Margaret Atwood

All Advice Is Bad

The arbitrary brain feed of writerly legends who could easily be the faceless guy at the bar crying into his shoulder bag.

Blake Butler

June 19, 2012

Last year or so the Guardian rounded up a bunch of writers over the age of 60 or something and asked them to give advice to writers who use the internet, AKA college students. Some of them offered up some pretty dumb ideas, and even the ones that seemed reasonable to me were mostly just as arbitrary as the ones that clearly were the brain feed of someone who’s been too long in a game where even the legends could be the faceless guy beside you at the bar crying into his shoulder bag.

1. Elmore Leonard: “Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people.”

If you’re a pussy, this rule is true. Giving up some banal crap I can look out my window to find out isn’t that necessary, but there are plenty of ways to talk about what’s in the air without sounding like you’re setting up an Elmore Leonard novel. One of the most famous opening lines ever, Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky,” isn’t regarding weather per se, but it’s just provocatively situated enough to make you think it could be. And our crime drama writer Leonard is OK with the weather as long as you’ve got a human telling about it? Isn’t that every sentence in every book? I’m sorry to break it to you, Elmore, but humans are the most transient pieces of weather on the earth.

2. Margaret Atwood: “You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality.”

A grip on reality is the last thing I recommend if you are hoping to devote your life to sitting at a machine all day while other people work for actual money and then go home and spend time with their families while not still in the back of their mind doting on the fantasies they ejaculated that week at the desk. More likely you should have a willingness to completely dash any hope of being a normal person with a normal face, though it does indeed help not to be a total headcase motherfucker in the meantime, so perhaps find/replace “reality” with “death.” I don’t think you’ll find that replacement in your thesaurus, which is why they are mostly a waste of time.

3. Roddy Doyle: “Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph.”

I like writing in a frenzy as much as anyone, but to pat yourself on the back every time you’ve blathered the roughly 450 words it takes to fill one double-spaced page, which is essentially the length of a slightly-too-long email, is not only unnecessary, it’s pathetic. Look, no one cares what you do at your desk or how long it took you to get there, or how many words you snuck in today before going to the gym to burn off the beer you drank to feel better about having sat in one place all day again, or how long the manuscript you’re currently working on that should probably have half of itself deleted if you really want to be kind not to yourself or to the reader but the thing you’re making, which is the point in the first place, right? If you’re the kind of person that needs a new small triumph a few times an hour, take up playing billiards against toddlers. If you want to write, put down the mirror.

4. Richard Ford: “Don't read your reviews.”

If you’d read your reviews, Richard, you might have found enough self-guilt to do something new.

5. Jonathan Franzen:“You have to love before you can be relentless.”

Giancarlo DiTrapano and I already extensively covered our feelings on J-Franz, but I’m still cringing about this little nugget. Is that, like, make sure you squash your itch to watch old episodes of Friends before you sit down at the computer, otherwise you’ll just never quite be able to focus?

6. Esther Freud: “Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.”

I mean, yeah, you need to edit, but this sounds like you just put the printout in a magic hat and shake it around and out it comes all wise and ready for the National Book Awards. “Cut until you can cut no more” taken to its logical conclusion pretty much ends up with a blank page, which is maybe some advice that could be taken more regularly, for sure, though this thing about springing into life reminds me for some reason of the Smurfs. Why do so many grown ass-people sound like wise-beyond-their-years nine-year-olds?

7. Neil Gaiman: “Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right.”

No. Bad Neil. You are wrong.

8. David Hare: “Write only when you have something to say.”

Following this rule, every Facebook status update could be expanded into a novel. Your baby is six weeks along now? Well by all means, tell the world! Why stop at 50 words? I AM SO READY TO HEAR EVERYTHING THAT’S ON YOUR MIND. How about instead only write when you have absolutely nothing to say and aren’t even in your body so now it’s not you with all your shitty human want and wishing, and is instead something bigger than a person ostensibly writing out a Christmas list of narrative action on paper?

9. Hilary Mantel: “Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.”

Barf on my dick, Hilary.

10. Michael Moorcock: “Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel…. Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development. Resolve your themes, mysteries, and so on in the final third, the resolution.”

