Essays
Playing Fast and Loose: The Memoirs of Georges Simenon
To paraphrase Gore Vidal: autobiographies are histories that require doublechecking the facts; memoirs are accounts of how authors remember their lives. And there you have it: a loophole at the get-go, since memory is invention.
The memoir output of Belgian writer Georges Simenon, world famous for his Maigret and what he termed his “hard novels,” began in 1945 with the publication of Je me souviens, not yet translated into English, and something of a first draft of his autobiographical novel, Pedigree, published in 1948. In 1970, Simenon published When I Was Old, a collection of journal entries written in 1960, 1961 and 1962. Having made good on his longtime threat to quit writing novels (Maigret and Monsieur Charles and The Innocents both appeared in 1972 and finished off the run), Simenon began releasing the Dictées, a series of dictated reminiscences that his American publisher, Helen Wolff, passed on releasing because, as she told Pierre Assouline (Simenon: A Biography), she “didn’t want to damage his reputation” in the U.S. Letter to My Mother, another slim volume, also dictated, appeared in 1974. And then, in 1981, the sprawling 800+-page Intimate Memoirs, his last book and the last of his endgame memoir flurry.
Simenon’s memoirs are of course read because of the fiction he wrote and began writing under multiple pseudonyms as a teenager in Liège. Relocated to Paris and “pot-boiling furiously,” as John Raymond (Simenon in Court) phrases it, Simenon turned out 80 pages a day, an early indication of the extraordinary productivity that would mark his entire career. In addition to memoirs, short stories and articles, he published nearly 200 novels under his own name, famously completing each of those books in an astonishing ten to eleven days. His novels were brief, he said, because writing them exhausted him and because a novel should be able to be read in one sitting. “The pure novel is too tense for the reader to stop in the middle and take it up the next day,” he told the Paris Review in 1955. “You never think of going to see a play—one act today, the second act a fortnight later, and the third in a month. You see the whole play in one evening. It’s the same for today’s novel,” he told the New York Times in 1971.
The author made no secret of considering the Maigret series inferior to his non-Maigret novels, labeling the former “minor works” in When I Was Old. “When I was too tired to start a hard novel, I wrote a Maigret,” he told the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg. Despite the authorial dissing, readers became and remained fanatically attached to Chief Inspector Jules Maigret of the Police Judiciaire, who in his unhurried, nonjudgmental, immensely competent and rarely rattled way unknotted the mysteries surrounding murders committed primarily in Paris but occasionally farther afield, as in Maigret in Vichy, Maigret in New York and the Porquerolles-set My Friend Maigret, the Maigret that critic and writer Julian Symons considered the best of the bunch. To read Simenon’s “hard novels” is to reside—often claustrophobically so—in the minds of the mad, bad and broken. Although readers encounter the same populace in the Maigret novels, we do so through the perspective of the eminently sane and sensible chief inspector. Much is the rain and many are the bars in a Maigret fiction. If you don’t already have a beer or aperitif in hand, you’ll want one after finishing any scene involving Maigret and his team taking a bar break to mull the case.
Simenon shared Hemingway’s aversion to “ten-dollar” words and declared on multiple occasions that he limited the vocabulary of his fictions to 2,000 words. When praised for his “atmospherics,” he bristled. But what are atmospherics other than an effective blending of setting and tone? From Maigret and the Yellow Dog:
The streets were running with black mud. The wind was rattling the blinds on the second floor. Maigret had eaten in the dining room, nor far from the table where the doctor sat, looking despondent.
Beyond the little green windowpanes, inquisitive faces moved, sometimes pressing up to the glass.
As well as writing a staggering amount of prose, Simenon gave a staggering number of interviews, both in print and on camera. In When I Was Old, he understandably carps about journalists asking him “the same questions” (“Haven’t they read the articles their colleagues have published?”) yet accepts every interview request—not for the publicity, he insists, but to avoid “hurting anyone’s feelings.”
