Allan Massie

One good reason to read Simenon is to recover Paris. It is now 75 years since Maigret made his first appearance, and, if his Paris is not yet utterly lost, you have to walk distances and search diligently to find it. The Brasserie Dauphine, for instance, rue de Harlay, which in real life was the Restaurant aux Trois Marches, is now the restaurant-salon of the Paris Bar (La Maison du Barreau). Maigret’s favourite blanquette de veau may still be simmering there, but consumption will be reserved to lawyers. Though fond of the district Maubert-Mouffetard, in his day a poor quarter, Maigret is essentially a man of the Right Bank: of the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Marais, a quartier de petits gens and Jewish immigrants, of artisan workshops and small, disreputable hotels.

The suggestion was made the other day that Dylan Thomas may have been dyslexic. Apparently, the experts deduced this from the style of his poetry. It seems an odd assertion. Dyslexic children find difficulty, and therefore no pleasure, in reading. Dylan, according to his parents, taught himself to read when he was three, and thereafter read, in his own words, ‘indiscriminatingly and all the time, with my eyes hanging out on stalks’. Doesn’t sound like a dyslexic child to me, though doubtless the experts know better. Also in the news recently was the announcement of a Dylan Thomas Prize, worth £50,000 to the winner.

When Prince Harry stirred up a fuss by wearing Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party he found a gallant defender in Paul Johnson who wrote that ‘in treating Nazi insignia as a party joke’ the young prince ‘reflects the instincts of his generation’. ‘The Nazis,’ he added, ‘do have an undoubted fascination for many young people’, because of their style, not their ideology. ‘Hitler still exerts some of the dread appeal he exercised in his lifetime ... A lot of his appeal, I suspect, is visual. Hitler was a kind of artist’ who ‘put his  artistic and inventive instincts to work’. This is surely undeniable, and Johnson is by no means the first to remark it. Thomas Mann was there before him.

Anthony Powell’s centenary last year was rightly celebrated; not much notice, I think, was taken of C. P. Snow’s. This was hardly surprising. Shares in ‘Snow Preferred’ are, in Wodehouse’s phrase, ‘down in the cellar with no takers’. I would guess that very few under the age of, say, 50 have read the 11 volumes of his Strangers and Brothers sequence, published between 1940 and 1970. Yet he was then regarded as a major English novelist, and the sequence as being as important and ambitious as Powell’s.

T S. Eliot thought Hamlet an ‘artistic failure’, Shakespeare being unable to reconcile the theme of the old revenge tragedy on which the work is based with the conception of the character of Hamlet himself. One may agree with this while still finding the play compelling; indeed the most puzzling of the tragedies. The revenge theme is admittedly tiresome and the reasons for postponing the act of vengeance both unconvincing and boring. We can accept the ghost only as a convenient theatrical convention. No doubt Elizabethan audiences saw it differently. Belief in ghosts was then common, and one wonders to what extent Shakespeare shared it. Banquo’s ghost appears only to Macbeth and is invisible to the other dinner-guests; invisible to Lady Macbeth also.

Asked whether a good review would sell a book, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davies replied, ‘No, but a concatenation of good ones may do so.’ One would like to think this true, even while observing that the bestseller lists regularly feature novels which are either not reviewed at all, or have been given brief and sometimes scornful notices. No doubt this was always the case, sales of the likes of Edgar Wallace and Dennis Wheatley not depending on reviews. The means by which a book becomes a bestseller have always been mysterious, though nowadays the level of the promotion budget and the willingness of publishers to pay for lavish displays in bookshops seem also essential to the creation of a bestseller. Few literary novels come into that category.

In a volume of his posthumously published notebooks (Garder Tout en Composant Tout), Henry de Montherlant remarks: ‘Je ne sais pourquoi nous faisons des descriptions, puisque le lecteur ne les lit jamais.’ Well said, but not quite true; there are readers who dote on long descriptive passages. Alain de Botton for instance wrote recently that the best bits of Proust are the descriptions and passages of analysis. Yet for me these are just the parts of A la Recherche which seem stale, while the characters and conversation remain entrancing. So I find myself on Montherlant’s side.

Sometimes at book festivals I am asked which historical novelists I most admire and enjoy. ‘Alfred Duggan,’ I say first, and am usually met with a blank response. This is not entirely surprising. Duggan died in 1964 and most of his books are out of print. Some will know of him as a friend of Evelyn Waugh from Oxford days. ‘A full-blooded rake ... we were often drunk ... Alfred almost always.’ He remained in this condition for some 20 years, Waugh himself eventually doing much to rescue him from alcoholism. So there was an unusual pattern to his career, as Waugh remarked in an article published in The Spectator soon after his friend’s death.

Rob Roy (1671-1734) is one of the most famous of Scotsmen. Whiskies, hotels, pubs, and junior football teams have been named after him. He has been portrayed on stage and screen. The 1994 Hollywood film, written by Alan Sharp, is a fine western set in 18th-century Scotland. He was already famous in 1817 ‘when’, as David Stevenson writes, ‘Walter Scott decided that Rob Roy would be a good title for his latest novel, even though Rob was a fairly minor character in the book.