Reading Simenon in an airport

I've written before about the difficulty of selecting books to carry on a trip, and yesterday I decided that I may need to add a new categorical consideration to my pre-trip book packing: I should always pack a slim and claustrophobic novel to read in case of airport delays.

The needs of an airport reader, after all, are different from those of an airplane reader. The oppressive open-endedness of an airport delay also argues for the short novel over the epic or Victorian: unlike plane reading, which is conducted in full knowledge of its end point, airport delay reading should, if the reader wishes to stay sane, inherently reinforce the idea that he and his fellow passengers will surely be leaving soon, O'Hare's vagaries and incompetencies be damned. And the more claustrophobic and involving the narrative, the better, as few places are less conducive to reading than an airport full of delayed passengers; poetry won't long survive the blither-blather of CNN, the fuckery of Fox, and the soul-sucking cell-phone addictions of business types. A perfect airport delay novel will seamlessly trade the oppressiveness of the modern lounge for its own form of oppressiveness, escaped only at the turning of the last page--at which point, if the stars have aligned, your plane will be ready.

All of which leads to my nomination of Hesperus Press and the matchless New York Review of Books Classics line as the official publishers of airport delays. All of Hesperus's titles would fit the first criterion, as would a number of the NYRB's, while both lists are thick with murky foreign settings, eerie tales, and hideous crimes conducted under cover of darkness (or, in the case of Ivy Compton-Burnett, the thinnest veneer of politeness). Now if only I can get all the Hudson News stores to agree with me, the world of the airport will be a much better--if far more sinister--place.

Yesterday, trapped by rain at La Guardia, I occupied myself with Hesperus Press's recent translation of Georges Simenon's Three Crimes (1938). Simenon has been enjoying an English-language renaissance lately through the help of both of the aforementioned presses, and Three Crimes could be the model airport delay book: it's only 125 pages long, thoroughly sordid, and just fragmented and disjointed enough to require real attention. Three Crimes tells the story of a pair of men, friends of Simenon in his youth, who later committed violent murders, one man of his wife and mistress, the other of his mistress, his mother, and his former Jesuit confessor. There is almost no plotting to the book; Simenon is far less interested in the how of a murder than in the unfathomable skein of whys that led to it. So he opens with details of the murders, then slips back into his energetically dissipated youth in Liege and his adventures--which range from teenage seductions to vague black magic--with the murderers-to-be, in search of the roots of their crimes:

Why? How? Where should one begin, since there is no beginning, nor any other link, over the years and across space, between three crimes, between five or six deaths and between a handful of the living, except for myself?

I seem to hear Danse's voice, in the strange Court of the Assizes in Liege, pounding out the words, "When I was four years old my mother took me to the countryside, and there, in a farmyard, I saw a man killing a sow, first with a hammer, and then by slitting its throat. . . . "

When he was four years old, I did not know him; I wasn't even born. What is more, I wasn't there when, forty years later, in a small house in the French countryside, he killed his mother and his mistress in exactly the same way he had one seen a sow being killed.

. . . .

Three crimes! It's easily said. But before them?

The novel is formed around, and returns obsessively to, the fact of Simenon's once-close connection to the murderers and the question of why he, having shared with them so many of the same adventures and vices, did not like them become a killer. Ostensibly, he is glad to have been spared that outcome and is truly marveling at the workings of fate--but at least a hint of disappointment at his comparatively ordinary life seeps through. Any lifelong student of what is found creeping around under rocks is bound to wonder about the seductions of that life; it's hard not to see Simenon throughout Three Crimes imagining himself as murderer--maybe even, in the unwritten spaces between lines and pages, wondering about who his victims, unwittingly saved, might have been. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Simenon is wistful about that road less traveled by, but his mind does turn regularly in that direction:

I belonged to the most respectable newspaper in the town and I was the youngest of the journalists. I still recall that, for the first official dinner that I attended, I borrowed not a dinner jacket, which I considered common, but a gray morning coat, and I am not sure if I didn't wear with it a white tie and gloves the colour of fresh butter.

Well, some time after that, during a grand lunch, which was, I think, given the title of a lunch for the Fervent City, I suddenly stood up at the table of honour, where I happened to be with my colleagues, and spoke out loudly and clearly: "I'm clearing off! It's bloody boring!"

After which there was an immense void. When I woke up I was in my bed, with a heavy head thumping like a drum. A little later I found my mother sobbing and my brother looking at me in horror.

"What's happened?" I asked in a casual tone.

"Don't you know that some neighbours picked you up from the doorstep at six o'clock in the morning, and that three people were needed to carry you to your bed?"

No, I didn't know. And I examined with astonishment an enormous dagger, which had been found, it seemed, in the pocket of my gabardine.

"What have you done?"

How did I know? They could have declared that I had killed someone and I would have believed it.

But for all its probing of the psychological and social roots of murder, Three Crimes is at its best in its scenes, like that one, of Simenon's youthful escapades, sordid and reckless, which he retails with verve and relish. He tells in detail what he learns about what happened during that "immense void," for example:

And I learned that I had arrived at the newspaper office, without my hat, and with a broken walking stick in my hand, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, and that I vomited with all my might. The boss took care of me and tried to make me drink some hot coffee, in the usual way. But what is worse than that I hurled the coffee at his head, yelling, "You're a great coward and you betrayed me! That's exactly what you are! I know what I'm saying!"

