A late novel by Georges Simenon, now read a couple of times, all 191 pages of it, following going to see the ‘Red Barn’ at the National, a new play based on the novel, by David Hare. My not very fulsome notice of the play is to be found at reference 1.
I found the novel good, a convincing tale of someone who was not evil but who, more or less by chance, was sucked into a disaster, a disaster which killed two people and messed up sundry others. Not evil, but certainly responsible, in the eyes of the church and of the law.
The novel is largely told in the first person, by a well-to-do Yale educated lawyer in a small town in Connecticut, within commuting distance of New York, hereafter the hero. Married with two adolescent children. Living in a house with a location and name which echoes that of Simenon himself when he lived in the US after the second world war.
The barn is the start and the key to the novel. Two couples, including the hero, come home from a party, worse the wear for drink, in a raging blizzard. Their road is blocked with snow and they have to walk the last mile or so. One of the men gets separated and fails to make it. The other man, the hero, morally pushed by the women, goes out to look for him, but ends up chain smoking for a couple of hours in the nearby (red) barn instead. Subsequent deceit apart, it can be said in his defence that he was very tired, there was a slight worry about cardiac arrest and there was a raging blizzard. It was fairly unlikely that he would have been able to find and rescue his friend, even if he had gone out to look for him, as had been his original intention.
But during his fag fuelled vigil, he comes to realise that he is jealous of his friend, of the way that he just takes what he wants from the world, be that women or money, that he hates him and he comes to be glad that he is out there in the snow, dead or dying. He decides that he is going to try to be like his friend, to break away from suburban life, tied to the apron strings of a wife who has taken on the supervisory role of his mother.
Friend dead. Hero worries about whether people will think that he killed him, pushed him off the rock in the snow. Hero has a sort of affair with the dead friend’s wife in New York, where she lives. Affair terminated when she decides to remarry. Outlook hopeless, only got living with a wife whom he has come to hate (quite unreasonably, as the hero himself recognises) to look forward to. More or less on the spur of the moment he shoots her with the revolver kept in the bedside table. Taking care to shoot out her all-seeing eyes while he is at it. With the sense that he might just as easily shot himself.
The problem with the wife (Isabel) being that she sees everything and says nothing. She just looks and judges. And, in Simenon’s phrase, a wife who smells of pastry rather than bedroom, unlike the friend’s wife (Mona). She is also an exemplary suburban housewife and all the people round about think that she is great.
Isabel finds the fags while the hero tells Mona.
The problem with being like his friend is that that is not that great either. All this frenetic charging around looking for sensation, gratification and applause is all rather empty – a point made, as it happens, in the Morse adaptation noticed at references 3 and watched again yesterday (maybe Cullen was a fan of Simenon). One might easily end up a suicide – like the friend’s father. And it seems that the friend himself had thought of such a thing – to the point where Mona thinks that maybe he just gave up in the snow. The hero looks with envy on a wino on a park bench, a wino who has abandoned the world and its cares. I associate to Ducrau at the end of the Maigret story ‘Écluse No.1’, a man who seems in many ways to be modelled on Simenon himself, a man who at the end of the story just gives up and is quite pleased to be toddling off to a quiet prison for a couple of years, away from a world in which it seems that he has to strive, in which he cannot just be. All of which make me think that Simenon was a more complicated character than I had realised – and also willing to put more of himself in a novel than I had realised.
I think the play gets it wrong by putting so much emphasis on the affair with Mona. She is just the symbol for a life which he thinks, for a little while, that he wants.
But the play got it right, renaming the story the red barn, to my mind more of a focus for the story than the hand for which it was named in the French. Also with the business of the wife at the optician and of the big eye at the beginning. But while it hung out both flags, it failed to get their meaning across. What we got was just a cartoon for a play, not a real play at all. I wonder why Hare thought he could do a job on such an introspective story, a story chock full of inner speech, hard to get across on the stage.
I did think of going to the play again, despite not having been all that impressed first time around, in order to get a clearer view of what Hare had done with the story, but it was sold out, despite running until well on in January.
I close with a few vocabularic offerings.
Violin as French (or possibly Belgian) slang for a police cell, presumably where one goes when picked up by the police, perhaps a vagrant or late night drunk. I associate to the Kentucky slang of 'cross bar hotel' for the lock ups in sheriff's offices, a class of hotel well known to habitual drunks and other trouble makers.
Grillon as the French word for a cricket, described by Larousse as a member of the orthoptera order, quite different to lepidoptera which are the butterflies and moths. It seems that the ‘ptera’ bit is from the Ancient Greek for wing and is appended to the names of lots of insect taxa. Rather like the Ancient Greek for toe which is appended to the names of lots of mammal taxa. But returning to crickets, it seems you can get them in your chimney in New England, where their noise can irritate of an evening.
Canadienne as the French word for the sort of serious jacket you wear out in the snow. Google suggests, more specifically, a fur lined jacket. Also a branch name. See reference 2.
PS: Simenon makes no comment about the wisdom of laws which allow people to keep loaded revolvers in their bedside lockers. Perhaps worries of that sort came a little after his time.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/a-triumph.html.
Reference 2: https://www.la-canadienne.com/.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/a-choice.html.
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