Salinger & Simenon

I watched the PBS American Masters segment on J.D. Salinger the other night. I always liked Salinger, and have always been perplexed at why a book about a miscreant and hateful adolescent got to be required reading in schools for so long. It’s probably a good thing. That audience can relate, and that the schoolmasters allow it is probably admirable (it could be getting time to change the curriculum now though). Never mind the wackos. They’d have latched on to something or someone else in any case.
            I respect Salinger immensely for saying; ‘Fuck these assholes. Catcher will give me a living for the rest of my life. Why bother? I can live a peaceful and sane life.”
            It’s an intelligent approach.
            But I think his choice was founded on his hyper sensitivity to criticism, which he would not have been able to indulge if Catcher hadn’t given him the resources. He wouldn’t have been able to do it without those resources, and wouldn’t have chosen to do it even given those resources, if his later works didn’t receive some harsh criticism. If those works had achieved universal acclaim he would have appeared at the opening of an envelope!
            He bowed out when the mud-slinging started slapping him in the face.
            He was no masochist.
            Narcissist, yes; masochist, no.
            From then on, he claimed to have been writing on a daily basis. It was all for ‘his own pleasure’. There is an archive, and we would expect it to be a huge archive, after 45 years!
            Is it? Will it be?
            Perhaps, but I’m willing to bet it will be an endless ramble, with brilliant passages that make you wish he was more calm and collected and could weed out the chaff and get to the quick, so that it was all brilliant.
            He was too self-indulgent to be able to do that.

            Now take Simenon.
            Georges Simenon was a Belgian who wrote in French. He was a high school drop-out, and a journalist in his teens. By his mid-twenties he was rich and partly famous for his hundreds of pulp novels. Then he hit on the character of a detective and wrote about 75 mystery books around him. In the middle of all that he began writing ‘hard novels’. Sometimes they’re called psychological novels, for some reason. There are a lot of them. I don’t think anyone is quite clear on just how many but there is little doubt that no one has surpassed the output.
            Whatever you call them, they are a wonder.
            Currently I’m reading Dirty Snow, a book about a young man living in an unspecified city in an occupied country and who is eagerly diving into a criminal lifestyle‒in a world where ‘criminal’ has become undefined and amorphous. We think that we are in France, or Belgium in World War II, but nowhere is there a mention of ‘German’ or ‘Nazi’ or ‘France’ or ‘Fascism’, or any reference to a specific time and place. Hitler is nowhere to be found. Things are mostly circumscribed to a small urban neighborhood. As the book progresses one is sucked into a more and more surreal world‒Philip K. Dick and Kafka come to mind‒which still somehow feels like the world we all live in. The book transcends time.
            It’s not even his best book. 
            How did he do it? How could someone write so much, so well?
            Simenon’s style was spare, sparer than Hemingway. The lines lay down like a blade of quick fire. Read Simenon after just a few hits of decent weed. Any more than that and you’ll blow it…none or less would be fine…but do it anyway.
            Unlike Salinger, Simenon was not afraid of criticism. I’m pretty sure he didn’t give a damn. He had all the acclaim he needed, and caring about that kind of thing would interfere with getting laid, an obviously more satisfying pursuit. He claimed to have had sex with 10,000 women.
            Now there’s a common pursuit of these two writers...myth-making. It’s not among their most attractive aspects, but it worked for both of them, in a big way. It’s worked for a lot of writers, in fact. Myth-making. Not essential for a writer, but for a writer who would achieve financial success?
            Hell, just another character, eh?

            But what a contrast! I’ve liked both these writers, and they have both had an influence on me. I don’t think Salinger could touch Simenon however, and it’s a measure of America’s preoccupation with itself that Salinger’s myth is so much bigger than Simenon’s, and that a writer who freely gave it all to the world, and maintained his artistry while he was at it, is less read and discussed than one who hid it away, like a squirrel.
            You pretty much know that Salinger will disappoint, while we have all the evidence we need of Simenon’s brilliance.