No biography brief or otherwise could possibly do Georges Simenon justice. What’s there to write that he didn’t write himself? Simenon published hundreds of novels under his own name, hundreds more under pseudonyms, wrote short stories aplenty, and reportedly dictated twenty-one volumes of memoir that he would later agonize over, condense, and ultimately label a wasted effort. The man had ideas, things to say, stories to tell.
Born in Liège, Belgium on February 13, 1903, Simenon wasted little time putting pen to paper. By the age of fifteen he was making a living as a reporter; at nineteen, he moved to Paris and began writing fiction. Once he had the hang of it, he claimed to write 60 to 80 pages a day, completing novel after novel in record time. (Hitchcock, on calling Simenon’s house and being told the author couldn’t come to the phone because he was deep in concentration beginning a new novel, supposedly quipped, “That’s all right, I’ll wait.”) Before turning thirty, Simenon had created his most famous and enduring character, Commissaire Jules Amedée François Maigret, of Paris’s Brigade Criminelle, a man who liked his stove warm and his sandwiches sent up from the bistro, an inspector who pursued criminals and ne’er-do-wells across Europe and the world, a fine detective but even more so a dogged one, who kept working the case until it was done, then poured himself a healthy glass of wine.
Through it all, Simenon seemed to take little pride in his books (his Maigret novels especially), though his reputation mattered to him a great deal, as did his financial success. He was liberal with interviews, maintaining a cynical distance from his work and its popularity. It was the same cynicism—a world-weary familiarity with base impulses, an observant eye sometimes focused, other times misdirected, a casual way of casting judgment and calling judgment into question—that filtered through much of his fiction.
Collected here are ten particularly cynical items written, said, and pontificated by Simenon. Are they the ten most cynical items in the author’s repertoire? Almost certainly not. Anyone who claims to have read all of Simenon with any discernment is probably setting you up for a scam. But they are ten items that capture a little piece of the author, for better or worse, and his work.
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Simenon the Cynical
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10. “The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.”
—Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
9. “We are all potentially characters in a novel—with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
—attributed
8. “Sunday lay so heavily in the air as to become almost nauseating. Maigret used to claim openly, half seriously, half in fun, that he had always had the knack of sensing a Sunday from his bed, without even having to open his eyes.”
—My Friend Maigret
7. “She manages everything. Myself, I have but one rule for doing business. That is to get and spend money. The first words I heard as a baby were Money! Money! Money! But money is not for banks, it is not for stocks, it is not for real estate. It is to spend. Money is so many hours of somebody else’s life. Who has the right to hoard somebody else’s life? No, no, money is to be got rid of!”
—Interviewed by Brendan Gill, New Yorker January 24, 1953
6. “You know, Fellini, I believe that, in my life, I have been more Casanova than you. I made the calculation a year or so ago that I have had 10,000 women since the age of thirteen and a half. It wasn’t at all a vice. I have not the slightest sexual vice, but I have the need to communicate.”
—Interviewed by Federico Fellini, L’Express, February 21, 1977.
5. “Everybody at Timo’s had killed at least one man—in the war or wherever. Perhaps by informing on someone, which was the simplest way. You didn’t even have to sign your name.”
—Dirty Snow
4. “His mouth open, he fell asleep, because a man always falls asleep in the end. One weeps, one shrieks, one rages, one despairs, and then one eats and sleeps as if nothing had happened.”
—unknown/attributed
3. “Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”
—Interviewed by Carvel Collins, Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 9, Summer 1955.
2. “Later they asked me why my novels are all so black. I told them that I don’t think of them as black. I am not, I said, an ecrivain noir. On the contrary I am an idealist. If I write so often of morbid people and things, it is to shake my fist in anger at all the evils they have to suffer. I was born in the dark and the rain, and I got away. The crimes I write about—sometimes I think they are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away. I am one of the lucky ones. What is there to say about the lucky ones except that they got away?”
—Interviewed by Brendan Gill, New Yorker January 24, 1953
1. “A whole life. So many hours, so many pages. Why?”
—From the introduction to Intimate Memoirs