Hi, Reader, I’d like you to meet my character, Michael Moorcock, and my theme, Anti-Transcendent Definition of Impossible-to-Define Terminology in the Name of Pretending There Is Perfect Science to My Mythology When in Fact the Only Thing That’s True About Anything Is What It Actually By Its Own Admission Is, Which Doesn’t Mean Anything Because Storytelling Is Just a Bunch of Stories and Making Art Is Making Art and The Reason People Are Sick of Reading Mostly Is That So Many People Think They Have to Follow Anybody’s Shitty Rules Instead of Thinking of Their Own Rules With Their Blood Instead of Their Brains and Just Fucking Creating Something Else.

11. Annie Proulx: “Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.”

AKA never learn anything, never invent anything, never change speeds, never feel deleted, never scare yourself, never scare anyone. Sure. Sounds good. See you in the gardens.

12. Will Self: “Stop reading fiction–it's all lies anyway, and it doesn't have anything to tell you that you don't know already (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't, you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).”

I suggest you start with the work of Will Self.

13. Colm Tóibín: “Finish everything you start.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, when I was six I wrote the first verse of a rap called “The Supersonic Dudes from 3003” and never got around to finishing and now I realize why I never sleep….

VICE

2018, as picked by writers / Part two

 Illustration: Jennifer Tapias Derch

2018, as picked by writers – part two

Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays

Saturday 7 July 2018

Lara Feigel

This is a brilliant summer for books by women: novels, memoirs and poems that address the difficult questions in women’s lives from an intimate perspective, but also with an unsentimental, distancing acuity and a preparedness to invent new forms for writing and for living. Three that seem to speak to each other in this respect are Deborah Levy’s game-changing The Cost of Living (Hamish Hamilton), Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (Faber) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (Harvill Secker). I also love Kathyrn Maris’s new poetry collection The House With Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin), which tackles motherhood and family life with a comic thoughtfulness that’s unusually open to cruelty and that can rise and fall easily between the heroic and the bathetic. And right now, the book that’s really gripping me, and making me start again in thinking about many things, is Silver Press’s reprint of Nell Dunn’s 1965 Talking to Women, a series of artfully transcribed conversations with 10 of her friends. What’s striking, reading this, is how much has changed but also how little. And, unusually, the lack of change doesn’t feel depressing, reading these interviews, because there’s a pleasure in feeling so connected to these women across the decades. Also, there’s a kind of satisfaction in feeling that it’s just as important to keep asking the questions she asked about how we live, and why, and it makes me grateful that we have Cusk and Heti and Levy and Maris still asking them.

Aminatta Forna

In Calypso (Little, Brown), David Sedaris’s essays marry meditations on family, suicide, grief and mortality with the hazards of bodily functions and frequent travel for his massively popular public readings. Sedaris is as much standup comic as writer, making this a great audio and one for the car journey. I’m currently reading The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, highly relevant in this fourth wave feminism moment and quietly gripping. I shall also be packing What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (Tinder) by Lesley Nneka Arimah, whose New Yorker short stories I have enjoyed. Tsitsi Dangaremba’s This Mournable Body (Graywolf) isn’t out until August, but I shall read it before summer’s end.

Mohsin Hamid

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile (Penguin) really made me think about how I think. I am also rereading Homer’s Iliad (the Robert Fitzgerald translation) and making my way through Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World (Norton).

Yuval Noah Harari

The Road to Unfreedom (Bodley Head) by Timothy Snyder is a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, Europe and the US in the second decade of the 21st century. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world.

In Enlightenment Now (Allen Lane), Steven Pinker extols the amazing achievements of modernity, and demonstrates that humankind has never been so peaceful, healthy and prosperous. There is of course much to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting.

Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, will be published on 30 August by Jonathan Cape.

David Hare

I’m sure Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is going to be great – at least if The Flamethrowers is anything to go by. In Ma’am Darling, 99 Excerpts from the Life of Princess Margaret (4th Estate), Craig Brown achieves the impossible by finding a tone in which to write about monarchy. Not bitchy, not snide, not angry, but not fawning nor deferential either. Just funny.

