Revisiting a dark and ‘Dirty’ time

Los ANGELES is the epicenter of noir -- cinematic and literary.

There are a number of plausible explanations: Nowhere else is the contrast between a benevolent, sunlit physical nature and the dark fecundity of man’s fallen nature more sharply visible. Here, between the mountains and the sea, the psychological gap between an immigrant population’s ideals and aspirations and the irrepressibility of human venality and evil widens into a moral chasm, a sinkhole into which good intentions, garden variety weakness and seething malevolence are irresistibly drawn and perversely commingled.

That’s life, and a great deal of good art has been made of it. Like flint and steel, the collision of light and darkness beneath Los Angeles’ imported palms has sparked a creative combustion that continues to be recognized, discussed and imitated.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to be reminded that what many regard as the finest of all noir novels was written by a Belgian living in exile in Tucson. Fans of the genre can judge for themselves now that New York Review Books Classics has reissued Georges Simenon’s classic “Dirty Snow” with an extended and provocative afterword by the Los Angeles-born writer William T. Vollmann.

This is the 100th anniversary of the prodigious Simenon’s birth to French-speaking bourgeois parents in Liege, Belgium. By age 15 he was a reporter for the local newspaper and, two years later, published the first of more than 200 novels. No one is quite sure how many he wrote because so many of the early works were published pseudonymously. In 1923, he moved to Paris to pursue his writing and a sexual appetite that he later claimed led him to sleep with more than 20,000 women. One of them was the celebrated American expatriate entertainer Josephine Baker. Simenon broke off their affair because he said he found her so distracting that he was able to complete only 12 novels during the year they were involved.

There is a Hollywood anecdote -- probably apocryphal -- that Alfred Hitchcock once phoned Simenon about a film project, only to be told the writer had just begun a new novel and could not be disturbed. “I’ll hold,” Hitchcock replied.

Today, Simenon, who died in 1989, is best known for the extraordinary mystery series he created around the fictitious Parisian police inspector Jules Maigret, who, like his creator, was fond of pipe smoking, beer and hearty bourgeois cuisine. Ernest Hemingway, who remained always mindful of Gertrude Stein’s admonition that a working writer should read “only what is truly good or frankly bad,” habitually relaxed with the French editions of Maigret’s latest cases.

Outside the United States, Simenon remains equally well known for his disturbing -- often harrowing -- psychological novels, books he referred to as “dur,” or tough. That they were, and none more so than “Dirty Snow.”

In 244 unrelenting pages, it relates the story of 19-year-old Frank Friedmaier, who is living through occupation of his unnamed country by an unspecified foreign power. Frank resides with his mother in the brothel she maintains on the upper floor of a rundown apartment building. He himself is a pimp, thug and petty thief, who, as the story opens, has just murdered for the first time. The narrative follows him through a winter of appalling degradation and self-destruction whose only redemptive conclusion is Frank’s final admission that he is worthless and deserves death.

In an interview Tuesday, Vollmann -- not only a novelist, but also the author of an extensive treatise on violence, “Rising Up and Rising Down” -- called Simenon’s book “pretty bleak and black, for sure ....All that Frank stands for is that he is wicked.

“This is the king of the noir novels and proof that you don’t need light in the darkness to construct a noir narrative. The further into the darkness you go, the further into another world you penetrate. This book is spectacularly otherworldly and grim.”

In his afterword, Vollmann begins the essay with the question, “What is noir?” He contrasts Raymond Chandler’s archetypal “hard-boiled” but idealistic detective Philip Marlowe with Simenon’s Frank Friedmaier and delivers this judgment: “With each passing decade, Marlowe’s corpse decomposes ever more rapidly into a skeleton of outright sentimentality. To some readers he already seems as quaint as Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer.”

Friedmaier, by contrast, “is almost inhumanly horrific. Chandler’s novels are noir shot through with wistful luminescence; Simenon has concentrated noir into a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star.”

And with good reason. The Dutch-born novelist Hans Koning has described “Dirty Snow” as “one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.”

In fact, Simenon sat out the war in occupied France as a best-selling novelist and enthusiastic participant in the filming of nine of his books by German and French movie-makers beholden to the Nazi and Vichy authorities. After the war, Simenon was charged with collaboration, but quickly cleared.

Nonetheless, he went into self-imposed exile in the United States, where he completed “Dirty Snow” during two intense weeks in Tucson. He did not return to Europe until 1955 and finally settled in neutral Switzerland.

“One of the impressively creepy things about this book,” said Vollmann, “is that you can’t quite pin down who the occupiers are, but it doesn’t seem to matter. In this world, any sort of occupation is evil and any collaboration is evil, but anyone who doesn’t collaborate is an idiot. Simenon seems to say that anybody who resists is guilty of what the Marxists call ‘false consciousness’ and doomed to fail.”

Given the profundity of Simenon’s insight as a psychological novelist, it is hard not to read “Dirty Snow” as both a characteristically self-lacerating meditation on the author’s own conduct and, simultaneously, as an apologia for his decisions, or lack thereof.

“Simenon is an amazing novelist and not sufficiently appreciated,” said Edwin Frank, who selects and edits the Classics series for the New York Review. “Maigret is well known, but [Simenon’s] psychological novels are too infrequently read today ....This was a book he worked on with deliberation and a sense he was doing his best work, which he was. It’s also the most interesting novel I know that explores the psychology and menace of occupation.

“Dirty Snow,” said Frank, is “an excavation of the dark places in the soul and how people acting on the impulses that reside there destroy themselves step by step.”

The late Canadian novelist Robertson Davies was fond of quoting Simenon’s observation that “writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.”

“Dirty Snow,” first published in 1948, simultaneously exemplifies that and a sentiment Simenon put in the benevolent Maigret’s mouth just two years later: “Truth never seems true. I don’t mean only in literature or in painting. I won’t remind you either of those Doric columns whose lines seem to us strictly perpendicular and which only give that impression because they are slightly curved.”