Tropic Moon

GEORGES SIMENON (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. His father was an insurance salesman, easygoing and unambitious; his mother, an unhappy, angry woman whose coldness and disapproval haunted her son. Simenon went to work as a reporter at the age of fifteen and in 1923 moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful and prolific author of pulp fiction while leading a dazzling social life in the company of his first wife and lovers such as the American dancer Josephine Baker. (He is said to have broken up with Baker because their affair was a distraction: he had produced a mere twelve novels during the year.) In the early 1930s, Simenon emerged as a writer under his own name, gaining renown for his detective stories featuring Inspector Maigret. He also began to write his psychological novels, or
romans durs
—books in which he displays his remarkable talent for capturing the look and mood of a place (whether West Africa, the Soviet Union, New York City, or provincial France) together with an acutely sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Simenon remained in France throughout the Second World War, at the end of which he was accused of collaboration with the Germans; though quickly cleared of the charges, he moved to America, where he married his second wife and lived for close to a decade, returning to Europe in 1955. Having written nearly two hundred books under his own name and become the best-selling author in the world, whose stories had served as the inspiration for countless movies and TV shows, Simenon retired as a novelist in 1973, devoting himself instead to dictating memoirs that filled thousands of pages: “I consider myself less and less a writer … All this is nothing but chatter … Since dictating has become a need, so to speak, I will dictate every morning whatever comes into mind … I would like to be able to be silent.”

NORMAN RUSH is the author of
Whites, Mating
, and
Mortals
.

TROPIC MOON

GEORGES SIMENON

Translated from the French by

MARC ROMANO

Introduction by

NORMAN RUSH

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

Tropic Moon

 
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Copyright and More Information

T
ROPIC MOON
(
Le Coup de lune
) is the first of Georges Simenon's novels to be set outside Europe, and it is also among the first and best of his serious novels, those he called
romans durs
in order to distinguish them from the hundreds of genre fictions he produced, the
romans populaires
that were making him rich and world famous, which included his psychological crime thrillers and the titles in the Inspector Maigret series. It is a remarkable work, in which Simenon's characters deliver a brutal and clueless enactment of interwar French imperialism at its most naked—in Gabon, French West Africa, in the capital Libreville and upcountry. As a revelation of the institutionalized squalor the French Empire amounted to, it stands high, ranking with L.F. Céline's depiction of life in another part of the same empire, Cameroon, in his
Journey to the End of the Night
.

It's a particularity of the iconography in porn magazines that the male partners of the lovingly detailed women on display will often enough be represented essentially as mere functioning lower selves, torsos, their heads cut off by the edges of the layouts. Something similar is seen in the character embodiments in this moral tale: the actors are reduced to their appetites. The face of Adèle, the hyperpromiscuous antiheroine of the novel, is never described. We do learn about her that she wears clinging dresses and disdains underwear. She is in her thirties. Her breasts droop, slightly. Similarly, the African locale is rendered rather generically. We have the Hotel, the Prefecture, the Docks, the Police Station, all evoked without recourse to the kind of detail that might distract from the vertiginous drama of personal destruction we have come to witness. Simenon's heightened minimalism serves his purposes well, forwarding the staccato unfolding of the central plot. Maddening heat, isolation, boredom, illness, alcohol—the traditional scourges of white expatriates in tropical Africa—play their expected parts in sustaining the lethal malaise that hangs over Libreville.

Joseph Timar, a young man from the provinces (La Rochelle), arrives in Libreville in the early 1930s intending to take up a posting at a timber camp in the jungle. His well-placed family in France has arranged this opportunity for him. He is an innocent. Obstacles arise that prevent him from going directly upriver and he falls into a sexual relationship, not an affair exactly, with the wife of the owner of the hotel he is lodging in. This is Adèle, and she has been active with a great many of the French gentlemen around town. Billiards, Pernod, card games, out-of-date newspapers, and intermittent sex with Adèle occupy Timar's time. When the mood seizes them, male members of the French community organize orgies in the bush with native women, abandoning them there without transportation at the end of the one excursion Timar goes along on. At this stage, the story has only begun. To come are rape, corrupt legal proceedings, other varieties of chicanery, more death, more spectacles of injustice.