Jess Kidd

I am rollicking through Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, which is one of the funniest, most twisted and freshest things I’ve read in a long time. It follows the fortunes of Mona, who cleans houses and falls for a man she calls Mr Disgusting. Beagin combines deep compassion and irreverent humour to create characters with nasty, wonderful, human flaws. Helen Barrell’s Fatal Evidence, Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor and the Dawn of Forensic Science is an engrossing read. It follows the career of Taylor, a remarkable scientist who gave evidence at the trial of William Palmer, “The Rugeley Poisoner”, pioneered the study of forensic medicine and let Charles Dickens nose around his laboratory. Barrell explores Taylor’s (occassionally bizarre) cases, his public and private persona and his wide-ranging interests, which included geology and photography. Her description of the ways in which forensic experiments evolved is as fascinating as the courtroom dramas they accompanied.

Deborah Levy

Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver) collects Audre Lorde’s essays and poems together for the first time in the UK. I look forward to getting stuck in to Talking to Women, Nell Dunn’s 1964 conversation about sex, money, work and art with a group of friends – including the writer Ann Quin and pop artist Pauline Boty.

My love affair with the explosive, erotic, modernist poetry of Apollinaire is the one enduring passion in my life. Many of his best poems were written when he was a soldier fighting on the front lines in WW1. It was Apollinaire who invented the word, Surrealist. In Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (NYRB), Ron Padgett’s translation from the French (Padgett wrote the poems for the bus driver poet in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson) is pitch perfect and dazzling.

I will also reread four books I initially read very fast, mostly because the skill of the writing itself is the main event in all of them: The Years by Annie Ernaux, Kudos by Rachel Cusk, The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg (Daunt, translated by Dick Davis) and Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (Faber).

Hilary Mantel

If you have not already met The Secret Barrister (Macmillan), he or she makes an entertaining and acerbic holiday companion for those who don’t switch off their brains in summer; it seems our resource-starved legal system is poised on the brink of not working at all. Tessa Hadley’s short stories, Bad Dreams (Cape), are simple and artful and leave you wanting more. Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims (Allen Lane, translated by Michael Lucey) is a haunting book, fiercely political and deeply personal; I shall be thinking about it this summer and for many seasons to come.

Paul Mason

Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism (Verso) is influencing left parties as they enter government, from Greece to Portugal to Mexico. It is a beach-sized introduction to a major left thinker of the 21st century. Mike Davis’s Old Gods, New Enigmas (Verso) is a challenging re-exploration of Marx in the light of the atomisation of class struggle, the climate crisis and the centrality of cities to social justice struggles. Patrick Langley’s debut novel Arkady comes beautifully presented by Fitzcarraldo. What’s not to like about a book where revolutionaries take over a city in the north of England?

THE GUARDIAN

My writing day / David Hare / ‘For every hour you write a screenplay, you spend 10 defending it’

‘Life is different when writing for the screen’ … David Hare. Illustration: Alan Vest

David Hare: ‘For every hour you write a screenplay, you spend 10 defending it’

The playwright and screenwriter on dilettante script editors, Bafta club bores and the simple truth about who should, and shouldn’t, be allowed to ‘improve’ your scripts


David Hare
Saturday 4 November 2017 10.00 GMT 

Last modified on Tuesday 7 November 2017 10.24 GMT

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very morning, Monday to Friday, I get up at 7am and make my wife breakfast in bed. She always wants something salty. I enjoy doing it because the rest of my day may be self-interested. I then walk for 15 minutes to a studio once owned by the artist Mark Gertler. Here, in 1916, he painted his antiwar masterpiece The Merry Go Round.

The day depends on whether I’m writing for stage or screen. If stage, I’ll putter through a couple of newspapers online, then start writing dialogue, ideas or maybe structural charts in a sketchbook that I get from an artists’ supply shop. When I’m ready I’ll transfer what I have to the computer and rewrite. My handwriting is so bad that sometimes I can’t work out what I’ve scrawled. If I end up with just a few lines of dialogue, it no longer panics me. All time spent considering your play is well spent, regardless of outcome. One day you write nothing, the next you write eight pages. It’s not in your hands. At lunchtime, I’ll go down to the local deli to get a pork pie or a bagel. If the writing is going well, I’ll continue into the afternoon. If not, I’ll go to the cinema or answer emails.

