Private I : THE MAN WHO WASN’T MAIGRET: A Portrait of Georges Simenon, <i> By Patrick Marnham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $25; 322 pp.)</i>

When I think of Georges Simenon, I see a man in a mask sitting in a bare room, writing; it might be an image out of a painting by Simenon’s fellow-countryman, the surrealist Rene Magritte. There is something uncanny about the creator of the great detective Maigret, something sinister and faintly alarming. He seems not quite human, or perhaps more than human, this man who before his death in 1989 had written nearly 400 novels, who had sales of 500 million copies in 55 languages, who after he had given up writing fiction dictated 21 volumes of memoirs, and who claimed to have made love to 10,000 women. Not your average wordsmith, certainly.

Simenon was born in 1903 in Liege, inheriting from his Flemish-Walloon-Dutch-German forebears what Vladimir Nabokov would have called a salad of genes. His adored father, Desire, one of the chief models for the character of Inspector Maigret--was an insurance clerk, a slow, tranquil, infinitely accommodating man who shielded his feral son from the threats, and sometimes the fists, of the boy’s self-loathing mother. The Simenon family was large and loud--25 people sat down to Sunday lunch--and young Georges from an early age had ample opportunity to study the passions that lie just beneath the surface of domestic life.

In the opening pages of this admirable biography, Patrick Marnham paints a lively picture of the Liege of Simenon’s childhood, a provincial city that had changed little since the Middle Ages. The life of the streets was colorful, noisy and harsh. Marnham speaks of the newspaper-seller, whose cart was drawn by a dog, and of the vendors of mousetraps and shoelaces and holy statues. “But perhaps the most specialized trader of all was the collector of urine. He had a barrel on his cart into which he emptied jugs of urine . . . which had been allowed to stand for a few days. He sold it on to dyers, and the barrel was regularly scraped for phosphorus, which was sold to match makers.”

The Simenons were Catholic, and Georges was brought up to be devout, even serving for a while as an altar boy. He was a prize pupil at school, and at an early age had decided he wanted to be a priest. All that was to change, however, with the coming of the Great War. Early in the hostilities, Liege was occupied by the Germans, and overnight the world that the boy had known was turned upside-down. “Occupation,” says Marnham, “was a slow process of corruption, of abandoned standards and compromises, and this did not escape the attention of an intelligent boy.”

From his first-hand experiences of the war, Simenon learned that “there was no such thing in life as strict rules which applied in all circumstances,” a dictum which informs all his fiction. Inspector Maigret, for instance, tracked down criminals less through procedure than through intuition and an objectivity that let him look upon even the most brutal criminals without pity or hatred. Simenon’s own motto in life, and in art, was “to understand and not to judge,” and this is the basis on which his greatest creation--the massive, pipe-smoking, infinitely patient Inspector Maigret--works. What interests Maigret is not the forensic procedures of the law but the nature of human nature itself, the ways in which the human mind and heart operate. He does not carry a gun, does not engage in manhunts (except at his own leisurely pace), is happily married, likes his good ragout and his glass of wine, and is utterly fair to the guilty as well as the innocent.

Maigret is unlike his creator in many respects. Simenon, if we are to believe his biographer, was an incurable obsessive: truculent, high-strung, promiscuous, often small-minded and unforgiving. What they have in common, however, is a fascination with the Other, the lonely, lost individual plotting dark deeds behind the fusty curtains of his cheap hotel room. Simenon realized that he himself might have been just such a loner had he not found his calling as an artist.

Once young George sensed that the rules of the big world had given way, he quickly understood that the rules in his own, small world might also be dispensed with. By the age of 12 he had lost his virginity and his religion. In 1918, when Georges was 15, his father suffered a crippling heart-attack, and the boy was forced to leave school and take up work as a pastry cook, a job he detested. Then one day in 1919, passing by the offices of the Gazette de Liege, he went inside and asked for a job. Simenon, who had a cavalier way with the facts of his life, gave differing versions of this piece of impudence, but whatever the true circumstances, he did get a job, and found himself, not yet 16, reporting murder cases from the local courts, dressed for the part in a snap-brim hat and a mackintosh, and drinking and whoring with the most hardened of his colleagues.

He also began to write short stories, at an astonishing pace, under the pseudonym “Georges Sim,” the name he was to publish under for many years to come.

