The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

First published:L’Homme qui regardait passer les trains, 1938 (English translation, 1958)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: Gronigen, Amsterdam, and Paris

Principal Characters:

• Kees Popinga, the managing clerk for the firm of Julius de Coster and Son, ship chandlers; a model husband and father, later a murderer and lunatic
• Mums, his wife, the mother of Frida and Karl, a good Dutch housewife
• Julius de Coster, Kees’s employer, the head of an apparently well-established firm, actually a crook and a bankrupt
• Pamela Mackinsen, de Coster’s mistress, a cabaret entertainer and later a murder victim
• Louis, the head of a gang of car thieves
• Jeanne Rozier, Louis’ mistress, a prostitute
• Goin, the owner of the garage in Juvisy where stolen cars are given new identities
• Rose, Goin’s sister
• Inspector Lucas, a member of the Police Judiciare who is in charge of the hunt for Kees

The Novel

The novel opens on December 22. Kees Popinga is bored by the evening routine in his respectable household: children doing homework, wife pasting cards from chocolate packages in an album, stove making the air heavy. He goes out to check whether the shipping firm for which he works has outfitted the Ocean III properly. Nothing ordered has been delivered; his employer,de Coster, is getting drunk in a bar and confides that he plans to abscond,faking suicide. The firm is based on fraud: Kees’s job is gone, his savings are lost. De Coster gives him five hundred crowns and Kees aids in his employer’s disappearance, then goes home to bed, refusing to get up the next morning. Whenever he is plagued by thoughts of work, he rehearses the meeting that he plans to have with de Coster’s luscious mistress, Pamela. At nightfall, Kees takes the train, leaving his family and his former conformist-self behind in Gronigen.

He whiles away the journey with amused recollections of the time he dropped a (winning) opponent’s chessman into a tankard of beer, of the evening when he added sugar to his host’s oxtail soup because the maid had repulsed him. In Amsterdam, Pamela repulses him, too; worse, she laughs at him. Kees silences her with a towel and leaves on the Paris train, unaware that he has committed murder.

In Paris he picks up Jeanne and spends the night with her. She persuades her boyfriend, Louis, to admit Kees to his gang. Under Louis’ direction, Kees steals a car and drives it to Juvisy where he hides out at Goin’s garage. When Inspector Lucas, who is in charge of the hunt for Kees, questions Jeanne and the papers publish Kees’s crime, the gang considers turning him over to the police. Kees escapes and returns to Paris to see Jeanne, who refuses to sleep with him. Kees beats her unconscious with a revolver butt and returns to the streets of Paris, moving from hotel to hotel, cafe to cafe, picking up a different woman each night, reading about himself in the papers each day. He writes to the newspapers and to the police, correcting their view of him and giving information about Louis and his gang. Though the police arrest the car thieves, they are released to set the underworld hunting for Kees.

By New Year’s Eve, Kees feels hunted. His habits must be broken because they will betray him. He cannot rest. A psychiatrist is reported to have called him paranoiac. The papers claim that he will soon be caught. He wants to announce himself to the world. Then all his money is stolen and he realizes that he is only an amateur in crime. He can neither outfit himself as a tramp and sleep under bridges nor afford a hotel. Clad in only a raincoat, he places his head on the railway line and waits for the train.

The train stops in time, and Kees is captured and taken to the police. He finds interrogation boring, refuses to answer, and pretends not to recognize his wife, Mums. Finally, he is returned to Holland and placed in an asylum where Mums visits him regularly once a month, bringing news of the biscuit factory where she pastes on labels, of their son Karl’s scholarship, of their daughter Frida’s leaving school to work in an office, where her employer’s nephew has proposed marriage to her. Kees does not care. Contentedly, he considers the way in which he has himself proved himself superior to the police. The doctor wants to play chess. Kees drops a chessman in the teacup. His memoirs, “The Truth About the Kees Popinga Case,” remain unwritten. “Really, there isn’t any truth about it, is there doctor?” says Kees, at the conclusion of the book.

The Characters

In a sense, Georges Simenon has written the book that Kees did not write, but the truth contained in it remains subject to question. The title suggests that Kees Popinga watched longingly as life passed him by. His stifling home and rigid respectability enable the reader to sympathize with his wish to escape and to comprehend his dream of being a different Kees, his feeling that the rascally de Coster is the man who does what another, deeply buried Kees would like to do.