Life is different when writing for the screen. For every hour you spend writing a screenplay, you spend 10 hours defending it. Because you are the person who first proposes what the eventual film should be, you are likely to have to deal with 50 people who, usually from the best intentions, imagine something else. A film is a carnival of opinion, and if your view is to survive, you need the skills of an advocate. Screenwriting is more lawyering than writing.

On such days, I am likely to get on the tube to spend hours in meetings, usually victualled with stale sandwiches and a token orange. Producers fall into two categories. The great ones make suggestions to help you realise your work more fully. The annoying ones tell you at length how they themselves might have written the story, if only they could write. I have one simple rule. Only those who are invested in the outcome are allowed to give advice.

What this means is: when you write a screenplay, all sorts of people will want to fantasise their preferred version. But are they on board to be the people who actually make it? If you finance a film you have a perfectly legitimate right to argue about how it might be improved. But dilettante script editors and Bafta club bores who feel entitled to judge a script without the courage to commit to it are a waste of time. It’s simple. You have to buy chips to sit at the table.

The hardest thing in film is distinguishing between good and bad input. The whole point of writing screenplays is to provide a platform from which a director, actors and cinematographer will be able to leap to create something infinitely richer and more suggestive. You have to excite your colleagues. If you are too prescriptive in what you write, there is no room for their genius. But if you do not fight for your structure and underpinning, then everything will go to hell in an inchoate mess of actors’ improvisation and directorial overreach.

The joy of the performing arts is in collaboration. If there is a better way of spending a day than watching Carey Mulligan or Bill Nighy or Billie Piperperfect their performances, I have yet to find it. It’s exhilarating, but also instructive. When good actors rehearse, they test the ground, showing you or telling you where your own work is boggy. This is the glorious payoff for the hours you spend alone. Good actors illuminate everything.

Intelligent directors then welcome the writer into the cutting room, because a film editor does exactly the same job as you. They define shape, structure, theme and character, while driving narrative – only they happen to do it at the end of the process, not the beginning. It’s only second-rate, defensive directors who lock the door of the editing suite in order to pretend they’re auteurs. I avoid any director who, metaphorically, sweeps around the set in a cape.

Lately I’ve worked with youthful directors – Robert Icke in the theatre, and SJ Clarkson in television. In both cases it’s been pure pleasure, partly because their younger perspectives have deepened my scripts, but also because they both have a fabulous sense of humour. The surprising thing about a writer’s day in film and theatre is how much of it we spend laughing.

In Brief:

Hours: mornings always, afternoons when useful

Words: a play may take eight weeks, it may take two years

Time wasted: it all contributes

Drinks: a pot of coffee to last the morning, tea at 5pm

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / David Hare

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: David Hare

David Hare

Friday 19 January 2007 17.41 GMT

I work in what was once Mark Gertler's studio. It was originally built to house the furnace for a Victorian sculptor next door. Gertler lived and worked here from 1915 to 1932. He painted The Merry Go Round in here - it's now in the Tate - and tried to seduce Carrington in the bed immediately above my head. Occasionally the odd art student comes round and knocks on the door.

The big pine desk was a wedding present from my future mother-in-law, Jean Matheson, in 1970. My first play had just been produced. The desk cost £50, and I've worked on it ever since. The gifted designer who built it was killed hang-gliding a year or two later.

The problem for writers in the performing arts is that your work- place too easily becomes an office rather than a study. You end up administering plays, not writing them. So when I need to concentrate hardest, I go away. I associate particular plays with the places where significant parts of them were written - Plenty and Licking Hitler in a peeling shack in Brighton, The Secret Rapture in a cottage near Montgomery, Racing Demon in a huge cheerless hotel during a very wet winter in Llandudno. The Permanent Way, about British rail privatisation, was written beachside in Santa Monica. Afterwards, I like to eat alone in restaurants - that way you think about the play all day.