The experiences of these precocious adolescent years in Liege were to form the basis of a view of life and the world that remained constant throughout Simenon’s life. He fell in with a world-weary group of young painters and poets who called themselves “La Caque,” one of whose number, the drug-addicted “ le petit Kleine “ ended up hanging himself by his scarf in the doorway of the local church of St. Pholien (Simenon was fascinated by Kleine’s death and, as usual when something fascinated him, he used the incident as the basis of one of his novels, “Le Pendu de St. Pholien” --”The Hanged Man of St. Pholien”).

Two of Simenon’s friends from those days were later charged with murder, and there was of course the daily round of criminality and its aftermath to be witnessed from the reporters’ box in the courts. The streets too were rife with violence, as the hunt for collaborators continued in the months after the war. By the time Simenon at the age of 20 set off to make his fortune in Paris, he had already amassed enough experience to fill the entire life of an ordinary man.

At first, times were hard for him in Paris, and there were occasions when he went hungry, though Patrick Marnham is able to revise somewhat the self-created legend of the penniless young man “who spent his days tramping the streets looking for work and the evenings with his face pressed against the glass of brasserie windows, gazing at the food he could not afford to eat.” He found work as a messenger to a somewhat dubious political group, and spent his nights furiously at work on his short stories, which he quickly began to sell to magazines; very soon he was publishing crime novels, which he could produce in a week or two of intense and unremitting labor. In 1923 he returned to Liege to marry the painter Regine Renchon, whom he called Tigy.

The marriage lasted for 27 years. Tigy was a generous and understanding wife. Simenon regarded himself as sexually quite normal, yet the evidence suggests he was a lifelong erotomane who had to make love on average four times a day. (A trait, no doubt, that helped him develop the central theme of his fiction: the isolated existence of a neurotic, abnormal individual.) For many years he maintained a menage a trois with Tigy and their servant, Boule, who remained faithful to him all her life. When he was a wealthy man he kept a number of maids, each of whom could expect to be “visited” daily (a new recruit inquired: “On passe toutes a la casserole?-- “Do we all get a turn?”). Tigy, after her initial surprise, regarded her husband’s sexual energy with tolerant amusement; however, when Simenon introduced a fourth recruit to the menage she knew she was lost.

Denyse Ouimet (Simenon, who changed all his women’s names, spelt it Denise) was a French Canadian he met during his American years. He fell helplessly in love with her in the space of an afternoon; she was in her 20s, he was 42. Denise was not a particularly beautiful woman, but she carried a sexual charge (Simenon described her husky voice as “vaginal”) that he found irresistible. They were married in 1950 in Reno the day after Simenon divorced Tigy, and settled on an enormous estate in Connecticut, where their daughter, Marie-Jo, was born. A few years later they moved back to Europe and settled in Switzerland. In time Denise grew tired of Simenon and his obsessive ways, the marriage collapsed, and what had been Simenon’s possessive love turned to possessive hatred. He sold his Lausanne house and moved to an apartment with Teresa Sburelin, the last of his mistress-maids, who stayed with him to the end.

Patrick Marnham has done his best, but the modesty evident in his subtitle indicates his awareness that any biographer of this extraordinary man can do no more than paint a likeness of him. The essential Simenon remains an enigma. Marnham suggests that the writer was in thrall all his life to the lowering figure of his mother, and that when she died, his obsessive need to create fictions died with her. Perhaps. He was himself unable to account for his astonishing productivity. He was a lifelong sleepwalker, and when he wrote he entered a strange, somnambulistic state in which he “became” his characters. Art is a mysterious business, never to be fully explained, and Simenon was an artist, of a specialized kind. I believe that one of the strongest spurs to creativity for him was that he was, as he said of Balzac, haunted by the conviction of his own mediocrity. Like Balzac (who wrote the novel “ Le Pere Goriot “ in three days), Simenon worked at high speed, in a kind of trance, producing books as a bird produces song--and with the same ferocity and territorial jealousy; not for him the slow, painful poring over sentences of a Flaubert or even a Stendhal. The result is a fluid, dashing surface under which some very dark fish dart and dive.

Simenon was a difficult, lonely and dangerous man. In a New Yorker interview he said of himself: “The crimes I write about 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?” Just so.