When the historian Henry Adams met President Grant the shock upset years of his “education,” a term he used to cover his entire intellectual heritage as an American:

Grant fretted and irritated him, like the Terebratula, as a defiance of first principles. He had no right to exist. He should have been extinct for ages. The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as common-place as Grant’s own common-places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

I always think of this scene whenever I hear anyone speak of meritocracy in America. In the country where Donald Trump became president? Grant had at least been a successful general. Trump couldn’t even run a casino. Doesn’t Trump’s election make the notion of rising through one’s merits, however broadly defined, ludicrous? Does it not seem like a defiance of first principles?

Things I was thinking of recently while reading Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes. If not evolution, in the strict Darwinian sense, I think we’ve at least put paid to the notion of there being much progress in human affairs.

Three books in and I’m starting to detect a pattern. At its center we have men, haunted by demons and drink, who have come to the end of the line. Simenon is the poet-psychologist of disappointment and downward mobility. This one starts off with another such down-at-the-heels fellow, a “desperate soul,” checking in at a cheap hotel and then, “both enraged and overcome by his fate,” blowing his brains out.

An opening act like that wouldn’t seem to introduce much of a mystery, but Maigret feels personally responsible (which he certainly is!) and so decides to investigate further. This gets him into a really improbable back story, apparently having some relation to Simenon’s own youth in Liège and which plays a bit like a Belgian Crime and Punishment. And again one has the sense that the real original sin was a class mixture that didn’t take. Rich and poor are like two different species. When the suicide’s wife comes to see Maigret he notices a resemblance right away: “Not a facial resemblance, no, but a similarity of expression, of social class, so to speak.”

I don’t know where Maigret himself fits in on the class ladder. His father was a bailiff or estate manager. Being a top investigator seems like a pretty big deal, but in 1930s France? Most of his authority comes from the way he physically dominates a room, which is often attributed to his “proletarian” frame or “peasant” stock. I don’t think this is meant to be flattering. He is described here as appearing “bovine” a couple of times, and as seeming like an elephant. In many ways he is a sort of anti-type to the eccentric fictional detective, who is often something of a dandy. Maigret doesn’t speak much, has a face not fully molded out of clay, and either affects or genuinely feels bored a lot of the time (in The Flemish House he’ll let it drop that “when in the presence of a possible culprit, I make a point of acting like an imbecile”). Instead of the thrill of the hunt he has only a weary sense of duty. And yet dramatically it seems to work.

Maigret index

Antonia Fraser, in the golden age of author photos.

Sometimes when you’re reading you come across a line in a book that makes you lift your eyes from the page and go “Hm.”

This happened to me recently while reading Antonia Fraser’s biography Mary Queen of Scots. One chapter in this classic work is given over to an account of the murder of Mary’s husband Lord Darnley. It’s one of the more celebrated, and complicated, murder plots of all time, but Fraser goes a step further in calling it “the most debatable, as well as surely the most worked over murder in history.”

By “worked over” she means worked over by historians. And to be sure, there’s been a lot of study and analysis of the event surrounding Darnley’s death. But “surely the most worked over murder in history”? I will give Fraser a mulligan for the Kennedy assassination, as her book came out in 1969 and Kennedy might not have been “history” yet, and while there’d been the Warren Commission things hadn’t gone totally crazy. But for other murders having as good or better claims I would submit the assassination of Julius Caesar and the murder of Rasputin. I think historians have probably worked over both those events more than the killing of Lord Darnley, though in the case of Darnley there may be more mystery still attached. Moving away from politics I might add the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. That probably still ranks as “the crime of the (twentieth) century” though it’s not as well remembered now.

Food for a moment’s thought anyway.

Maigret is still a big guy. A “good 100 kilos.” The kind of weight that really makes him feel the heat. But he can also turn his size on for effect, swelling to fill a room (“He was enormous . . .”) when he needs to intimidate a witness. He does this a lot.

A “dull, grey atmosphere” of middle-class mediocrity surrounds the case. At the end of the novel Maigret will present himself in such a way that “If you had seen his face, you would probably have described the dominant impression as boredom.” But he may be acting a bit at that point.