I write things out in longhand, then later put everything on the computer. The most precious object on my desk is a small self-portrait by my wife Nicole Farhi which she sculpted just after we met. It's one of her best pieces. Opposite my desk is a wonderful photograph by Ivan Kyncl of a production I directed at the Almeida of Shaw's Heartbreak House. Emma Fielding is sitting alone, waiting for Richard Griffiths and Penelope Wilton to come on and act with her. For me, it expresses theatrical potential. Looking at the photo you know something good is about to happen. And it did - every night.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

David Hare / The genius of Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon
Paris, 1962

 The genius of Georges Simenon

BIOGRAPHY

As he brings one of the crime writer’s novels to the National stage, David Hare reveals why he loves the pithy, power-obsessed creator of Maigret

David Hare
Sunday 25 September 2016 08.00 BST

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ike many bookish children, I grew up consuming detective fiction more than any other kind. Even then I had noticed that stories supposedly driven by narrative depended for their real vitality on establishing ambience. Crime writing came to life when it had density, when you felt that the paint was being laid on thick. A strong sense of time and place was far more exciting than a clever puzzle. Anyone could create a mystery, but only the best could summon up a world in which the mystery could take root.

My taste in literary fiction – I read every word of Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene – was towards those authors whose techniques most closely resembled those of thriller writers. When, at university, I came across WH Auden’s suggestion that Raymond Chandler’s books “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”, I was bewildered. It had never occurred to me that thrillers were anything less. By then I had already graduated from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to Dashiell Hammett and the chill ambiguity of Patricia Highsmith. But when I discovered that the author of the Maigret series – which I knew chiefly through the BBC television series with Rupert Davies – was also the author of stand-alone novels, my expectations of the genre changed and expanded. These books belonged more alongside Camus and Sartre than Arthur Conan Doyle. The popular joke in Le Canard enchaîné that “M Simenon makes his living by killing someone every month and then discovering the murderer” seemed nothing more than that. A joke.

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 Rupert Davies as Maigret in the BBC TV series, 1964. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

It’s symptomatic of our misunderstanding of the unique Georges Simenon that so many people believe he was French. In fact, he was Belgian, born in Liège in 1903 and brought up in a poorly defined country that had often suffered under occupation. In Belgium, few people fostered illusions about national greatness. “Under occupation,” he wrote, “your overwhelming concern is with what you will eat.” Simenon’s background, and his lifelong feeling that he was disliked by his mother, left him with the aim of developing, equally as a writer and as a man, a wholly undeluded view of life. As he later observed: “It must be great to belong to a group, a nation, a class. It would give you a feeling of superiority. If you’re alone you’re not superior to anyone.” Or as he put it rather more bitterly: “During earthquakes and wars and floods and shipwrecks you see a love between men that you don’t see at any other time.”

In fact, he could hardly have been less French. What Frenchman or woman would speak of their loathing of gastronomy – “all that terrible fussing about what you eat”? What French writer or politician would agree that “every ideal ends in a fierce struggle against those who do not share it?” Simenon was particularly horrified by Charles de Gaulle’s pretence that the French had won the war. The untruth offended him. Simenon believed the events of the 1930s and 40s had defeated the French as thoroughly as they had the Germans. “I’ve ceased to believe in evil, only in illness. Nixon believes he’s the champion of the United States, De Gaulle the rebuilder of France. Yet nobody locks them up. Those who invent morals, who define them and impose them, end up believing in them. We’re all hopeless prisoners of what we choose to believe.”

Simenon, not prone to grand literary statements, once said that he wanted to write like Sophocles or Euripides. Over and again, he describes someone quietly living their life, until some random fait divers – a road accident, a heart attack, an inheritance – brings out a fatal element in their character that trips them up. Striking out towards freedom, they fall instead into captivity. He had the idea that a book, like a Greek tragedy, should be experienced in a single session. “You can’t see a tragedy in more than one sitting.” Serial killers, soon to become the thundering cliches of modern drama, whether speaking Danish, Swedish or English, would have held no appeal for Simenon precisely because they are, by definition, extraordinary – and considerably less common in life than on television. Typically, in one of Simenon’s stories, a single crime is enough to ensure that a hitherto normal life falls apart, with no notice, as though any of us might at any time suddenly encounter a crisis that we will turn out to be powerless to overcome.

The thrill of reading a novel, said Simenon, is to “look through the keyhole to see if other people have the same feelings and instincts you do”. The man who, when adolescent, says he suffered physical pain at the idea that there could be so many women who would escape him, has the intense focus of a voyeur. An ex-journalist, he often describes towns from their canals or railway lines, because from there you could look into the back of residents’ lives and not be deceived by the front. He may have said “Other people collect stamps, I collect human beings”, but remarkably he refuses at all times to pass judgment on anyone. “You will find no priests in my work!” Not only does Simenon take care to exclude politics, religion, history and philosophy from his character’s dialogue and thoughts, but the deadpan flatness of his prose style and his bare-bone vocabulary create a disturbing absence of moral control. “Fifty years ago people had answers, now they don’t.”

