

31 This is not the first time he has described a menacing character in relation to his/her resemblance to Hitler. In one of his contributions as a foreign correspondent, he captions a photograph of serial killer, Peter Kürten, known as the Düsseldorf Vampire, to indicate the resemblance of the mustachiod face to the Führer (Oliver Lubrich 2010: 33). 99 render M. Rambures vulnerable to betrayal by the local people, and the chief contender would, in his mind, be Aunt Valérie (128).32 Revolutionary symbolism colours her comment as she witnesses M. Rambures’s capture: “Il sera quand meme décapité…”(Il Pleut: 184—ellipses in original).

Simenon has created an atmosphere which enriches his storyline, and characters who can best depict the message he wishes to convey. For the reader, it can simply be construed as a gentle story of a confused little boy with a caring but distracted mother, an unwelcome visitor and an enigmatic neighbour, similar to yet irrevocably separated from the child. For those who choose to analyse the story in an allegorical sense, it can be compared with the author’s other works such as Maigret et le corps sans tête, in which literary techniques such as the terrain vague and allusions to republican iconography create a distancing effect in the mind of the reader. Equally, the reconfiguration of events from several viewpoints, and the distortion of both events and the outside world through the arched windows show it to have a deeper significance as a comment on political events of the epoch.

Marianne

The author indicates his disquiet and resentment about the impending war in the symbolism he uses to describe Albert’s mother, who makes a cameo appearance only when her husband—or ex-husband—is about to be arrested by the police. Jérôme has overheard her described as having “fait la vie…”, the implication being that she is a woman of ill repute (Il Pleut: 116 with ellipses in original). This defiant stranger is described as a femme fatale, as follows:

32 Interestingly, the English translation published in 1949 makes this threat explicit by the addition of a short paragraph not in the original: “But if I thought a lot about the police, it was not they who constituted the danger. The great danger—that was no one else but Aunt Valérie.” Geoffrey Sainsbury (trans) Black Rain, (Middlesex, Ringwood: Penguin, 1949: 83). 100 C’était un genre de femme que je ne connaissais pas encore. Elle portait des bottines vernies à talons très hauts, un manteau cintré, un chapeau planté sur le devant de la tête et sa bouche était rouge, ses yeux entourés comme de crayon noir. Il y en avait d’autres avec elle (129-30).

Her disparity to all the other characters of the novel is remarkable.

Although she is apparently accompanied by other women of the same ilk, their presence remains shadowy and indistinct, while bystanders laugh at her coarse invective. Simenon depicts the enigmatic woman, who becomes Marie Antoinette by her relationship to the character Albert, as representative of his confused relationship with his adopted country at that time. His portrayal of her as a prostitute, while not unusual for his depictions of women,33 indicates his anger at

France’s part in the present conflict. Her outward appearance—unlike many of his other prostitute characters—is one of glamour and seduction in contrast with the women from the stalls, Aunt Valérie and even Jérôme’s mother. The implication is that she has neglected her son in his hour of need, leaving him to be reared by her husband’s mother while the father is in prison. Her rejection of her son mirrors

Simenon’s perceived judgement of France’s dereliction of duty in declaring war instead of a peaceful compromise. It can also be a reflection of his well- documented ambivalent relationship with his own mother (see for example,

George Watson 1995). There are also traces of personal resentment at the way

Simenon was rejected by the French who, after his successful career as a French- language author, relegated him to the status of an alien during the years of conflict.

Having made several moves within the Vendée area during the Occupation, he comments wryly in a letter to Gide, “Je vis plus que jamais dans mon coin. Je n’ai

33 See, for example, Becker, (1999: 11) for an analysis on this. 101 même pas le droit, en qualité de Belge, de quitter le territoire de la commune et chaque jour je vais signer à la police” (Correspondance: 54).

Albert’s mother’s vitriol is vented against her mother-in-law; she is unaware that the older woman is at that time in the nearby shop, Tati’s, buying food (Il Pleut: 133), and not behind the little crescent window on the first floor to which she directs her tirade. She screams abuse at the window with its blackout curtain, taunting Mme Rambures for the misfortune of having her son arrested, reminding her that current events are payback for her attitude of superiority in the past (130). Even while being dragged away by plain-clothes policemen, the woman continues to howl in protest (131). As a representation of a compromised yet intractable Marianne, she exemplifies the position in which Simenon already felt France to be at that time. Rolls describes authors’ use of women to represent defiance in his appraisal of Baudelaire’s La Belle Dorothée thus: “this image of a woman refusing to submit beneath the weight of reality will reappear on the posters of Paul Colin in 1944 in the form of ‘Liberation’” (Rolls and Walker 2009:

22). Simenon has captured the rebellious spirit of the woman, ostracised from society because of her lifestyle, yet fiercely committed to the struggle for the ideals of the Revolution.

This vignette of an angry, compromised woman is a powerful depiction of the conflicting emotions of French people during the hiatus between the announcement of war and armed combat. While Simenon, along with his neighbours and compatriots, is confused and indignant about impending war (MI:

64), he still recognises that there may be many differing ways to view events. His fear that France will become a laughing stock to other nations is reflected in the reaction of the crowd to the defiant intruder, while the boy’s secret pity and

102 reluctant admiration of her declares the author’s inner contradiction (Il Pleut:

130).

Rain as imagery for war

Although in later novels about the drôle de guerre, such as Le Train and Le

Clan des Ostendais, and in the Maigret novel Maigret et le corps sans tête (discussed in Chapter Four) Simenon was to reflect the Indian summer quality of the season, at the time of writing Il Pleut he associated war with the prevailing weather conditions of World War I in his childhood. Platten says that rain “whether in Paris or the provinces, is an indispensable element of Simenon’s impressionistic prose”

(2011: 57). He goes on to say that in Maigret et l’homme du banc (1953) “the

Parisian rain is a motivated sign, which, in combination with the bench, imparts [...] momentum to the narrative”. For his part, Bresler has noted that Simenon is obsessed by water and quotes the author himself as having attributed this fixation to the fact that it rained some 200 days a year in his hometown, and that he was

“born in the dark and rain” (1983: 59). In Simenon’s “autobiography” of his chief protagonist, Inspector Maigret, rain is linked with the difficult first years of the inspector’s career:

Pourquoi, quand j’y repense, ai-je surtout un souvenir de pluie? A croire que, pendant des années, il n’a fait que pleuvoir, à croire qu’à cette époque- là les saisons n’étaient pas les mêmes. C’est évidemment parce que la pluie ajoutait à notre tâche quelques épreuves supplémentaires. Il n’y avait seulement les chaussettes qui s’imbibaient. Il y avait les épaules du manteau qui se transformaient petit à petit en compresses froides, le chapeau qui dégoulinait, les mains bleuies qu’on enfonçait dans les poches (Les Mémoires de Maigret 1950 : 108).

However, he makes use of this symbolism in different ways. Following the trend of all detective novels of the era, he places the action of the Maigret novels, of which he wrote only a handful during the war years, in a deliberately timeless and

103 apolitical France, mostly Paris. Simenon can, and often does, use rain, storms, dockside settings and so on as situational enhancements, as strong theatrical backdrops to the action. This does not mean, however, that there is not hidden symbolism, and the use of rain in Simenon’s novels written during the war will be examined briefly below. One important fact to keep in mind is that Simenon’s main focus during the Occupation and war years was to have his novels —both romans durs and Maigrets—filmed by Continental. Accordingly, the usage of weather is in keeping with the trends of the times, as movies made just before and during the war were precursors to the films noirs of the immediate post-war era, in which Schrader indicates that filmmakers had an:

almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh rain […] and the rainfall tends to increase in direct proportion to the drama. Docks and piers are second only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points (2003: 57).

Following youthful moonlighting at La Cinématographie française, the official review of the French film industry, and enjoyment from 1919 onwards of

German expressionistic films in the small Left Bank theatres in Paris, Simenon had begun to develop a clear picture in his mind of how he wanted his films to appear on the screen. Brunsdale reports that during the filming of Le Chien jaune (1931),

Simenon clashed with the director, Jean Tarride, by insisting upon being credited as the co-adaptor. He demanded strong input to the character of Maigret and insisted upon helping to choose the actors “because he had no faith in the film industry’s ethics” (2010: 502). The actor portraying Maigret, Abel Tarride, did not meet his approval. He was criticised by the writer as “obese and bland [...] like an inflated rubber animal” and “more disposed to make you laugh than to represent the Police judicaire” (Gauter 1989: 67-72). It appears clear that the setting, an

104 isolated harbour village of Concarneau, a commune in the Finistère department in

Brittany in north-western France, and the sequences of storms, rain and muddy aftermaths were carefully captured by the writer with the filming of Le Chien jaune in mind.

It was a disappointment which enraged Simenon that he was unable to

“control all the manifold details of film production” of that and subsequent movies, although a lifelong friendship developed between him and French film director

Jean Renoir, whose eldest brother, Pierre, he found “tolerably true to life” as the

Inspector (Brunsdale 2010: 502). He tried his own hand at film-making, commencing with La Tête d’un homme, but was unable to make a profit from the experience and, thus forced to withdraw, became so “embittered that he wanted nothing more to do with the film industry” (503). This stance was to bring his work into disrepute during the war years, when the adaptation of his novel Les

Inconnus dans la maison (1942) was bracketed with Louis Chavance’s Le Corbeau

(1943) and both authors were savagely criticised for anti-Semitic leanings.

Andrew Dickos recognises the “spirit of noir” in the adaptation of Les Inconnus

(2002: 53).

The setting of Le Chien jaune, described in the present tense, encapsulates the juxtaposition of the hostility of nature with the violence of the storyline. A customs officer on the dock observes the meteorological violence from the safety of a cubby hole and a pedestrian holds his hat to stop it being blown away:

C’est le plein de la marée et une tempête du sud-ouest fait s’entrechoquer les barques dans le port. Le vent s’engouffre dans les rues, où l’on voit parfois des bouts de papier filer à toute allure au ras du sol [...]. Les poulies grincent et un foc mal cargué claque du ressac, un déclic à l’horloge, qui va sonner onze heures (7-8).

105 During the build-up of events leading to the capture and removal of the

‘anarchist’ father of Albert in Il Pleut, it rains continually, a fact commented upon many times by the protagonist. In later life, the events are inextricably linked in his mind with the confusing experiences of that particular time in his childhood:

Pleuvoir noir, en tout cas, reste pour moi quelque chose de rien spécial, quelque chose d’intimement lié à notre petit ville normande, à la place du marché que nous habitions, à certaine époque de l’année, voire à certaines heures de la journée (11).

The child perceives the relentless precipitation as “black rain”. As in

Simenon’s other war and occupations novels, the water is not symbolic of cleansing, but of obscurity, of hampering and of inconvenience, helping to enhance the suspense and heightening tension. The protagonist makes a point of contrasting this particular ‘black’ rain with “abondantes pluies d’orage que je voyais passer en grosses gouttes claires derrière les vitres de ma fenêtre en demi- lune et qui crépitaient sur le rebord de zinc et sur les pavés de la place” and also with “pluies en brouillard du pâle hiver” (11). It is neither of these natural phenomena; instead, in scenes which pre-empt the visual elements that would be used so effectively in post-war films noirs:

[q]uand il pleuvait noir, d’abord, la pièce basse de plafond était sombre et tout le fond, vers la cloison qui la séparait de la chambre de mes parents, était feutré de pénombre. Par contre, du trou dans le plancher par où passait l’escalier en colimaçon, émanait la lueur du gaz allumé dans le magasin (Il Pleut: 11).

The continuous rain can be read merely as a theatrical backdrop. However, the ‘black rain’ can correspondingly be invested with bleak feelings regarding war, occupation and helplessness in the face of outside forces. It can equally be compared to Eric Rovit’s description of rain in A Farewell to Arms as “the persistent symbol of foreboding […], the current of doom—the inexorable march of tragic

106 warning which is echoed in the imagery, the rain, and the narrator’s prescient comments” (1972: 39). Death and impending disaster in the storyline are accompanied by descriptions of the inclement weather, for example: “Ma mère aurait dit qu’il faisait un temps de cimetière. Tout était d’un gris blanc, tout était mou, feutré, irréel, et les bruits n’avaient pas leur résonance des autres jours” (Il

Pleut: 101), and Le ciel tournait au jaune crasse, comme si l’agitation du marché avait sali petit à petit le brouillard, et je m’aperçus qu’on n’avait pas éteint les becs de gaz, ce qui faisait de cette journée une journée tout à fait à part (106).

While preparations are being made for the aunt’s arrival, the unremitting, insistent rain permeates the conscience of the child like a foreboding of impending evil. His uneasy sleep, too, is a harbinger of difficult times ahead:

Le soir, je me suis endormi, mais d’un sommeil irrégulier et, chaque fois que je reprenais conscience, j’entendais mon père et ma mère qui chuchotaient dans leur lit. Je n’étais pas encore habitué au rayon du bec de gaz de la cour des Métiers qui passait juste au-dessus de mon lit. Il pleuvait toujours (28).

Later, before the aunt is brought to the house by Jérôme’s father, the child observes the way the drops of water form an uninterrupted yet ever-changing configuration on the sill. He notices that each action leads to a larger, more comprehensive pattern, just as the events of France’s past conflicts will contribute to the as-yet-unrevealed future. What Simenon portrays is the far-reaching consequences of war and the fact that Germany and France repeatedly revisit the encounters of 1870 and the Great War, for example. While the lead-up to war may be different, the resulting outcome is the same:

Juste en dessous de ma fenêtre en demi-cercle, une bande de zinc large d’environ trente centimètres courait le long de la façade, afin de protéger le vélum rayé de rouge qu’on baissait en été. Les gouttes d’eau, sur ce zinc, jouaient un jeu endiablé, jamais le même. En s’écrasant, elles formaient un

107 dessin compliqué, vivant, un peu comme une carte de géographie en mouvement (38).

When angry crowds impede the safe removal of the neighbour’s anarchist father from his hiding place to a place of custody, the police escort him by way of the rooftops (Il Pleut: 179-80). In contrast to the continuous rain during the build- up, the rain has stopped at this time, as the protagonist and his mother discuss years later. The effect of the cessation serves to encapsulate the moment of final betrayal and defeat:

Je la vois me dire dans un effort pour concentrer sa pensée: - Il pleuvait, n’est-ce pas ? - Que non! triomphai-je. Il avait plu toute la journée mais, le soir le vent s’était levé… Tu ne te rappelles pas le toit du marché couvert, avec ses ardoises argentées par la lune et tous les hommes qui s’y tenaient en équilibre comme un soir de feu d’artifice? (166—ellipses in original text).

While this may refer to the fact that the Dauphin was said to have been exercised on the roof of the tower in which he was imprisoned, it also recalls the author’s experiences during World War I in Liège. In his pseudo-autobiographical work, Trois crimes de mes amis, Simenon remembers the effect of war and an invading force on everyday lives as follows:

[o]n nous apprenait à profiter des coins d’ombre, à vivre dans le clair- obscur, à chuchoter. Comme on ne pouvait pas circuler dans les rues après telle heure du soir, on allait les uns chez les autres par les toits, au clair de lune… (Trois Crimes: 421—author’s ellipses).

In the lead-up to the arrest, fog has replaced the rain, causing a visual warp to the onlookers in the same way as a mob mentality can be seen as a distortion of the normally placid mind-set of the townspeople. This also reinforces the fact that, although he would have refused to admit such a thing, the protagonist may have observed events through a biased perspective, as earlier he had described the position from which he watched Albert and the occasional partial glimpse of an

108 adult next door. Simenon, a pacifist, is keen to emphasise that there is more than one way to contemplate world events:

Il ne pleuvait pas, c’est ce qui me frappe le plus. Le sol était encore mouillé, encore noir, ainsi que le vaste toit d’ardoises du marché. Mais ce qu’il y avait d’inattendu, ce qui transfigurait le paysage, c’était le brouillard que perçait à peine le halo jaune des becs de gaz (Il Pleut: 98).

The foregoing can be compared to the way the fog makes the streetlights and headlights of oncoming traffic appear yellow in Hemingway’s A Farewell to

Arms, at a similar crisis point in the novel. While Jérôme and his aunt experience the brewing tension of a pre-dawn vigil preceding the denouement of the unfolding drama (Il Pleut: 98), Frederic and Catherine spend their last few hours together in idyllic bliss before he returns to the front (A Farewell to Arms: 135).

In contrast to the earlier continuous rain, as the crowds converge upon the site to watch the arrest of Albert’s father, the weather becomes gusty and lowering clouds still fill the sky, but the rain holds off, as the following descriptions show:

Il ne pleuvait pas, mais il y avait des rafales de vent, les nuages couraient presque à ras des toits et, quand on tournait le coin de certaines rues, on était saisi pas un courant d’air pénétrant, les jupes claquaient, les femmes tenaient leur chapeau, des hommes, parfois, couraient après le leur qui roulait dans un nuage de fin poussière (Il Pleut: 117). and On put croire qu’il allait pleuvoir. De larges gouttes d’eau tombèrent qui n’avaient pas l’air de venir d’au-dessus de la ville mais de très loin, du côté de la mer, et elles avaient à peine dessiné quelques taches noires sur les pavés que cela s’arrêtait (119-20).

The following morning, as life resumes its usual tempo, “il pleuvait à nouveau, moins noir, par rafales, par bourrasques, avec des entractes livides et frissonnants” (125). And later, when the dreaded aunt has outstayed her welcome and is going home, the effect of the rain is quite different, gentle and evocative, more suitable to the life of a child. This is a hopeful sign, in line with Simenon’s brief for the novel. Through the rain he attempts to prophesy that, no matter what

109 the intervening conflict may be, this too shall pass and life will return to normal, albeit a new type of normal:

J’ai été gratifié, ce matin-là, d’un réveil aérien, un de ces réveils qui vous imprègnent de joie pour toute la journée. Encore fort avant dans le sommeil, à peine conscient du tambourinage d’une pluie fine sur les toits de zinc, un frôlement plutôt, comme la vie d’un nid de souris qu’on perçoit dans l’épaisseur d’un mur, je retrouvais confusément la promesse d’un jour exceptionnel (137).

Especially effective is the author’s historical terrain vague created by mixing images from several eras to produce as it were a mosaic of war. This tactic allows the reader to choose the perspective from which to view the events of the story: a child’s disordered and subjective memories, a prediction of the future, a warning of hidden agendas or simply as a nostalgic story. The backdrop of continuous rain, not reassuring but sombre and foreboding, reflects the author’s personal disquiet, enriching the novel with atmosphere as it replicates the confusion and intensity of feeling at that time. The multiple perspectives allow the reader to search for possible alternative solutions to global unrest. The fact that the events are being recalled by an older protagonist implants the seed of hope that life will continue.

