Two Novels

It’s an old legal trick: if you’re defending a client and the prosecution puts a witness on the stand who attests to your client’s guilt, you attack the credibility of the witness. In 1942 two novels were published in France around the same time that have had the misfortune of being associated ever since. One, called L'Étranger, was written by Albert Camus, a novice novelist who had been born in Algeria. The other, La veuve Couderc, was written by Georges Simenon, a world famous novelist born in Belgium. I first read the Camus novel 40 years ago, and having just finished reading Simenon’s novel, under the title The Widow, I think it is highly imaginative for a critic to draw any similarities whatever between them. I am confident that if they had been published years apart there would never have been comparisons. 

Paul Theroux’s 2008 introduction to a new edition of The Widow belabors the comparison to such an extent that he manages to make Simenon look bad and himself look ridiculous:

Two startlingly similar short novels appeared in France in 1942, at the center of each narrative, a conscienceless and slightly creepy young man, unattached and adrift, perpetrator of a meaningless murder. 

The very odd thing about Theroux’s introduction isn’t what he has to say about Simenon (though he is quite incorrect about Simenon’s neglect by serious critics) but what he says about Camus, with which I don’t think anyone would agree: 

Camus’ [sic] novel rose to become part of the literary firmament, and is still glittering, intensely studied, and praised—to my mind, overpraised. 

I feel as if there should be a headline that reads: Paul Theroux says Camus’s L'Étranger is ‘overpraised’. Although he has written novels, Theroux is best known as a writer of non-fiction travel books. The last thing I read by him was Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a scathing account of his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul. Naipaul was, by most accounts, an exceptionally nasty person – who happened to write some of the finest English prose of the 20th century. Theroux has it in, it seems, for great writers. 

No two novels could hardly be more dissimilar. Jean Passerat-Monnoyeur, Simenon’s young man, is a murderer who has been released from prison and is taken on as a hired hand by a domineering older woman on a country farm. Meursault, Camus’s young man, works in an office in Algiers. His mother has just died in a nursing home and he travels by bus to take part in her vigil and burial. Jean’s story is told in featureless prose in a limited third person. We are allowed into Jean’s thoughts, which doesn’t help us to understand his actions. Meursault’s story is told in uninflected language by himself. He is a much more reliable narrator, and I felt much closer to Meursault at the end of the novel than I did to Jean. 

The posterity of Camus’s novel has been considerable. It ushered in a new philosophy, one that Camus artfully elaborated in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. On the strength of L'Étranger and two other novels, a few plays and books of essays, Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Simenon’s novel, one of four novels he published in 1942, simply fell in line with all his other dashed-off romans dur. 

The Camus comparison is not gratuitous—Simenon often made it himself, and André Gide brought the same subject up a few years after L'Étranger appeared, favoring Simenon’s work, especially this novel. 

Born in 1869, Gide was a friend of Simenon’s and, by then in his 70s, one of the arrière-garde of French literature – hardly a trustworthy critic of Camus. In his review of Sartre’s novel Nausea, Camus had thrown down a gauntlet by claiming that “a novel is nothing but a philosophy couched in images.” I don’t believe he would have made such a claim for a Simenon novel. 

Simenon deeply resented that Camus’s novel got so much more attention than his did. And, evidently, Simenon couldn’t let it go. His wife reported that when Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, he angrily remarked, “Can you believe that asshole got it and not me?” I doubt if Simenon saw it that way, but didn’t Camus die like one of the protagonists of his novels – in a car crash with a return rail ticket in his pocket? 

It hardly seems necessary for me to admit that I am not a Simenon detractor. Crime novels hold no special interest for me, so I pass by his Maigret novels without a second thought. But Simenon himself saw the difference between the books that sold and the ones that satisfied in him something more personal and essential. He had the luxury of writing whatever he pleased, so why not turn out a serious novel every now and then? Clearly he was a compulsive writer, and he believed he was a second Balzac and that the sheer bulk of his work represented some kind of organic whole that was impressive in itself. 

Camus’s L’Etranger is in the form of a testament. Meursault, condemned to death in the last pages of the book, is telling us everything we need to know about what led up to the murder of an Arab man he encountered on a beach, as well as everything that came after. It isn’t so much for his having committed murder that he is condemned, but that he is unapologetic and – more tellingly – utterly truthful about his own character. He is deemed to be a monster for not crying at his mother’s funeral, for taking a mistress the day after, and for saying in his defense, “It was the sun” that made him kill. He is merely telling the truth and refusing to submit to lies. That is what sets him apart from everyone else in the story: he refuses to go along with the Big Lie. 

Simenon’s Jean is, in contrast, almost a cipher – a doomed man, doomed as much by his release from prison as by his imprisonment. Honestly, Simenon lost me when, in chapter 4, he muses, “His day had been spoiled, and perhaps far more than his day; his sky had been smirched; he did not feel like whistling any more; he was not hungry; he did not sniff, as on other days, at the already familiar smell of the kitchen.” What had happened was innocent enough, Jean approached a girl he was attracted to in her yard and the girl had responded by spitting at him and calling him a dirty dog. The way he responded to this scene made me wonder if he had murdered her. From that moment, he began to repeat to himself parts of the penal code: “Every person condemned to death shall be decapitated.” Is this Simenon’s fatalism? Camus never insisted that Meursault shooting the Arab on the beach was in any way inevitable. In fact, the way the crime is committed, with Meursault encountering his victim alone and being threatened by him with a knife, makes his crime seem justified. Camus wasn’t making any special argument against the French penal code (although he later opposed the death penalty in a powerful polemic, “Reflections on the Guillotine”). 

Camus’s narrative is what became known as “cool” – detached, emotionally uninvolved, dispassionate. It carries within it a dimension that Simenon could not even glimpse. Meursault’s life is cut short because of circumstances beyond everyone’s control – even Camus’s. It isn’t destiny but happenstance. Over the years since I first read it, it has stayed with me as very few other novels have – because Camus’s encounters with the universe reflected my own. Everything he wrote affected me with lesser and greater degrees of recognition. In contrast, Simenon’s view of life seems deterministic, streaked with inevitability, a kind of fate with which I cannot agree. 

Two fine novels were published in France at about the same time. You may prefer, based on your taste, one or the other. But I believe there is a reason why one of the novels has been exalted far above the other, and that reason rises above the literary qualities of either book. Camus’s novel introduced a way of looking and thinking about life in the world. Compared to which, Simenon’s is a momentary entertainment. 

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with  its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my  heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. 

I wouldn't trade that single sentence by Camus for every word Simenon ever wrote.