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"They Have Everything!" Georges Simenon in Arizona.
by Jane Eblen Keller The annals of Southwestern literature seldom include Georges Simenon (1903-1989), but he was here all right, just after the Second World War. The Belgian-born, Francophone author of some two hundred novels, including the world-famous Inspector Maigret detective stories, lived for more than two years in southern Arizona and wrote four remarkable "Westerns" chronicling the region's mores and mentalities during the postwar boom years. A half-century later, this period in our culture is suddenly a hot topic. Simenon's portrayal of life in America in the late 1940s and early 1950s is therefore newly relevant. In the hands of one of the twentieth century's master storytellers, these tales of the emerging New West have always been gripping, daring, and disturbing. A legacy of Georges Simenon's stay in southern Arizona--from the end of August 1947 to the end of October 1950--is that people from these parts pronounce his name correctly. Among Americans, I'm usually embarrassed to do this, to give the accented first syllable the long eee sound, to drop the middle e, and to Frenchify the last syllable, making it appropriately oink-like: Seem'-non This seems pretentious. The average person looks at me strangely. George who? In Arizona or among Arizonans, however, I am often enough made to feel the oaf for Anglicizing the name. People who remember Simenon, even people who only know people who knew him, repeat the word slowly for me, give it the proper French inflection, and thus politely but sternly point up my ignorance. Oh yes, Seem'-non. This is pretty amazing considering that so many other traces of Simenon's Arizona years have vanished. No commemorative plaques mark the houses in Tucson and in the Santa Cruz Valley where one of world's most prolific and widely read novelists lived, nor is he ever, to my knowledge, included in lists, books, and articles about writers in and of the Southwest. His biographers and critics, French, Belgian, English, and American, give short shrift to the Western period, focusing instead on the last five years of his decade-long stay in the United States (1945-1955), when he lived in the East. Yet the Arizona years were, I argue, the most important in Simenon's experience of America. Although he claimed never to feel alien anywhere in the world--during his globe-trotting years in the 1930s, he wrote, "We weren't 'taking trips' for we were at home everywhere" (1)--in Arizona he became, for the first time in America, part of a community. Here, he made the important transition from being a visitor, however comfortable and adaptable, to being a resident, albeit a foreign one with a Maurice Chevalier accent and decidedly Continental ways. Part of the change had to do with language. While he was living in Tucson, Simenon slipped across the language barrier from awkward insecurity to relative fluency in English. Now, when he could at last hear Americans, all his extraordinarily acute senses became attuned to American ways. As anyone in a foreign land knows, that moment when you can understand and be understood in another language is a kind of miracle, your magic passport to a sense of belonging. Simenon used his to begin a remarkable series of nine "insider" American novels; that is, books not simply about Americans but written from the point of view of Americans. This Belgian expatriate, who came to the United States at middle age without knowing much if any English, was one of very few European writers to dare such a thing, to risk the many embarrassments possible when writing from the perspective of people whose culture, history, idiom, and frame of reference are not your own. (2) But Simenon took the risk and succeeded in rendering believable, in some cases unforgettable, Americans, beginning with his first "Western," which was also his first insider American novel. He wrote La Jument Perdue (The lost mare ranch; not translated into English), in 1947 in Tucson, not six weeks after he arrived. A year later, he followed with Le fond de la bouteille, published in English as "The Bottom of the Bottle," written in Tumacacori. The from-life portraits of Tucson, Bisbee, Tombstone, the ranches of the Santa Cruz Valley, and the people he knew in all these places are so vivid and detailed that these books would be, if nothing else, valuable historical and sociological documents. Two other Arizona novels complete Simenon's Western period: Maigret chez le coroner, published in the United States as Maigret at the Coroner's, was ...
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