Therefore, we see that, in spite of Bresler’s dismissal of the novel, it in fact gathers the threads of conflicts from the French Revolution to the twentieth century, and through the symbolism of ‘black rain’, projects the conflict forwards to express the protagonist’s anguish about the changes taking place in his life.

Simenon has captured perfectly what Schrader (2003: 58) defines as the “over- riding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future”.

To this he has added his prediction—or at least his desire—that hope will prevail.

He achieves this by using place and weather as characters, by intermixing

Revolution, late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century imagery and background

110 events, and by flashback, first person narrator and an ingenuous child protagonist.

Consequently, Il pleut, bergère does not preclude an allegorical edge as a commentary on the times and the author’s reactions to France’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939.

111 Chapter Three: La Neige était sale

Quote from Jacques Tourneur (dir.) Out of the Past (1947): Jeff Bailey: That's not the way to win. Kathie Moffat: Is there a way to win? Jeff Bailey: There's a way to lose more slowly.

This chapter will deal specifically with one of Simenon’s novels that has been recognised as dealing with war, albeit in an unspecified country with an unidentified enemy, in a novel whose time and place of composition are well documented. La Neige était sale, completed at Tucson, Arizona on 20 March 1948, gives the reader insight into the mind of a protagonist pitted both against himself and the occupation forces. Lack of a clear distinction between the activities of the conquerors and the conquered people is mirrored by the fact that a blanket of snow has rendered the very locality unrecognisable to the observer. The ambivalence of locality with no identifiable landmarks plus a deliberate manipulation of surnames creates a geographical terrain vague or non-lieu from which the events and characters are freed of preconceptions by the author and the reader.

Eskin views La Neige était sale as a “tour de force” that “might seem to qualify as a war novel because it takes place in an unidentified country occupied by an unknown enemy” and has Gestapo characters, but comments that it seems more reminiscent of Liège in World War I (1987: 168). Elsewhere, La Neige is quoted as an example of Simenon’s fascination with the “intertwining of destructiveness and self-destructiveness” (253). Keller calls La Neige the “blackest of black stories about war, foreign occupation, human depravity, and evil […] where the degradation match[es] the icy wind” (2002: 475-76). She especially comments upon the gulf between the location in which the novel was written and its locale, creating a milieu in which “[s]uch words as evil and good in fact lose their meaning,

112 exchange places, merge confusingly in the wilderness where his characters find themselves” (476). She goes on to comment:

This novel is really about the possibility of absolution for even such as he. Literary types will be thinking of Pinky in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and of Meursault in Camus' The Stranger (but without the underlying religion of the one or the dense philosophical underpinning of the other), as well they should (477—her parentheses).

While recognising the geographical terrain vague used by the writer in this novel, she does not expand on the significance of that tactic. Quoting correspondence between Simenon and Frédéric Dard in 1949, Assouline explains that the author’s intention in writing La Neige had been to show that a man “could be drawn into this kind of downward spiral in any country occupied by any army”.

He also records that the novel earned from Dashiell Hammett a comparison with

Edgar Allan Poe (1997: 244).

Marnham says—without identifying the reviewers—that La Neige était sale is not usually listed among his war novels, although he feels it ought to be, and avers that no novel “better expresses Simenon’s feelings towards war” in that the hero is not a member of the Resistance but a “collaborator of the worst sort, a callous murderer”. Although assuring us that the protagonist is not meant to be

Simenon’s brother, he tells us that “his activities bear some similarities to those of

Christian in Belgium during the occupation” (1992: 244). He further notes that La

Neige is:

memorable for its picture of a European country in winter, in war-time, occupied, in fear; the bread queues, the casual violence, the absence of certainty, the presence everywhere of death, hunger and denunciation (245).

Becker judges that La Neige était sale deals with “moral redemption through suffering” and that Simenon is trying to “address the eternal, universal

113 problems of Good and Evil” (1999: 65). One of its themes is that of paternal redemption which, she says, is implicit in all of the Maigrets (23). Again, Becker has reviewed the novels partly biographically and partly as a means of exploring the motives of his stereotypical protagonist, whom she sees as “the prototypal modern antihero, prey to the feelings of alienation, solitude, guilt and expatriation to which the works of writers like Camus and Sartre have accustomed us” (132).

Although she sees that Simenon has “by means of delicate impressionistic evocations […] re-created the period between the two World Wars over much of the globe” (131), she does not examine how he deals also with the wars themselves. Hutton avers that La Neige is “unquestionably set during a period of war” which is “crucial to the plot” (2013: 20). Her focus is on the classification of crimes against an occupation scenario, highlighting also a comment on Frank’s earlier thwarted ambition to join the resistance (21).

Simenon calls this a long novel and agonises about the title, telling Gide that he fears his original title of La Neige sale is too romantic (Correspondance: 131).

Luc Sante pronounces this work the darkest of all Simenon’s books, saying that he has gathered together all the feelings of the war, including his brush with the

Resistance and the threatened impact on his “little world” and “cathected [it] into a bleak tale of total breakdown, societal as well as personal” in a book that is “a landscape without a horizon” (2007: 9). Simenon divides his own writings into two categories: those he considers his serious writing or romans durs—those which critics such as Platten would place within the roman noir genre—and the

Maigret novels, in which he sometimes ‘practises’ a theme before developing it into a roman dur (Marnham: 256, 276). Becker explains the plight of the protagonist of La Neige, Frank Friedemeir, as one who “seeks to avenge himself on

114 a world that [does] not permit him to remain pure” (1999: 23). In discussing the novel, Platten has said that Simenon’s fiction—and specifically his romans noirs—

“render the human condition in tones of elegiac despair” (2011: 40), which fits the theme of other Simenon novels and indeed of the entire French noir genre, reflecting the confusion and grief over a France that has been irrevocably altered by the events of the 1940s and their immediate aftermath.

Gide had offered his services as Simenon’s literary advisor at a social gathering in 1935, and from then on Simenon submitted his manuscripts to his mentor for comments and approval (Platten 2011: 45). Having arranged for Gide to proofread it—but not until after he has sent it to the publishers—he begins an anxious exchange with his mentor on the subject. He is keen for Gide to agree with his own opinion that this is surely his most important work, and that Gide not be disappointed again, as his mentor has been somewhat critical of a series he calls his “série américaine”. Simenon explains that he views that series, comprising

Trois Chambres à Manhattan and Lettre à mon juge (123), La Jument perdue (139) and Le Fond de la bouteille (143), as a sort of exercise in familiarising himself with

American décor and personalities (Correspondance: 139). On the subject of writing from the perspective of American protagonists, Pierre Verdaguer alerts us that

“portraits of American society in French novels inevitably reflect national attitudes towards the United States” (2005: 148), so it follows that the writings of novelists including Simenon are a window through which we can determine prevailing outlooks.

When the proofs of La Neige était sale finally arrive, Gide’s first criticism is that Simenon has not, as is his usual rule, signed the end of the novel with the date and place of writing, which would enable Gide to place it in order with those

115 written before and after it (Correspondance: 149). This demonstrates the importance Gide places on contextualising the texts according to where and when they are written. After reading it, he declares himself satisfied (151) and reports, much to Simenon’s relief:

Je tenais à vous dire (entre autres choses) que La Neige était sale m’a épaté (j’ai horreur de ce mot, mais tant pis!) avec le surprenant rétablissement du caractère de votre affreux Frank, qui aurait pu être “un héros” (Correspondance: 149).

The novel sparked much discussion, and was considered important by the critics (171). It was widely praised by the French press and director and producer

Jean Renoir, a long-time friend, contemplated transposing a film version to an unnamed American city which would be easily recognised as Boston: “the film would make a fortune” (Eskin: 169).34 Jean Mambrino (1973: 41) describes the crisis point when Sissy expresses her love for the man who has treated her with such disregard as “l’une des plus belles scènes d’amour de la littérature universelle”. Eléonore Schraiber calls it “l’un des [Simenon’s] meilleurs romans sur la jeunesse pendant l’occupation” (1973: 187). According to Gide, it was one of his protégé’s best, even “(oh, disons même: le meilleur) que vous avez écrit depuis longtemps” (Correspondance: 173).

Despite this approbation, Simenon’s English editor, having previously published some 40 translations of his client’s novels, dared not publish La Neige at that time (Correspondance: 177). However, Prentice-Hall released an English translation called The Snow was Black in the US in 1950, when a review by

34 In passing, this transposition of locale is not new for filmmakers. Bertrand Tavernier, in directing Simenon’s L’Horloger d’Everton (1954), deemed the conflict out of place in an American novel and filmed it in Lyon as The Watchmaker of St Paul (l’Horloger de Saint-Paul)(1974) in order to tie it with contemporary events in France (Lanzoni 2004: 245). The transposition of location “transforms a contemptible crime into a politically justified murder, a concept foreign to Simenon’s work in general, this novel in particular” (Becker 1999: 121). It was accorded the French Prix Louis-Delluc and the Sonderpreis der Jury in Berlin. 116 Austrian cultural historian and writer, René Fülöp-Miller, in The New York Times

(30 April 1950) stated positively that it takes place in Paris during the German occupation. Routledge and Kegan Paul published the novel in England as The Stain on the Snow in 1953. The following year, a movie, La Neige était sale, was made with Daniel Gélin in the role of Frank, to be greeted with the criticism that the novel “était carrément massacré par le cinéaste argentin Luis Saslavsky” (Philippe de Comes et al 1984: 118-20). Interestingly, the film script attempts to justify to some extent the shallowness and lack of human warmth of the protagonist by focusing on his childhood as a disposable by-product of a liaison. Added scenes such as a dramatic prison escape to visit Sissy in hospital, with Nazi police barking orders auf deutsch and aided by snarling German Shepherds are clearly contradictory to Simenon’s brief for the novel (Assouline 1999: 244).

Definition of noir

In an era where France was forced, as a humiliating aftermath of the

Liberation, to accept American financial assistance, several concurrent developments revolved around the creation, categorising and popularising of both literary and cinematic noir. During the Occupation, German cutting-edge technology, especially panchromatic film and effective marketing techniques, had led to the production of four of Continental’s movies now credited with forming the nucleus of what became known in France as film noir: Simenon’s Les Inconnus dans la maison (1942), Stanislas-André Steeman’s L’Assassin habite au 21 (1942),

Maurice Tourneur's La Main du diable (1943) and Louis Chavance’s Le Corbeau

(1943) (Bowles 2011: 144). Adaptations of Simenon’s novels continued to dominate the market in the post-war film policier and film noir (Bill Marshall 1992:

117 33). As well, a large backlog of American films was released in France along with a flood of the latest development, paperback originals by Pocket Books, Avon,

Popular Library and Dell and Bantam. The convenience and availability of these books, coupled with a lower price, was accompanied by the distinctive innovation of lurid cover art and sensational cover copy. By 1946 the supply of softcover novels in print had increased threefold from the previous year to over 350 titles

(Horsley 2009: 90). The influx of films from Hollywood helped to assuage the hunger for a cultural change of menu while the paperbacks served as a much needed distraction from the reality of everyday French life. Both helped to meet the emotional needs of a public confused and dazed by the Occupation (Rolls 2006:

38). Hollywood began to produce increasingly pessimistic and downbeat crime films, including Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, my

Sweet, released in America in 1944. These two films, when they appeared in

France, were evidence to the French that America was also making dark movies.

Although the parallel gloomy movies shared a similar focus the label of ‘film noir’ was not applied in the US until the 1970s (Horsley 2009: 90).

In response to public demand and the paucity of American cultural products exacerbated by the occupation and war, Gallimard, at the instigation of editor Marcel Duhamel, introduced a revolutionary new type of novel with three texts in 1945-46 (Marshall: 33). Duhamel’s mandate was not so much upon genre as upon a writing style that would present “un document et un témoignage sur notre époque” (cited in Gorrara 2003b: 597). These thriller paperbacks, whose success depended upon the description ‘traduit de l’américain’, were known collectively as La Série noire because of the distinguishing black quadrangle on the front cover to differentiate them from Gallimard’s prestigious Collection Blanche.

118 Original authors included Peter Cheyney, whose Dames Don’t Care (Les Femmes s’en balacent) had been a popular choice for air-raid shelters in England during the war (Holman 2008: 28-29), and James Hadley Chase. Although British, Cheyney and Chase, to suit the brief of the times, were marketed as American (Gorrara

2003b: 596). Later authors included, among others, Horace McCoy, Jonathan

Latimer, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Australia’s

Carter Brown. Non-American writers including Brown freely gleaned knowledge of American speech and culture from films and books because the emphasis was more on ‘otherness’ and the requisite slogan ‘traduit de l’américain’ than upon authentic background. While closely studying speech and mannerisms of

Americans first-hand, Simenon seeks to make his American characters other or in many cases, for example in Les Frères Rico, “doubly nonconformist”, to quote

Verdaguer (150), by the fact that they are both Sicilian and Mafia.

This series met a psychological need among French readers who were left in the grip of American hegemony following Liberation. Although the term noir, in the context of film noir, had not yet become part of the literary metalanguage when the Série noire was born, the element of noirness was one of the attractions of the series. Mark Bould explains the complex nature of film noir thus: “The origins […] are typically traced back to four sources: German expressionism, French poetic realism, American hard-boiled fiction and American crime film” (2005: 2). He also quotes Carl Richardson (1992) to show that Italian neorealism is a forgotten influence. The hardboiled protagonist of these novels, specifically written by “non-

French authors about ostensibly non-French issues”, created a liminal space for the reader and acted as a buffer between the reality and the perception of postwar

France. To quote Franck Llomeau (1995), the integrity of the detective was not

119 important: there are “policemen who are more corrupt than the thieves they pursue. The friendly detective does not always solve the mystery. Sometimes there is no mystery. And sometimes no detective at all” (cited in Gorrara 2003a:

13n). The origin of the Série noire gave them “the necessary latitude to be able to function as powerful allegories of what were very much Franco-French concerns”

(Rolls and Walker: 33). Part of the translation process involved reinterpreting the novels by changing the original focus in an effort to rewrite history (Rolls and

Sitbon 2013: 5). Rolls argues that American crime novels in translation became a

“perfect vehicle for an allegorical representation of Paris in the immediate post- war years” and that “the ‘translated’ crime wave of the Série Noire […] allows a story of crime set in a dark city any where out of the world […] to be smuggled into, and mapped onto, Paris like a literary Trojan Horse” (2011: 530). Elsewhere, he notes how the French novels produced by translation for the Série noire will not only “give the French access to an imaginary America but to a reappraisal of their own French imaginary” (2006: 37). The manner in which the novels were translated served to “make allegories of the Occupation and Liberation stand out more strongly than is the case in the original English” (38). What Rolls and other analysts fail to acknowledge is Simenon’s important role in this allegorical process—he manages to be French and non-French but without the limen of translation.

The purge committees were savage in their reprisals against publishers following Liberation, and fallout from a publisher found guilty of treason could and did impact upon the authors published through their imprint. Partly fearing repercussions against Gallimard’s charges relating to his position as host and sponsor of the German-endorsed Nouvelle Revue, Simenon had used the excuse of

120 dissatisfaction with his publisher’s support of his work to move on (Herbert R.

Lottman, 1986: 235-237). His timing therefore precluded him from the Série noire phenomenon but his works can be counted among the romans noirs, a term coined to tie film noir with the literature that spawned it.

Noir literature differs from the usual crime novel in that the protagonist is often not a detective, but a character, usually male, who is a social misfit, a victim, a suspect, a perpetrator and/or a predator. The crucial elements—and ones that

Simenon enthusiastically embraced—are the bleak, squalid setting and the self- destructive qualities of the protagonist. Joseph Conrad was the writer whose novel, Heart of Darkness (1902), Simenon strove most to emulate (Bresler 1983:

78). Horsley compares Grahame Greene and Conrad as each exploiting the theme of the wasteland, the defining mark of film noir. She reminds us that Heart of

Darkness is “the novel most cited in relation to noir themes like otherness and the crossing of boundaries into dark, forbidden zones” (2009: 4). Elsa Triolet, among others, majored on this theme, especially in L’Inspecteur des ruines, in which the protagonist muses:

A propos des ruines… Je croyais qu’au bout de la douleur devaient se trouver les ruines du mal. Je me suis trompé de chemin. Il ne mène à rien. A un terrain vague qui sert de poubelle au monde entier. Détritus, déchets, immondices… Je suis un chien perdu qui cherche un os rongé par d’autres chiens perdus (1968: 121).

Léo Malet’s 120, rue de la Gare, written during les années noires, is argued by

Gorrara to be one of the prototypes of this genre, being what Gorrara describes as

“the template for the first truly French roman noir” (2003b: 592). Elsewhere, she defines it as “the first French roman noir to be set in a recognizable and contemporary French reality” (2001: 271). Horsley goes so far as to declare

121 confidently that “[n]one of the European writers published in the Série Noire were of the standard of Greene and Simenon” (2009: 282n).

While the Maigret series stands in opposition to the noir thriller because of the integrity of the detective, most of Simenon’s other dark novels meet all the requirements of the roman noir. William T. Vollmann, in the afterword to the

English version of La Neige attributes to Simenon the capacity to concentrate noir into “a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star” with a protagonist who is “almost inhumanly horrific” (2003: 248). Hutton makes the point that “any novel that represents the années noires is inevitably noir” (2012:

494). The self-destructive activities and relentless decline of the main character, not a new theme in Simenon’s œuvre, can be compared to the protagonists of Jean-

Luc Godard’s A Bout de souffle (1960) or Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des Brumes (1938).

Platten labels La Neige était sale “Simenon’s ‘Occupation’ novel” (2011: 58), emphasising the noirness of the protagonist by describing him as:

the thuggish son of a brothel-keeper whose establishment is protected by the visits of an officer of the occupying forces. Franck [sic] is constructed in the image of the oppressor. He is cruel, tyrannical, and seeks to dominate the other (59).

The ambiguity of the crime in La Neige highlights the focus of the post-war

épuration, in which crimes against the state—specifically collaboration—take precedence over all other crimes. As Simenon himself had witnessed comparable reprisals following the 1914-18 occupation of Liège, women had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets to be boo-ed and jeered at by bystanders. More than twenty thousand suffered this indignity following World

War II, this deliberate “othering” of them for their crime of ‘horizontal collaboration’ or sleeping with enemy soldiers (Kelly Ricciardi Colvin 2008: 4). J.

122 Robert Janes, in his 1992-94 St-Cyr and Kohler series including Mirage (1992), depicts the difficulty of law and order during the Occupation years, where seemingly random crimes can be linked to the Resistance or to war crimes. The novel, depicting a detective forced to work within the Gestapo guidelines, demonstrates how radically police procedure changed during the Occupation years, as does Malet’s 120, Rue de la gare. Both of these writers acknowledge that the policeman did not function alone during the war, but was answerable to

Gestapo authorities for the decisions he did or did not make, and show how suspicions of espionage or resistance activity can colour even the simplest crime.