A journalist via on-the-job training, he occasionally took on the role of interviewer himself. For Paris-Soir, in June 1933, he interviewed Leon Trotsky, then living in exile in Prinkipo, Turkey. Trotsky, even more famous than Simenon, set the conditions: questions submitted in advance to which Simenon would be handed a written response. In Simenon’s portrait, Trotsky emanates “calm and serenity…the same calm, the same serenity as in the garden, in the house, in the décor.” Such calmness notwithstanding, Trotsky informs Simenon “a warlike explosion from fascist Germany is absolutely inevitable” and coming soon. Not just anyone could get an interview with Trotsky, Simenon insinuates in the published article. As Patrick Marnham reports in The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret, Simenon’s access had in fact less to do with Simenon’s status than with Trotsky’s goal of receiving some favorable French press, having recently, and secretly, applied for a French visa. While interviewing Federico Fellini about the film Casanova for L’Express, Simenon offered up what became his most famous public remark. Since he had “had,” by his count, “10,000 women,” the author reckoned he was “more of a Casanova” than Fellini.
Simenon’s answer to the charge of being publicly indiscreet: “I lay myself shamelessly bare for I detest poses” (Intimate Memoirs). In Letter to My Mother, the laying bare includes the revelations that he doesn’t love his mother nor she him. Henriette Brüll Simenon died at age 91 in Liège with Simenon at her side, a weeklong deathwatch recreated in the memoir. The entire text is set in italics and because of the epistolary format, to enlighten the reader, Simenon must at times tell his mother what she already knows (“Then you moved to the Outremeuse quarter…”). Unlike his other memoirs, Letter to My Mother benefits from scenic grounding. However scattered and associative the son and author’s thoughts, the setting is a single hospital room. His mother’s second marriage to a retired train conductor “shocked” Simenon, and he shows considerable relish in recounting the details of its step-by-step souring. Husband and wife “began to distrust each other. He accused you of being impatient for him to die, so you’d have the pension all to yourself.” Then came the “day you decided to stop talking to each other and to exchange scribbled notes.” He is not, Simenon assures his mother and the reader, “exaggerating” the “hatred” of their union. “You were both afraid of being poisoned.” From such perceived reality, Simenon fashioned The Cat, one of his most intense and brutal novels, a portrait of married enemies who communicate by notes and fear poisoning. Where her elder son was concerned, Henriette had her own criticisms. “Georges was very proud,” she told John Raymond. “But you see, sir, it was a misplaced pride.”
The notebooks that would be published as When I Was Old were taken up, Simeon states in the text, for “writing’s sake” and so that his children could learn “more about their father” and understand “the vulnerable man that I am.” Whether the notebooks are “published one day or whether they remain in one of my children’s drawers does not matter to me” reads the reader reading the published notebooks. His motivation for writing Intimate Memoirs, he told the New York Times in 1984, was to correct the “many books” that “claim to tell the truth about me and…are all wrong” and to “defend the memory of Marie-Jo,” the daughter who killed herself in 1978. (Appended to Simenon’s memoir is Marie-Jo’s Book, a collection of notes, letters and transcriptions of tape recordings found in his daughter’s apartment after her death.) He returns to the direct address setup in Intimate Memoirs, writing to his “tiny little girl” and three sons (e.g., “I’m going to tell you a secret, Johnny, and hope it won’t upset you too much if someday I made it public”). Readers weaned on the taut economies of Simenon’s fiction will have to adjust expectations with regard to his unapologetically rambling memoir style and its repetitions. “I hate to reread,” he writes in When I Was Old, followed on successive pages by “I don’t reread these notes,” “fortunately I don’t reread myself” and the declaration that he is “not going to leaf back through the pages” to determine whether he’s already expressed his view of sexuality. (He has). In the Dictées, he announces his intention and method thus: “I will dictate every morning whatever comes to mind, whatever pops into my head while I’m holding the microphone.” The principle in operation seems to have been that an unedited, unrevised presentation of his thoughts represented a truer version of himself.
Who, then, in Simenon’s take, is his true self?
