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Three Beds in Manhattan

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Though neither a crime nor a detective novel, Georges Simenon's Three Bedrooms in Manhattan (1946) nonetheless takes place in the lonely, desperate, claustrophobic, and paranoid world of most of the author's other books--of which there are hundreds. The story of a recently divorced French actor, Francios, who takes up solitary residence in Manhattan until he encounters and becomes dependent upon an unattached woman who is also of foreign birth, Three Rooms In Manhattan is a dark examination of a crippled human psyche. Simenon had few peers when it came to writing psychological fiction, and despite a hopeful if slightly improbable ending, the novel is gripping and seductive. Simenon also excelled at recording the vicissitudes of human emotion under stress, and his earnest depiction of Francios, who is crippled by jealousy, delusion, and rage, is superb.

Early in the novel, Simenon shrewdly depicts Kay, the object of Francios's obsession, as a listless, calculating mythomaniac, so much so that during the book's first 50 pages, Kay seems like one of the permanently wounded, misplaced female protagonists found in Jean Rhys' five novels. But readers are seeing Kay through Francios's blighted eyes, and Kay eventually manifests on the page in quite a different fashion. Nonetheless, Three Rooms In Manhattan revels in the grim, the sordid, and the violent, and an ugly fog of sadomasochism continually hangs in the air. Few 20th Century writers, with the exception of Denis De Rougemont, Jean Genet, and Vita Sackville-West, in her diaries, have had the courage to depict the cruelty and desire for domination and submission that lies just beneath the surface of passionate love.

Appropriately, the book takes place in mid-autumn, when the New York City weather routinely shifts between the transcendent and the unpleasant. The novel's first half revolves around a sometimes nightmarish schedule of endless, compulsive, and directionless walks which the couple takes through the city. Stopping only to drink and smoke in bars, and occasionally to eat, Francios and Kay are two lost souls seeking solace in one another, and both incapable of being apart and unable to be alone, except for the briefest of intervals. All the while, unspoken suspicions, recriminations, and phantoms from the past hang in the air.

Modern readers may find Francios misogynist in the extreme, as he spends a great amount of psychic energy spewing volleys of hatred towards Kay in his imagination, even while he walks calmly beside her through the haunted city streets. The idea of taking active revenge against all of the women who have wounded him--especially against his ex-wife, who has left him for a much younger man--through Kay is never far from his consciousness. But Simenon superbly reveals how it is the ostensibly subservient and masochistic Kay, and not Francios, who is the stronger of the two. Accepting even physical abuse, Kay manages to remain perceptive, objective, and resilient, while her lover repeatedly collapses in bouts of tears, humiliation, and self hatred. For Francios, passion and deep anxiety are synonymous; unable to live independently, he discovers that love is a stifling, suffocating trap too.

The mood of fatalism that suffuses Three Rooms In Manhattan was somewhat prescient; Simenon, upon whom Francios was based, eventually married Denyse Ouimet, the woman who inspired the character of Kay. But Ouimet later "lapsed by degrees into psychosis," and the child of their union, Marie-Jo, committed suicide.

Most of Simenon's non-detective fiction has been long out of print in America; New York Review Books is to be commended for bringing this and several other classic Simenon novels back into circulation.

Let me add that Simenon offers that rare combination in art--artistic skill and fabulous productivity. There's Mozart and Hayden and Bellini and Des Prez and Defoe, as against the tormented labors of Beethoven. There's Dickens and Simenon and Shakespeare and A Trollope and Hugo and Dumas (pere), and DeMeung, as against Conrad and Flaubert and Hemingway, who suffered and suffered. Some people are born lucky. Are there any interviews with Simenon that offer an explanation? By the way, Simenon's closest peer in the golden age of detective fiction is Graham Greene: Both are consumate wordsmiths, both eschew the vegetive world tho setting their fictions in romantic locals, and both write successfully in several modes of fiction.

One of Simenon's roman durs, novels that are bleaker in tone, THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN, is good, but not as good as two others I have read, Tropic Moon (New York Review Books Classics) and The Engagement (New York Review Books Classics). Simenon again takes the literary style best associated with crime noir, using short, hard sentences, and applies it to a non-criminal story.

In THREE BEDROOMS, the story is that of two lonely people meeting by hapstance and thereby changing everything. Francois is an out of work French actor who has come to New York after his wife humiliatingly left him for a younger man. Kay is a woman with a past who, by her own admission, would have taken about any guy who would have her. As happens all too frequently in real life, when two damaged souls meet, they discover the nicks and cuts in one's personality fit into those of the other like a key into a lock. Francois and Kay meet, and it is as if their previous lives no longer matter.

The writing is at times extraordinary. The rain drenched streets of New York at night are as clear as if the reader were looking at them with the light of the full moon. The story, however, becomes a little too pedestrian after awhile. And Simenon is a little too, well, French at time. Francois loves Kay, then cannot stand the sight of her, then is so madly in love as to be in an abyss, and on and on and on. While the French are good at noir (there is a reason why the concept is stated in the French), they can lay it on a bit thick at times. It is what keeps THREE BEDROOMS IN MANHATTAN from being any better than average.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, first published in 1946, and is a short, introspective novel about two lonely people.

Francios Combe is a 48-year old French actor. After seventeen years of marriage, he's newly divorced, -- his wife left him for an actor half his age. He's a sad sap, living in a rundown place in New York, a man looking for human connection.

"On this chilly October morning, he was a man who had cut all threads, a man approaching fifty, without ties to anything--not to family, profession, country, himself, and definitely not to home. His only connection was to a complete stranger, a woman sleeping in his room in a seedy hotel."