Many of the facts and events of Simenon’s life are mirrored in the text of his dark novels, but especially his craving for love—relentlessly withheld—from his mother. Bresler (1983: 249) says that Simenon searched for the impossible all his life—the love of a mother who never loved him, while Brunsdale says that there were “continual conflicts with his mother who had no faith in him and treated him like a stranger” (2010: 487). This broken relationship is probably the most recurrent of the themes in his novels. Part of the conflict was that despite his ambivalence, his mother provided the impetus from which his lifetime of creative talent flowed. To quote: “the woman who drove his work[…] was his mother, the over-apologetic, proud little lodging-house proprietor whose standards he never managed to reach and who never loved him as she loved his younger brother […]

When she died, Simenon's inspiration died too” (Marnham 2010: 241-42).

Marnham (1992: 40) records that when student lodgers were not forthcoming during the occupation, Simenon’s mother, Henriette, voluntarily took in German officers at rue de la Loi, seeing no conflict because her own father had served in the German army. She could not have foreseen that her attitude would

123 have contributed to the blurring of lines for both of her sons in the next war. On the other hand her husband, Désiré, found it hard to listen to her conversing with the lodgers in German, which she had learned in her childhood and was now able to resurrect. As a solution Désiré forced a move to a disused Post Office, the smaller lodgings making it impractical for her to continue taking in German officers as boarders (43). Eskin quotes Simenon’s 1960 television discussion on

Balzac as being revealing:

He has said that Balzac once defined a novelist as “a man who doesn’t like his mother.” If the attribution is correct, it only partially suits Balzac, but it suits Simenon totally. If one placed all his remarks about his mother end to end they would add up to a tremendous, endless harangue (Eskin: 16).

Of course, Simenon is not alone in this; difficult mother-child relationships are factors also in the lives of other writers, including Némirovsky.35 Becker attributes the shallowness of Simenon’s female characters with his yearning for the love of his mother and describes a “series of murderous, castrating mothers” who are “two-dimensional caricatures of a pathological psychological profile”, concluding that:

The image of women is always linked to the fear of loss of identity through female domination, a fear paralleled by the concomitant desire for total fusion analogous to the one existing between the mother and the very small child (Becker 1999: 11).

A thematic leitmotiv appearing again and again in his works is of an impotence at odds with his own lurid sexual history: young men, or middle-aged men, seeking but unable to accept love from their wives; Jews or other stereotypical outsiders earnestly looking for tolerance within their chosen community; passive rejection of love by the pitiable, parasitic characters who

35 Miriam Anissimov (2004: 396) in the preface of the French edition of Suite Française published by Editions Denoël, says in part: “Irène was not a happy child. Her mother […]felt a kind of aversion to Irène […], forc[ing] [her] to dress like a schoolgirl well into her teens [to preserve her own image]”. 124 would give anything for acceptance by one person in their ineffective lives, yet are unable to verbalise the need nor to reciprocate. The author’s generalised misogyny is evident in the shallow, perfunctory descriptions of sex, with the rare tender scene (eg, in Il pleut, bergère: 72) being very noticeable. Simenon steers away from the femme fatale, but his women characters are, with very few exceptions—one of those being Madame Maigret—seriously damaged. One of the stronger characters of his romans durs is the woman with whom the protagonist of

Le Train shares a sexual experience in the railway carriage. It is no surprise that the man uses her for his own ends, as she demonstrates what Kimyongür identifies as “intersecting marginal identities” (2012: 246) in that she is Czech, a woman, a refugee, a prisoner, a Jew and a résistante who has lost her passport in the flight from Namur. Sullerot (1973: 93) explains that Simenon views women from the outside, not simply their bodies and mannerisms, but also the order and cleanliness they bring to their homes, their dirty dishes and crumpled sheets on their beds and what they do or do not cook for their husbands.

The women in La Neige are the madam, Lotte (Frank’s mother), and various girls in her establishment. Frank has lived in the brothel since he was about ten years old and despises his mother and the girls whom he has helped to procure, while using the girls for sex and to keep him warm at night. Conversely, he covets love and acceptance from his neighbour Gerhardt Holst, whose daughter he has attempted to compromise. Sissy, who loves him unconditionally, is the focus for one of his shabbiest crimes. As in most of his other novels, women are viewed as a means to an end rather than objects of affection, love or fulfilment. Luis Saslavsky makes Frank’s childhood the defining element in his adaption of the novel (1954), showcasing his loneliness and confusion as his mother brings a new partner each

125 time she visits. This angle seeks to make explicit why the older Frank feels only resentment towards his old nanny, having no compunction about killing her when she is in a position to identify him after the robbery.

James Naremore offers a definition of the complex and multi-faceted concept of the term noir, which demonstrates how Simenon’s novels, with their lonely, dysfunctional protagonist pitted against authority and the world, fit into this category. Noir, says Naremore, is:

[n]ot merely a descriptive term, but a name for […] an antigenre that reveals the dark side of savage capitalism […]. The essence of noirness lies in a feeling of discontinuity, an intermingling of social realism and oneiricism, an anarcho-leftist critique of bourgeois ideology, and an eroticized treatment of violence (1998: 22).

Nostalgia is one of the main elements of noir: “depending on how it is used,

[noir] can describe a dead period, a nostalgia for something that never quite existed, or perhaps even a vital tradition” (Naremore: 39). Rolls and Walker paraphrase Ellen Lee McCallum to show us that:

to noir is not to remember the past with longing or to harbour delusions as to the way life used to be; instead, it is to act in the present with no idea of what is to come and in full (if suppressed) knowledge that our memories of the past are longings and no more than that (2009: 7—parentheses in original).

Mambrino (1973: 42) sees the search for love and acceptance as a theme haunting the works of Simenon while Moré (1973: 228) imbues it with religious significance. This baseless longing is demonstrated in La Neige by Frank’s consuming passion to know a stable father figure. Never having been in the position to know a father, and despising all other human relationships, he nevertheless feels a vacuum in his life. Indeed, because of the officer’s long- standing acquaintance with Lotte, Frank entertains a theory that Kurt Hamling could perhaps be his father (La Neige 241); on one occasion, he feels sure his

126 mother is going to confirm that fact (259). A constant theme of the novel is his fascination with the neighbour, Holst—seeking to attract his attention, speculating about his life and profession before the Occupation, wanting him to visit when

Frank is in prison, and attempting to get close to him through Sissy. As he awaits the consequences of his crime, he refines this vague quest for Holst to a desire that the honest, aloof man become his father in reality. In the framework of the present thesis, this can thus be read allegorically as the hunger for leadership felt by the

French people during the Occupation years. Prior to May 1940, Maréchal Pétain had been hailed as a hero and his defection caused confusion for the man on the street. Hindsight has made de Gaulle’s role clear, but at the time, he could be considered to have abandoned those who needed him most, thus rendering the nation symbolically fatherless.

Location as ‘terrain vague’

As explained in Chapter One, Simenon deliberately achieves a terrain vague in which the characters act out their roles, both in terms of the setting of the novel and his own physical distance from the location of the story. La Neige represents one of the most complicated of his terrains vagues, with a landscape buried under a blanket of snow to create a consciously unrecognisable non-lieu, an enigmatic city or town without landmarks and from which “all historical references are carefully expunged” (Platten 2011: 58). By viewing the events within a geographically abstruse setting, the reader has space in which to examine the issues pertaining to enforced occupation without the interference of preconceived prejudice. This can be compared with Gorrara’s quote from Gérald Durozoi, who describes Malet’s use of distancing techniques as “un entre-deux, un espace intermédiaire entre la réalité

127 et l’imaginaire” (2001: 274). Fülöp-Miller (above) and the publicity notice on the back cover of the English translation of the novel telling us that “Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as ‘one of the very few novels to come out of German- occupied France that gets it exactly right’” notwithstanding, the author identifies neither the country nor the occupiers. All of the elements of the French occupation are there, in the food shortages, the mistrust, graft and betrayal, and the occupiers act in a way reminiscent of the Nazi Occupation, but nowhere in the novel is this made clear. So much so, in fact, that Mambrino (1973: 41) accepts without question that Frank has fallen into the hands of the Germans.

Simenon himself comments that “dans mon esprit, [La Neige était sale] ne se passe dans le nord ou l’est de la France, comme l’ont crus les critiques, mais dans une petite ville d’Autriche que je connais bien” (MI: 202). In a letter dated 7

January 1949 to Frédéric Dard (Fenton Bresler’s archives) he says that in his mind the events take place in Central Europe, while intimating that the occupiers could be Russian (Assouline 1997: 244). Whatever the intended setting, it could effectively be read as an allegory of the Alsace-Lorraine area, claimed by Germany in 1871, contested in World War I and finally restored to France post-World War

II. In support of his thesis of the setting being in Austria—or someplace other than

France—Simenon has given the protagonist and many other characters names that appear Germanic or Slavic—Friedmaier, Holst, Vilmos, Kamp, Berg, Wimmer,

Schonberg, Kromer, Loeb, Ressl, Adler and Gerhardt, for example. Conversely, the occupiers have Anglo-Norman names such as Hamling, or are known only by sobriquets such as “le général” (La Neige: 61), “le chef” (173), “le vieux monsieur”

(189), “le sous-officier” (15), or “l’officier” (200), no matter how significant a role they play. This creates what Jeffrey Mehlman calls the “reverse mirror” effect,

128 forcing the viewer to view the events in a different manner because the characters do not fit a recognised mould (quoted in Simonin 2000: 16). In this way, the occupiers are not clearly the malefactors, and Hamling, the occupation official whom Frank suspects of seeking compromising information about Lotte, is quite benevolent in his attitude towards Frank. However, as Platten explains:

given the cultural references to a café society dominated by black marketeers and to a population living in fear of random detention, it is difficult to imagine that the novel is set anywhere other than in France, or perhaps Belgium, in the early forties (2011: 58).

The landscape, which is explored more fully below, is used symbolically to represent the occupation in this novel. The burial of familiar landmarks under a layer of snow (La Neige: 20) helps to emphasise the poverty and sense of helplessness of the occupied people. It is also representative of death—of people murdered, but also of death of integrity as Frank sinks ever deeper into the mire of self-interest, sadism and corruption. We can usefully compare the symbolism with that of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, where the snow is simultaneously emblematic of purity and perceived cleanliness while blurring the periphery of the contended landscape. Without visual markers, there are no national boundaries, and the reasons for seeking to retain or regain possession lose their urgency:

The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto's long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense (Guterson 1994: 281).

If this reading of the effect of snow is applied to Simenon’s terrain vague, the liminal space becomes suggestive of a noir reading of the storyline as an allegory of Franco-German collaboration. The geographical non-specificity becomes an allegorical device to describe the peculiar plight of France, which has

129 lost its identity under the Occupation. The blurring of the lines of distinction between occupier and occupied replicate the confusion and ambiguity of the

Occupation—which in this novel has lasted for four years (La Neige: 48)—when daily survival did not preclude a degree of compromise and of potential collaboration. Platten explains that by generalising the foreign power and the subjugated nation, Simenon has attempted to “distill the essence of occupied life” and this has the effect of “[dodging] issues of memory and political bias that tend to bear on narratives of the Vichy years” (2011: 58). He makes no provision for the fact that Simenon has deliberately chosen, not to dodge, but to remove from its emotion-charged environment, the essence of liaison within an occupation scenario. John Gray describes it as “perhaps the supreme example of a 20th- century novel that looks, without pathos or false hopes, at what ordinary life becomes when it is overtaken by power” (1999: 87). The matter for Simenon is not Germany versus France, but the relationship between victor and vanquished, therefore referring just as easily to the uneasy relationship between France and

America, as has been examined in the Introduction.

The elaborate creation of a non-lieu in this way can also be seen as an attempt by Simenon to globalise the experience of war, colonisation and oppression. This is in keeping with his theory that it was up to individual people to maintain peace. Spotts records Simenon’s proactive stance in this regard during the tense years when Hitler was setting the stage for world dominance:

Hatred, pure and unalloyed, had in fact already become a pervasive characteristic of public life in the late Thirties. So bad was it that the novelist Georges Simenon, a man of the right and by no means a public- spirited figure, decided to organize a movement to neutralize it. Badges were made with the slogan ‘Sans Haine’ (Without Hate) and posters were

130 printed with the message ‘I have my ideas, you have yours; let’s express them without hate’ (2008: 25).36

By making a Germanic people the occupied nation and the occupier hard to categorise, he attempts to create a world-view of the damaging effects of occupation itself. Astier de la Vigerie quotes a 1955 radio programme in which

Simenon explains to his interviewer the link between hate and fear: “[e]n temps de guerre, on hait l’ennemi—qui, souvent était un ami dix ans auparavant et redeviendra un ami dix ans plus tard—parce qu’on a peur” (1973: 266). This relocation serves a similar purpose to the novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) by Erich Maria Remarque, published in 1929 by Propyläen

Verlag and banned and publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933 because it appeared to show a two-dimensional model of nationalism and fanaticism. The substitution of location, creating confused loyalties, can also be seen as an attempt by Simenon to justify his own stance in the face of charges of collaboration, especially for his contribution to Continental’s output of films during the war.

Badge of (dis)honour

Like Malet, Simenon has presented “a place where the collusion between establishment interests and the disorder of the criminal underworld leads to injustices and a sharp divide between the rich and poor” (Gorrara 2001: 273). The gulf is illustrated by the unequal distribution of warmth, food, privilege and access to services where “[p]aranoia, fear, hysteria, and curiosity about the role of others are at fever pitch” (Platten 2011: 58). This can be compared to themes of shortages and the abuse of power by those who have access to contraband goods

36 Although he declared himself non-political, this membership of a pacifist political party in January 1938 shows him as opposed to war: Marnham (1992: 199), Eskin (1987: 119) and Spotts (2008: 25) all concur on this.

131 in Malet’s works, for example the lawyer smoking Philip Morris cigarettes in 120,

Rue de la gare. Indeed, one of Frank’s excesses is the contraband cigarettes he smokes, which serves as a highly visible indication of his collaboration and his contacts in the black-market underworld (La Neige: 52-53). It can also be seen in the meal to which he treats Sissy (98), which in turn can be compared to the culinary experience of the young couple in Sabatier’s La Souris verte (147). Marc inadvertently agrees to go to the rear of the restaurant, only to find a cornucopia of black market foods. Maria sees it only as evidence of the elegance of French cuisine, while Marc is mortified with shame as well as distress about whether he can afford to pay for the meal.

Frank’s privileged position is indicated by the repeated references to the green card he has negotiated to obtain (La Neige: 86, 92, 102, 105, 106, 112, 138,

143, 151-52, 161, 172, 174). The possession of the green card represents his degree of compromise with the occupation authorities. The fact that he mentions and shows it at every opportunity indicates his need for reassurance, and while waiting for it, he reflects that for others it could be representative of “un succès extraordinaire”, its possession meaning “vous met dans la même position que, dans l’autre camp, un chef de réseau” (92). Hutton here compares Frank with

Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien as another “eponymous anti-hero”, both protagonists having attempted unsuccessfully to join the Resistance at an earlier time (2013:

21). Given Frank’s inflated sense of self-importance, this scenario remains unconvincing. He feels disgust for those less privileged than himself, including the girls employed in his mother’s stable of prostitutes, although his disgust does not prevent him from availing himself of their services (48). The women themselves can be seen through the prism of Kimyongür’s intersecting marginality (2012:

132 248)—they are female, prostitutes, in some cases of ethnic origin, and as such, they are at the mercy of abusive clients, the woman who uses them to gain money, but also to carry heavy coal scuttles to light the fires, and of Frank himself (La Neige:

30). As cultural outsiders, they are questioned by the police who attempt to lay a charge on Frank. Through his enjoyment of the black market goods which his mother’s profession enables him to relish, he has become one with the occupying force, while at the same time despising them. In turn, the tenants despise his mother for her occupation (138).

Several descriptive icons are used throughout the novel, some always in the company of others. Platten alerts us to the fact that the use of symbolism is a deliberate ploy on Simenon’s part:

[His] persistent deployment of a finite number of tropes or signs may […] be understood as an appeal to read his fiction metaphorically, to attempt to see more precisely what both the Maigret and the non-Maigret series of novels reveal about the world that they both reflect and create, perhaps even to debate what truths they might articulate about the nature of human existence (2011: 67).

Frank’s neighbour Holst is very tall, of an indeterminate grey, and he stands aloof from those he meets on the street (La Neige: 21-22). Poverty and oppression have made him stoop and his facial skin hangs in folds (48). Seemingly an intellectual (45), he now works as a tram driver, and part of his attire is a pair of shapeless homemade boots he wears tied with string (49) and the tin lunchbox he carries under his arm whenever he is outside the apartment. Because of his shift work, he carries an electric flashlight and is the only tenant with a key to the apartment building (23). References to the shabby boots and the tin lunch box are made whenever Holst appears or whenever Frank (who thinks of him obsessively) is reminded of him (21, 49, 100, 132, 182, 194, 254, 266). When Holst waits in line

133 for rationed goods, he carries a shopping bag and waits patiently, unlike Frank who manages to avoid this onerous task. The boots and tin box plus his overall greyness make Holst the embodiment of the poverty and oppression of the town’s inhabitants, and emphasise the difference between Frank and Holst, whose calm, uncomplaining demeanour “triggers a sense of disempowerment that lurks beneath the youthful swagger of the small-town gangster” who is Frank (Platten

2011: 59). Holst becomes metonymic of the novel’s broader anonymity, its resistance to geographical localisation.

Platten argues that the boots are fetishised, and that Frank’s knowledge of his neighbour “is reduced to a few external signs, notably some furry, home-made boots that he wears to work, and a lunch box that he hugs to his chest” (2011: 59).

Platten’s interpretation of this recurring symbol is as follows:

Simenon uses signs and symbols to guide us, but also to warn us of the dangers of adopting a unilateral perspective on reality. Holst’s furry boots stray into different regions of Franck’s [sic] mind […], ending up on the upper lips of his captors in the prison (67)

Although Holst is identified by name, he is epitomised more by the signature boots and lunch box than by his personality, so that the objects serve as symbols of integrity and poverty or perhaps as the link between the two qualities.

Frank is not in a position to know the older man’s personality, in spite of questioning Sissy about his age, marital status, prior employment and financial history (La Neige: 94-99). His self-effacing demeanour indicates that Holst is a kind of MacGuffin, a term devised and immortalised by Alfred Hitchcock to describe an object or person that, while not necessary to the storyline, serves to motivate the character and to drive the plot. Present from the first paragraph, subliminally recurrent throughout the novel and seen in silhouette at the finale

134 (283), Holst is more important to Frank than is his daughter. One of Frank’s interrogators is similarly depersonalised and stereotyped by his cigar (200) and the other by the big brass ruler that lies menacingly on his desk (219, 221). A play on words following the assault with the ruler, when the escorts return to take

Frank to receive medical attention: “[l]e reste fut réglé en quelques mouvements”, makes clear the implication that the ruler enforces the rules (223). In an

Occupation scenario possession of a cigar, an incongruous luxury for the normal man on the street, can be seen as heralding either supremacy or collaboration.

