BOOKS & ARTS
can missiles on British nuclear submarines.
This left us, as Macmillan privately recog-
nised, with an independence of action that
was little more than a formality.
But for De Gaulle this was the final dem-
onstration that Britain would always look
towards America, not Europe. In January
1963 he announced that Britain was not
adapted to the European project. The nego-
tiations were abandoned. Macmillan was
shattered. Even his opponents could not
forgive the general for jilting Britain at the
church door.
A year of transformation followed,
marked by the exuberant rise of satire and
the Beatles, and by Macmillan’s scandal-
ridden fall. But the problem of Britain’s role
in the world remained entirely unresolved.
1963 was also the year that Britain signed
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty alongside Rus-
sia and America, ‘the last time’, the British
negotiator Lord Hailsham said later, ‘that
Britain appeared in international negotia-
tions as a great power’.
Hennessy’s story ends as Labour’s Harold
Wilson arrives in Downing Street in October
- Wilson’s political cunning, eloquence,
social conscience and underlying patriotism
matched Macmillan’s. He too saw ‘Europe’
as an answer to Britain’s problems. He too
was scuppered by De Gaulle. We joined the
Community only after the general had gone.
When Wilson held a referendum in 1975,
two thirds of the voters supported member-
ship. But the British remained torn between
a burdensome cooperation with their equals
inside the European Union and an unchart-
ed future among the giants outside. Leavers
nevertheless insist that their small margin
of victory in the referendum of 2016 set-
tled the matter once and for all. They warn
against any attempt to ‘thwart the people’s
will’, a phrase with unfortunate overtones of
the 1930s. Remainers, unable to mount an
effective campaign of their own, sourly dis-
miss their opponents as ignorant provincials.
Accusations of treachery fly about, always
a sign that politics is in trouble.
Macmillan and Wilson sought solutions
to the European puzzle within the bounds
of our democratic system. This time, consti-
tutional restraints, even the very definition
of democracy, have been fraying away. Some
Leavers talk of closing parliament to ram
their polices through. Charles I tried that,
and lost his head. Cromwell was more suc-
cessful, but he died and the English returned
to common sense.
Hennessy concludes with a powerful
expression of faith in our age-old institutions.
But he admits elsewhere that ‘our British
political system is being tested on the anvil
of Brexit’. Britain’s problem with Europe
will not be resolved soon, whatever happens
at the end of October. Genuine patriots of
all stripes might think that their priority is
now to preserve our democracy and reunify
a sadly fractured people.
The seamy world
of Simenon
Ian Thomson pays tribute
to Maigret’s creator on the
30th anniversary of his deathG
eorges Simenon, creator of the som-
bre, pipe-smoking Paris detective
Jules Maigret, pursued sex, fame and
money relentlessly. By the time he died
in 1989, he had written nearly 200 novels,
more than 150 novellas, several memoirs
and countless short stories. His demonic
productivity and the vast sales and fortune
it brought him were matched by a vaunt-
ed sexual athleticism. Simenon claimed to
have slept with 10,000 women. (‘The goal
of my endless quest,’ he explained, ‘was not
a woman, but the woman’ — which is
French for wanting lots of it, very often.) It
was not love-making, but a desire for brute
copulation that drove Simenon to demand
sex at least once daily of his wives, secre-
tary and housemaid-mistresses. How he
found the time to write the Maigret books
is a matter for psychoanalysis. (Simenondescribed himself, without irony, as
a ‘psychopath’.)
On the 30th anniversary of his death on
4 September, Simenon continues to be read
and enjoyed. Although he dismissed his
75 romans Maigret as ‘semi-potboilers’, they
are unquestionably literature. ‘In 100 years
from now,’ Ian Fleming told him in 1963,
‘you’ll be one of the great classical French
authors.’ Like the 007 extravaganzas, the
books were written fast, without outline and
hardly corrected at all. Simenon demanded
silence as he set out to write one Maigret
adventure a week. When Alfred Hitchcock
telephoned one day, he was told: ‘Sorry, he’s
just started a novel.’ ‘That’s all right, I’ll wait,’
came the reply. A one-man fiction factory,
Simenon despised the Paris literary estab-
lishment and what he called literature with
a ‘capital L’.
Over a period of six years, at the rate
of one a month, Penguin have been issuing
new translations of all the Maigret novels.
The project is now almost complete, and notbefore time. The uneven quality of earlier
translations, where endings were sometimes
altered and the register was at times jarring-
ly American (‘Maigret had gotten into the
habit’), was unfortunate. The 11-strong team
of Penguin translators, among them the late
Anthea Bell, have restored a stylistic bril-
liance to the romans Maigret.
With rare narrative verve the books
conjure the workaday rhythms and guilty
secrets of Paris and small-town France.
Simenon’s is a world of second-class hotels
and third-class railway carriages, of drift-
ers, bargemen, tarts and luckless creditors.
His interest was not in intellectuals or mas-
ter criminals but in his beloved ordinary
people — les petits gens. Ordinary peo-
ple are driven to ordinary acts of violence
and social outrage. Criminals look like us,
Simenon seems to be saying. His motto,
‘comprendre et ne pas juger’ (understand
and judge not), is also Maigret’s.
Maigret’s is, triumphantly, a search
for understanding. The earthily depend-
able flic in his trademark velvet-collared
overcoat and bowler hat is presented as
a neutral observer, who looks on crime
with an unbiased curiosity. The sense of
complicity between criminal and police-
man is omnipresent in the books. Strik-
ingly, Maigret compares his role with
that of a priest or ‘mender of destinies’.
In The Saint-Fiacre Affair, translated
by Shaun Whiteside, Maigret’s almost
sacerdotal knowledge of the human soul is
evident as he draws on childhood memo-
ries of communion wafers and ‘the secret
of the confessional’. An elderly woman isMaigret’s adventures are awash with
quantities of Calvados, Vouvray,
Armagnac, kummel, pastis and roséSubscribe for
only £1 an issue
9 Weekly delivery of the magazine
9 App access to the new
issue from Thursday
9 Full website accessINTRODUCTORY OFFER:Auto-renewing payments only. $1 a week in Australia
call 089 362 4134 or go to http://www.spectator.com.au/T051A0330 333 0050 quoting A346Ahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/A346A