Those words come to mind when one reads about Georges Simenon. I knew nothing about him, but now know a little since I stumbled upon a recent essay written to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. Here is what I learned. You will be impressed.
He Wrote a Lot
As someone who has been unable to deliver a daily post consisting of a few paragraphs, I am impressed that Simenon would typically write 20,000 words per day and often ended up with 80 pages. He wrote hundreds of books across a variety of genres using many noms de plume. A publisher could count on a book every few weeks. It is reported that when someone rang up Simenon and was told that he was in the middle of a novel and could not be interrupted, the caller supposedly responded, “I’ll wait”. He produced almost 500 books. Many have been translated into 50 languages and 600 million have been published worldwide. Penguin books is currently publishing 75 of his ‘Maigret’ books and the New York Review of Books has issued some of his classics. There are also the films and TV series.
He Moved Around a Lot
Early in his career he lived on a boat and sailed on rivers and canals throughout Europe. He resided in Paris and had a mansion on Lake Geneva. He also lived in Florida and Arizona and, for a while, around Montreal where he apparently had time to not only write, but begin an affair with a much younger woman.
He Fooled Around a Lot
And that brings me to the promiscuous and prurient part of this post. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that you will be appalled rather than impressed by this next statistic. There is no need to incur the wrath of the #MeToo Movement by seeming to imply that one is envious of Simenon’s next ‘accomplishment’. I also hope I have no Incel readers since they might be triggered by the unfairness of the magnitude of the number about to be presented.
In 1977 (when he was 74) Simenon said that he had slept with 10,000 women and it is estimated that about 8,000 were prostitutes. Someone noted that he used prostitutes at the rate that Parisians smoked Gitanes. His wife thought the number closer to a modest 1,200. I am not sure what the score was for the remaining twelve years of his life.
Speaking of Scoring
As soon as I saw 10,000 I was reminded of another great scorer, “Wilt the Stilt”. I knew that he had scored 100 points in a basketball game, but I could not remember his off court stats. I quickly found the number which is presented in his biography, A View From Above (a nice double entendre, don’t you think?). He claims to have slept with 20,000 DIFFERENT women.
The arithmetic involved with such large numbers is beyond me. Someone did suggest that it is estimated that Simenon averaged 160 women over 60 years and more involved calculations are found in one of the sources listed. Luckily for you, someone has done a careful analysis for Wilt. See: “Did Wilt Chamberlain Really Sleep With 20,000 Women?”, Eddie Deezen, Feb. 6, 2018, MentalFloss.com. In any case, apparently both men “got lucky” many times even though Simenon was born on Friday the 13th and Wilt wore ‘13’ on his uniform.
Sources:
Apart from the Wikipedia entries see:
“It’s True, My Father Really Did Sleep With 10,000 Women,” Damian Whitworth, The Times, May 26, 2015.
“John Simon Interview: Maigret’s The Man My Father Wanted to Be,” Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph, August 31, 2019
“The Dilemma of Georges Simenon,” Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2011
"We shouldn’t be too impressed by this.[the big number]. In 1968, Simenon, with his usual indiscretion, allowed himself to be interviewed by a panel of five doctors. One of them later said that the group was struck by his unromantic approach to sex. He told them that he limited the contact to two minutes. Reportedly, he also kept his clothes on (he just unzipped). One day, when Denyse was in her study conferring with one of her assistants, Joyce Aitken, Simenon entered the room, wanting to have sex. “You don’t have to leave, Aitken,” Denyse said, and she and Simenon got down, briefly, on the rug. If you followed such procedures, you, too, could have twelve hundred sexual partners.”
“The Unlikely Life of Belgium's Greatest Sex Machine," Michael Deacon, The Daily Telegraph, June 2, 2017.
"Still, if true, hats off to the man. All the same, you do have to wonder how he maintained such a gruelling schedule. Take the women. Simenon died aged 86. If he started at 16, he must have been sleeping with 142.8 women a year. Yet he had two marriages: the first when he was aged 20-47, the second when he was aged 47-61. Which means that, unless he was quite spectacularly unfaithful, he had only 29 years (when he was aged 16-20 and 61-86) in which to sleep with 9,998 women. That's 344.8 women a year. Almost one a day."
Post Script:
But What About Warren Beatty? No Wonder He Is So Vain!
The number is 12,775 and one supposes that he stopped after he married Annette Bening in 1992. Review of: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind by Euan Ferguson, The Guardian, Jan. 10, 2010.
Among his conquests: Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Julie Christie and Cher when she was 16.
“He’s So Vain", Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York Times, Feb. 5, 2010.
The Bonus:
Unsure about the exact meaning of "Incel", I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term was coined by a Canadian woman! See the Wikipedia entry.
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