The novel falls into three sections: ‘Les clients de Timo’, in which Frank commits his crimes; ‘Le Père de Sissy’, where he acquires his green card, Frank’s actions impact on his mother and her establishment (146-47) and even upon

Timo’s club (150-51), and he is arrested (164); and ‘La femme à la fenêtre’, where

Frank is relentlessly questioned and seeks to escape into an ideal world by fantasising about the mysterious woman he sees at a distant window. This unknown person embodies Frank’s growing hope for the future while representing what he has never had—a stable home life or indeed a stable, recognisable place in history or in the world (213).

The style is less journalistic than in many of Simenon’s other novels, with longer paragraphs and the use of imagery to describe the setting and environment.

The ubiquitous rhetorical questions (see Gide’s comments in the Introduction) reflect Frank’s attempts to rationalise his actions:

Frank n’avait aucune raison de faire du bruit. Collé au mur, il était pratiquement invisible. Alors pourquoi toussa-t-il juste au moment où l’homme allait atteindre l’impasse? […] Au fond, il toussa pour attirer l’attention (La Neige: 22).

135 Although much of the novel reads like a stream of consciousness, the reader is no more able to read Frank’s mind than to understand the protagonist of any other noir novel or film. For Frank, the age of innocence has long since been vacated, because he does not understand himself. Vollmann makes these comments:

The struggle for life alone cannot explain him. Frank doesn’t know what he’s about, and it is a measure of his sickness (and his world’s) that all he can think to do in order to discover himself is to commit acts of violence and betrayal (2003: 252).

Simenon captures the uncertainty of the Occupation, when no one knows if or when the regime will be overthrown and the country once more be positioned under a French government. The club owner, Timo, has an excellent working relationship with the invaders because he has killed enough people no longer to be regarded as a threat (La Neige: 13). The fact that everyone at the club has killed at least one man, whether in war, through crime or by informing on him brings to mind Le Corbeau with its letters of denunciation to discredit people in the eyes of their fellow citizens (13). Coupled with this is the divergent attitude to crimes: a person perceived as a terrorist by the occupiers and collaborators can simultaneously be seen as a patriot by the residents of the country (44). Part of

Frank’s ruminations after his crime include the following:

Il y a eu un temps où on aurait cerné le quartier et fouillé les maisons une à une. C’est déjà loin. Les otages aussi. On dirait que les hommes sont devenus philosophes d’un côté et de l’autre de la barrière. Mais y a-t-il encore une barrière? (32)

Casual mention of the curfew (La Neige: 21) corresponds with an equally offhand reference in Malet (120, Rue de la gare: 108, 142). His description in the latter instance replicates the snow-covered scenery in La Neige: “Le black-out est absolu, la nuit d’encre. La neige, boueuse et fondue, n’offre plus le tapi immaculé

136 sur lequel les silhouettes se détachent aisément” (Malet: 142, English term

‘blackout’ used stylistically). Crystel Pinçonnat quotes Peter Conrad in The Art of the City to describe the kind of after-curfew life of the city: “the city at night is taken from those who think they run it and handed over to its amoral aborigines— the sexually hungry, the larcenous, the violent, all of them agents of the somnambulistic id” (1996: 112). This encapsulates perfectly the settings of most of Simenon’s romans durs, where vague figures skulk in doorways or disappear down narrow, dirty alleyways and the ambience reflects and merges with the sullied lives of the protagonist.

The depiction of little porcelain angels in wall niches, illuminated by candles, recalls the scene in Il pleut, bergère (76) discussed in Chapter Two. This is echoed in the fact that Sissy decorates china ornaments to be sold as souvenirs, mostly to the occupiers (La Neige: 51). The quaint village in which Frank was reared, with its pink, green, blue and yellow houses emphasises the distance he has come in such a short time—not yet nineteen, he is completely unmoved by this fairytale setting when he returns to steal the watches from his former nanny (73).

It also pays tribute to the paucity of Frank’s childhood, which has been clouded not just by the occupiers but by the perceived inadequacy of love from his mother. He has no concept that she may have attempted to shield him from some aspects of her unsavoury life by having him cared for by the jeweller’s sister. So removed is he from the naiveté of his childhood that he pitilessly shoots Mlle Vilmos lest she identify him (81).

137 Stages of decline

As the author has noted, the novel, at some 240 pages in length, is atypically long for Simenon. Written in the third person with an omniscient narrator focusing on the point of view of Frank, it commences, not exactly in medias res, but with the protagonist pondering a recent event in which, as a kind of rite of passage, he has killed his first man. This killing he equates with losing his virginity, principally because neither has meant much to him, both events having been neither premeditated nor remarkable (La Neige: 8). In both cases, a decision has been made to perform an act—irrespective of partner or victim—and, when the opportunity presents itself, the act is done. The first murder is when Frank’s friend, Kromer, fells a red-haired dwarf with one blow. The body, juxtaposed incongruously with an orange peel—a rare and amazing sight in the country deeply entrenched in occupation and replicating Kromer’s skin—has flown through the air to land in one of the snow banks that run parallel to the walkway

(11). The dwarf can be seen, similarly to Holst, as a MacGuffin. Rolls and Walker demonstrate how Léo Malet’s character, appropriately named Mac Guffine, in his

1945 novel, Nestor Burma contre C.Q.F.D., reproduces the Franco-German polarity of the Occupation by adding to the theme of ‘half-and-half’: his size and impotence make him half a man, to match the half-dressed girls and half-consumed drinks

(2009: 26). As Rolls and Walker explain, “Malet’s use of the term is potentially both coy and cleverly deceptive: the dwarf is a small and insignificant character; his insignificance, however, is precisely how he drives the main plotline" (2009:

201n).

In La Neige, it is only after seeing Kromer’s brutal treatment and casual indifference that Frank decides that his next rite of passage will have to be a

138 murder. His first victim, a non-commissioned officer of the occupation forces, enormously obese and known simply as l’Eunuque, is the only member of the occupation forces to patronise Timo’s club (15). Not considered dangerous by the town’s lowlife who gather at the club, he is “un gros vicieux dont on [including the madam of the brothel] ne parlait qu’en rigolant” (16). The knowledge that the death of another member of the occupation forces—“[d]es gens en uniforme, on en tuait chaque semaine”—reassures Frank that blame will fall on patriotic organisations and retributive hostages taken from local council members (20). For him, it is simply a matter of killing his first man and initiating Kromer’s Swedish knife, “[r]ien de plus.” The only problem he has with the scenario is that, while waiting for his victim, he has to stand up to his knees in the surface-hardened snow, which had not been shovelled from the alley where he waits in ambush (20).

As he leaves the scene, he has to step over the body lying half on the footpath and half in the pile of snow (26), thus commencing his crossing of the Rubicon. This crossing or transition happens in two phases, the final, irrevocable stage after his betrayal of Sissy, whose unconditional love for him is outside the realm of his knowledge or comprehension. As Sissy flees the scene of his crime, “[m]aintenant, il a payé sa place” (121); he looks back with confusion and an uninformed regret from the other side, as it were, of the moral outrage: “Il a franchi le cap. Il a regardé de l’autre côté” (122). Moré (1973: 245) generously see this as a symbolic passing from death to life.

Margaret-Anne Hutton (2012: 493-94) includes La Neige in novels that address the issue of plunder from Jewish communities during World War II, but allocates more time to other novels to illustrate her point. She quotes Boileau-

Narcejac’s La Lèpre (1976) to demonstrate that under Occupation, common law

139 had been effectively suspended and broadly uses the issues of La Neige to illustrate the complexity of matters within that scenario. By outlining the three overt crimes of Frank, she shows how Occupation had muddied the water in determining whether acts can be designated as criminal, illegal, immoral or, alternatively, acts of heroism and/or patriotism (493). Problems of demarcation between legal jurisprudence of the occupier to those of the domestic government are further complicated by the presence of a parallel government in France during the

Occupation years (494). Simenon addresses this fact by having the narrator comment that the same person can be designated a terrorist or a patriot (La Neige:

44).

In this context, the theft of the watches can be seen as representative of the theft of art works, jewellery or other valuables, either on behalf of the occupiers or by the collaborating government for their own coffers. Kromer asks Frank if he can procure some antique watches for a senior official and provides transport, a driver and a guard to assist Frank when he concedes knowledge of a possible source (La Neige: 61). The official (le général) has been specific about the type of watches he wants—silver or gold, with nested cases, ones that strike the hour or incorporate revolving figurines (63). Frank has no compunction about stealing these from the elderly jeweller whose sister had been his childhood carer, while

Kromer prefers to remain ignorant of the means he uses to obtain the goods and of their provenance (64).

Unfortunately, Hutton does not pursue the analogy in Simenon’s novel, but quotes to demonstrate that Frank views his crime as separate from those of other criminals who are executed by the authorities, seeing them as deserving of judgement and his crimes as somehow different: “Ceux-là, ce sont des hommes qui

140 ont été jugés, qui ont commis un crime, qu’on peut juger, inscrire dans les grands livres de la justice” (La Neige: 245). Hutton (496) quotes official documentation to show that, depending upon whether the crime has been committed by Vichy

France or Nazi Germany, it can be classified as spoliation or pillage, the former being regarded as “legal theft” and the latter as illegal under international law.

Frank has no scruples about stealing the watches he played with as a child for the general he has never seen. He and Kromer share the money paid by the general but are equally unaware that this money can be traced back to the occupation forces (La Neige: 204-05). Frank’s interrogator seems to consider neither the theft nor the murder of Mlle Vilmos as a crime, but the theft of money from the authorities is punishable by death for Frank and perhaps also for Kromer

(205). Hutton demonstrates that recent crime fiction (1999-2005) is now addressing the issues of theft of Jewish property, but once again Simenon has pre- empted this by many years by “turn[ing] a magnifying glass on various categories and discourses: of legality, morality, history, and crime fiction itself. Defining criminal acts in times of war is never simple” (2012: 494).

Nadir of degradation

A crisis point is reached when Frank commits his shabbiest crime, arranging for an acquaintance to rape the girl who loves him. Fleeing from the scene, Sissy ignores Frank’s remorseful attempts to return her keys so she can return to her apartment (La Neige: 133). Symbolically, she takes refuge in the exact spot where Frank has committed his first murder (128). The incident unsettles Frank, who is inexplicably reminded of a similar incident involving an injured cat during his childhood (123-24). As he spends the next several days in

141 bed, he is aware of a change in the weather signalling a new phase in his life;

“même dans la cuisine, la qualité de l’air est changée” (136). The women, including his mother, are afraid of the depths to which they now realise he is prepared to go and suspicious of his involvement in other recent crimes (138). When Frank is arrested by a member of the occupying forces and taken by streetcar to headquarters for questioning, the snow lends an incongruous fairytale appearance to the town. In spite of the way it sparkles on the roads, rooftops and windowpanes, the snow has begun to melt in the same way as Frank’s façade of uncaring abandon has begun to come unstuck. The cigarette butt he drops sputters and is extinguished in the thawing snow; he resists the urge to compare it to the demise of his hope for rescue (168). This incident signifies the effect occupation by the enemy has on the conscience of the occupied people, whose moral compass begins to function for survival rather than integrity.

During Frank’s internment, his erstwhile freedom is reduced to mere existence in a makeshift cell at the requisitioned school. Snow is implied but not mentioned as he is taken by car to the military offices for further questioning (La

Neige: 198). It is here that Frank realises that he is charged not, as he had assumed, for the murder of the NCO, nor for that of his old nanny who had fostered him for the first ten years of his life (74), but that his questioning is part of a greater inquiry. A lethargic investigation had been conducted following the death of the NCO (43) and Frank himself volunteers the information that he has killed

Mlle Vilmos because the investigating officers are seemingly unaware of his connection to the death (273). While Platten (2011: 59) and Mambrino (41) assume that Frank was charged for the obvious crime of murder, the ‘real’ crime, somehow involving a superior officer (La Neige: 272) and the presence of a radio

142 transmitter (274), is that stolen money has been used to pay for the watches Frank had volunteered to steal from his old nanny. His interrogator tries to sow the seed of self-preservation by telling Frank that it seems unfair for him to take the fall for someone else in whom they are far more interested (262). While it is hard to ascertain what the authorities considered to be Frank’s crime, the banknotes paying for the watches had been marked with a series of pinholes enabling them to be traced to the offices of the Occupation authorities (204-05). The general with a penchant for old watches is perhaps being internally investigated for his misuse of money, and had Frank admitted from the start what he knew, he could have avoided much of the abuse and brutality used in the quest for truth.

Hope of redemption

Frank finds hope by watching a building opposite the school, where a young woman opens a window to hang out baby clothes and other garments (213-14).

This scene is an exact replica, according to Moré (1973: 257-58), of the view from the desk of the young Simenon at his first primary school, and was used in another context in Pedigree. The weather reflects this hope by a kind of false spring towards the end of January, when bright sunlight reflects off the unthawed snow.

Although the water in open barrels remains frozen, birds begin courting rituals (La

Neige: 213). Sissy comes to visit Frank in his place of incarceration and verbalises her love for him. The weather, the implication of reproduction in the baby clothes and the amorous activities of the birds indicate the possibility of a new or different life.

This phase ends when he learns that his accomplice in the robbery during which the stolen banknotes changed hands (La Neige: 66-70) has been killed by

Occupation forces. The false spring passes, the temperature drops and he predicts

143 that “[d]emain matin, il y aura des fleurs de givre sur les vitres”—the small flare of hope is gone and he surrenders to the inevitable death sentence (277). The day a final decision is made that Frank has no more information to contribute and he is to be sent to the snow-covered courtyard for execution, “[o]n dirait qu’ils sont en avance [of taking the prisoners out at a set hour] parce que le ciel est sombre et bas” and it has begun to snow again (285).

The character’s singleminded journey to destruction is similar to other literature and films of the era, where the reader or watcher is drawn into the vortex of the action, but feels powerless to influence the outcome. By choosing not to cooperate with the authorities Frank in fact makes the choice to opt out of life after being brought to the ends of his endurance (La Neige: 285). His inertia is illustrated by the fact that, lacking the means of escape or resolution, he relies on the merciful oblivion of sleep to blot out the uncertainty of the future and to dull the edge of his pain and disillusionment. His refusal to answer the questions put to him by the prison officer (190-93) mirrors Mme Calas’ claim for the right of silence in the face of Maigret’s questioning (Maigret et le corps sans tête: 168). For Frank :

[l]a question est de ne pas céder, non pas par principe, non pas pour sauver qui que ce soit, non pas par point d’honneur, mais parce qu’un jour, alors qu’il ne savait pas encore pourquoi, il a décidé de ne pas céder (La Neige : 201).

While it is unclear whether his compliance would have produced a different outcome, he has “de son plein gré, en toute connaissance de cause, […] fait tout pour attirer sur lui le mauvais sort” (154).

Snow as a geographical terrain vague

Simenon’s use of precipitation imagery is strongly effective in La Neige, not least because this represents a significantly different milieu to that used in his

144 other novels dealing with war—or indeed to any of his other novels. In the previous chapter, the use of rain in Il pleut, bergère was analysed and it was shown that this is linked to the author’s childhood memories of Occupation in his hometown of Liège. Two other novels, Le Clan des Ostendais and Le Train, both based on his experiences and people with whom he had dealings in his capacity as

Commissioner for Belgian Refugees at La Rochelle during the drôle de guerre, make use of the prevailing Indian summer weather corresponding with the official reports contained in the Royal Meteorological Society’s records (Anderson 2009:

8). As will be outlined in Chapter Four, Simenon reflects this anomaly in his allegorical approach to wartime events in Maigret et le corps sans tête.

The bleak murders and betrayals of the storyline of La Neige take place in the winter months, so the blanket of snow, an already established fact at the beginning of the novel, remains intact and mostly static throughout the novel.

Residents have made inroads into the deep, encrusted snow by the application of salt or ashes to allow access from their houses to the footpath (20). The effect of the snow is to provide anonymity of location, the landmarks hidden beneath its covering. The cold creates isolation by keeping people indoors except for the food queues and those travelling on the bus, while the two ‘hot spots’ of activity are the brothel and Timo’s club, in both of which there is also physical warmth from the fires. Contrast is formed by the incursion of tramlines:

La rue du tram est blanche et noire et la neige y est plus souillée qu’ailleurs. Jusqu’aussi loin qu’on peut voir, les rails, noirs et luisants, soulignent la perspective, formant des courbes lorsque les deux voies se rejoignent. Le ciel est bas, trop clair, avec cette luminosité qui fait plus triste que la vraie grisaille. Ce blanc-là, livide et translucide, a quelque chose de menaçant, de définitif, d’éternel (La Neige: 49).

145 After each snowfall, gangs of unemployed men are hired by the local council to shovel snow from the footpaths (154). A similar cameo of regimented manpower is used in Les Frères Rico (35), where an American chain gang is used for the same purpose. The intertextual link is suggestive of a mapping onto the white page of an(other) Occupation text.

The appearance of a world covered in snow is pure and untainted because everything under the snow is hidden and unified. Only where man has encroached upon it by clearing pathways to the doors of houses or by the tram tracks, which must of necessity push aside the snow, does the unblemished whiteness become blackened and unsavoury. Frank has become sullied by his association with the people in Timo’s club and the brothel and by his criminal activities. He can be compared to the piles of dirty snow “avec [les] incrustations de détritus” while a

“poudre blanche, qui se décolle parfois de la croûte du ciel, comme le plâtre d’un plafond” is inadequate to bury the exposed filth (La Neige: 106). Becker (1999: 66) points out that the clean snow beginning to fall as he is led away to execution represents his expiation and purification, covering the dirty snow of his sins. The other aspect of snow is its coldness, which reflects the lack of emotion or human warmth displayed by the protagonist. Knowing that his mother has contributed to this by hiding the identity of his father (La Neige: 141), by leaving him with a wet- nurse, then a nanny during his growing years, and by exposing him to her choice of profession does not fully explain his lack of scruples and human feeling. This forms a parallel to the concealment of location throughout the novel, making it an allegorical representation of the situation of France during the Occupation.

When Frank looks out of the windows of the residential block where he lives with his mother, he sees a harsh reflection of the snow which seems to blend

146 with the white-painted stairs and hall so that the glare permeates the building.

The outer oppression has entered the inner being of the protagonist, until the lines of demarcation are blurred (La Neige: 39). This reflects the confused loyalties of the people, the temptation to collaborate and the very real need for many people,

Simenon included, to establish working relationships that are as painless as possible with the enemy within an indefinite occupation situation.