He is a man “not interested in politics, who “hate(s) politics,” but frets about events unfolding in the Belgian Congo and Cuba and rants about President Charles de Gaulle, who “lies, contradicts himself,” and nurtures the delusion that he is the “rebuilder of France.” Simenon himself doesn’t believe in “evil” or “criminals,” a stance he has defended “for thirty years.” He has a “precise memory” except for “dates and chronology.” Although “allergic to statistics and figures in general,” he has successfully negotiated all his book contracts except the one he let his second wife “cook up,” the “only contract” he “ever lost money on.” A man of “intuition” rather than “intellect,” he has never been “ambitious.” A writer uninterested in “literary” recognition, he would “turn down the Nobel” if offered and has given the medals he has received to his children “to play with and make fun of.” He still “regards” himself as “one of the…humblefolk.” A “Bohemian,” a “true anarchist,” a “furious individualist,” who “dislikes bourgeois people” and “from the beginning” only wanted money “so as not to have to count it.” A man who has a “phobia” about crowds and cannot bear an untidy desk: “a pencil out of place bothers me.” Simenon’s Simenon is conscientious, “scrupulous by nature.” It is his “trademark” to get “manuscripts in before the deadlines, never a late one.” He is “annoyed” when people “look for parts” of himself in the novels and “dreams” of writing a novel “without head or tail…with characters who rise up and disappear without reason.” He considers sex “a necessary hygienic measure” and numbers among his 10,000 women, 8,000 “professionals” who “often” provide the greater “pleasure.” All told, he has “taken” only “three virgins”: his first wife, her maid and a “young girl with firm breasts.” Despite his own sexual adventuring, he has “a deep innate need for ‘exclusivity’” in a woman he loves. Had he not feared becoming “Monsieur Josephine Baker,” he would have married the chanteuse back in his Paris days. If he had met Charlie Chaplin’s wife Oona prior to his second marriage, he would have married Oona. Since childhood, he has walked in his sleep. He “just missed becoming an alcoholic.” An ever-generous husband and ex-husband, he handed over almost “everything” to first wife Régine Renchon (nicknamed “Tigy” by Simenon) when they divorced—stocks, the house in France, furniture, paintings—and agreed to alimony that approximated “the salary of a United States ambassador.” The devoted dad of four is “often bored by people who are supposed to be bright or witty.” Quite possibly he chatters on and on during interviews so that he “won’t have to listen.”
By his calculations, Simenon moved house thirty-three times, the last three relocations in Switzerland. “I make my nest. I settle down with my family and I hate to leave until one day, without knowing why, I don’t feel at home anymore and I take my little world elsewhere to start all over again” (When I Was Old). During his 10-year stint in the United States, he and his family lived in Bradenton Beach, Florida, Tucson, Arizona, and Carmel, California, where he “smiled over the artistic pretensions” of the “old ladies” of the town and lived across the street from the unnamed “greatest American poet of the moment” (Robinson Jeffers), finally settling for five years in Lakeville, Connecticut, at Shadow Rock Farm. It was in America, shortly after arriving from France, that he met French-Canadian Denyse Ouimet, whom he bedded the first day they met in New York and hired as his private secretary. The expensive divorce from Tigy was prompted by Denyse’s pregnancy with his second son, Johnny. Unlike the “jealous” Tigy, second-wife Denyse (rechristened “Denise” by Simenon) was not in the least troubled by her husband’s sexual escapades. His “‘lays’…did not affect her,” Simenon discloses in Intimate Memoirs. Such unbotheredness might have made for a happy state of affairs, but no, the permissive attitude aroused Simenon’s suspicions: “Did she ever indeed attach any importance to physical sex? Even with me?”
Does any memoirist expect to be (fully) believed? Every memoir is in some measure self-serving; every memoir is in some measure an exercise in justification. Every memoir is inherently a brag (“Look what I’ve accomplished!”; “Look what I survived!”). And every memoir, blatantly or subtly, settles scores. So-called pal Charlie Chaplin is ever putting on an “act,” even in his private life. Henry Miller has fallen into the trap of other literary men who “spend a good part of their lives seeking each other out for reassurance.” André Gide was one of those writers who “lived for their image.” Gide and Simenon’s longstanding relationship began not as equals but as Gide, the literary star, and Simenon, the up and comer. It was Gide who advised Simenon to forego the first-person narration of Je me souviens and, instead, to fictionalize the story of his early life, advice that resulted in the novel Pedigree. Alas, Gide disliked the “vastly enlarged new work” (Fenton Bresler, The Mystery of Georges Simenon). For his part, Simenon tells us, although he tried on several occasions to read a Gide novel, he simply “couldn’t” make it through.
As for the women principals, Tigy is the primary target of Simenon’s resentment in When I Was Old and not solely because of the divorce settlement. The grudge goes deeper. “Without her constant jealousy,” he “might have had more adventures in the usual sense of the term.” When they moved from Belgium to Paris, “the largest and best-lit room” of their quarters “was always reserved” for Tigy and Tigy’s painting. In order for Tigy to “try her luck at painting,” he had to “efface” himself and write solely for money. Had Tigy “achieved success at that time, what would have happened? I wonder and tremble,” he writes. Another kick-her-in-the-teeth revelation: he married Tigy, but he was “really in love” with Tigy’s sister.
