The Watchmaker of Everton by Georges Simenon

First published:L’Horloger d’Everton, 1954 (English translation, 1955)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The mid-1950’s

Locale: Everton and other New York villages and cities, and various Eastern and Midwestern locales

Principal Characters:

• Dave Galloway, a forty-three-year-old watchmaker
• Ben, his sixteen-year-old son
• Musak, Dave’s friend, a cabinetmaker
• Lillian Hawkins, Ben’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend
• Wilbur Lane, the attorney hired by Dave for Ben

The Novel

The Watchmaker of Everton is a story about the failure of a family. Dave Galloway, the watchmaker of the title, leads an existence that is as regularized as the watches and clocks that he repairs. Every day of his life is marked by a routine that is kept so faithfully that he is hardly aware of it. For more than fifteen years, since his wife deserted him, he has cared for Ben, his son, now sixteen years old. Fulfilling the roles of both parents, Dave consciously seeks his son’s respect and love.

Late one Saturday evening, after he has had his usual night out with his friend, Musak, Dave discovers that Ben has disappeared with a suitcase and Dave’s car. The mother of Lillian Hawkins, Ben’s girlfriend, comes to Dave’s home and tells him, accusingly, that her daughter has stolen some money from home and gone away with Ben. Dave spends an anxious night, wondering what has happened. On Sunday morning, he is told by the police that Ben and Lillian have killed a salesman and stolen his Oldsmobile, having abandoned Dave’s vehicle along the road. Soon the news becomes public, and Dave awaits further information. Against his will he is drawn into the events. At last, word comes that Ben and Lillian have been captured in Indiana, where they went to be married. Musak helps Dave get a flight to Indianapolis, where Ben is being kept by police before being turned over to the New York authorities, but to Dave’s surprise and sorrow, Ben refuses to see him. A passenger on the same plane that returns Ben and Lillian to New York, Dave is left alone with his thoughts. Georges Simenon allows the reader to look into Dave’s mind: Dave’s anguished reflections are among the recurring flashbacks in the narrative. Collectively, these thoughts give information about the past, rounding out the present.

The preliminary hearing comes, and then the trial, and Dave still has not received his son’s acceptance. At the trial, the verdict is guilty, and the sentence is life imprisonment for Ben and Lillian. Sing Sing, where Ben is sent, is scarcely twenty-three miles from where Dave lives. The father is entitled to visit his son once a month, but the first visit is futile and unproductive, because Ben has not come to regard his father as one of his own kind. Dave is ready to take as much time as needed, however, to make Ben understand how alike they are, if only in their revolt; through revolts of one kind or another, especially ones totally unacceptable to society, they have both tried to set themselves free. Soon, it is discovered that Lillian is pregnant by Ben, and Dave dreams happily of the time when he can talk with his grandson and “reveal to him the secret in men.”

The Characters

Dave is the only character in The Watchmaker of Everton who achieves any degree of roundness. Simenon gives his character life by looking into his mind. His motives are explained with each thought or action, and his past experiences are connected with those of the present, thereby unifying the psychological motifs and the parts of the story. Because Simenon is more concerned with telling a story about the modern world than with creating believable characters, however, even Dave does not receive the author’s complete attention. Once he is understood to be Everyman, Dave is little more than a stereotype. Readers will identify with him, however, and sympathize with him, because Simenon treats him with understanding and humanity.

The other characters are seen only through Dave’s eyes. Ben scarcely has any existence except as Dave perceives him; he is a constant presence merely because Dave is constantly thinking about him. Dave’s failed relationship with his son is the reason for the story, and thus the details of the novel are often about Ben. Interestingly, although she is not a character in the present narrative, Ben’s mother—Dave’s wife—is more fully realized than Ben, perhaps because she exercises such a forceful influence on the lives of others, especially Dave’s. She led Dave to the one significant revolt in his life. Lillian is like Dave’s former wife only insofar as she is a catalyst in Ben’s revolt, for Lillian, like her parents, is peripheral to the major incidents of the novel.

Indeed, all the other characters are presented either to give Dave definition or to round out the action. Musak is described rather than dramatized. He is in the story only to help account for the way in which Dave spends his time. Wilbur Lane, Ben’s lawyer, through a few brush strokes of Simenon’s word-painting, comes to life for a short time, only to fade back into Dave’s reflections on his family.

Critical Context

Having written more than two hundred novels under his own name and hundreds under various pseudonyms, Georges Simenon is best known as the creator of detective novels about Inspector Maigret. Nevertheless, the Maigrets, as they are often called, are far more than conventional mystery stories. Without discernible plots, they are more concerned with the motives and other facts behind the murder than with locating the murderer. In the attention they give to realistic human behavior, they are, essentially, psychological studies.

Simenon considers his psychological novels, of which The Watchmaker of Everton is one example, to be his most important work. He is indebted toHonore de Balzac for his realism and to Fyodor Dostoevski for his psychological probing. Modern schools of thought involving psychoanalysis, scientific determinism, and existentialism also are significant influences on Simenon’s fiction, which he stopped writing in 1972, when he turned to his memoirs and autobiographical reflections.

The Watchmaker of Everton is one of several novels that Simenon wrote with an American setting. He is at his best on familiar ground, that of France or another Western European country, but he usually succeeds in being universal, timeless, and placeless. He is considered by many great writers to be one of their number, but he is often criticized for the very thing for which he is also often praised, that is, for writing a large number of works at such a fast pace. Still, he has an unquestioned permanence among modern writers, and other writers are among the first to declare that fact.

Bibliography

Becker, Lucille F. Georges Simenon, 1977.

Bresler, Fenton. The Mystery of Georges Simenon, 1983.

Galligan, Edward L. “Simenon’s Mosaic of Small Novels,” in South Atlantic Quarterly. LXVI (Autumn, 1967), pp. 534-543.

Mauriac, Claude. “Georges Simenon,” in The New Literature, 1959.

Raymond, John. Simenon in Court, 1968.