The weather conditions form an isolation and restriction to the people of the occupied city so that their roles are acted out as it were in a vacuum. Only in the club and the apartment from which Lotte conducts her business is the warmth of the fires contrasted to the wilderness outside. Later, the officer conducting interrogations also has a fire in his room so that these three spaces reflect passion for negative reasons. The geographical non-lieu creates a space from which issues of occupation itself can be examined without the emotional baggage of a known environment, as any place in France would have been. The cloaking of an entire landscape in snow, at once concealing and showcasing the issues at play, encourages the reader to consider not a preconceived stance but an objective examination of world conflict.

The foregoing illustrates how Simenon has manipulated a narrative of a small-time criminal in an occupied country to encompass a wider political perspective. By noiring the storyline, he illustrates the pessimism of the post-war era, when the integrity of those in power, as well as the man on the street, is compared to the crimes of the occupiers. The brutality of the trial mirrors how investigations for collaboration by members of the Resistance appear to punish patriots as much as the invaders. The relentless movement towards the denouement illustrates the helplessness felt by people caught up in the activities of

147 their political leaders and of decisions made under impossible duress, which are then repented at leisure. The deliberate cloaking of the countryside in a perpetual blanket of snow neutralises the locality, which further blurs the line of distinction between the occupier and the occupied. The criminality of a large portion of the subjugated people, plus the insecurities of the conquerors, opens the door to a more objective view of recent world events. What is left is the morality of the actions themselves, unclouded by preconceived ideas of who has the ethical high ground.

148 Chapter Four: Maigret et le corps sans tête

“People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel [...] but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.” - Eudora Welty

The novel Maigret et le corps sans tête is significant for being Simenon’s last work at Lakeville, Connecticut, before he and his household returned to live in the

South of France. It will be argued that this is one of the novels in which he deals with his own issues of war and dislocation, including his dissatisfaction about

French political events. He incorporates also a sense of the inevitability of history that he shares with French people of the era, which include a reluctance to face

French collusion in German war crimes, and ambivalent feelings about both France and the United States. He does this through various distancing techniques, one of which is the use of both real and literary terrains vagues. Andrea Goulet (2009:

54) demonstrates by analysis of Emile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq (1868) how calculated mention of actual neutral spaces serves to alert the reader to their significance in the novel.37 In Maigret et le corps sans tête the author twice uses the term which, combined with the fact that he was writing from Lakeville, can be interpreted as a statement of his intention in writing the novel: “Pourquoi aurait- on jeté une partie du corps dans le canal et une autre dans un terrain vague, par exemple?" (21-22) and police officer Judel from the local precinct asks in relation to the missing head, “Rien dans les terrains vagues?”(45). Other strategies used include allusions to republican iconography, especially Marianne—the emblem of

Frenchness since the French Revolution; allegorical references to the épuration that mirror post-war attempts to purify and restore the reputation of France, and

37 “The importance of the terrain vague is indicated in Monsieur Lecoq not only by the novel’s introductory descriptions of the criminal and liminal space, but by the prominence of the very phrase in the map that is reproduced in […] the book.” 149 the torn loyalties of French people who desire simultaneously to emulate the US and retain traditional ways. Another literary technique is the faithful reflection of weather patterns of the drôle de guerre, which can be cross-referenced with several of his novels set more identifiably in the time of the Occupation. As well, this aspect can be compared with works of other writers including Vercors and

Irène Némirovsky, which, for their part, have been recognised as politically motivated and historically accurate works.

Bresler comments only upon Maigret et le corps sans tête to highlight the seamless transition from the US to south-western France. The novel set in Paris but written in Lakeville is followed by another, Maigret tend un piège, set in

Montmartre but written in Mougins.38 No one, Bresler avers, reading the two novels, can detect 4800 kilometres of separation and two completely different lifestyles between the two (1983: 190). What becomes apparent is that Bresler is functioning mostly as a biographer who does not consider literal or literary terrains vagues, although his comments just quoted are a perfect example of

Simenon’s skills. Assouline dismisses Maigret et le corps as simply one of five written at Lakeville (1997: 254) and as an exercise designed “little more than [to] keep his hand in” (1997: 294). Both of these biographers overlook the symbolic treatment of post-war concerns in the novel. Eskin (231) mentions it only as an example of the development of a suspect from broad brushstrokes to a complete character.

Subliminal history

Although many of his novels have very mundane titles, for example, Maigret or Stan le tueur, at other times Simenon deploys an allegorical strategy,

38 Becker (1999: 22) comments upon a theme of impotence in this latter novel. 150 particularly at the paratextual level, with the name of his novels alerting the reader to a possible hidden significance. Marcel Moré points out that the covers of

Simenon’s original novels are no accident, with the jaquette serving as a “manière de préface" (1973: 258n). As in Il pleut, bergère and Signé Picpus,39 the title of

Maigret et le corps sans tête initially transports the reader as virtual spectators of the French Revolution. It is also reminiscent of the law passed on 8 September

1940 by the Vichy government, requiring that all busts—or heads—of the French icon, Marianne, be removed from local mairies during the Occupation and replaced with busts of Joan of Arc and of Maréchal Pétain. Vichy saw the kind of liberty represented by Marianne, popular since the Revolution, as inimical to Vichy ideals and suggestive of the notion of an unwilling alliance with the Nazi regime. Her image became synonymous with that of the Resistance, and upon Liberation in

1944, many mayors were to be considered as collaborators because of their compliance with the Vichy directive (Agulhon and Bonte 1992: 96-97). A third interpretation of the title of this novel can see the headless corpse as representative of France’s head, or leader, French president, Charles de Gaulle, whose absence during the Occupation years had effectively rendered the country fragmented and ‘headless’.

As in so many of his novels, the backdrop of this novel is Paris—a city stripped of any outward references to the German Occupation of 1940 to 1944, or of the privations suffered there for the duration of the War. Instead, Simenon calls upon the inferred history of the area to anchor the story in events which form a subliminal basis, not contemporary to the story but at times preceding it by

39 The subliminal reference here is to the largest private cemetery in Paris, where the bodies of 1,306 people from all walks of life were buried in mass graves as a manner of coping with the output of the guillotine set up in Place du Trône-Renversé, today the Place de la Nation. 151 hundreds of years. He achieves this by occluded references to the history and past of France—or Paris—through the unremarked inclusion of place names or seemingly incidental glimpses of everyday life. Marco Modenesi explains how

Simenon marks out the boundaries of the action in a way that we perceive as authentic because of the degree of detail:

Le narrateur, en effet, évoque sans relâche les rues ou les boulevards de la capitale française; il les impose au lecteur qui est ainsi pris à l'intérieur de ce réseau routier, ce tissu urbain que les toponymes ébauchent d'une page à l'autre. Dans l'évocation des lieux, Simenon a tendance, aussi, à avoir recours à un usage métonymique des toponymes.40

Therefore, although great upheaval existed in Paris at the time this novel was being written, and Simenon could not have been unaware of this, none of it is reflected on the surface of the novel. Between 1954 and 1974, 24 percent of Paris, including entire quartiers such as Montparnasse, Italie, Belleville and Bercy immortalised in Simenon’s novels, were demolished and reconstructed in the name of modernity and hygiene. An incidental or deliberate result of this was that

19 per cent of the city’s population, mostly workers, were relocated to outlying suburbs where high-density living provided housing for some 550,000 of them.

This reshuffle increased by 51 percent the number of cadres supérieurs within the péripherique, while reducing that of workers by 44 percent, which had a profound effect upon the social fabric of the city (Ross: 151).

Simenon allows the history of the areas, of which the observer is not consciously aware, but which s/he ‘knows’ at a subliminal level—to speak for itself by association. He does this by prioritising location in each novel—be it a particular suburb of Paris, La Vendée, the Congo or an area in the USA—before

40 http://www.trussel.com/maig/marcom.htm. 152 deciding upon the sequence of events in the novel. Gilbert Sigaux (1973: 16) draws our attention to the way in which Simenon holds in his memory the colours, smells and sounds associated with a district, then recalls them to give “un poids de vie indiscutable” to his settings. In his opinion, except for Balzac, no other writer portrays the essence of an area—especially Paris—in such a manner. After deciding upon the location, Simenon then focuses on the protagonist, maybe a composite of several characters he has met or known in the past. From one of his

150 telephone books, the author chooses a name for his character, and decides upon the characteristics of this particular personality. These details are entered upon his manila envelope along with parents, ages of family members, and maybe even a floor plan of the house in which the protagonist lives (Becker 1999: 100).

Only when the locality and characters have taken form does the situation in which the protagonist will pit his existence come into being. Simenon asks himself: what would make this person, in these surroundings, go to his limit? This means that the location is never an accident, but has been deliberately chosen as the milieu from which the character grows and develops. From a moment of crisis, often at the beginning of the novel, a series of flashbacks will evoke the past leading up to the crisis point, and the novel moves towards a denouement that often appears to all but the protagonist as useless, defeatist or at best avoidable.

Once set upon his chosen course, the protagonist is unable to change tack or reconsider, following the predetermined route “as inexorably as the workings of destiny in Greek tragedy” (Becker 1999: 99-100).

Hemelryk Donald and Gammack (2004: 7) agree with the theory of locales having an implied history. While their focus is upon urban development and how a locality is promoted through film, they pay tribute to how the locals perceive past

153 events as colouring the concrete presence of an area. Researchers attempt to capture and utilise the “layered histories of the city” in order to create historical depth:

Places are differentiated not only by their physical forms and architectures, but also by the contexts of their construction and development, by the known experiences of usage, and by the currency of the memories, which attach to them (7).

Elizabeth Golden uses the Berlin Wall as a case in point, explaining the delicate balancing act needed to preserve reminders as an act of remembrance as opposed to removing all evidence to achieve “emotional catharsis” (2014: 220-21).

Like the gravestones cleared from cemeteries, at least part of the Wall needs to be retained as an aid for “psychological liberation from memories” (220). Only by allowing people to remember in a non-threatening way can the past be accommodated (228). This has been facilitated in part by an official bike trail and hiking route where the barricade once stood, allowing the Wall to now be read by those sensitive to its history as “a narrative created by a series of places” (222).

This is in opposition to, for instance, a novel written by Léo Malet under the pseudonym of Frank Harding, Johnny Metal ou le dé de jade (1947). Pinçonnat, commenting upon the use of suburban landscape to anchor the action in this novel, emphasises that whether the work is set in New York, Chicago or San Francisco:

c'est une ville imprécise, semblable à n'importe quelle métropole américaine. Elle n'existe pas dans sa spécificité, mais elle est partie intégrante de la mythologie policière qui la modèle (1996: 116).

What is important is an impression of a stereotypical American town, just as in La Neige était sale, Simenon uses a generic European city as his locale.

Likewise, Malet’s protagonist has no past and no private life, seeming to emanate from the town itself (Pinçonnat: 115). Simenon, in a novel published the same

154 year and set in New York (predictably, the novel is called Maigret à New York) emphasises the banal aspect of the city as seen through the eyes of the detective.

Unlike Johnny Metal, Simenon’s protagonist has been systematically developed as a character, with an address, a wife, known preferences in food and a penchant for pipes and wood stoves. Upon his arrival in New York, he muses upon the fact that there are no concierges, that there appear to be no buildings of importance, and that the odours of the area are offensive (Pinçonnat: 118-19). However, in Paris, every district is imbued by Simenon with an occult history from which the qualities, actions and reactions of the individuals develop.

In Le Corps, the storyline is set in the former Belleville, erstwhile wine making commune outside the confines of Paris. This former working-class region, site of revolutionary activity in 1848 and 1871 and considered “a place of revelry

[…] matched by its renown as a centre of crime” (Stott 2011: 359), became the home in 1933 of German Jews fleeing pogroms under the Third Reich and of

Spanish leaving their homeland in 1939. One of the characters of Le Corps, Antoine

Crispin, lives with his mother in rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin (71). This precise area, site of a furniture business owned by Russian-born Wolff Lévitan from 1936, was firstly requisitioned by German troops during World War II and, from 1942 to

1945, by the workers of the Todt organisation. This Nazi corporation was responsible for the defensive fortification known as le Mur de l’Atlantique. Its workers were initially prisoners of war and local workers, but later the inmates of

German concentration camps such as Drancy (Dreyfus and Gensburger 2011: 45-

48), and this links it with the damage sustained by France in its dramatic rescue by the Allies. Simenon mentions the same location of rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin in

155 L'Inspecteur Cadavre (1943) in relation to seedy bookshops selling pornographic material, emphasising the unsavoury reputation of the area.

Another significant character in Le Corps is Dieudonné Pape, who lives in the rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin (155), site of the infamous gibet de Montfaucon where, from the 1300s to 1627, multiple hangings could be performed simultaneously. This gibbet, immortalised by both Victor Hugo and Alexandre

Dumas (listed by Simenon as being among his favourite writers), and specifically referenced by Quadruppani in La Forcenée (Stott: 363), can be seen as emblematic of organised slaughter by authorities such as those in the events of two world wars and the contemporary escalation in Algeria. This reflects Simenon’s “horreur de la violence sous toutes ses formes, de la force brutale” and the fact that he wished for peaceful ways to settle international disputes (QJV Tome 1: 47). A nearby building in rue Saint-Denis was the 1834 site of Pierre-Raybaud’s shop selling “savons de ménage et de toilette, et [une] collection d’huiles essentielles”.41 Simenon’s character’s contemporary dwelling is described as a 3-room apartment in a “vieil immeuble de cinq étages à l’aspect assez confortable et petit bourgeois”, with a former storage area converted to a bathroom (Le Corps: 170). The connotations of the bathroom and of nettoyage are discussed below, but his living near the premises of an historic soap merchant in an œuvre fits the theme of épuration.

Simenon places great significance therefore, not just upon the events of the story but the positional circumstances in which the story develops. The fact that he chooses the location before working on the narrative suggests that certain locales require a corresponding set of values or preconceived outlook on life.

Scenery, conflicting values, remarks by bystanders and ambient colour all

41 Catalogue des produits de l'industrie française admis à l'exposition publique sur la place de la Concorde en 1834..., (Paris: Pihan-Laforest, 1834: 71). 156 contribute to the direction of the plot, and the present is infused with the history of the location. In this case, the bloody history of the area, known consciously to very few of the contemporary characters (or readers), serves as a backdrop to the gruesome storyline.

Politicisation of imagery

It is my contention that Simenon’s agenda in this novel is a political comment upon France’s chequered history, with relief at the end of war blending with new conflicts as the FFI indulge in an orgy of épuration. He comments allegorically on the perceived passing of the ‘old France’, which is being replaced by the ‘American ideal’, and allows glimpses of suppressed wartime memories, and of alienation and polarising stances in the difficult post-war period. Symbolically, the work also emphasises the ambiguity of a situation that, seen through the noir perspective of the fictional universe, admits the reality that France, as Gorrara explains, has “prostituted itself to one occupying power” and ‘liberation’ means being “beholden, in different circumstances, to another” (2012: 33).

Simenon encapsulates the dehumanising effect of the war years and the

Occupation, both by the Germans and by the victorious Americans, in the treatment of the victim’s corpse, which is not simply decapitated but is literally in pieces in various newspaper-wrapped parcels in the Canal Saint-Martin. Although divers eventually locate the rest of the body parts, the fact that the head is not found has a depersonalising effect upon the remains. Not even a photograph remains of the man who a week before was alive and well (Le Corps: 69). Without the head, everyone is forced to speak in general terms about his identity, which symbolically highlights the loss and divorce from tradition and culture in Paris.

157 Although all evidence points towards the remains being those of Calas, in that time before DNA identification, it was difficult to be sure (91). Simenon has Maigret muse upon the fact that :

[l]es gens n’ont pas les même réactions, la même pitié par exemple, ou la même répulsion, devant des membres retrouvés par-ci par-là que devant un cadavre entier. On dirait que le mort devient anonyme, presque bouffon, et c’est tout juste si on n’en parle pas avec un sourire (181).

If we pass these body parts through the filter of an allegorical reading, they suggest the fragmented nature of France’s body politic, Maréchal Pétain’s government at Vichy and German governance of the occupied zone, the Hexagon separated into two mutually exclusive sections while de Gaulle organises the

Resistance from the safety of Britain.

Savage reprisals at the end of the Occupation did not take into consideration the unenviable situation of France, which had not recovered emotionally or physically from World War I, nor the confusion felt by the masses.

Pétain, lauded as the Lion of Verdun following the 1914-18 war, is now accused as head of the Vichy Government of betraying and selling out his country in the new conflict. France, once so proud, has become a laughing stock in the eyes of the world because of a perceived lack of moral fibre as well as fragmentation. Anthony

(later Sir Anthony) Eden, former Prime Minister of Britain, when his interviewer comments that he seems “rather charitable” in his comments towards Pétain, emphasises that the English are not in a position to judge, adding:

For this simple reason: that if one hasn’t been through—as our people mercifully did not go through—the horror of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that (cited in Mireille Johnston 1975: 168).

Not only does France have an identity crisis in this period, in that people are unsure of where their loyalties ought to lie, but the very fact that Eden feels called

158 upon to deliver this gracious comment means that outsiders are critical of the circumstances of the Occupation. Robert Gildea (2002: 4) records the guilt and shame felt by French people during the time of the Occupation. Part of the shame can be attributed to the fact that the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line had been so easily breached and France brought to its knees in six weeks. Part of the guilt attaches to the compliance of those French people who did not intervene while Jewish refugees to France were deported from their host country.

Whereas this novel does not come under the umbrella of noir literature (see

Chapter Three for a discussion on this), the dismemberment of the body does lend elements of noir to the storyline. Rolls explains that Peter Cheyney and other writers of noir literature reduce the female characters—representing the feminine

France or Marianne—to fetishism or symbolism by viewing them as “just so many body parts” (2006: 40). While Rolls is speaking here of the isolation of, for example, stocking-clad legs, Simenon is more forthright and brutal in his approach: his victim is literally in pieces and thus unable to be viewed as a single entity. This depersonalising approach acts as a buffer between how the reader wishes to view

France and “the blinding light of reality” most vividly expressed in Paul Colin’s poster of 17 August 1944 entitled ‘Libération’. As people restore busts of

Marianne to their former vaunted positions, Republican values—set aside during

Pétain’s regime—are being resurrected. However, Marianne has been irrevocably tainted and is depicted by Colin shielding her face against the brutal truth: France will never again be the same as it was before les années noires (40). What Rolls does not mention are the scars on her hands, recalling the stigmata of a crucified

Christ, on the one hand a linking of Marianne to the Catholic Joan of Arc, on the other signifying that France has been betrayed and crucified (Michael Kelly (2004:

159 71, 73). Kelly sees Marianne’s defensive hand position either as protecting herself from the glare of a burning building or against the bright sun (71). The implications include the devastation suffered by France in the battle of Normandy:

However, the image of France climbing her own Calvary suggests not only that the worst part of the ordeal is yet to come, but also that it must be undertaken to expiate past sins. The ascension from the abyss to the heights can only be achieved at the cost of suffering freely accepted. France must take her own sins upon herself and atone through suffering and death for the ignominy of the années noires (74).

