One of the characteristics of fiction writers that unfailingly attracts attention is the volume of work they produce. Graham Greene habitually produced five hundred words a day. Jack London wrote one thousand a day, and for Anthony Trollope it was two thousand. But, ultimately, what does the sheer amount of words any given writer produces matter? Considering that they managed to produce creditable prose is the only thing that matters.
Then there was Georges Simenon. He wrote more than two hundred books under his own name and almost as many under pseudonyms. In his most prolific period, he could write a novel in eight days, six for composition and two for revision. His revising method was a matter of cutting out everything that was superfluous to the story, including any passages that were overtly literary – i.e., that call attention to themselves merely as writing. He wanted to be known as a “craftsman” and not as an artist. He avoided literary circles and distrusted intellectuals. His style, assuming he had one, is spare and utilitarian and serves exclusively to tell whatever story he has to tell.
Simenon had a great number of admirers among serious writers and critics. His contemporary, and one with whom Simenon had a long correspondence, was Andre Gide, who wrote:
This is what attracts and holds me in him. He writes for ‘the vast public,’ to be sure, but delicate and refined readers find something for them too as soon as they begin to take him seriously. He makes one reflect; and this is close to being the height of art.
Simenon was 27 when his most famous character, Inspector Maigret, made his first appearance in print in 1930. These police procedurals were what made him world famous as well as one of the wealthiest fiction writers of his time. Yet Simenon wanted to be taken seriously, so he began in 1933 to write “non-Maigret” novels, or what were also know as romans dur – literally “hard novels.” They weren’t always crime stories, but placed his characters in highly dramatic predicaments.
The Window Over the Way was Simenon’s second roman dur. Like his first, Tropic Moon, it was inspired by his travels – in this case a visit he made to Odessa in the Spring of 1933. Simenon saw the deprivations of daily life in provincial Soviet Russia at a time when Stalin was tightening his grip on power. Simenon had even interviewed Trotsky, who was in exile in Istanbul, so he was acquainted with the political aspect of Soviet life.(1)
The novel, titled Les Gens d’en face in French, was published in September 1933, at a time when the French reading public had an insatiable appetite for exotic settings – especially those that were parts of the French colonial empire: Indochina, North and West Africa. That appetite was also being fed by contemporary French cinema. Films like Jacques Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu and Julien Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko, both of which are set in North Africa.
Adil Bey, the protagonist of The Window Over the Way, is a Turkish consul just arrived in the Black Sea port of Batum, a replacement for a previous consul who died under unexplained circumstances. Bey encounters nothing but dysfunction at his consulate, with no amenities and no housekeeper. Even the gramophone he saw when he first arrived is now missing.
The next day a Russian woman appears at the consulate. She is Sonia, and she lives over the way with her brother and his wife. They live in a single room behind a window that can be seen from the consulate. Her brother is a high ranking member of the local secret police.(2)
Because he is so isolated with her, and there is no one else with whom he can communicate, Bey becomes obsessed with Sonia. She nonchalantly becomes his lover, and he is fascinated by her strange indifference, her lack of emotion. He follows her through the ugly town, until he becomes ill. He thinks that someone must be poisoning him, that he will suffer the same fate as the last Turkish consul, who must’ve been poisoned, too. One morning, just as Sonia has arrived for work, Bey grabs her purse and finds a vial of white powder inside. He forces a confession out of her that she has, indeed, been poisoning him. In an extraordinary scene, they express their love for each other. Bey decides that they must escape Russia together.
There is a transcendent moment, once their emotions have subsided, when Sonia asks Bey about life in Turkey. He contradicts the lies she has been told all her life about life in a capitalist country.
“Is it true the streets are so brightly lit you can read in them at night?”
“Yes All through the night....And all along the Bosphorus there are places where you can sit listening to Turkish music while you drink Raki and eat all sorts of marvellous things. And you watch the caiques slowly sailing by...“
The story’s climax arrives abruptly, and it reminded me of that in John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Trying to save himself, Bey extends his hand to Sonia, not knowing that there are forces that will not allow it. There is a strange moment when her brother, who is inspecting the ship's passenger list prior to its sailing, and he comes to Bey’s name.
Koline did his job slowly and thoroughly. Adil Bey, who was at the end of the line couldn’t take his eyes off a bit of black ribbon about an inch wide which went round the lapel of his coat, threaded through the buttonhole.
“Van Rompen...”
“Here!” Each had his passport returned to him.
“Nielsen...”
“Here!”
“Adil Zeki Bey.” There was no answer for a moment and Koline looked up into the consul's haggard face. Still the latter couldn’t answer. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move. All he could do was to stare fixedly at that bit of black ribbon.
“Captain Cauwelaert..“
“Here!”
It was over. Adil Bey had been given his passport. His fingers had almost touched Koline’s, yet nothing had happened! Next came the inspection. Koline and the officers went out while the crew remained in the saloon. Some of them sat down. One finished off a half-emptied bottle of beer.
“Well! That’s over, at any rate,” sighed John looking hard at Adil Bey. The latter smiled painfully. With an effort he managed to say:
"Yes. Did you see the Black ribbon?”
"And his eyes too. In his place I’d have killed you....”
And by the way he spoke it seemed as though John had guessed everything—the window over the way, Koline leaning out in the dark smoking his cigarette, the grey paper that Adil Bey had pasted on his own windows, the Russian looking up and down the street watching for his sister...
While the novel’s portrayal of the deprivations of life in a provincial city in Stalinist Russia could be mistaken for anti-communist (the book was reprinted in 1943 in a French collaborationist journal), it isn’t propagandist in the least. Simenon obviously cares what happens to the people in the story, especially to Sonia. Some critics complained that Adil Bey isn’t brought sufficiently to life. I think it’s due to the fact that he is a Turk, and that Simenon had been performing a delicate political dance by not making his hero a Frenchman instead. I think Simenon is just as capable of bringing life to a quite foreign character than he is making the motives of a murderer convincing in so many of his Maigret novels.
What stays with me long after I’ve finished reading the book is the strange interplay between Bey and the “people (les gens) over the way,” and the moments in near darkness, after the power in the city is shut off, when they watch one another enduring hot, sleepless nights.
(1) The Trotsky interview can be found here
(2) The OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate) was the precursor of the NKVD, the secret state police. It was dissolved in 1934.
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