Simenon on the Lives of the Poor

Most people don't usually read Georges Simenon's "Inspector Maigret" mysteries for pithy one-liners, but I put a tic by this one:

The poor are used not to express their hopelessness, because life, work, and the hourly, daily calls of life lie forever ahead of them.

That's from Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets,(1931; page 27 of the Penguin Paperback). This sounds right to me; if you are truly poor, or catching poverty out of the corner of your eye, you can't indulge the luxury of expressing your hopelessness; you soger on, or you spin free of the flywheel and make a colossal nuisance of yourself.

I tend to think this is a safe generalization, but at least it is a pretty good description of life in Maigret's world: heavily populated with the quietly desperate, too proud to make a nuisance of themselves but finding little solace in anything else.

Footnote: I pulled the Maigret out of the corner of an untended bookshelf when I couldn't sleep. They're the novelistic equivalent of comfort food for me: consoling, familiar, and in their own way, reassuring. Is this perverse, considering the melancholy tone? I think not. Walker Percy says that there may be novels about alienation, but there cannot be an alienated novel: the mere fact of connection is enough to make you whole.

Footnote to footnote: but I have to add that, structurally this seems to be one of the weakest of the Maigrets--a silly plot with more than a few touches of Agatha Christie. From the date I gather it must be one of the first and even if the plot is wrong, the tone is still right. Oddly enough, it receives nothing but five stars from the reviewers at Amazon. I wonder what I am missing?