It was this fallen universe of compromise that I found so convincing when I was growing up. It matched what I had already seen of life. I knew at first hand that Simenon was right when he said that “the criminal is often less guilty than his victim”. But it was only when I was older that I became addicted to the hard stuff – the unsparing novels that take his fatalistic view to its ultimate. If, as is generally thought, Simenon wrote around 400 books, then about 117 are serious novels, the romans durs that meant most to him. André Gide, one of his many literary admirers, when asked which of Simenon’s books a beginner should read first, famously replied: “All of them.” But to my own taste, Simenon’s most searching work came out of his queasy, compromised time in occupied France, and in his desperate hunt thereafter for personal happiness in heavy-drinking exile in the US. If you want to read three of his greatest books, try the deceptively light Sunday, written in 1958 about a Riviera hotel-keeper who spends a year preparing to kill his wife; try The Widow, published, like The Outsider, in 1942, and at least equal to Camus’s work in portraying a doomed and alienated life; and above all be sure to read Dirty Snow, a story of petty crime and killing at a time of collaboration in a country that remains unnamed, but which is always taken to be France under the Nazis.

Because he was foolish enough in an interview to claim to have slept with 10,000 women – the real figure, said his third wife rather crisply, was nearer 1,200 – Simenon has sometimes been accused of misogyny, just as by allowing films to be made of his books at the Berlin-supervised Continental Studios in Vichy France during the war, he was also accused of collaboration. The charge of misogyny at least is unfair. A small man’s fear of women is often his subject, and he describes that fear with his usual pitiless accuracy. In his books, casual sex is fine – it may or may not be satisfying – but passion is always dangerous because it arouses feelings neither party can control – and loss of control is seen to be a particularly masculine terror. In these circumstances, sex comes closer to despair than to joy. The women he portrays are not usually manipulative or cruel or deceitful. Far from it. They simply possess an inadvertent power to disturb men and to drive them mad. They exercise this power more often in spite of themselves than deliberately. All of his books are, in one way or another, about power of different kinds, and he specialises in depicting the lives of those near the bottom of society, the concierges and the salespeople, the waiters and the clerks, who possess very little. No wonder, when he went to America, that he remarked how everyone was expected to have a hobby, so that in one small field at least they might exercise at least a measure of domination.

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 Georges Simenon at home in Switzerland, 1973. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

The inspiration for finally deciding to write a play from Simenon came from my friend Bill Nighy, who knew that I was a fan. He gave me a present of a rare first edition of a novel that had been almost entirely forgotten. Even now, I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who claims to have read La Main. In Moura Budberg’s translation, long out of print, the book had been published as The Man on the Bench in the Barn. It was written in 1968, but its atmosphere clearly derived from Simenon’s own period of residence in Connecticut, where he moved to live with his new wife, Denyse Ouimet, in the late 1940s. In the book, the town he then lived in, Lakeville, is renamed Brentwood. His house, Shadow Rock Farm, becomes fictionally Yellow Rock Farm. But the topography and feel of the place are pretty much identical, with beavers playing in a nearby stream, and the local Connecticut community expecting strong but already threatened standards of private morality. The only detail omitted was Simenon’s own telephone number: Hemlock 5.

We hear a lot about Henry James and the Americans’ traditional fascination with Europe. We hear rather less about its opposite. In my view, there is something rare and interesting artistically when a European sensibility engages with American morals. La Main describes America at a point of change, when the suburban world patrolled so brilliantly by writers such as Richard Yates, Sloan Wilson and Patricia Highsmith is about to yield to a newer way of life, theoretically freer but equally treacherous. It was characteristic of Simenon to suspect that sexual liberation might not deliver everything it promised. After all, he doubted most things, except his own writing. But it was even more characteristic of Simenon to be in the right place, as he had been in France and Africa before the war, and at the right time, equipped with a reporter’s calm genius for putting a moment in a bottle.

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