INTIMATE MEMOIRS

by Georges Simenon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 29, 1984

In his unsatisfying but informative The Mystery of Georges Simenon (1983), biographer Fenton Bresler drew extensively, if critically, on the Belgian writer's 1981 Memoirs intimes--which Bresler described as ""a massive tome. . .verbose and heavy-handed. . .in a totally different style than any of the novels."" Now translated into English, the Memoirs are indeed, alas, a sludgy bore: nearly 700 pages of domestic confidences, 1937-1978, plus over 100 pages of writings by Marie-Jo, the daughter who committed suicide in 1978 at age 25. In maudlin, saccharine tones, Simenon at 77 addresses these reminsciences to Marie-Jo and to his two older sons, Marc and Johnny--with belabored musing on each baby's birth. (""I know you well, by Marc, whom I have often called 'my sweet Marc,' especially when I saw you watching the sky with dreamy eyes and you seemed to come back from another world when you heard my voice. What were you dreaming of inside your mother's warm womb?"") The WW II years in Belgium and France, with wife Tigy and baby Marc, bring a few intriguing anecdotes: a false death-sentence from a provincial M.D.; a mad scramble to prove non-Jewishness to an occupying Nazi. But, for the most part, tight from the start, the Memoirs shift droningly back and forth between lyrical father-to-child effusions and complacent comments on the assorted harem-ish set-ups needed to accommodate Simenon's insatiable sex-drive. GS is ""unfaithful"" (the mocking quotation marks are his) to Tigy with hundreds of women, including housekeeper Boule, ""sometimes several times a day."" Then, temporarily emigrating to Canada and America, he meets French-Canadian ""D."" (Denise), who beomes his secretary, his feverish passion, his eager procurer, his partner in lesbian-shaded threesomes. Both Tigy and Boule hang on, however--at least until D. gets pregnant and becomes the new Madame S., mother of Johnny and Marie-Jo. And D. seems the perfect mate: sensual, without jealousy, delivering all sorts of women (including a 13-year-old) to GS' bed. But ""from our very first meeting, I had been aware of her unstable equilibrium""--her alcoholism, lust for celebrity, crazy behavior; GS remains ""attached to the hope of curing her,"" yet D. gets ever more unstable after the return to France, where housekeeper Teresa takes over as favorite bedmate. So, though GS sanctimoniously intones ""I do not condemn her, children,"" he is clearly out for revenge (D. wrote her own vengeful book in the 1970s), out to put primary blame on D. for the mental instability and ultimate suicide of Marie-Jo. In fact, however, Marie-Jo's problems seem, unsurprisingly, to center on an incestuous obsession with her father--who barely acknowledges his own responsibility for the bizarre situation in which his daughter grew up. And, throughout, despite anguished rhetoric, there is much to support Bresler's view of GS as an uncommonly selfish man. (Also, Bresler takes sometimes-convincing aim at the veracity of the Memoirs.) Virtually nothing, then, about Simenon-the-writer--while readers can get the sordid details here from Bresler, in blessedly boiled-down form.

Pub Date: June 29, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1984

Categories: NONFICTION