Making Art of Life

In an Earth Day-related issue predominately devoted to the dangers--physical and political--of climate change, The Nation magazine also hosts a fine essay about the life and linked fiction of Georges Simenon. In it, contributor Marco Roth opines:

To posterity, then, the Belgian-born writer appears as one of literature’s great graphomaniacs. Where other novelists had moods, fantasies and love affairs that may or may not have influenced their work, Simenon seemed to turn every mood, every passing fantasy, every love affair into a novel. And there were quite a lot of fantasies and affairs. On the rare occasions when he wasn't writing, Simenon had lots of sex: with prostitutes, mistresses--even with wives (he had two, although his preferred mode was a ménage à trois that included a housekeeper or personal secretary). It usually took him between six and fourteen days to produce a novel. The affairs often took an equivalent amount of time, while the marriages averaged twenty years.

Literary theorist Gérard Genette remarked that graphomaniacs pose a special problem to scholars since it’s hard to know where life ends and writing begins. Does it make sense to mark the end of one novel and the beginning of the next, or should the entire lifework, including journals and random jottings, be understood as a sort of stream of consciousness, and the pauses in between as merely like rests in music? Simenon is a perfect test case, despite the sharply defined compartments and the tight formulaic plots he used to separate the man who was Maigret from the man who was more often [Inspector Jules] Maigret’s quarry--the man who could write The Engagement, a novel that eerily predicted the psychological mechanics of fascism, and the man who lived a comfortable war in an aristocrat’s chateau, hosting dinners for German officers while the Nazi-run film industry adapted nine of his novels.

Roth’s full essay can be read here.