Volume 31, Number 12 · July 19, 1984
The End of the Tether
By Julian Symons
Intimate Memoirs, including Marie-Jo's Book
by Georges Simenon, translated by Harold J. Salemson
Helen and Kurt Wolff/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 815 pp., $22.95
It would be unwise to regard any of Georges Simenon's three approaches to autobiography as factually accurate. Pedigree (1948) began with the writer drawing a genealogical tree of the Simenon family, but became a book that although obviously based on the writer's childhood and adolescence in Liège, has a protagonist named Roger. Twenty years later Simenon called it 'not really accurate…in spite of what people think and what, out of laziness, I have let them think.' When I Was Old is a notebook record kept from June 1960 until early in 1963, when Simenon was nearing sixty. It appeared in 1970, published because 'I have not felt old for a long time' and 'no longer feel the need to write in notebooks.' The notebook contains tender pictures of family life, Easter eggs for the children hidden in Denise Simenon's boudoir, chocolate bunnies bought for everybody by ten-year-old Marie-Jo. It gives an affectionate picture of Denise, called 'D' throughout, 'who wants so much to make us all happy' but is often unwell, struggling to regain her joy in living. 'What did I say to provoke a painful crisis? I don't know at all. I search in vain…. Words are like drops of acid on a burn.' This, we are now told, is a book that should never have appeared, much of it having been written 'to try to keep a woman, my wife, from slipping into the abyss' of alcoholism.
Review, 3059 words
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