Witness for the Prosecution

By Paul Gray

INTIMATE MEMOIRS by Georges Simenon; Translated by Harold J. Salemson Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 815 pages; $22.95

A few facts in the case of Author Georges Simenon, 81, are not in dispute. He has written more than 400 books, some 220 under his own name, including the immensely popular Inspector Maigret novels. The native-born Belgian had scarcely launched his career in Paris during the 1920s when the money began rolling in; royalties and subsidiary rights reaped from the movies and TV made him wealthy many times over. His personal life has not matched the success of his career. A first marriage lasted some 20 years and produced one son. When his secretary-mistress became pregnant, Simenon looked at the legal problems he might face and demanded a divorce. He married his assistant; they had three children before a vitriolic estrangement. In May 1978 his third child and only daughter, then 25, shot and killed herself in her Paris apartment.

Grief-stricken, Simenon felt an understandable need to make sense out of Marie-Jo's suicide. He began a journal, addressed to his sons and particularly to his late daughter. His first entry assures her: "This book will be not mine but yours." Not true. As it took voluminous shape day after day, Intimate Memoirs be came exclusively Simenon's, his rambling attempt to prove, as he assures the dead Marie-Jo, that "I have nothing to apologize for."

The evidence does not support this assertion, although Simenon, who provides reams of it, never realizes what a telling witness he is for his own prosecution. "Did I have periods of snobbery?" he asks his children and concludes that "I can frankly answer no." Yet he cannot forbear reminding them of all the impressive people and places they have experienced, thanks solely to their relationship to him. While he was hobnobbing with crowned heads and the likes of Chaplin, Cocteau and Jean Renoir, he always made sure that the physicians who watched over him and his growing brood were "world famous," or at the very least "big." At Hotchkiss, one of the innumerable schools they attended, trailing behind their father's impulse to establish, then break up permanent homes, there was the doctor who "treats the sons of some of the most important in the U.S., and he was not select at random. He took care of you, Marc, you too, Johnny, as well as me."

Simenon confronts his self-engenreputation as a womanizer. He has in various interviews, the conquest of "tens of thousands" of women, sometimes at a pace of five a day. His message to his children shuffles the terms of his earlier boasts; "Never in my life had I had the idea of playing Pygmalion to any woman, because I have too much respect for human personality." Yet he did not like his first wife's given name, Regine, so he called her Tigy; he renamed the young woman who became their housemaid and his lover, dubbing her Boule instead of Henriette. His second wife, whom he now reviles and calls D. rather than Denise, underwent a similar transformation: "In Canada I had gotten D. to give up using makeup." Having made them, he could also break them. Tigy agreed to a divorce stipulation that she must always live within six miles of her son's father. Her alimony, Simenon confides to his children and the world, "was high, about as much in dollars as a top executive made at that time , a bit under the salary of a U.S. ambassador." D. gets her comeuppance in these pages, where her husband describes the mother of three of his children as a manic-depressive alcoholic given to stripping in public and calling herself a whore. As for "good old Boule," the time comes when Simenon must get rid of her too, handing her over to his oldest son's household. He complains: "I can tell that she doesn't fully comprehend the sacrifice I am making."

Perhaps such a man should never have had a daughter. Simenon hints that D. made a sexual advance toward Marie-Jo during the child's eleventh year; when the book was published in France, D. sued successfully to have two passages making this charge explicit suppressed. Whatever the facts of this tangled, pathetic affair, Simenon proudly displays Marie-Jo's incestuous feelings toward him. He danced with her to the strains of the Tennessee Waltz wherever he and his entourage happened to alight. He wrote her passionate letters before she was twelve: "Good night, good night, my tender and delicious love," adding an odd postscript: "Please share with your wonderful mother every thing I have said to you here, which is for her too. I know you are not jealous of her." Marie-Jo wore a wedding band her father had bought her when she was eight; she was dutifully informed when Simenon began sleeping with Teresa, her mother's Italian chambermaid. When Marie-Jo killed herself, she left a request that her ashes be strewn in the garden outside the room where her father and Teresa now spend their days. Writes Simenon: "Now that you are here, have come back to your real home, the whole universe has changed in my eyes, and I feel that henceforth I can never think sad thoughts about you. We have finally gotten together again forever."

As a bereaved father, Simenon is entitled to any comfort he can find. But when he goes on to tell Marie-Jo what a splash her suicide has made in the press ("Friday, France-Soir published a front-page article with a very big headline"), the realization dawns that the author is parading another tribute to himself and his fame. Intimate Memoirs does not tell the story of a man's "attentive tenderness" toward his children, as Simenon incessantly contends; the book is a chronicle of self-love, an alternately fascinating and repellent testament of indomitable ego.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

When Teresa leaves us alone, as she always does, you look at me almost with hardness, and I am afraid to understand...

You say to me indeed, as if suffocating me?' with rage: 'Why her and not me?'

'Don't you understand, my little girl?'

'Understand what?'

I point to the bed. 'Teresa shares every part of my life.'

'So?'

I have always been afraid of what I am discovering. You point to the wedding ring you asked me to get you when you were eight. What can I answer? One day, you will speak of incest in relation to your mother, in referring to an unspeakable scene, which was such a trauma to you. And now you are saying . . .

'Whatever she has done for you, I can do as well, can't I?'