This is a novel of appearances, among people who think that appearances are all there are. The beastly bourgeoisie: Maigret finds them both respectable and repulsive (an attitude readers will get used to). “Funny sort of people,” he concludes. He looks on the young woman preparing to marry the murdered man’s son “with feelings verging on admiration. But a particular kind of admiration, with more than a touch of revulsion in it.” She’s entering marriage like it’s some kind of business enterprise! Meanwhile, “he was both attracted and repelled by the complex physiognomy of his murder victim.” He’s better off dead, I think we’re meant to feel, and finally done with being part of such a miserable family, where even the presence of happiness and love has to be guessed at. Certainly Maigret is relieved not to have anything more to do with them.

Another story of a double life. The respectable man and the criminal. Inside every human being there’s a crook and a wrong-doer. I was reminded of a true crime book I read years ago called The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère. Perhaps the guy in that book was reading a lot of Simenon and took it too much to heart. Or perhaps this is a French thing.

Maigret index

Maigret is introduced as a big guy, though evidence varies in the series as to how tall he is. He’s more broad like a bull. He dominates a room. When he walks down a narrow corridor his shoulders brush either wall.

Tough guy too. He can take a bullet and keep on the case. And when his partner is killed he can’t cry. Literally, he’s “unable to shed tears.”

But he’s sensitive as well. Or at least he’s good at reading people, which is a kind of sensitivity. The book begins with a simple exercise in decoding. Ironically, the anthropometric information he receives will be of no use at all given the nature of the mystery to be solved.

Maigret has a simple theory for solving crime that he refers to as the crack in the wall. “Inside every crook and wrong-doer there lives a human being.” Eventually that human being will reveal itself. I suppose by extension this might mean that inside every human being there’s another human being as well, so that all any of us ever reveal to the world is a façade.

In this case Maigret gets lucky and the crack comes from the wrong-doer’s fondness for alcohol. Not much work involved there.

The plot carries some message about the duality of man, though not so much good and evil as high and low. This is the real conflict in society, more so even than that between villains and do-gooders.

Maigret index

An index to my reviews of the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon.

Pietr the Latvian
The Late Monsieur Gallet
The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien
The Carter of La Providence
The Yellow Dog
Night at the Crossroads
A Crime in Holland
The Grand Banks Café
A Man’s Head
The Two-Penny Bar
The Shadow Puppet
The Saint-Fiacre Affair
The Flemish House
The Madman of Bergerac
The Misty Harbour
Lock No. 1
Maigret
Cécile is Dead
The Cellars of the Majestic
The Judge’s House
Signed, Picpus
Inspector Cadaver
Félicie
Maigret Gets Angry
Maigret in New York
Maigret’s Holiday
Maigret’s Dead Man
Maigret’s First Case
My Friend Maigret
Maigret at the Coroner’s
Maigret and the Old Lady
Madame Maigret’s Friend
Maigret’s Memoirs
Maigret at Picratt’s
Maigret Takes a Room
Maigret and the Tall Woman
Maigret, Lognon and the Gangsters
A Maigret Christmas
Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook
The Little Restaurant near Place des Ternes
Maigret’s Revolver
Maigret and the Man on the Bench
Maigret is Afraid
Maigret’s Mistake
Maigret Goes to School
Maigret and the Dead Girl
Maigret and the Minister
Maigret and the Headless Corpse
Maigret Sets a Trap
Maigret’s Failure
Maigret Enjoys Himself
Maigret Travels
Maigret’s Doubts
Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses
Maigret’s Secret
Maigret in Court
Maigret and the Old People
Maigret and the Lazy Burglar
Maigret and the Good People of Montparnasse
Maigret and the Saturday Caller
Maigret and the Tramp
Maigret’s Anger
Maigret and the Ghost
Maigret Defends Himself
Maigret’s Patience
Maigret and the Nahour Case
Maigret’s Pickpocket
Maigret Hesitates
Maigret in Vichy
Maigret’s Childhood Friend
Maigret and the Killer
Maigret and the Wine Merchant
Maigret’s Madwoman
Maigret and the Loner
Maigret’s Informer
Maigret and Monsieur Charles

Mystery and Detective Fiction

I have to begin with a disclaimer. I read a lot of books in 2020, but not very many new books. And in particular not a lot of fiction (outside of SF). This is something that I’ve noticed is only getting worse. I’d like to read more new fiction, but much of it seems to be getting lost in the shuffle of pages.

