THE HATTER’S PHANTOMS

 

First off, to get yourself up to speed on Simenon, I can heartily recommend you read this interview with the man himself. The man’s biography is usually condensed into a list of overwhelming numbers — books written, women bedded — and it is a life that has been covered well enough in other places (not least of which, in Patrick Marnham’s excellent biography.)

But if you really want to get the measure of Simenon, read the above interview. He comes across as serious and thoughtful about his work, and also rather honest. The interview’s main strength, however, is in keeping a resolute focus on his craft — something that should never be overshadowed by the often lurid details of his private life.

And so to ‘The Hatter’s Phantoms’ from 1949…

This roman dur, or ‘hard’ novel, opens in the town of La Rochelle, whose inhabitants are being pressed to the very limits of endurance. (This in itself could be said to be Simenon’s overarching theme in all his work.) It has been raining almost constantly for three weeks, “and people who didn’t have a change of clothes lived in a perpetual cold dampness.” What’s more, a killer prowls the streets, his first victim strangled on the day the heavens opened.

A hatter goes about one of his many daily routine tasks, and pauses at the window to gaze out at the tailor’s opposite. “…(T)he gap made by the street was so narrow, that you had the feeling you were living in the same house.”

And thus the mood and the basis for many of the novel’s themes are set after only the first two pages. Already, we are drawn into an intangible and seemingly unexplainable relationship between two men who rarely say more than “Good morning” to each other, who work opposite each other in private, suffocating lives.

The tailor, Kachoudas, is — like many of Simenon’s characters–a stranger in a decidedly strange land; that is to say, a land of hypocritically staid respectability and long-ago-formed cliques. He is a foreigner, like untold others in Simenon’s oeuvre, who is on the margins of the society he’s settled in; who, despite his many years walking among the locals, feels unable — even unworthy — to join in with their chatter. At the nearby cafe, filled with local dignitaries of long standing, he sits apart from them and maintains respectful silence — waiting, hoping, craving their acceptance.

The hatter is the only one who notices him. Every evening, he knows it is his duty to leave his shop first, so that the tailor has the courage to follow him to the cafe.

And so, it is this relationship that propels the book along. One of these men is the murderer the town lives in fear of. The other one is the only one who knows.

The novel is only marginally a mystery. We know who the killer is within the first chapter. The police are barely a presence in the book. Yet this is very definitely a novel of suspense. The drama is in the psychological machinations going on inside the killer’s mind — the unravelling of the motive that had once seemed so clear to him.

The idea of characters watching each other’s lives play out through adjoining windows is one that Simenon has used in other books — ‘The Window Over the Way’ and ‘Mr. Hire’s Engagement’ being the two that I’m aware of. In Simenon’s hands, this is more than just a plot device for a thriller.

His characters are (usually) men whose lives are in a rut. They are small people living small and sheltered lives. For the tailor and the hatter, their windows and what they see out of them (or think they see, at least) become a kind of mirror for their own self-image. They learn to see themselves in a new way.

They see themselves as if through the eyes of the person that they think they see across the street. They never think to get to know the other person. They are so trapped inside their own lives — their own heads — that real human contact is perhaps by now impossible.

And so when the tailor is taken ill, the hatter’s routine life begins to fall apart. The two men are responsible for the saving of the other. But as is usual with Simenon, it is this final push through the limits of a man’s endurance that forms the basis of the downbeat, though typically sensitively-handled, ending.

And no one ends a book like Simenon. I always put his books down with an exhausted sigh, a melancholy ache. As the man himself said in that Paris Review interview:

“I know that there are many men who have more or less the same problems I have, with more or less intensity, and who will be happy to read the book to find the answer—if the answer can possibly be found.”

For me, ‘The Hatter’s Phantoms’ was yet another satisfying attempt to find some answers.