We can't help but read this novel today against our knowledge that in 1932 European civilization is poised, one more time, to give birth to monstrous fratricide, genocide, apocalyptic warfare, cultural destruction, the breaking of nations. In
Tropic Moon
the dehumanizing heedlessness, rapacity, and cruelty shown by the agents of the French
mission civilatrice
toward the black populations under their control will, we know, be replicated, played out differently very soon elsewhere, by different Europeans, different actors, with different victims. And beyond the looming specter of fascism—a subject, by the way, not on the minds of any of the characters in this book—is something else we know is coming. And that something else is the bleak outcome for black Africa of the inevitable arrival of independence, a process itself hastened by the autodestruction of European power. The reader is barred from the easy comfort of feeling that the poverty and cruelty of colonial life described in Simenon's novel will be, will have been, undone by decolonization. Conditions in West Africa today are dauntingly, if variably, grim. But how could it be otherwise? The scene presented by Simenon—the stripping of natural resources by French commercial interests, the instruction in unfairness provided by the colonial system of justice, the reduction of the African population to servile status—is portentous. There are portents in
Tropic Moon
. Its original readers may not have seen them, but we do.

In the matter of justice, Simenon's novels—the
romans durs
and the psychological crime studies—dispense with it. It is not to be had, generally speaking. So
Tropic Moon
can be taken as one more specimen from a dense array of similarly Hobbesian Simenon stories set anywhere, including the United States, Europe, ships at sea, in which crimes (typically crimes of passion or impulse) are committed,
l'homme nu
(Simenon's term for the potentially murderous universal everyman he saw everywhere and in every station of life) does his thing, people get hurt, and somebody's suicide may wrap things up. If you want to see justice done, you must go to the seventy-six Maigret
policiers
. Maigret embodies justice, the bringing of order. Simenon referred to him as
le redresseur des destins
. Maigret is reliable. Simenon kept the two streams of narrative running fiercely side by side, his whole life. It makes an interesting balance. Graham Greene, another great writer as engaged as Simenon with questions of crime and punishment, made a similar distinction between his commercial products, which he called entertainments, and his serious novels. Greene, however, employed his serious novels as vehicles for explorations of justice—justifications of the ways of God to man. There is no theodicy in Simenon. Nothing close.

It can be instructive to compare what a novel stands for or represents—its direct or implicit advocacies or critiques—and what it accomplishes as a strictly aesthetic device.
Tropic Moon
is notable on both counts. What it achieves aesthetically is a true evocation of a social hell and a persuasive portrayal of what it does to thinking, perception, identity to be a member of the oppressor class in such an environment, and, to a lesser degree, of what the toll is on the oppressed. This evocation is conveyed in Simenon's trademark style—swift, colloquial, seamless. (Simenon deliberately restricted his literary vocabulary to two thousand words, in the interest of accessibility.)

What
Tropic Moon
represents politically is a thunderous and absolute blast against empire as it was then. The novel arose out of travel reports Simenon wrote for the magazine
Voilà
in 1932, a series published under the title
L'Afrique vous parle: elle vous dit merde
. Simenon's summary conclusion, according to his biographer Patrick Marnham, was essentially that colonialism was not practical. Marnham writes,

The complications in Simenon's anticolonialism don't end there. What exactly did he think he was doing when he ran backstage after a birthday performance given for him by a Martiniquaise dance troupe and had his way with two of the dancers, to general merriment? It's hard not to think of Simenon as a rich, entitled white erotomane first and an anticolonialist second. In any case, his magazine series and
Tropic Moon
incited resentment in official circles, and when he sought to revisit the French colonies in 1936, he was denied a visa.

An aspect of empire that Simenon captures well is the ethical blankness, the cloud of unknowing, it seems to engender in the psyches of the imperializers, at all levels. The characters in
Tropic Moon
may experience odd moments of vague disquiet that interrupt the peculiar emotional equilibrium that reigns while dark deeds are routinely transpiring, but deep recognition of what is truly happening is rare, and when it occurs, costly. The conditions floridly depicted by Simenon, specific though they may be to a time and a place in the past, are not irrelevant for Americans to contemplate in the new millennium. Here, writing in 1921 in his book
The New World
, is Isaiah Bowman, Director of the American Geographic Society and a high-level adviser to a string of American presidents on matters of global policy:

Today, something very much resembling empire is back. It remains to be seen how our own fictions will serve us now and how they will be read in the future.

—N
ORMAN
R
USH

W
AS THERE
really any reason for him to be so anxious? No. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Nothing threatened him. It was ridiculous to feel this way. He knew it—knew it so well that even now, in the middle of the party, he was struggling to regain his self-control.