A job for Maigret — who killed author’s daughter?

Press, 21 January 1982, Page 13

A job for Maigret — who killed author’s daughter?

By

ROBIN SMYTH

from Paris

After a life full of bestsellers. critical acclaim, accommodating women, adoring children, limitless money, a hacienda in Tucson, and a castle in Switzerland. Georges Simenon has written an autobiography which is a cry of bewilderment and pain.

He wants to know why his beautiful daughter. Marie-Jo. lost her will to live at an early age and committed suicide when she was 25. He believes — though he later appears far from sure — that the solution lies in something that happened when the child was alone with her mother. Simenon’s estranged second wife Denise. That was when Denise Simenon, the grand passion of the author’s life and mother of three of his four children, was moving through alcoholism into more or less permanent mental breakdown (this is his story — she has her own version). The love of Georges and Denise Simenon had turned into a remorseless battle fought through lawyers and rival memoirs. We are not to know his solution to MarieJo's death because her mother’s lawyers have had it removed from the book, leaving blank patches in the text.

Simenon’s “Memoires Intimes,” now published in Paris, closes the oeuvre of the most prolific serious writer of the century. Born 79 years ago in the back streets of Liege. Simenon has written more than 200 novels and detective stories as well as almost as many potboilers under pseudonyms, some of which are now being reissued in paperback in France for terminal Simenon addicts. He started life on what he called “the third rung” from the bottom of the social

ladder. His Belgian father was an insurance company clerk and his half-Dutch, half-German mother a shop assistant. As a teen-age newspaper reporter he developed an insatiable curiosity about other people’s lives. A brief spell as secretary to an eccentric French marquis developed a taste for luxury

— the best restaurants, cars, and houses. But a close look at the marquis and his friends shattered any illusions he might have had about beautiful people at the top of the social ladder.

His gaze was thrown back on the lowest rungs, on the desperation and poverty which his mother was sure lay in wait for a son who thought he could live by writing. In his early twenties he had already amassed a small fortune by hammering out mindless fiction for French pulp magazines at a rate of up to eight stories a day.

In his late twenties he invented Inspector Maigret, who won an immediate following. Literary Paris is suspicious of writers who try to rise from the ranks of popular fiction, but Andre Gide. Celine, and Marcel

Ayme confessed to being dazzled by Simenon. When he had been married 20 years his first wife, Tigy, who had threatened to commit suicide if he was unfaithful, found him in the’arms of Boule, their devoted housekeeper. It had been an odd marriage. Tigy, an artist and intellectual three years older than her husband, had refused to bear him a child until she was 39. He decided to make a full confession: he had been unfaithful almost every day of their married life and sometimes several times a day, with Boule and with “hundreds of other women.”

His wife was so stunned by this news that she not only decided to live, but to stay with him as a companion while he pursued his career of sexual conquest. After the war thej r took their son, Marc, to Canada and the United States where Simenon fell deeply in love for the first time with Denise, a highly strung French Canadian who had become his secretary. Soon

Simenon was leading exactly the life he wanted. He had the intelligent Tigy to command his household, Marc to play with, Denise — whom he calls D — to occupy his bed, and occasional visits to Boule for the first part of the night. The women got on well together until D became pregnant. It was then clear that Simenon would be in danger from the American' immorality laws if there was not a divorce. Tigy moved off with a lai-ge slice of the Simenon fortune, leaving Marc. Such was the glamour of Simenon for his children that mothers had little chance in that direction. D bore him two sons and Marie-Jo. Simenon always felt that there was something unstable about D, but he was confident that he could put it right. The cure was not ideal. It included heavy drinking and visits to brothels where D — he reports — picked the girls and joined in the lovemaking. After a series Of splendid American houses thev settled in a Swiss castle

with a fleet of servants and secretaries.

All the time Simenon was working on Maigrets with considerable success, and on novels which were of variable quality. He cut down the time he spent on each book from 12 days to about seven. The proces of writing had always caused him anxiety, sometimes resulting in stomach pains and vomiting.

He was an international celebrity with television teams, writers, and journalists queueing for interviews; but when the books were written he never wanted to see them again. He was embarrassed when admirers questioned him about characters he had forgotten. This dedicated watcher of other men hated to be studied. “I detest myself,” he once told an interviewer.

Simenon saw his own children as his only true witnesses. From the start he was intensely — sometimes absurdly — eager to win their approval. He records how before his eldest son was born he took a physical fitness course so that the baby would have a good first impression. On every other page of the memoirs, he calls out messages of affection to

his three sons and dead daughter. Marie-Jo's writings and pathetic last messages are added as an appendix to the book.

After D had spent some time in a psychiatric home, her husband says that he was warned that he and the children would be in danger if she ever returned to live with them. That is his story. In her memoirs, which were published first, D presented herself as a woman forced out of her family by a ruthlessly self-centred husband and a corrupt psychiatrist.

The teen-age Marie-Jo, with her long fair Alice-in-Wonderland hair, looked uncomplicated enough; but soon she was washing her hands all day pursued by a terror of uncleanliness. At some turn in the terrible marriage of her parents, Marie-Jo had seen, felt, or been told something that had blown her emotional bridges.

When she was eight MarieJo had persuaded her father to give her a wedding ring and she resented all female rivalrv for his affections

with an insistence that — as he admits — had incestuous undertones. At the end she asked to be cremated with the ring on her finger. In a letter to her father before a first failed suicide attempt, she wrote: “This ring is the only thing that has counted in my life. You understand?”

Simenon's old age would be dread indeed had he not seduced his wife’s Italian maid, Teresa, who has become his devoted companion. He has decided that one reason why he dislikes himself is that his wealth has moved him too far from his true condition, which is that of the “little people.”

He has now finished with writing and banished his books to a library on the other side of Lausanne. He and Teresa dismissed the servants, sold five cars in one day, and moved into a relatively small house with workmanlike furniture. He has strewn the ashes of Marie-Jo in the garden — and waits for his ashes to join her. Copyright — London Observer Service.