Yet even in the first chapter there are warning notes: “Kees tended to over-play his part...were he to give way in the smallest point there were no lengths to which he would not go.” The rigidity of his life has kept him safe. Associated with his love of night trains is “the streak of wildness latent in his mental make-up,” the longing for the improper, the idea that anyone leaving on the night train is gone forever. The distance from himself and from reality suggested by his vision of himself, playing himself, grows stronger as Kees’s mental illness increases.

The shattering of his illusions about his employer, the end of his security and respectability, are represented by Kees as the advent of freedom. Paradoxically, Simenon insists that free choice ended when Kees left home on December 22: “Then destiny took charge.”

Simenon is always concerned with the relation of environment to character, and he has said that he is interested in what a man shows himself to be when he is stretched to the limit. The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By shows how a shock unhinges a man who has spent his life conforming. Yet this shock does not make Kees a different being: It merely brings into play characteristics already present, though hidden.

The coincidence of person and circumstance produces the apparently uncharacteristic act with its predictable and inexorable consequences. Thus while Simenon seems to chronicle the decline into criminality of a conventional man who “lets go,” he also takes care to present the paranoid characteristics which increase during the course of the narrative. For example, de Coster remarks that his managing clerk has always had a high opinion of himself though he is unaware of the frauds perpetrated under his nose. Previously, Kees revenged himself in petty ways on those who attacked his image of himself. Both these characteristics, like his detachment from reality, become increasingly evident as the novel progresses. By the end of the novel, the world and everyone in it are unworthy of his attention, are merely comic. His wife’s concern for their children makes him discover her inferiority to a “man of wide experience like himself.”

The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By is essentially the study of one character. Certainly Mums, with her flannel drawers, her solid figure, her pasting, her stifling domesticity, is easy to picture and easy to understand. She is not belittled for the competence she brings to dealing with financial disaster, which underlines her husband’s irresponsibility, and her regular visits to him in the asylum indicate her family loyalty.

Jeanne, the Parisian prostitute, is presented with clear, neutral understanding. Her reactions to Kees as a client, her relationship to Louis, and her reactions to police questioning provide the reader with a coherent system of antisocial reactions and relations. The gang members are differentiated only in superficial ways; for example, Louis is merely a function. De Coster has solidity: He is an engaging rascal as he cheerfully reveals his years of skulduggery, his family’s tradition of fraud, his own established infidelities, and those of his wife. De Coster exists to provide both motive and example for Kees’s escape, but he exists quite vividly in the reader’s mind, perhaps because he is present in Kees’s own mind.

Although the novel is written in the third person, Simenon inhabits Kees; indeed, he knows more of Kees than Kees knows of himself. Thus the reader sees characters and events from Kees’s point of view, feels the stifling routine of his home, chuckles over the sugared soup and the drowned chessman. Kees appeals to the universal wish to break out of the traces: “I am not crazy....I am merely a man who at the age of forty has determined to live as he thinks fit, without bothering about convention or the laws; for I have discovered, if somewhat late in life, that I was the dupe of appearance.”

Nevertheless, Simenon’s technical skill is evident in his management of the reader’s sympathy. As Kees becomes divorced from reality, the reader becomes divorced from Kees. Although he is clearheaded, can eat, sleep, plan, and play chess, yet his enjoyment of his notoriety, his view of his own behavior as justified and reasonable, his increasing sense of superiority all limit the reader’s identification with him. Thus, by the end of the novel, Kees has withdrawn from reality and the reader has withdrawn from Kees.

Critical Context

Simenon’s first novel was published in 1922; the Maigret series was begun in 1931. Thus The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By is an early novel, but it is not apprentice work; Simenon was a full-time writer of pulp fiction during the 1920’s and had already published more than fifty novels under various names and written nineteen of the Inspector Maigret stories before writing The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. The novel lacks the sophistication of some of Simenon’s later narratives in that it is linear and uncomplicated and contains only one character of any depth. Nevertheless, its unobtrusive neatness of line, its realism, its particularity, and its grimness are characteristic of later and better-known works. The psychological, not the factual, emphasis which marks Inspector Maigret is evident even in those novels in which he does not appear. Perhaps Simenon may be compared to Arthur Conan Doyle, who also created a fictional detective so fascinating that he overshadowed his creator’s other works. Maigret aside, Simenon is a vastly prolific craftsman who can make comprehensible the apparently bizarre psyche with conviction and economy. He is a novelist whose success has paradoxically overshadowed his achievement.

Bibliography

Becker, Lucille F. Georges Simenon, 1977.

Bresler, Fenton S. The Mystery of Georges Simenon: A Biography, 1983.

Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge, 1976.

Narcejac, Thomas. The Art of Simenon, 1952.

Raymond, John. Simenon in Court, 1968.