Damian Whitworth.
Georges Simenon was one of the 20th century’s most prolific authors and probably its most promiscuous. His energy in the study was matched only by his voraciousness in the bedroom, where he claimed to have slept with 10,000 women.
In the life of Simenon, best known for his 75 novels about Jules Maigret, the lugubrious, pipesmoking Parisian detective, the numbers are so large that it is hard to be exact.
According to Unesco he is the 17th-most translated writer and estimates of how many copies of his works have been sold vary from 500 million to a billion. He bashed out thousands of words a day, completing Maigret novels in about a fortnight. He wrote almost 400 novels, plus 160 short stories and novellas under his own name and more than 1000 short stories under at least 15 pseudonyms.
The story goes that Alfred Hitchcock rang one day and was told that Simenon couldn’t come to the phone because he was in the middle of a novel. He replied: ‘‘That’s all right, I’ll wait.’’
The crime novels are only about 160 pages long, but the speed at which Simenon spilt words on to the page was astonishing.
The extent of his sexual incontinence is harder to pin down. That huge number of partners was only ever a rough figure. In 1977 he told his friend, Federico Fellini, the film director, that he had calculated that since the age of 13 he had slept with 10,000 women. That would mean that for more than 60 years he averaged more than 160 different sexual partners a year. For decades Simenon has been included in the annals of all-time great lotharios but with inevitable speculation that this was merely a boast.
Now corroboration comes from none other than the author’s son, John Simenon, the guardian of his literary legacy and, it would seem, his sexual legend. ‘‘It’s realistic,’’ says Simenon of his father’s claim. The key is that the vast majority of the women were prostitutes. ‘‘He wasn’t talking about seducing 10,000 women. [He was saying he] had sexual intercourse with most likely 10,000 different women, just by calculating once a day for so many days of his life.’’
I am still incredulous, so Simenon expands. ‘‘There is nothing extraordinary in having sex once a day. People recommend now to live to be old you have to have sex at least three to four times a week. That is not that much less than what he was computing and if you think [he would] go in the brothel, spend half an hour and come back it is not so far-fetched in terms of numbers and in terms of what it actually meant.’’
John is one of the author’s sons by his second wife, Denyse, and grew up mostly in Switzerland where his father’s brothel-creeping was part of the daily routine. ‘‘I was raised knowing that that was something that he would do. I knew he would and that was fine. It didn’t detract from his fatherly duties and husbandly duties either.’’
We are talking about Georges Simenon’s extraordinary life in a room with views over a rainy London at the offices of his British publisher. Simenon died in 1989 and, his son says, in the decades since there has been ‘‘a trough’’ in his popularity in Britain. Now Penguin is publishing new translations of the Maigret novels at the rate of one a