Keeping an author before the reading public

Things can get a bit complicated with Simenon, who died in 1989, and economical readers wanting just one of the two books would no doubt make a straightforward choice of the threesome of “The Hand And Other Novels” with 496 pages over the standalone “The Cat” and its 160 pages, particularly so as both cost exactly the same price.

It could be that Penguin, having only fairly recently issued single retranslated editions of the trio in the omnibus, in 2015, 2016 and 2021, felt that to give them another outing so soon it made sense to put them in a single volume. Omnibuses certainly make good value.

“The Cat”, though, is a new addition for any Simenon collection, not having been among Penguin’s 16 new psychological translations in the past decade. The Budapest Times’ modest Simenon library includes a hardback of “The Cat” that was translated from French to English by Bernard Frechtman in 1967 and published by  Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., of New York. Now it has been retranslated in the safe hands of Howard Curtis, who was in the team of a dozen or so translators who tackled the 75 reworked  “Maigret”s between 2013 and 2020 (and among whom were Linda Coverdale and Ros Schwartz who also did the new versions of “The Hand”, “Betty” and “The Blue Room”).

“The Hand” was first issued as “La Main” in 1968 and is one of Simenon’s “romans durs” (hard novels), taking its American setting from the years that he spent living at Shadow Rock Farm in Connecticut, United States, in the early 1950s. It has also appeared over the years in English editions titled “The Man on the Bench in the Barn”, and is not the only one of his books to have been retitled, making things a bit complicated for we collectors. The latest Penguins do at least return to the correct titles. “Betty” was the original title when it was first published in 1961 and “The Blue Room” appeared as “La Chambre Bleue” in 1963.

In 1968 Georges Simenon, born in French-speaking Liège, Belgium, in 1903, was 65 years old, retirement age for ordinary folk but not for a writer whose creative juices were still flowing. Even in his advancing years and after writing some 300-plus books, he could still produce a superior effort such as “La Main”.

Here is an example of the best of his writing: fast and lean and needing minimal correction. Not a word is wasted; literature as an exercise in stripped-down economy. He trimmed his vocabulary to a rudimentary 2000 words and used language that could be easily understood. More sophisticated vocabulary and baroque phrases would have only slowed him down.

And we readers too. We can clearly picture him at his desk, writing this latest effort at white heat with an unrelenting intensity that holds up throughout. Simenon kept it short and was no Dickens. For the week or two that this book would have taken to write – the standard time for a Simenon – the author’s brain is fully inside that of his protagonist, Donald Dodd.

Adding to the effect, Simenon tells the harrowing tale in the first-person singular, one of the rare such novels he wrote. There is a quartet of major characters: Dodd, a 45-year-old successful lawyer and graduate of Yale Law School, his wife of 17 years Isabel with whom he has two daughters, his best friend Ray, also a Yale Law School graduate, and Ray’s wife Mona.

It’s January and we join the two couples during a party at the home of wealthy social magnet Harold Ashbridge. The house is packed with guests, several dozen men and women drinking and talking deep into the night. At one point Dodd goes upstairs and opens the bathroom door to find – in a typical Simenon moment of casual sex – Ray and Harold’s beautiful young wife Patricia copulating standing up. Only Patricia notices Dodd. She couldn’t care less.

Dodd quickly retreats back downstairs. He’s shaken and begins drinking all he can get his hands on. Eventually the four of them drive back to the Dodds’ place in a blinding blizzard, the worst for 72 years. Dodd is at the wheel and they almost make it, but half a kilometre from safety they run into a high snow bank, so they have to abandon the car.

They struggle on foot, Isabel and Mona walking ahead, arm in arm, finally making their way to the front door. Donald and Ray follow. But in the blizzard Dodd arrives to discover that Ray is no longer by his side. Although totally exhausted, Dodd goes back out to search. He can barely see beyond his nose. And he’s not good to his word.

Something has changed within him after catching the bathroom action at the party. He struggles through the raging conditions to his barn, takes a seat on a red bench and passes the time thinking and smoking several cigarettes. Now he realises that the man he considered his best friend was in fact a lie to himself.

He hates Ray and he will let him die, lost in the snow. Is he, Dodd, a coward? Is he a liar? Does he totally betray his best friend? Has he always been secretly attracted to Mona? These are among the questions he poses to himself in the ensuing hours and days.

One thing is certain – his vision of his life and everybody around him is completely transformed. He is not the man he supposed himself to be. While he sits in the barn, Ray falls off a cliff, breaks a leg and freezes to death. “I had killed Ray, so be it… I had killed in thought. In intention… The sight of a man and a woman making love in a bathroom had been enough… I hate him and I let him die. I hate him and I kill him.

“I hate him because he is stronger than I am, because he has a wife more desirable than mine, because he lives a life like the one I would have liked to live, because he goes through life without bothering about those he bumps aside as he goes by… in reality I was cruel, taking pleasure in the death of a man I had always considered my best friend and capable, if necessary, of provoking that death.”

There’s another, equally unsettling recognition: Isabel is not only his wife but his judge and jury rolled into one. She found and cleared away the cigarette ends in the barn. She doesn’t mention this or come right out and confront him as the new, transformed Donald Dodd. Oh no, her husband thinks, that would be too easy. All Isabel has to do is gaze at him in silence with her piercing, penetrating pale blue eyes. She knew but with no hint of accusation.

And “the hand” of the title? On the night that Ray went missing he and Mona were to stay at the Dodds’ after the party. After his unsuccessful “search”, Dodd, Isabel and Mona sleep on mattresses on the floor of the living room, Dodd in the middle. He is hypnotised by Mona’s hand lying on the parquet in the light of the flames on the hearth, and has an “insane desire” to touch it, to seize it. He doesn’t but wonders what would have happened if he had.

He needn’t have worried. After Ray’s funeral, almost before the body is cold, Dodd and a willing Mona immediately start an affair at her place in New York. “We are not in love. I am not sure that I believe in love, or in any case, in a love that lasts a lifetime,” reflects Dodd.
You have to hand it to Simenon. Here is his laser vision of one man stepping out of his social roles as husband, father, successful professional and upstanding community member to confront the stark realities of his existence. It is the disintegration of a man, a gripping, intense and unrelenting tale. Plus two more stories to satisfy – “Betty” and “The Blue Room”.