Part of the significance can relate to Christ’s declaration of “Tetelestai” or

“It is finished!” from the cross (John 19:30), linking it to the phase of actual occupation having ended at great cost and the fact that the battles of the future are still to come. Other significances could be the divided loyalty of the French people during the Occupation, the difficult situation of ‘to publish or not to publish’, and what Leah D. Hewitt (2008: 36) calls “the messy ambiguities of everyday survival” in her discussion of, among others, the film based on Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour as examples of “images of a France at war with itself”.

The ambivalence of the French experience, of reaching out to modernisation on the one hand while yearning for how things used to be is represented by the other characters’ reactions to Aline Calas. This is demonstrated by Maigret’s fascination with the woman, whom the butcher’s assistant describes as “une malheureuse qui n’est pas responsable” (Le Corps: 153). Such is the detective’s affinity with her that he talks about her in his sleep. His wife teases him, “Tu avais l’air d’en être amoureux”, with the implication that if she were a jealous woman, she could take offence at this preoccupation (218-19). While realising that Aline has most likely been at least an accessory after the fact in her husband’s murder, he “ne pouvait la ranger dans aucune catégorie” (126-27). The

160 questioning has become less of a police inquiry and more of “une affaire personnelle entre Maigret et cette femme” (127). The younger detective, Lapointe, sees “un manque de conviction” and an “air d’agir un peu à contre-cœur” that he recognises as being unusual in his boss (124).

Maigret feels reluctant to turn Aline over to his nemesis, Judge Coméliau (Le

Corps: 125), although he sees her as a worthy opponent of that “juge exaspéré”

(140). Dubourg (1973: 149) notes that Simenon, presumably when speaking through the voice of the narrator, “prend toujours le parti de Maigret contre le juge

Coméliau” which reinforces the idea that Simenon imparts his own opinions through the mouthpiece of his protagonist, especially Maigret. As more details of the dismemberment of Omer Calas come to light, he becomes less regretful of having subjected her to being questioned by the judge (Le Corps: 149). The notary, who has had only a short, fruitless interview with her, sees her as “le personnage le plus extraordinaire qu’[il ait] rencontré de [sa] vie” (194). Maigret has already been aware of the same response to her (50). These reactions serve as a reflection of the reluctance of French citizens to convict fellow French people of complicity in deporting Jews, for example, during the Occupation. There was a feeling that it was easier to place responsibility solely upon the Germans, and as time passed, citizens accepted this compromise as the truth.

Maigret finds that he has much in common with Aline, as his father had been the manager of an estate somewhat similar to that owned by Aline’s father.

Like her, he was born in the country (Le Corps: 194). Maigret, while now reasonably sure of the sequence of events, asks himself “s’il tenait tant que ça à pousser [Aline and Pape] dans leurs derniers retranchements” (220). He feels himself able to understand the complicated relationships shared by Aline with

161 both the younger man, Antoine, and the older man, Dieudonné (183). The fact that these two lovers are privy to compromising information about her means that she can be coerced into continuing the relationship, as France’s betrayal of its Jewish population has formed an unhappy alliance with the occupiers. Denial and fabrication are used to adjust ‘facts’ of history lest French collaboration and culpability be exposed. This reflects the collision of values, the complexity of issues involved in simple survival and the confusion caused by external judgement for seemingly unavoidable situations.

Narrative confession

As already seen, more level-headed observers such as Anthony Eden were aware of the impossibility for outsiders to accurately assess the degree of pressure or compulsion to act in a certain way under the circumstances. As analysis by critics over the years has shown, memory of the Occupation era cannot be portrayed in black and white. Efforts to place all the blame on German people, especially for the fate of France’s Jewish population, and to depict all Frenchmen as résistants have been shown as incomplete and misleading. Gorrara describes it as a “moral universe of shades of grey and where right and wrong are relative concepts” (2012: 12). Her critique reveals patterns of memories, loosely connected with the decades following the war, in which representations gradually move away from righteous indignation to a more realistic portrayal and acceptance of some of the issues. Both Gorrara and Hutton (2013) deal with what

Henry Rousso calls the Vichy Syndrome, which explores “the history of the memory of Vichy, of Vichy’s remnants and fate after 1944” into the indeterminate future

(Rousso 1991: 1).

162 De Gaulle’s impassioned speech presenting “a glorious nation of resisters who [rise] from the ashes of defeat to free themselves from German tyranny”

(Gorrara 2012: 22) served its purpose in 1945, but led to a period during the

1950s and 60s in which a ‘forced amnesia’ developed (42). This in turn was followed by embarrassment and restraint in the 1980s, when a new generation of historians, writers and filmmakers was less reticent about maintaining the myth and more intent upon revealing the conflict of choice, compulsion, expectation and reality (60). Reflecting the atrophy of those actually involved, succeeding generations during the 1980s and 90s had reached the stage of wanting to know the truth and to face up to its brutal reality as well as acknowledging the impact of those years upon themselves (83). Finally, the 1990s and 2000s has seen the public overturning the “memorial taboos” of previous generations, with the present generation having access to both sides of the dilemma and being invited to make informed conclusions (108).42 This has been a painful, complex journey in which crime fiction has played a part, especially as this mode of analysis approaches the past in the form of an investigation (13).

The first liberated country to do so, France demanded a reckoning which saw trial by military tribunals, prison sentences, death by execution, the stripping of civil rights and other penalties imposed on those who had collaborated with the

Germans (Philippe Burrin 1995: 459). This fervour of épuration set the stage for a new beginning, while simultaneously masking the reality of French complicity and alerting onlookers and historians that the population would have to face its own culpability before it could move on. As Anne Simonin points out, once the

42 Rousso’s corresponding phases are “unfinished mourning” (1944-54), “repression” (1954-71), “broken mirror” in which the Resistance’s heroic myth is confused with emerging collaboration memories (1971-74) and “obsession”, which deals with Jewish memory and Holocaust guilt (1975- 87) (Rousso: 10). 163 connection to concentration camps became public knowledge in 1945, it should have been impossible “to accredit political stances grounded in ideologies such as racism, or the respect for law and order, the terrifying consequences of which had become all too apparent” (2000: 6).

As war tribunals tried and convicted collaborators—a situation that

Simenon witnessed on both sides of the Atlantic—a new way had to be developed to negotiate a past too recent to be viewed with poise and equanimity. Writers such as Léo Malet developed amnesic and maimed characters as symbols of those not yet able to process the reality of their own role or that of their parents in the recent war. He and other writers “probed controversial aspects of France’s war record, such as the phenomenon of collaboration or the compromises of everyday survival” (Gorrara 2012: 43). Their works act like the Naud brothers’ barge in

Simenon’s text, which, weighed down with ballast, dislodges one parcel of body parts and fouls the propeller, thus forcing the acknowledgement that a crime has been committed (Le Corps: 217). The novel itself falls within the time of ‘forced amnesia’ or ‘repression’, which explains at least in part the approach taken by the author. Although not afraid to push boundaries on some levels, notably in regard to sexual matters, Simenon was in some respects too close to the action to be forthright. This is where we see the objectivity of distance brought into play by

Simenon’s physical and literary terrains vagues.

Ruth Kitchen calls novels dealing either directly or obliquely with this period “narrative confession”. “Confession is an implicit and integral part of the experience of guilt, conferring and consolidating further guilt”, she says, continuing that “[n]arrative confessions of guilt can be seen to present the working through of

[…] issues, not in order to find resolution but instead to find a way to live with

164 Occupation guilt in the present” (2011: 208). Simenon gives many examples of shame and what Kitchen calls “Occupation guilt” (213) in his novels of the era, often by the protagonist wanting to wash his hands to remove the ‘smell’ of guilt, eg Le Fond de la bouteille (1948: 22, 46). Another tic of the protagonist in Le Fond is checking his reflection in a mirror and marvelling, in the manner of Oscar

Wilde’s Dorian Gray, that guilt for his actions is not visible to the onlooker (9).

Although Dorian Grey describes a literal transformation, the tic is similar. Other examples of this can be seen in Les frères Rico (1952, eg, 22], and in La Neige était sale (111), both of which can be interpreted as dealing with Occupation and war scenarios.

Kitchen, in her analysis of Un Secret by Philippe Grimbert (2004), asserts that “confession of guilt needs to be consensual, requiring both parties to reveal their previously concealed pain and culpability in order to enter into a new discourse of ‘outed’ guilt where there are no innocents but also no secrets” (2011:

214). In a volume of memoirs, Simenon admits to writing one of his novels as an attempt to right the wrongs of America against Charlie Chaplin, a personal friend who:

a essayé de nous faire comprendre sa réaction devant le retournement subit, cruel, impitoyable, des U.S.A. à son égard. (J’ai voulu donner, voilà quatre ou cinq ans, la même impression dans mon roman: “Le Petit Homme d’Arkhangelsk”, sur un plan plus bas, exprès) (QJV Tome 2: 62—author’s parentheses).

In line with the theme of guilt and confession, Simenon again reminds the reader of the theme of Maigret’s life-long focus—not to sit in judgement, but to assist the offender to find forgiveness and restoration. Peter Ely explains that

Maigret sees listening to confession from criminals in a priestly manner as part of his métier as “médecin, prêtre et policier”, linking this with the earlier aspirations

165 both of Maigret and his creator (2010: 456). Thus, in what Becker calls his “insight into the human condition” (1999: 41), the inspector serves as confessor, peacemaker, referee and a buffer between the actual transgression and the motives that drive the person to commit the crime. While he is unable in most cases to deflect punishment, he allows the criminal to come to terms with his or her own motives and to acknowledge the misdemeanour as being separate from him- or herself as a person. Ely tells us that Maigret “ultimately resolves crimes by entering the humanity of the criminals he pursues, more interested in solving the mystery of broken lives than in finding the perpetrators of crimes” (453). In the novel, Maigret ruminates on how he dreamed of this aim from a young age:

Lorsqu’il était jeune et qu’il rêvait de l’avenir, n’avait-il pas imaginé une profession idéale qui, malheureusement, n’existe pas dans la vie réelle? Il n’avait dit à personne, n’avait jamais prononcé les deux mots à voix haute, fût-ce pour lui-même: il aurait voulu être un ‘raccommodeur de destinées’ (Le Corps: 62-63).

Nino Frank makes an emphatic statement that “Maigret, c’est Simenon”, seeing him as acting as spokesperson for the author, and posits the idea of a trio formed by Simenon, Maigret and the reader (1973: 195). From the perspective of the post-war situation, this plea for understanding addresses the complexities faced by intellectuals and others under the conflicting loyalties of the Occupation.

It can be seen to echo Anthony Eden’s plea to consider mitigating circumstances and personal motivations before judging another person.

Nettoyage

People in America and other countries find it hard to comprehend the ambivalence of the post-war period in France. The French government identified mass consumerism as the means of recovery for a country ravaged by war, leading

166 to a period of prosperity known as les trente glorieuses. Under the Marshall Plan, capitalistic regeneration was promoted and indeed eagerly sought after by the masses (Pulju 2003: 291).

Inextricably interwoven with the épuration was the obsession with another kind of cleanliness, the literal cleanliness of a new modernised France, made possible by automatic washing machines, new detergents and houses with bathrooms, where the latter arguably responds to the former. However, although marketed as ‘classless’, new appliances were priced outside the purchasing power of most French households, and working class women resorted to “washing machine cooperatives” in order to have access to the widely advertised, highly desired but out-of-reach appliances (Pulju 2003: 301-02). Women’s magazines, with a vested interest—up to 70% of their profits came from advertising electrical gadgets—constantly brought before French women the benefits of owning the appliances (Pulju 2011: 82). In fact, women’s magazines took upon themselves the role of educating women about modernity, carefully aiming the sales pitch at different strata of society. Advertisers such as Helena Rubenstein in the May 1955 edition of Elle reminded women that Americans had the cleanest and best-cared- for hair in the world (Ross: 80-81). The January edition of the same publication had, symbolically, been entirely devoted to ‘whiteness’, with rapturous articles on white baby layettes, schoolchildren drinking more milk and the use of bleach

(Ross: 84). While Maison et jardin targeted the top rung by showing homes of rich and famous—and predominantly American—consumers, Femmes d’aujourd’hui advertised appliances more affordable by its more modest readership (Claire

Duchen 1994: 74).

167 Kristin Ross quotes Alphonse Boudard as explaining a situation in which

“France was being regenerated, it was being washed of all the stains left behind by four years of Occupation” (1999: 74). A campaign of French “national purity” addressed social hygiene from a literally personal level, for example the cleanliness of hair washed in a certain shampoo or the use of a particular deodorant, but “for good or evil, the Vichy regime had made indelible marks on

French life. Some stains, in other words, you can’t get out”. Ross quotes Roland

Barthes to explain the psychological necessity to be rid of the compromise of the preceding years:

If France is hungry […] it is neither for food nor for the things whose existence French children of the war, such as Maspero, now found so precarious; its deep national psychic need, which he names but does not analyze, is to be clean: “Decay is being expelled (from the teeth, the skin, the blood, the breath)”: France is having a great yen [fringale] for cleanliness (1999: 73).

Brothels were closed, streets and sidewalks scrubbed clean and even literary language was addressed, requiring a stripping of all unnecessary adjectives, metaphors and other literary devices (Ross: 74-75). The latter brought other writers into line with Simenon, who had—aided by stern advice from the then editor of Le Matin, Colette, during the early years of his career—been working towards this goal for years (Becker 1999: 28).

It is surely no coincidence that during the Christmas and New Year break preceding his writing of the novel, Simenon had spent his evenings watching

American television “en me balançant dans mon rocking-chair. Tout me passionne, parce que tout me fait pénétrer davantage la vie américaine”. From this, he graduated to watching the daytime ‘soap operas’, which, he explains, are

“textuellement les ‘opéras-savon’, des émissions payées par les grandes marques

168 de lessive et destinées aux ménagères”, in which he sees “[e]ncore une autre

Amérique” (MI: 368). Given that he always spent some time before commencing a novel in absorbing atmosphere which he then brought into the fabric of the novel, we can surmise that from the soap operas it was a short step to writing about other forms of ‘nettoyage’.

In another of his novels set in America, Maigret chez le coroner (1949),

Simenon shows Maigret, in Arizona for a court hearing, ruminating on the stark contrast between America and France at that time. Keller summarises it by explaining the inspector’s reaction to the US, whose:

surface is squeaky clean and rich beyond reckoning. “They have everything!” Maigret keeps murmuring to himself. Even poverty is polished up, disguised, and hidden away [...] The European misère has an honesty, [he] thinks, if dimly [...] French poverty has a kind of pride. American affluence and wholesomeness leave no room even for an honest indigence. The Americans have built—or at least staged—a world that looks as close to perfect as anyone has yet managed in all history (2002: 497).

The theme of épuration pervades Maigret et le corps sans tête. Pape’s apartment has a full-sized bath, and he does his own cooking and cleaning, being justifiably proud of his apartment (Le Corps: 170-71). Maigret is surprised both by the presence of the bathtub and by the orderly appearance of the dwelling, which is in contrast to the Calas’ apartment with its lack of laundry facilities. It also stands opposed to the conditions in post-war Paris, where The Chambre Syndicale de la Savonnerie revealed that only 15 per cent of dwellings possessed bathrooms, and that soap consumption was the lowest in Europe, hence, concluded an

American correspondent, “the popularity of Eau-de-Cologne” (Horne 2004: 383).

This trend is famously satirised in the very first paragraph of Raymond Queneau’s

Zazie dans le métro (1959), where 11 per cent of flats are cited as being without bathrooms.

169 On the other hand, Aline spends most of her waking hours as the proprietor of “une petite salle sombre, en contrebas du trottoir, avec un gros poêle à charbon au milieu et un tuyau noir qui traverse presque toute la pièce” (Le Corps: 52).

Nearby is the depot for long-distance hauliers, Roulers and Langlois, whose trucks service all of the surrounding area (43). After Dieudonné Pape had killed Aline’s husband to protect her, the two had removed evidence of the crime by meticulous cleaning of the apartment where the crime had been committed (148-49). Maigret reasons that it would have taken:

[u]n homme comme [Pape], solitaire, patient, méticuleux, pour effacer avec tant de succès les traces du meurtre. Même [coroner] Moeurs et ses hommes, malgré leurs appareils, n’avaient rien trouvé dans la maison du quai Valmy, qui fournît la preuve qu’un crime y avait été commis. Aline Calas avait-elle aidé à tout nettoyer à fond, à faire disparaître le linge et les objets qui auraient pu porter des taches révélatrices? (216-17).

It is this cleanliness, unexpected and incompatible with the rest of the building, that alerts the detectives to the fact that a crime has been committed in this location (145-46). The only evidence left is two bleach bottles, one emptied, and the well-scrubbed interior of the apartment, signs of removal of fingerprints on the outsides of the drawers and cupboards and general overall tidiness (146).

Clean sheets in the bedroom, where the detectives expect to have found at least the recently changed pair in the laundry basket (147-48), remind us of Gorrara’s

“metaphorical clean sheets of a new beginning” (Gorrara 2012: 50), although

Gorrara posits this for the Jewish community in Léo Malet’s Des kilomètres de linceuls (1955), while for Simenon, it is a new life for the protagonist and her lover.

In Le Corps, Simenon encapsulates the contamination of both the crime scene and, symbolically, France, in the discovery of threads of string, of a kind not usually used in the bistrot, by the forensic team:

170 Remarquez-vous sur le noir de la laine, des traits brunâtres qui ressemblent à des brindilles d’arbre ? En réalité, c’est du chanvre. L’analyse nous le confirmera, mais j’en ai la certitude. Ce sont des brindilles presque invisibles à l’œil nu qui se sont détachées d’un morceau de ficelle (151).

This reminds us of Ross’s comment (1999: 74) on the impossibility of removing every stain left by the Vichy regime. While the guilty couple had made a concerted effort to remove all evidence, some impurities, too small to be seen by the naked eye, remained to bear witness of the crime. In the same way those who had, intentionally or otherwise, breached the expectations of the FFI could be seen as marked for life.

Antoine’s mother admits that she began to be suspicious of his involvement with Aline when she notices him buying hair-care products for himself, cleaning his teeth twice a day and even using cologne (Le Corps: 176). A continuation of the theme of cleanliness is Lucette’s workplace, the sterile atmosphere of a bustling hospital. Having recently spent time in the dingy bistrot, Maigret is amazed at the gleaming, polished surfaces while he waits to interview her and determine how much, if anything, Lucette may know about the crime (98). Tati, in Mon Oncle, reflects these same antiseptic, shiny surfaces in the plastics factory of which M.

