Compulsions

By Christopher Porterfield

THE MYSTERY OF GEORGES SIMENON by Fenton Bresler Beaufort; 260 pages; $18.95

Of Georges Simenon's two lifelong compulsions, writing and sex, only the former lends itself to anything like accurate documentation. The author's capacity to produce a novel in a burst of a week or two, usually typing a chapter a day at a rate of 92 words a minute, has yielded an astonishing output of approximately 420 volumes during half a century. Some 200 of these were early potboilers under a variety of pseudonyms; the rest are mostly spare, dark psychological thrillers, 84 of them chronicling the cases of that indelible fictional detective, Inspector Maigret.

Simenon's erotic exploits, on the other hand, while undoubtedly extensive, hover in the realm of legend. Six years ago, he boasted to a Swiss interviewer that he had known 10,000 women, 8,000 of them prostitutes. He later revised his estimate to "tens of thousands." Moreover, he professed to see nothing extraordinary in it: "It's quite a normal number--even banal."

Simenon exemplifies the dilemma that nearly any writer poses for a biographer: an outwardly uneventful life combined with a hyperactive imagination. Indeed, a Swiss psychiatric team that studied Simenon for a 1968 article in a medical journal pronounced him a fantasist, incapable of distinguishing truth from lies. In this brisk, commonsensical book, Fenton Bresler, an English lawyer and the legal correspondent for the London Daily Mail, rightly treats his subject as an unreliable witness. But before Bresler is through, his cross-checking of the record forces him to see the novelist as something more: a personality on trial.

Simenon was an eager refugee from his drab upbringing as the son of an insurance clerk in Liege, Belgium. He took on Paris in the 1920s with a sharp eye for a quick score, promoting himself as a pulp prodigy and becoming one of Josephine Baker's lovers. His invention of Maigret in 1930 soon brought him vast wealth, international celebrity and the freedom to pursue a more complete, often cruel self-absorption. To those close to him he was imperious and burdensome. His relentless couplings, conjugal and otherwise, were by his own account often starkly physical events, devoid of sentiment. One marriage ended in divorce, another in bitter estrangement. Two of his sons left home as early as possible, while his daughter conceived an incestuous attachment to him that ended in her suicide.

Today, at 80, retired from writing fiction, Simenon lives in a Swiss retreat with one of his former household maids. Popular fancy has tended to see him as the model for the benign, pipe-smoking Maigret, but Bresler maintains that the only connection is wish fulfillment. Maigret, with his equanimity, his intuitive sympathy for others, his fidelity to one woman, is the man that Simenon never could be. Less plausibly, Bresler attributes Simenon's "stunted sexuality" to his rejection by, and rebellion against, the formidably dour widowed mother he left behind in Liege. (When Simenon was 62, she defiantly returned all the money he had sent her for 40 years.) This purports to explain both too much and too little. As for how Simenon was able to write as he did, what demons drove him, why he held to such a reductive view of life, these remain, as Bresler bills them in the first place, a mystery.

-- By Christopher Porterfield This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.