In When I Was Old, Denyse (now referred to as “D.”) remains the “darling…dear girl” whom he continues to love “passionately,” a woman he remains “greedy for,” a partner praised for her “maternal quality,” her “amazing patience,” the ability “in a single day” to function as “companion, businesswoman, buddy, mistress, mother, I don’t know what not.” Nonetheless, trouble bubbles. Simenon has “never seen anyone as tortured as D. by the need to do everything just right”; she is a “perfectionist”; he must walk on “tiptoe” when she’s at home (and not in Prangins, a psychiatric clinic). The final notebook entry, dated February 15, 1963, details the author’s impatience for his “sweet,” “courageous” wife’s return and their resumption of a life together “that will be fuller than ever” after “almost eighteen (years) of happiness.” In print, it marks the last of Simenon’s loving treatment of wife number two.
In Letter to My Mother, Simenon ridicules Denyse as the “haughty, aggressive, merciless” woman who invariably tried to “make herself as important as possible.” In a what’s-that-again-aside, Stanley Eskin (Simenon: A Critical Biography) notes that a year before publishing Letter to My Mother, Simenon read Nancy Milford’s Zelda and felt “queasy” over what he perceived to be the Zelda/Denyse parallels: two women determined to “excel” and determined to “destroy” their husbands. Compared to the mud slung in Intimate Memoirs, the Denyse insults in Letter to My Mother almost classify as mild. In her husband’s literary swansong, Denyse is the demon force behind the tragedy of Marie-Jo’s death, the mother who scarred her daughter for life by masturbating in front of eleven-year-old Marie-Jo while the two were on holiday and who, by writing her own memoir (A Bird for a Cat), a “lying, twisting” book that “hurt Marie-Jo so deeply,” precipitated Marie-Jo’s suicide. Denyse contends she and Simenon share the blame for their daughter’s death. The radical shift in her husband’s feelings toward her she explains this way: “He hated me the same way that he loved me…possessively” (Marnham). Starting in 1964, Denyse and Simenon lived separately but remained legally married at the time of Simenon’s death in 1989. Denyse had long wanted to officially end the marriage; Simenon, reports Assouline, considered a second divorce “too costly to consider.”
A drawback of being famous: critics and biographers dig about for details and then dig about some more to substantiate the details they collect. Georges Simenon, Assouline writes, “always managed to remain the principal source of information about himself.” The problem with that arrangement, Assouline continues, is that Simenon “by middle age was no longer able to tell truth from falsehood, real from imaginary.” “Unlikely” and “implausible” are words that appear frequently in Simenon biographies, along with more pointed contradictions in the vein of: “the facts were rather different” (Marnham); “it cannot be taken wholly at face value” (Eskin); “a claim that does not withstand scrutiny” (Assouline). Correcting Simenon’s version of events has required his biographers and critics to sift through fabrications that range from moderately amusing exaggerations to more serious departures from reality. No, he didn’t go fishing with Trotsky on the Prinkipo visit; no, he didn’t play a round of golf (18 holes) every day. No, his son Marc was not the only living being ever to see him writing (that claim repudiated by Marc himself). No, Simenon did not “maintain ownership” of Shadow Rock Farm in Connecticut for reasons of “sentiment” or any other. The house, along with its contents—furniture, Baccarat glass service, “even the children’s toys”—was put up for sale in August 1955 (Assouline). Counter to Simenon’s supposed indifference to literary acclaim, Lucy Sante details the author’s “ferocious high-lit ambitions” and “shameless lobbying” for the Nobel Prize (Bookforum). (Simenon predicted he would win the Nobel Prize in 1947; André Gide won instead.) The self-proclaimed numbers naif “demonstrated a stunning mastery of questions of distribution, promotion, exchange controls, and the division of rights” regarding his work; after 1946, he was “merciless with publishers” (Assouline). Although Simenon always insisted his most famous creation first appeared in Pietr the Latvian, a character named Jules Maigret can be found in previous novels. Simenon repeatedly said that both Je me souviens and Pedigree were written to leave an account of his early life for son Marc after a radiologist told the author he had two years, at most, to live. In his various dramatic renditions of this tale, Simenon portrays himself as continuing to labor under a death sentence for many months. According to Tigy’s maid and Simenon’s lover Henriette Liberge (renamed “Boule” by Simenon), the timeline was closer to two weeks. Whether a misdiagnosis or a mishearing on Simenon’s part, Tigy investigated and cleared up the confusion: Simenon was perfectly healthy. “All his life,” reports Marnham, “Simenon had a tendency to hysterical illness.”