Kay Miller is another lonely, lost soul who had spent a few years in Swiss sanatorium. She was married to a Hungarian Ambassador, and has since been around the block a few times. She has a daughter that lives with an aunt.

"She wasn't beautiful or irresistible, as she thought she was. Her body, like her face was marked by life."

Francios and Kay meet in a diner, two lonely people starved for some human connection. " Two wandering creatures, set apart on the surface of the globe, lost in the thousand identical streets of a city like New York."

The story is narrated by Francios, and it follows him and Kay as they wander the streets of New York, observing the world around them. They wander to and from various bars, stop for food, and end most evenings with a hop in the sack. He is highly critical of her and at times even abusive, yet when the two are apart, they find they need to be together. The writing is straight forward, yet manages to carry some punches. The novel is only about 170 pages, was easy to read, by in the end it left me with a somewhat empty feeling.

Although the late Georges Simenon (1903-1989) may well be the best selling novelist ever, relatively few American readers know him. And if they do, it's likely for his Parisian Inspector Maigret detective series.

However, Europeans know him well. They even call any compressed, economically written and tense psychological novella of obsession a simenon, after the Belgian-born writer. This newly released edition of his searing 1946 novel of sexual obsession and isolation, "Three Bedrooms in Manhattan," with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, fits the category perfectly.

In it a dissolute French actor François Combe, stranded and sleepless in his New York room after a devastating split with his wife, chances to meet Kay Miller in an all-night Greenwich Village diner. Kay, another European, Viennese, and likewise rebounding from a broken marriage--hers to a Hungarian diplomat--echoes Combe's loneliness and decadence. Together they walk: from seedy bar to seedy bar swilling whiskey, chain-smoking, revealing bit by bit pieces of their broken pasts, and eventually succumbing to a sexual frenzy, all of which leads eventually to a type of desperate love.

In the hands of a less deft writer, such a story might melt into melodrama or dissolve into a weak, predictable cliché. But here, as always, Simenon rejects sentimentality, infusing his taut story with a sordid tension in a dreary, mechanistic world where loneliness and isolation ironically thrive amid throngs.

Simenon wrote his novels (some 400, which have sold over 200 million copies in scores of languages) in grueling two-week immersions into his characters, taking himself to the edge of physical and emotional exhaustion. With this novel the emotional cost must have been heavy, as it mimics his impassioned affair with Denyse Ouimet, whom he met in Manhattan in 1945 and who, five years later, after he divorced the current Madame Simenon, would become his wife.

When so submerged in a novel, Simenon pushed himself to write a chapter a day--a practice reflected in this novel, whose chapters generally run some 15 pages: a day's work. But it's the quality, not the prodigious quantity, of his output that causes it to endure.

The lean prose; the simple declarative sentences (or sentence fragments); the absence of metaphors, modifiers and writerly ostenation mark his simenons. He once remarked that he had learned from the French short story writer and editor Colette to eschew literary affectations. So, in writing, he cut "adjectives, adverbs and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence--cut it...cut, cut, cut."

Simenon's spare written words carry weight. An admirer of impressionist artists, he strove to give his novels a third dimension and fullness, as those artists did to their paintings. Like the pointillist Georges Seurat, who painted in discrete dots that took shape and value at a distance, Simenon, who once described himself as a pointillist writer, uses staccato sentences and short paragraphs with few transitions.

Yet somehow, in reading, it all blends together to form a vibrant, believable and often chilling whole. Mere words don't get in the way of the emotional experience being conveyed by them; the dream that Simenon creates remains unbroken by any egotistical authorial intrusion.

Indeed, at times the emotion experienced by the reader grows so intense that it is painful to turn the page. When Kay leaves to visit her ailing daughter in Mexico City and Combe latches onto (or is latched onto by) a beautiful girl in the Ritz bar, the reader cringes at the string of misjudgments Combe then makes, apparently fateful errors that seem certain to lead him into a self-destructive sexual encounter.

But as always--even in his mystery novels--Simenon never judges and never averts his piercing gaze from the most sordid and depraved human actions, the weakest and most human failings. His is a decadent world, where wives betray their husbands with young gigolos, where mothers abandon their daughters for money, where strangers have sex in taxicabs and cinemas, where men inexplicably beat the women they love.

His world is also one of seeming meaninglessness, where true human contact and communication appear nearly impossible. Where men and women alike are driven to despair and destruction by inner compulsions that defy logic and undermine their own happiness.

Yet here, for once, as Combe and Kay move from a cheap hotel to his rooms to her bedroom, they achieve a sort of connection, remarkable if only for its honesty. Somehow Simenon has created a romantic novel without romantic moments, a moving love story devoid of loving acts.

I learned a great deal from the introduction to this novella provided by Joyce Carol Oates. George Simenon is credited with creating "a sparely written and tautly constructed novella" now called a "simenon". Components of such a work are brisk inevitability of plot, startling and ironic conclusion, a structure which mirrors a cinematic sequence, and much more which form an intriguing formula. Novellas have always appealed to me because of their length not that I am a lazy reader by any means but I do enjoy the occasional swift conclusion.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan follows two very sad characters that in their individual pain form a co-dependency that could hardly be called attractive. This is mainly true of the lead male who is especially pathetic and who keeps with Oates' description of a simenon's main character: "male, middle-aged, unwittingly trapped in his life - is catapulted into an extraordinary adventure that will leave him transformed, unless destroyed".

I did enjoy Simenon's take on New York in 1946 as there are several walking tours he sends his characters on. I enjoyed less the circular desperation of the two main characters but that is only because it was honest and raw - the oft used phrase of "train wreck" comes to mind. At the end there is a whiff of possible redemption and happiness but it seems too remote to provide any real optimism.

one of the best true to life love stor