Demon lover
A. N. Wilson
The Mystery of Georges Simenon Fenton Bresler (Heinemann/Quixote Press £8.95)
Georges Simenon boasts that he has had carnal knowledge of at least 10,000 women. 8,000 of them have been pro- stitutes. Are we to understand that this is a lot, or a little? Theodore Zeldin's recent compilation The French- is full of useful statistics; but since Simenon is a Belgian who has lived most of his life in Switzerland, we are left none the wiser. Ac- cording to Fenton Bresler's absorbing and lightly-written new biography, the great novelist began his sexual adventures at the age of five, and was little more than 12 when he 'lost his innocence'. He is now 80. We gather that he has had an active sexual life for the last 70 years. It therefore works out as an average of twice a week, which many men would consider moderate. If we accept the analysis of his second wife Denise that the figure of 1,200 is closer to
the truth, you are left with the comparative- ly chaste statistic of 17 times a year.
So, although there are episodes in Simenon's biography which will impress the reader for their sheer gymnastic ingenuity, his sexual life is not the most interesting thing about him. The 'mystery' of the title is Simenon's demonic inner life, which has compelled him to write well over 400 books. In early life, he could polish off a 70,000 word novel in less than a week. I have never read the early, pseudonymous books (the Westerns, the comedies by Georges Sim etc) but the astonishing thing about his mature crime novels, written just as fast, is their formal perfection. Mr Bresler's biography of the great writer is full of appreciation for Simenon's genius. But he is unable to con- ceal a contempt and hatred for Simenon as a man.
Doubtless, it was no fun being married to Simenon. And there is a terrible pathos about the last few decades of his life — the great white empty house at Epalinges, the noiseless corridors, the obsessively tidy desk, with rows of neatly sharpened pencils and pipes, ready filled with tobacco. When we read the pathetic story of Simenon's daughter Marie-Jo, who wore a wedding- ring in devotion to her father and commit- ted suicide in 1978, the tale becomes as macabre as one of Simenon's inventing. And we have, too, his obsessively tedious memoirs, running into millions of words, a proportion of which Mr Bresler has presumably had to read. No one could envy him. No one could say that he has made a bad job of writing a short, popular biography of a man who, by the standards of Inspector Maigret is, beyond question, a mauvais numero.
But he is something more. He is one of the best writers of our century; and, for all
his bleakness, he is one of the most intense- ly entertaining. No crime writer in English comes near him. Mr Bresler's book is writ- ten from the preconception, widely held, that everyone ought to be nice. Where did this idea start? In Disneyland, I suspect. Simenon has never tried to be nice. It seems prudish to blame him for this. His only fault, as a writer, has been his wearisome exercises in autobiography. It would be complete hypocrisy to say that one disap- proved of his unchastity or of his unkind- ness to his wives. These facts alone will make Mr Bresler's book a best-seller. Everyone will enjoy reading about them. But it is scarcely forgiveable that the most excitingly concise of modern writers should have suffered the fate of the old woman in Belloc who died 'of Psittacosis, not before/Becoming an appalling bore'.
Previous page
