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."