Arpel is the CEO. The contrast between the exterior, showing the grime and patina of age, and the modernised, highly-functional interiors replicates the growing trend in Paris and in France. Americanisation and modernisation accompanied the

Marshall Plan, and the availability of modern appliances created an emotional conflict in the French who could not deny the attraction, but were reluctant to leave their comfort zone. Contemporary equipment demanded a degree of cleanliness and sterility to function efficiently. At the same time, there was an

171 emotional need to ‘scrub’ away the taint of collaboration, even if in the moment there had been—or seemed to be—no other alternative.

Marianne

It can be demonstrated that both Aline and her husband, Omer Calas, become representative of post-Occupation France, that is the years following

Liberation and through to the mid-fifties. They reflect the conflict in Algeria, the end of the empire, a population aware of the dichotomy but struggling to assimilate the old and the new, the past and the present, the sought-after along with that which had to be accommodated. They encapsulate the ambivalence of the modernisation of France, which involved moving away from that previously considered “French” and choosing American ways as a sign of forward progress.

Maigret is struck by the listless, faded attitude of Madame Calas, who has the appearance of someone sick or perhaps apprehensive of a returning pain (Le

Corps: 26). Her apathy, to the point where she has lost all self respect and accepts the advances of men who use her for sex, reflects the dilemma of France, ground down by the years of Occupation, relieved to be free at last of the invading force and yet apprehensive of the situation somehow not being completely resolved because the rescuers have imposed their own set of obligations. Madame Calas, having simply endured the relationship with her husband for many years, shows no emotion at the search going on around her for clues to the identity of the body found in the canal. To dull ambivalent feelings, she drinks brandy to the point of addiction, yet in her eyes there is still a “reflet d’une vie intérieure intense” (127).

This spark of life corresponds to de Gaulle’s famous speech quoted in Gorrara

(2012: 22), and is reflected in the red embers that Maigret finds in the fireplace

172 after Aline is taken to the Quai des Orfèvres for questioning (150). This is a picture of Paris at the end of the war, bravely struggling, having lost the lustre of its earlier glory, but still with the spark of inner life demonstrated by the resistance fighters and those who believed that, given a chance, it could regain its glory. Like Aline, however, the new Marianne has been compromised.

As the detective is to discover, Madame Calas has not always been as he sees her in the present, passively enduring the situation in which she now finds herself. Tenant farmers, the lord of the manor, agriculture and horticulture, cavalry officers and châteaux feature in her past, along with arranged marriages to consolidate wealth. Although now “maigre, sans âge, quarante ans ou quarante- cinq peut-être”, with almost black hair, there are remnants that tell Maigret that

“[e]lle avait dû être jolie. En tout cas comme tout le monde, elle avait été jeune” (Le

Corps: 24, 26).

This representation is that of the ‘old France’, the feudal system with its unequal distribution of riches and the reluctance with which the culture and people move away from the past towards the future. When her mother died in a riding accident (191), Aline had become spoiled, strong-willed and difficult to manage, but her father had indulged her, insisting she be educated by a succession of governesses rather than attend a school. As a child, she had adored her father, but made the lives of the governesses a misery, on one occasion setting fire to the château, and increasingly showing signs of living only to drive her father to distraction (199). Like France with its rich and flamboyant past, Aline has enjoyed a life of indulgence as the only daughter of a wealthy landowner, but her decision to marry Omer Calas as a final act of defiance has brought her nothing but grief. In his analysis of James Hadley Chase’s most famous contribution to the Série noire,

173 Pas d’orchidées pour Miss Blandish, Rolls explains the symbolism of a similar spoilt

Daddy’s girl as France being “torn away from an ageing and emasculated patriarch

(Pétain)” and left to face the consequences of her actions (2006: 45). The conflict of Aline as Marianne is that of France—both have their roots in the feudal past, but intervening circumstances have corrupted the integrity of that past while not yet addressing the issues of the present. Aline played a part, however unwittingly, in the gruesome violence of recent times. Thus the future for both Aline and France is uncertain and frightening.

French iconography has traditionally been dominated by feminine representations, more specifically that of Marianne. Both opponents and defenders of the republican system supported the myth of Marianne until by popular usage it became synonymous with the idea of the Republic. Throughout history, to suit whatever political climate, Marianne has taken on the guise of warrior, of motherhood, regal, triumphant, aloof, “avec or sans bonnet” (Agulhon and Bonte 1992: 37), bare-breasted, in chain mail, buxom or svelte, as a caricature, draped in le drapeau, but always representing France, la patrie. Complete with her cat and an “expression à la fois sourde et tendue qui ressemble à l’expression des toxicomanes attendant l’heure de leur dose” (Le Corps : 24-25) and “un cerne profond sous les yeux [...] et [...] sa robe devenue trop large lui pendait sur le corps”

(64), on the surface Madame Calas resembles the political caricatures of Marianne, more of a witch than a beautiful, triumphant warrior princess (see Agulhon and

Bonte 1992: 74-75). As she accompanies Maigret to the police station for questioning, she can best be illustrated as the Marianne of Colin’s poster, war- soiled, beaten down but determined to overcome. Harsh reality hurts her eyes as she is brought to account for her sins.

174 Her husband, Omer Calas, on the other hand, represents the countryman, the agrarian labourer with broad, strong hands with dark hairs on the back (Le

Corps: 30), unkempt toenails and fingernails, under which are traces of ingrained dirt and fertiliser (48-49). To signify that the old France has disappeared without a trace, there are no photos of Omer Calas in existence (69). Maigret ruminates that the man is:

[b]run, pas très grand, plutôt petit mais râblé, avec des muscles saillants, des poils sombres et drus sur les bras, les mains, les jambes et la poitrine. Les campagnes françaises produisent beaucoup de ces individus-là, solides, volontaires, têtus. Je suis curieux de voir sa tête (32).

The two people who love Aline, while not having exclusive rights to her favours, are Antoine Cristin and Dieudonné Pape. Antoine shares some attributes with both Aline and Omer, in that he has “l’air de venir de campagne” (Le Corps:

176), but he brings a freshness and spark of life to Aline’s drab existence. When he demonstrates an uncooperative and aggressive stance to the questions of Maigret and Lapointe to the point where he is “à bout de soufflé et sa réspiration [est] brûlante,” she gently rebukes him (70). While she may feel only affection and perhaps some responsibility towards Antoine (76), he is besotted with her (176).

He represents on one level a resistance fighter who, while exploiting Aline sexually, is on her side. His escape through the skylight of his apartment block baffles the detective keeping watch outside (95), and he enters the Calas residence through an open window on the first floor in the same manner as the ubiquitous cat (113-15). Both images add to his resemblance to a resistant, albeit in this case against local authority rather than the occupiers.

Alternatively, Aline’s relationship with Dieudonné is of long standing, so that an observer might mistake them for a couple who have grown at ease with

175 each other through long association (Le Corps: 104). Omer Calas’ opposite in every way, Pape has an open, honest face and, because of the crime he has allegedly committed, a manner which Maigret likens to that of a beaten animal (158). As a metaphor for the pictures and busts of Marianne found in French homes since the

Revolution, and also of his alliance with her, Pape has a portrait of Aline, developed and enlarged, in his apartment (176). The existence of the photograph is hidden from Calas, as the representations of Marianne had to be hidden during the years of Occupation, but Pape treasures it as a metonymic reminder of the woman he loves and for whom he has impulsively compromised his freedom. The fact that

Aline claims that the only photographic image of herself is on her identity card could indicate that she is also unaware of the existence of the portrait (69).

Together, these people are representative of the cultural conflict of France at the time. Antoine embodies a more or less unpredictable future but is exciting because of his youth; Pape, more contemporary and conventional, encapsulates security from the perspective of an alliance with the US, but a different prospective outcome. Like the future of France, both contain hidden depths.

Aline’s silence about her past can be connected to the repression of memories dealt with by Gorrara and Hutton (2012): Lucette, her daughter, has no idea that her mother has refused an inheritance of a château and substantial lands

(Le Corps: 147) at Boissancourt-par-Saint-André. Pending the outcome of the trial, the house—representative of traditional France—stands unclaimed for the foreseeable future. The silence is also about the reality of the life of drudgery that she has consciously chosen for herself. While there are some mitigating rewards, for example her relationship with Pape, the actual circumstances are demeaning: she serves wine in a dingy bistrot and is at the mercy of men who blackmail her for

176 sexual favours because they know too many secrets about her. Her husband and daughter have been estranged from her for years, and whatever chance she may have had to reconcile with her father has been removed by his death. Finally, it is the silence of muteness in the face of questioning. Although Aline stolidly answers

Maigret’s questions, he is well aware of what she does not say, and she claims the right of silence when questioned by the judge (168). The inspector is touched by

Pape’s immediate dependence upon the same legal right (161-62).

Aline’s silence about her past, her stoic acceptance of her present condition and her refusal to speak in her own defence together represent the dilemma of post-war life for the majority of French people as well. To speak of what has happened would in many cases be to betray themselves and others; the myth of glorious resistance must be maintained lest the full import of compromise be known; return to the past is impossible, but there is still an inheritance from that past which belongs deservedly in the future. While wanting to blame Germany entirely for the war, people must come to terms with their own culpability. They must learn to somehow atone for silence while Jewish prisoners were sent to concentration camps, many times at the instigation of French authorities, and face up, for instance, to the fact that demands for reparation following the Treaty of

Versailles had been a contributing factor to the start of World War II.

Americanisation

Americanisation is represented in the Maigret et le corps sans tête by the sequence of events and the relationship between Aline and her lover of the last ten years, a seemingly quiet and reliable man (170) with the unlikely name of

Dieudonné Pape. We can see a political significance in this name if we look at a

177 remark of Simenon’s some years later (QJV Tome 1: 115-16). After discussing people’s need to create a hero for themselves (115-17) and asking the inevitable rhetorical question,43 “Qui dirige vraiment les masses?” (118), he meditates on the subject of cynicism:

Je pense qu’un roi croit, ou plutôt croyait être roi de droit divin, croyait à sa mission, à la nécessité, au nom du pays ou de la dynastie, d’abattre ses ennemis, voire des membres de sa famille. Le pape finit pas se croire pape. Le général croit à la nécessité de sacrifier cent mille hommes dans une bataille. Truman croyait de son droit de lancer une bombe atomique sur Nagasaki (121).

Thus both the forename and surname have significance, in that Dieudonné could be translated as ‘God-given’ or ‘divine right’, while the surname is Pope.

Pape has rescued Aline with the best possible motives, to protect her from Omer’s violence when he discovers that she has refused to take the money left to her in her father’s will, but in doing so has foisted upon her another form of subjection.

Because of her complicity in the crime—she helps him dispose of the body—she now faces prison as an accessory after the fact (Le Corps: 151). While not forced to side with him, her decision to do so has compromised her future.

Just as the situation in France could not have been resolved without the help of US military intervention, Madame Calas’ unhappy and unfulfilling union with Omer would have continued forever without the timely intercession of Pape.

As far as Maigret can establish, the latter would have gradually replaced Omer in her life so that, in time, just as the old France would be supplanted by modernity, people would have forgotten Omer, and Pape would have settled into the apartment adjoining the bistrot (Le Corps: 218).

43 See section on “Narrowing the focus” for more information about this (p.18-20). 178 The daughter of Omer and Aline is symbolic of the new generation of

French people and of the “forced amnesia” which Gorrara (2012: 42-43) describes.

Lucette, in spite of some lingering affection for her mother, whom she visits in her father’s scheduled absences, is ashamed of her past (Le Corps: 82, 100-102).

However, like the modern generation at one remove from the war, she has no idea of the inherited wealth from the past nor of the extent of the conflict between her parents, although she has some suspicions (100-101, 221). She is ashamed of her father, and her most recent visit had been made with the idea of ensuring that both parents were fit for a visit to announce her impending marriage (169). Like the

French people of the 1950s and 60s, who were innocent children during the war, she is unaware of the past, both of the feudal origins of her grandfather and of the recent manslaughter of her father. Regardless of her lack of knowledge, however, the burden of the preceding years are imputed to her through inheritance (222).

Anomaly of l’été de la Saint-Martin and war

One aspect of this novel which ties it with Simenon’s other works dealing more overtly with the war is his depiction of a particular anomalous weather situation. Other writers remember the same idyllic conditions of the time. Irène

Némirovsky (2004: 145-46) uses juxtaposition of peaceful scenery with savage war imagery to create a scene of horror:

Au-dessus d’eux scintillait le ciel d’un pur azur étincelant, sans un nuage, sans un avion. A leurs pieds coulait une belle rivière brillante […] Au même instant, les Français tirèrent, les mitrailleuses allemands répondirent. Pris entre deux feux, les réfugiés couraient dans toutes les directions […] une femme enjamba le parapet et se jeta dans le fleuve.44

Again, she describes how :

44 Suite Française was written in 1942 but first published in 2004. 179 [d]es obus avaient mis le feu à une partie de la ville. Dans la splendide lumière de juin, les flammes avaient une couleur transparente et rose et une longue colonne de fumée montait en panache dans le ciel, traversée d’or par les rayons du soleil, avec des reflets de soufre et de cendres (151).

This can easily be cross-referenced not just to the works of contemporary writers, but to official reports. The Royal Meteorological Society’s records confirm the weather conditions of bright sunshine as an incongruous backdrop as:

[i]n the early hours of this fateful Friday, the War came to Western Europe with the murderous ‘rape’ of Belgium and Holland—and for the young men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) an abrupt end to what had been a cosy sojourn in France (K D Anderson 2009: 2).

The meteorologist, Anderson, describes a “brilliant summer day” as

“[t]error, confusion and chaos spread among refugees by German fighter-bombers, fighters and Stukas on roads leading west” (2009: 8). Vercors, writing about the time some twenty-five years later, remembers the glorious Indian summer that formed a bizarre backdrop to the devastated terrain and the despair in the hearts of the people:

L’été n’était pas moins bleu que ne venait de l’être le beau printemps de la déroute. Besayes en ce juillet était écrasé de soleil. En autres circonstances, j’aurais aimé ce village peut-être, qui fleurait déjà la Provence. Mais il y manquait les platanes. Pas un arbre. Tout autour, un vaste désert beauceron de maïs, d’orge et d’avoine. Nous n’avions rien à faire que d’attendre, sous cette lumière de plomb, d’être démobilisés dans un avenir imprévisible, et je traînais mes os dans un désespoir sans issue (La Bataille: 96-97).

One of the clues to Simenon’s agenda, hidden in plain sight in this novel, is the reflection of the same weather, mentioned repeatedly throughout the Le Corps.

In two separate memoirs, Simenon mentions a conflict he felt at the time of

Germany’s invasion because of this seemingly incompatible phenomenon, remembering that:

Le soleil était clair, le temps doux, le 10 mai, quand la radio annonça que la Hollande était attaquée et qu’elle avait, pour gagner du temps, inondé une

180 partie du pays en ouvrant les digues qui la séparent de la mer. Le même jour des chars allemand pénétraient en Belgique qui les retardait de son mieux et qui lançait, cette fois, l’ordre de mobilisation générale (MI: 69).

He emphasises the continuing nature of the balmy conditions while claiming that he was not the only person to have benefitted from what comfort the weather had to offer, because:

pendant les deux mois de l’invasion il n’a pas plu une seule fois […]. Or, ce qui est resté le plus vivant dans ma mémoire, c’est le soleil, la couleur du ciel, de la mer, à La Rochelle, l’odeur de printemps et des terrasses. Je jurerais que je ne suis pas le seul dans ce cas, que pour des milliers de soldats et de réfugiés, le tragique s’est effacé pour ne laisser que cette impression de vie radieuse (QJV Tome 1: 65-66).

At the same time, he talks about the disruption and confusion of that period by describing the happenings of La Rochelle, where he and his young family were at the time. He remembers how the wonderful weather stood in contrast to the prevailing disruption and rollercoaster of emotions because:

[m]ai et juin de cette année-là ont été tragiques. L’invasion, la défaite, la débandade, la peur et sans doute aussi une certaine honte (pourquoi?), les réfugiés sur les routes, les bombardements par avion, l’incertitude du lendemain (65—his parentheses).

He uses similar wording in Le Train to express the protagonist’s (and by extension, his own) surprise about the lack of rain during the early days of the Occupation:

Je jurerais qu’il n’a pas plu une seule fois pendant toute cette période en dehors d’un orage, cela me revient, qui a formé des poches d’eau dans le toit de notre tente. Le temps paraissait irréel à force de merveilleux et je ne peux imaginer La Rochelle autrement que dans la chaleur du soleil (156).

In Le Corps, the horror and revulsion felt by Maigret and his companion,

Lapointe, about the details of the crime (30, 33-34) are contrasted with the superb spring weather outside (17, 18, 27-28, 31-31). The dark, dreary interior of the bistrot is penetrated by rays of sunlight “comme les vitraux d’une église” (24).

Even the corridors of the Quai des Orfèvres, “le plus grisâtre, le plus terne de la

181 terre”, were that day “touché par le soleil, tout au moins sous la forme d’une sorte de poussière lumineuse” (36). Delicate colours of chimney pots and the sky soften the harshness of reality (56), giving a surreal aspect to the sinister events (17).

Through allegory, this novel deals with conflicts between France’s distant past and the uncertainty of the future; of upheaval revolving around the end of war blending with new divergences as the FFI indulge in an orgy of épuration; of the values of ‘old France’ being replaced by the American ideal. The obliquity parallels the liminal space in which the participants no longer desire the old ways but are uncomfortable about the future to which they have no alternative but to relocate.

Suppressed wartime memories and alienation, in many cases filled with ambivalence and shame because of forced collaboration and confusion over the

Vichy government’s manipulation are addressed symbolically by the dilemma of the heroine. The novel is a sympathetic mirror of the ongoing reluctance of citizens to face up to the whole truth, not just that part which can be comfortably reviewed or remembered with pride, but occult parts that taint the memory.

As can be seen from Simenon’s memoirs, he had strong views on the government of his chosen country and grieved over the loss of credibility caused by occupation, war and post-war events. He has attempted to comment on his feelings through a novel in which the dismemberment of the victim is deeply representational. From his objective position of exile, he is able to create a character who demonstrates the fragmentation of France and the disruption of established values. The dismembered body, like the situation in France, is both pivotal and reactionary, provoking feelings ranging from pity through lack of interest to ambivalence and hostility. Also, like France, the main female character is poised between two realities: not yet ready to leave the safety of an

182 unrealistically nostalgic past, she is equally ill-prepared to enter an impossibly compromised future.

