Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon appears as a writer of immense public success and private darkness. The narrator recalls his view of authorship as a vocation of unhappiness, then sets that claim against his extraordinary productivity and fame. His life also gathers unsettling contradictions: the self-described feminist’s sexual boasts, a novelistic explanation rooted in hatred of his mother, and a daughter who used one of his novels to find the gunsmith from whom she obtained the weapon with which she died.

Identity and Literary Success

At a conference, the narrator recalls Simenon challenging a packed audience’s assumption that being a writer was wonderful. He had described writing as a vocation of unhappiness. The claim carries particular force beside the scale of his career: he wrote hundreds of novels under his own name and hundreds more under two dozen pen names. By the time he retired, he was the bestselling author in the world. His productivity makes unhappiness seem not an obstacle to the work but, in the narrator’s framing, one of its defining conditions.

Walking and the Work

Simenon’s account of how books came to him locates composition in movement. He said that all his books had come while walking. The narrator identifies him as a flâneur, a writer whose literary imagination was bound to roaming rather than simply to the desk. This detail gives physical form to his working life: the novels were associated with the act of moving through the world, even as writing itself was described as a vocation of unhappiness.

Sexual Reputation and Family History

The portrait turns from literary achievement to Simenon’s claims about himself. He boasted of having slept with no fewer than ten thousand women, many or perhaps most of them prostitutes, while also calling himself a feminist. The narrator places that self-description beside his relations with two prominent women: Colette was his literary mentor, and Josephine Baker his mistress. Their affair was reportedly ended because it interfered with his work; the slowdown left him with only twelve novels that year, a figure presented as disappointingly low by the standards of his production.

Asked what had made him a novelist, Simenon answered that it was his hatred for his mother. The narrator’s parenthetical emphasis on the hatred echoes the earlier reckoning with unhappiness, linking his account of literary vocation to a sharply personal source without explaining or resolving it.

His Daughter’s Death

The most devastating detail concerns Simenon’s daughter, whom the narrator describes as psychotically in love with him. When she was a little girl, she asked him for a wedding ring, and he gave her one. As she grew, she had the ring enlarged to fit her finger. At twenty-five, she shot herself.

The account then draws an exacting connection between Simenon’s fiction and the means of her death: asked where a young Parisienne could get a gun, the answer is that she found a gunsmith by reading about him in one of her father’s novels. The detail makes his writing part of the story’s terrible final circumstance, but it does not establish that the novel caused her death. It leaves Simenon’s immense literary production beside an intimate loss that his success cannot explain or undo.