Best fiction: I don’t think Clifford Jackman’s The Braver Thing is a perfect book, but it is challenging and different, which is saying something. A pirate ship becomes a social-science lab for experiments in different forms of government. As with S. D. Chrostowska’s The Eyelid (see below) it’s a political allegory. Something must have been going on at this time that was turning people’s minds in this direction . . .

Best non-fiction: Trump dominated my non-fiction reading for most of the past year, as he did throughout his whole depressing reign. Is it over now? I suspect that after a wave of books about the 2020 election land it mostly will be. But we’ll have to see. One non-Trump title I really liked was William Deresiewicz’s The Death of the Artist, which takes a look at the collapse of the arts economy and how it’s being felt on the ground. I think I was most impressed though by the final volume in Rick Perlstein’s epic chronicle of the rise of the American political right, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980. Not a Trump book, though the arrogant New York City real estate maven does have a cameo and you don’t have to look too hard to see where America’s right turn was heading. A fascinating read, despite its heftiness and a ton of typos.

Best SF: I could go with a number of different titles, but S. D. Chrostowska’s The Eyelid sticks out the most. Not so much for the story as for the way it projects politics and even theory into a fantasy realm which is still relevant and interesting. One of few contemporary SF titles I found myself wanting to read again right away.

I first noticed something disturbing about fifteen years ago. I was lending books out and not getting them back. What made this disturbing was not discovering that I had friends who would take advantage of my generosity, but that they were surprised I wanted them returned. “You mean you want it back?” one of them gasped in disbelief.

I’ve since stopped lending out books (and DVDs too). I’m afraid that one day I’ll be informed that the borrower no longer has it in their possession, having thrown it out. This loss of status is something I talked about in Revolutions, and a lot of other commentators have addressed it as well. Here is what I said then:

What will be the consequences, not just for us but for our cultural inheritance? What will happen when people come to see Pride and Prejudice no longer as a novel, or even a book, but only as a worthless file to be diced, sliced, mashed-up, manipulated, and (mostly) ignored? . . .

There is something more to this transformation than the shedding of a Benjaminian “aura.” Not just the integrity of the text, but our sense that text can have any value or meaning at all is being lost.

I was thinking of all this again recently while reading William Deresiewicz’s The Death of the Artist. There’s nothing new in what he’s saying, but it’s a message that is still worth heeding. At least it helps explain why I wasn’t getting those books back.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of free content, as well as the most demoralizing, is the extent to which it devalues art in the eyes of the audience. Price is a signal of worth. We tend to value more what we have paid more for or worked harder to get; what we have gotten for free with a click we tend to value not at all. With Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the like, music, text, and images are now akin to tap water, accessed with a turn of the spigot and supplied in an endless, homogenous stream. . . . We used to take pride in the books, albums, and movies that we kept on our shelves, personal touchstones as well as permanent companions. Now that we don’t even store anything on our hard drives, art is here one minute, gone the next.

Nor is this devaluation purely psychological. The creation of art cannot be automated, nor can technology make the process more efficient. Quality, therefore, will sink to meet price. Artists who are paid less, all else being equal, will be forced to spend less time on making any given thing. Kim Deal, the indie rocker, remembers how, at a certain point, music came to be “considered not only just free but trash, a bother to have to wade” through. We still put a tremendous amount of value on the arts in general, but less and less on any given work.

I had an earlier post where I mentioned Len Deighton’s use of the word “azoic” (lifeless) in The Ipcress File. I’ve been revisiting Deighton’s spy novels for a viewing of ’60s spy movies I’m preparing for Alex on Film, and recently turned up a passage in Funeral in Berlin where the hero is driving past a timber plantation where saplings are planted in rows and he looks out to where “the graticule of trees glowed with fiery foliage.”

A graticule is the grid of lines, typically of longitude and latitude, on which a map is drawn. I didn’t know that. Thanks again, Len!

Words, words, words