Thus, while ostensibly a crime novel or detective story, this work by

Georges Simenon symbolically addresses issues far beyond the actual story. The author, through the physical terrain vague of writing the novel from the other side of the Atlantic, plus the literary terrain vague of a narrative that appears oblivious to events of recent years in Paris, creates a space in which to deal with issues of war and dislocation. This then becomes an allegorical distance to differentiate it from the other types of terrain vague covered in this thesis, specifically historical and geographical. The characters serve as embodiments of the dissatisfaction felt by French citizens about French political events and a sense of the inevitability of history. They also represent reluctance to face French collusion in German war crimes in an environment where no one can feel completely innocent. Like many other novels of this period, this novel begins to make the first moves towards accepting responsibility for collusion and collaboration, no matter how unavoidable that compromise may have felt at the time. Through the interaction of the characters and Maigret’s ambivalent feelings towards Aline Calas, on the one hand feeling a strong bond with her and on the other being convinced that she has been party to her husband’s gruesome murder, it addresses the confused feelings of people towards both France and the United States. By creating a female character who figuratively represents Marianne, it deals allegorically with the

épuration that was an attempt to purify and restore the reputation of post-war

France. Maigret’s vacillation mirrors the torn loyalties of French people who desire simultaneously to emulate the US and cling to old ways.

183 Thesis Bibliography

Georges Simenon

— Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien (Paris: Gallimard, 1931). — Les Trois crimes de mes amis, in Simenon, Oeuvres, Vol. 7, (Paris: NRF, 1938). — Il pleut, bergère (Paris: Galliamard, 1941). — Le Clan des Ostendais (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1947). — La Neige était sale (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1948). — Pedigree (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1948 a). — Le Fond de la bouteille, (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1949). — Les Quatre jours du pauvre homme (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1949a). — Les Mémoires de Maigret (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1950). — Les Frères Rico (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1952). — Maigret et le corps sans tête, (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1955). — Le Petit homme d'Arkhangelsk, (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1956). — Le Train (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1961). — Quand j’étais vieux, Tomes 1-3 (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1970). — “Préface à Traqué de Arthur Omré”, in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.369-372. — Mémoires Intimes (Paris: Presses de la cité, 1981). — Tout Simenon Vol. 12, French and European Publications, 1990.

Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Bonte, Marianne: les visages de la République (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 1992).

Bill Alder, Maigret, Simenon and France: Social Dimensions of the Novels and Stories (Jefferson: McFarland and Co., 2013).

K. D. Anderson, Weather Services at War: Occasional Papers on Meteorological Services, Jan 2009, www.rmets.org/sites/default/files/hist07.pdf.

Pierre Assouline, Simenon: a Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

Margaret Atack, Literature and French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Form, 1940-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).

Patrick Barron, “Introduction: at the Edge of the Pale” in Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani (eds), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (New York, London: Routledge, 2014, pp.1-23).

Simone de Beauvoir, Le Sang des autres (Paris: Gallimard-Folio, 1945).

Lucille Frackman Becker, Georges Simenon: 'Maigrets' and the 'romans durs' (London: Haus Publishing, 1999).

David Bellos, Jacques Tati: His Life and Art (London: Harvill Press, 1999).

184 Alain Bertrand, “Georges Simenon: de Maigret aux romans de la destinée” in Menguy, C., (ed), Bibliothèques des paralittératures, vol.5 (Paris: Editions du Céfal, 1994).

Don Bluth, (dir.), An American Tail, 1986.

Mark Bould, Film Noir: from Berlin to Sin City (New York: Wallflower Press, 2005).

Brett Bowles, “The Attempted Nazification of French Cinema 1934-44” in Roel Vande Winkel & David Welch (eds), Cinema and the Swastika: the International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) pp.130-147.

Fenton Bresler, The Mystery of Georges Simenon: a Biography (Melbourne: Heinemann/Quixote Press, 1983).

Brigid Brophy, Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).

James W. Brown and Laurence D. Stokes, (eds) Le Silence de la mer: a novel of French resistance during World War II (New York, Oxford: Berg, 1992).

Charles Brownson, The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014).

Mitzi M. Brunsdale, Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: from Sleuths to Superheroes (Greenwood, ABC-CLIO, 26 July 2010).

Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: New Press, 1995).

Catalogue des produits de l'industrie française admis à l'exposition publique sur la place de la Concorde en 1834..., (Paris: Pihan-Laforest, 1834).

Ross Chambers, “The Long Howl: Serial Torture”, Yale French Studies, Number 118/119: Nœuds de memoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture (Yale French Studies Series), 30 November 2010, pp.39-51.

Kelly Ricciardi Colvin, “Engendering Frenchness: Gender and French Identity during the Long Liberation”, PhD thesis, Brown University, 2008, Providence, Rhode Island.

Philippe de Comes, Michel Marmin, Michel Caillot and Raymond Chirat, “Simenon au cinéma”, Le Cinéma français. 1930-1960, Paris: Editions Atlas, 1984, pp.118-120.

Milton Dank, The French Against the French (Sydney: Cassell, 1974).

185 Benoît Denis, (ed), Correspondance 1938-1950 Georges Simenon/André Gide … sans trop de pudeur (Paris: Carnets Omnibus, 1999).

Andrew Dickos, Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir (University Press of Kentucky, 2002).

David F. Drake, The Chronology of Maigret’s Life and Career, on www.trussel.com/maig/ddchron1.htm.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensburger, Nazi Labour Camps in Paris (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

Page Dubois, “Oedipus as Detective: Sophocles, Simenon, Robbe-Grillet” in Yale French Studies, No.108, 2005, pp.102-115.

Maurice Dubourg, “Géographie de Simenon” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.139-156.

Claire Duchen, Women's Rights and Women's Lives in France: 1944 – 1968 (London, New York: Routledge, 1994).

Jean Duperray, “Au Nom du père” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.99-129.

Peter B. Ely, “Detective and Priest: the Paradoxes of Simenon’s Maigret”, Christianity and Literature, Vol. 59, No. 3, Spring 2010, pp.453-477.

Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon: a Critical Biography (London: McFarland & Co, 1987).

Jean Fabre, Enquête sur un enquêteur: Maigret: Un essae de sociocritique, (Montpellier: Centre d'études et de recherches sociocritiques, Université Paul Valéry, 1981).

Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964).

Nino Frank, “Hypothèse à propos de Maigret” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.193-196

Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: the Journey (New York: Anchor, 2002).

René Fülöp-Miller, “Search for Forgiveness”, in New York Times, 30 April 1950.

Paul’s Letter to the Galatians Chapter 4, Verses 21-31, New American Standard Bible.

John Gammack and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, “Branding Cities: a case study of collaborative methodologies in Cultural, Film, and Marketing research”, in Mark Gibson, Debbie Rodan, Felicity Newman, Ron Blaber, Wendy

186 Parkins, Geoffrey Craig and Christina Gordon (eds), Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) 2004 Annual Conference, Online Proceedings, http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/cfel/csaa_proceedings.htm.

Henry Geiger, (ed), “The Uses of Allegory” in Lead Article, Manas: Explorations in Ethical Thought 1948-1988, Vol.XXII, No.42, 15 October 1969, www.manasjournal.org.

Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the French Occupation, (New York: Picador, 2002).

— France Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Elizabeth Golden, “Following the Berlin Wall” in Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani (eds), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (New York, London: Routledge, 2014, pp.216-229).

Claire Gorrara, “Malheurs et ténèbres: narratives of social disorder in Léo Malet's 120, rue de la gare”, French Cultural Studies, Vol.12, 2001, pp.271-283.

— (2003a) The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

— (2003b) “Cultural intersections: the American hard-boiled detective novel and early French 'roman noir'”, The Modern Language Review, Vol.98, No.3, July 2003, pp.590-601.

— “Reflections on Crime and Punishment: Memories of the Holocaust in Recent French Crime Fiction”, Yale French Studies, No.108, 2005, pp.131- 145.

— French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2012).

Andrea Goulet, “Gaboriau’s “Vague Terrrain” and the Spatial Imagery of the Roman Policier”, Formules: Revue des créations formelles, No.14, 2009, http://www.formules.net/revue/14/sommaire.html.

Matthew Graves and Elizabeth Rechniewski, “From Collective Memory to Transcultural Remembrance”, Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, Vol.7, No.1, January 2010, pp.1-15.

John Gray, “John Gray on Georges Simenon”, New Statesman, Vol.12, No.583, 29 November 1999, pp.86-87.

Henrik Gustafsson, “A Wet Emptiness: the Phenonemology of Film Noir” in Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson, A Companion to Film Noir (John Wiley & Sons, 2013) pp.50-66.

187 David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1994).

William Harman and Clarence Hugh Holman, Handbook to Literature (New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006).

André Harris and Alain de Sédouy, (prod.) Le Chagrin et la pitié: Chronique d’une ville française sous l’occupation, Productions Télévision Rencontre S.A., 1969.

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1929).

— “A Good Café on the Place St-Michel,” A Moveable Feast (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Scribner, 1964).

— A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964).

Valerie Henitiuk, Embodied Boundaries : Images of Liminality in a Selection of Women-Authored Courtship Narratives (Madrid: The Gateway Press 2007— Studies in Liminality and Literature).

Leah D. Hewitt, Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2008).

Lynn A. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representations of History in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, London: Belknap Press, 2002).

Valerie Holman, Print for Victory: Book Publishing in England 1939 – 1945 (London: British Library, 2008).

Alistair Horne, The Seven Ages of Paris (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

— Friend or Foe: a History of France (London: Hachette, 2012).

Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2009).

Margaret-Anne Hutton, “Legacies of the Second World War: Representations of the Theft of Jewish Property in Recent French Crime Fiction”, French Studies, Vol. LXVI, No.4, 2012, pp.493-509.

— French Crime Fiction, 1945-2005: Investigating World War II (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.

Julian Jackson, France: the Dark Years 1940-1944 (Melbourne: Oxford Uni Press, 2001).

188 J. Robert Janes, Mirage: a Thriller Set in German-Occupied Paris During World War II (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1992).

Richard Jobs, Riding the new wave: youth and the rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007).

Mireille Johnston, The Sorrow and the Pity: the People of France under the German Occupation (transcript of Marcel Ophüls’s film Le Chagrin et la pitié, 1969) (St Albans: Paladin, 1975).

Jane Eblen Keller, “‘They Have Everything!’ Georges Simenon in Arizona”, Journal of the Southwest, Vol.44, No.4, 2002, pp.449-516.

Michael Kelly, The Cultural and Intellectual Rebuilding of France after the Second World War (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004).

Angela Kimyongür, “Dominique Manotti and the Roman Noir”, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Vol.7, No.3, 2012, pp.235-252.

Ruth Kitchen, “Another Side to the Story: Confession of Guilt in Occupation Narratives”, French Cultural Studies, Vol.22, No.207, August 2011, pp.207- 217.

Richard F. Kuisel, “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: the French Face Americanization 1948-1953”, French Historical Studies, Vol.17, No.1, 1991, pp.96-116.

— Seducing the French: the Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Francis Lacassin, “Simenon et la fugue initiatique” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.157-183.

Gavin Lambert, The Dangerous Edge: An Inquiry into the Lives of Nine Masters of Suspense (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976).

Rémi Fournier Lanzoni, French Cinema: From Its Beginnings to the Present (London, New York: Continuum, 2004).

Jacques Charles Lemaire, “D’une guerre à l’autre: l’opportunisme de Georges Simenon”, Bulletin de l'Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique, Vol. 80, 2002, pp.97-135.

Michel Lemoine, Paris Chez Simenon: Bibliothèque Simenon 1 (Paris: Encrage, 2000).

Alison Light, Forever England : Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).

189 Christopher Lloyd, Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France: Representing Treason and Sacrifice (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003).

Peter Lord, (dir.), Chicken Run, 2000.

Herbert R. Lottman, The People’s Anger: Justice and Revenge in Post-Liberation France (London, Melbourne, Auckland, Johannesburg: Hutchinson, 1986).

Oliver Lubrich, Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945: Foreign Authors Report from Germany (Chicage: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Barry Maitland, “First Find Some Atmosphere” in Michael Robotham (ed.), If I Tell You… I’ll Have to Kill You: Australia’s Leading Crime Writers Reveal their Secrets (Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London: Allen and Unwin, 2013).

Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Houndmills: Palgrave McMillan, 2006.

Léo Malet, 120, Rue de la gare, (Paris: SEPE, 1943).

— Des kilomètres de linceuls (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1955).

Jean Mambrino, “Le Mot du coffre" in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.23-51.

Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: a Social History of the Crime Story (London, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984).

Patrick Marnham, The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret: a Portrait of Georges Simenon (London: Bloomsbury, 1992).

— “The Mastery of Georges Simenon”, The Wall Street Journal, 23 October 2010, on http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304510704575562080 516157648.html.

Bill Marshall, “National identity and the film policier: the moment of 1981,” French Cultural Studies, 1992, Vol.3, No.031 pp.31-43.

Marie Helen Mercier and J. Louise Despert, “Psychological Effects of the War on French Children”, Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol. 5, July 1943, pp.266-272.

Marcel Modenesi, “Rues, ruelles, impasses et boulevards: Maigret et l’espace Parisien”, on http://www.trussel.com/maig/marcomf.htm.

Marcel Moré, “Simenon et l’enfant de chœur” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.227-263.

190 Anne Mullen, Emer O'Beirne (eds), Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture Since 1945 (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2000).

Pierre Murat, “Alfred Greven, l'Allemand double”, in La culture sous l'occupation 3/7, Cinéma, 29 May 2010) on http://www.telerama.fr/cinema/alfred- greven-l-allemand-double,56353.php.

James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française (Paris: Gallimard- Jeunesse, 2004).

Marcel Ophüls, (dir), Le Chagrin et la Pitié, 1969.

André Parinaud, “Simenon Confesses”, Paris Match, No.346, 26 November 1955, pp.90-95.

Paris-Soir, June 16-17, 1933, on http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/06/16.htm.

Crystel Pinçonnat, “Maigret contre Metal: Georges Simenon et Léo Malet face à la tradition américaine du roman noir”, Études littéraires, Vol.29, No.2, 1996, pp.111-122.

Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press, 2001.

David Platten, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”: Shades of Noir in Simenon”, Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol.43, No.1, 2006, pp.19-34.

— The Pleasure of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011).

Murray Pratt and Alistair Rolls, “Variations on the Hexagon: Getting the Measure of Culture Change in Contemporary France” in McCormack, J., Pratt, M. and Rolls, A. (eds), Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011) pp.21-42.

Rebecca Pulju, Changing Homes, Changing Lives: Material Conditions, Women's Demands, and Consumer Society in Post-World War II France (Kent State University, 2003).

— Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Raymond Queneau, Zazie dans le métro (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).

191

Richard Rayner, “Simenon was a relentless self-mythologizer, but a pitiless self- analyzer too”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 February, 2012 in http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/paperback-writers-georges-simenon.

Alistair Rolls, ‘“In Olden Days a Glimpse of Stocking”: Fashion, Fetishism and Modernity in Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours’, French Cultural Studies, Vol.15 No.2, 2004, pp.99-113.

— “Throwing Caution to the French Winds: Peter Cheyney’s Success Overseas in 1945”, Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol.43, No.1, 2006, pp.35-47.

— “Venus and the Motley Marianne: A Prose Reading of Léo Malet’s Nestor Burma contre C.Q.F.D.” (unpublished: University of Newcastle, 2007).

— “Camus’s Algerian in Paris: A Prose Poetic Reading of L’Étranger”, Sophia: An International Journal for Philosophical Theology and Cross- Cultural Philosophy of Religion, Vol.50, No.4, 2011, pp.527-41.

Alistair Rolls and Clara Sitbon, “Traduit de l’américain: from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France, Vol.21, No.1, 2013, pp.37-53.

Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker, French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2009).

Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

Marco Roth, “It’s Doom Alone that Counts”, The Nation, 7 May 2007, on http://www.thenation.com/article/its-doom-alone-counts.

Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Erik Routley, The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: a Personal Monograph (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972).

Eric Rovit, “Learning to Care” in Gellens, J., (ed), Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms: a Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970) pp.33-40.

Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague”, Cynthia C. Davidson, (ed), Anyplace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).

Robert Sabatier, La Souris verte (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990).

Luc Sante, “Soul Inspector”, Bookforum, June/July/August 2007, on

192 www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_2_241.

Luis Saslavsky (dir.) La Neige était sale, 1954.

Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir” in Alain Silver and James Ursini, Film Noir Reader (New York: Limelight Edition, 2003).

Eléonore Schraiber, “Georges Simenon et la littérature russe” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.184-189.

Gilbert Sigaux, “Lire Simenon” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.13-17.

Anne Simonin, “The Right to Innocence: Literary Discourse and the Postwar Purges (1944-1953)”, Yale French Studies, No.98, 2000, pp.5-28.

Susanne Sklar, “Sublime Allegory in Blake’s Jerusalem”, The Glass, No.17, Spring 2005, Editorial, pp.2-3.

Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Carolyn Stott, “Belleville au pluriel: Representations of a Parisian Suburb in the Néo-Polar”, Jo McCormack, Murray Pratt and Alistair Rolls (eds), Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2011) pp.355-370.

William W. Stowe, “Simenon, Maigret, and Narrative”, The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol.19, No.3, Fall 1989, pp.331-342.

Evelyne Sullerot, “Les Hommes, les hommes…” in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.94-95.

Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: a History (Hammondsworth, New York, Ringwood, Ontario, Auckland: Penguin, 1985).

Jacques Tati (dir.), Mon Oncle, 1958

— Les Vacances de M Hulot, 1953

Clare Tufts, Student exhibit, La Bande Dessinée et la Propagande France: 1939- 1944 in the Bostock Library on http://library.duke.edu/apps/locationguide/areamap/41/.

Pierre Verdaguer, “Borowed Settings: Frenchness in Anglo-American Detective Fiction”, Yale French Studies, No.108, 2005, pp.146-159.

Vercors, Le Silence de la mer (London: Cahiers du silence, 1943).

193

— La bataille du silence: souvenirs de minuit (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1992).

Boris Vian, L’Écume des jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, preface to the Russian edition of three Simenon novels, in Lacassin, F. and Sigaux, G., (eds), Simenon, (Paris: Plon, 1973) pp.264-67.

Richard Vinen, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

Nancy E. Virtue, “Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: A national allegory of the French-Algerian War”, Studies in French Cinema, Vol.13, No.2, 2013, pp.127–140.

William T. Vollmann, Afterword in Georges Simenon, Dirty Snow (New York: NYRB, 2003).

David H. Walker, Outrage and Insight: Modern French Writers and the ‘Fait Divers’ (Oxford, Washington: Berg, 1995).

George Watson, “Kafka's father, Simenon's mother: The battle of generations”, Sewanee Review, Vol.103, No.4, 1995, pp.597-605.

Susan Weiner, “Editor’s Preface: The French Fifties”, Yale French Studies, No.98, 2000, pp.1-4.

Laurence Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse (London: Harvard University Press, 1977).

© Hazel Paton 2014

194