Now [the next day] he just waits for me, as is only right. He starts by firing me. Then he calls me back, because he is a nice man and informs me that he will give it a try again with me, but that I won't be sent to banquets any more.

At this point, a colleague rings me up.

"Are you better? Did you find your dancing girl?"

"My dancing girl?"

"It would be a good idea to drop by the Trianon to apologise . . . "

In his ability to wed late-night stories of drink and dissipation with the closely observed details of grotesque crimes, Simenon comes across as a sort of unholy mix of Julian Maclaren-Ross, Anthony Powell, William Roughead, and Michael Lesy. Which, now that I think about it, would also serve as a good description of Luc Sante, whose article about Simenon in the current issue of Bookforum is a good place to learn more about Simenon and his four-hundred-book oeuvre.

[By the way, both Hesperus and the NYRB Classics have blogs that are worth checking out.]

Well-designed books

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977)

All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss has only one result under this roof . . . What books? I had named them: when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: “We can’t do much about the others but here’s Horace for you.” He put a small duodecimo volume in my hand. It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket. There were gold edges to the pages and a faded marker of scarlet silk slanted across the long S’s of the text and the charming engraved vignettes: cornucopias, lyres, pan-pipes, chaplets of olive and bay and myrtle. Small mezzotints showed the Forum and the Capitol and imaginary Sabine landscapes: Tibur, Lucretilis, the Bandusian spring, Soracte, Venusia.

When I was younger, and a Star Trek fan, I enjoyed that Kirk and (more believably), Picard were fans, in that distant future, of antique printed books. Even as a kid I knew what the writers were trying to convey. A well-designed book is more than the words it contains, and I too rarely note that in this blog about books. So, a moment to appreciate as objects some books I’ve read recently.

The passage that opened this post is from a book in the New York Review of Books classics series, which are smartly designed, hearty paperbacks, printed and bound to last. At the other end of the spectrum, but no less well-designed for their subject and audience, are the lurid, pulpy Hard Case Crime volumes, with their original cover paintings by R. B. Farrell and others. The Hesperus Press, too, has a memorable, effective series design, with French flaps, an elongated trim, and well-set type.

Then there are the tiny volumes of the Library of America’s American Poets Project, with their luxurious, creamy paper and their sandy-textured, matte-finish jackets, designed by Chip Kidd. Or Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them, designed by Darren Haggar, which wonderfully weaves photos into the narrative, which is itself set in the appropriately elegant Centaur MT. And along those lines, there’s the most extravagantly beautiful design I’ve seen the past few years, the three-volume, illustrated, slip-cased New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

All of these books are instances of designers adapting art to the needs of commerce, and thus enabling commerce itself to be put to work passing on stories, disseminating knowledge, continuing an argument. It’s complex, difficult work, and its successes—the many, many books that are a joy to pick up, open, read, and lend to friends—are the reason our house will keep getting more and more crowded as the years go on.

Posting will be sporadic through the Fourth of July holiday, as work and travel and such things intervene.

Witches, ghosts, and fear

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lois the Witch (1856) and Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005), which I happened to read back-to-back this week, make a good pair. Both are essentially books about fear and the ways we conceive of and attempt to deal with life’s uncertainties. And both come at those questions through the unseen and the supernatural.

Lois the Witch, originally published in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round and republished a few years ago by the wonderful Hesperus Press, is a novella set in Salem, Massachusetts in 1691, right before the witch hysteria. From its opening pages, when Lois, a vivacious English girl, arrives to live with unwelcoming relations, we can see how the tragedy is going to unfold. Gaskell presents a Salem whose existence is somewhat precarious: the colony is estranged from English protection, surrounded by increasingly hostile Indians, and suffering through the hard New England winter. But the fear those dangers engender is unacknowledged, transformed instead into a formless fear of the unknown:

Sounds were heard that could not be accounted for; they were made by the evil spirits not yet vanished from the desert palaces of which they had so long held possession. Sights, inexplicable and mysterious, were dimly seen—Satan, in some shape, seeking whom he might devour. And at the beginning of the long winter season, such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors, were supposed to be peculiarly rife. Salem was, as it were, snowed up, and left to prey upon itself. The long dark evenings; the dimly lit rooms; the creaking passages, where heterogeneous articles were piled away, out of the reach of the keen-piercing frost, and where occasionally, in the dead of night, a sound was heard, as of some heavy falling body, when, next morning, everything appeared to be in its right place ; . . the white mist, coming nearer and nearer to the windows every evening in strange shapes, like phantoms—all these, and many other circumstances, such as the distant fall of mighty trees in the mysterious forests girdling them round; the faint whoop and cry of some Indian seeking his camp, and unwittingly nearer to the white man’s settlement than either he or they would have liked, could they have chosen.

Add in Puritan refusal to acknowledge desire or passion—to the point that people can’t even speak openly (“Hush! you know not who may be listening; you are putting yourself in [Satan’s] power.”)—and the end begins to seem inevitable.

Gaskell’s psychology is acute, her descriptions powerful, and her story convincing. In less than a hundred pages, she presents the horrors of Salem and, without reducing their complexity, offers an explanation. It’s quite an achievement, and thanks are due to Hesperus Press for making Lois the Witch readily available.

Since this is a long post, and it breaks fairly naturally, the rest will wait for tomorrow.