Simenon’s omissions, evasions and distortions about his activities in Occupied France are of a graver sort. In Intimate Memoirs, Simenon recounts hiding out in the garage of a friend and sleeping in meadows after two Germans—a blonde woman “who might well have been the famous spy Mademoiselle Docteur” and her Gestapo associate—came knocking at his door in the Vendée near war’s end. Biographers are united in identifying those visitors as members of the Resistance. Marnham believes Simenon “deliberately changed the story to distract attention from the problems he eventually had when the FFI (French Forces of the Interior) caught up with him in January 1945.”
During the four years of the Occupation, Simenon sold film rights to his work to German-controlled Continental Films and radio rights to Radio-Paris, a station run by Germans and French collaborators. No mention is made in his memoirs of those wartime windfalls. Nor does he mention, after the Liberation, being placed under house arrest by the Les Sables d’Olonne police and FFI while staying at a resort hotel. Nor does he disclose that his brother, Christian, a member of the Belgian fascist Rexist Party, was tried in absentia and condemned to death as a collaborator.
“What do you call a man who suffered more from the Liberation than from the Occupation and who hastened to go abroad in 1945?” Assouline asks. “Suspect, to use the term of one of his novels.” The Occupation most definitely “filled (Simenon’s) coffers,” but whether the author’s collaboration “was primarily economic, intellectual or moral,” Assouline cannot with confidence say. “Like many French writers during the war,” Simenon “tried to carry on as though little had changed” (Adam Gopnik, New Yorker). “He had no particular beliefs, except in the preservation and cosseting of his own skin (Lucy Sante, Bookforum). “More pro-Simenon than pro-Nazi” concluded Mark Lawson in the Guardian. The French government eventually reached a similar conclusion, judging the author to have been more opportunist than active collaborator during the war. As such, Simenon was free to leave France and spend his capital elsewhere.
Simenon’s novels regularly received positive to rave reviews; the critical reception to his memoirs was less complimentary. In her largely scathing review of Intimate Memoirs in the New York Times, Mavis Gallant complained: “By turning us into voyeurs, he manages to divert our attention from his deepest secret, his creativity.” In his adopted country, a Tribune de Genève reviewer was aghast at the “banality” of the nonfiction: “One would believe that Simenon, the novelist, and Simenon, the writer of the intimate journal, are two totally different men.” Simenon himself joined the chorus, his own regard for his memoirs fluctuating. Je me souviens was “often inaccurate,” as was the autobiographical fiction Pedigree, he said. (About certain depictions, the courts disagreed, awarding several Liège personages damages for defamation. As a result, a number of passages had to be scrubbed from the novel’s 1952 edition; “offending” sections were also deleted from Je me souviens before its republication.) Simenon declared When I Was Old “false” and “contradictory” because Denyse was looking over his shoulder, reading every word. He dismissed the Dictees in a Dictee as “nothing but chatter…. At bottom, I have nothing to say.” Ultimately, Intimate Memoirs was the only volume he stood wholeheartedly behind, defending until his death its “crude truth.”
The slyest, most entertaining “memoir” Georges Simenon composed was the one “penned” by his character. Maigret’s Memoirs (1951), the only first-person Maigret, is a novel that affords the Chief Superintendent the “welcome opportunity of explaining (his) relations with Monsieur Simenon.” Maigret’s first impression of the journalist-turned-novelist: “He seemed to have no lack of confidence about anything, least of all himself.” Maigret’s Memoirs pits the stalwart Jules against pushy, arrogant, wildly ambitious Georges Sim who, without invitation, invades the policeman’s life, turns him into a fictional hero and profits enormously from the association. It is book that brims with wit, playfulness and irony—the rare example of Simenon having a laugh on himself. And in just 134 pages it’s done and dusted.
Kat Meads is the author of three essay collections, including IPPY winners 2:12 a.m. and These Particular Women. Her prose has appeared in New England Review, Agni online, Chicago Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She lives in California.