No prospect of retreat

• Paul Theroux on Georges Simenon in The Times Online.

A lengthy read -- a foreword, apparently, to a new edition of Simenon's novel The Widow, published by New York Review Books. Simenon's output is intimidating but his writing is clean and very to-the-point; ample evidence, Theroux argues, of the anti-intellectual bent the self-educated Simenon favored throughout his life. Much of the piece is a summary of The Widow's plot, but the biographical info and critical discussion that bookend it are fascinating.

What to make of the gifted and unstoppable writer who has a rarefied existential streak but also a nose for what the public wanted? The universities are seldom any help. Simenon dropped out of school at thirteen to become a reporter, and like many self-educated people, he tended to be anti-intellectual in a defiant and mocking way, despising literary critics and giving literature departments a wide berth. The universities returned the compliment, rubbishing him and belittling or ignoring his work. The academy is uncommonly fond of the struggler and the sufferer; scratch even the most severe academic and you find a supporter of the underdog. How can (so the argument seems to run) a prolific and popular writer be any good? Usually, like Ford Madox Ford or Trollope they are nailed as graphomaniacs and subjected to cruel simplification, represented by one book, not always their best. Professorial philistinism dogged Simenon; so did snobbery. It was, after all, an embittered provincial university librarian who wrote of “the shit in the shuttered chateau / Who does his five hundred words / Then parts out the rest of the day / Between bathing and booze and birds . . .”. Simenon was the living, intimidating embodiment of Larkin’s envious lines, plenty of booze and birds available, though his daily output in the chateau was more like 5,000 words.

It's a great overview of Simenon and his work, although Theroux the globetrotting travel writer can't help himself from butting in:

The figures associated with him are so extravagant that he seems a victim of them – the numerous novels, the 500 million copies sold, the fifty-five changes of address, and his often quoted boast that he bedded 10,000 women. (His second wife put the figure at “no more than 1,200”.) But the statistics were misleading in the way that record-breaking is misleading, merely the helpless adoration of the exceptional. Simenon trotting out his big numbers sounds to me like a man’s mendacious self-reckoning, not different from the modestly endowed group of islanders in Vanuatu who call themselves Big Nambas.

Fidelity

• Joe Queenan confesses all about the number of books he reads simultaneously in The New York Times.

With books (and other such relationships in my life), I am a serial monogamist. I'm loath to read more than one at a time, and rarely have; if I'm liking what I'm reading, I finish it. It's also rare for me to bail out on a book before I finish it, although it does happen, because some books just don't ring my bell at all. (I tried to get into One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a little while back and quit about halfway through; short as it was, it was still like watching paint dry.) Someone was looking at my bookshelf recently and asked me if I'd read all of it, and my breakdown went about like this: 60% I've read the entirety of, 20% I've read enough of to get the gist, and 20% I've yet to dive into. I collect 'em faster than I can read 'em, but that probably makes me just like every other book lover out there.

• Joseph Epstein examines the friendships between intellectuals in Commentary.

I've always been fascinated by the relationships between artists, in particular; it's like watching rival gang leaders of equal power playing a cagey chess match. Friendships between creative/intellectual types tend to be short and intense, and Epstein gets into some interesting territory:

How many intellectual friendships dissolve over conflicts of opinion and ideas cannot be known, but the number is probably at least as great as those that fall apart through such normal perils as insults (intended or not) or wounds resulting from pride, ingratitude, feelings of abandonment, or misunderstanding. Nor are intellectuals immune from the riskiest of all maneuvers in a friendship: the effort to reshape the ideas and even the character of one’s friend in one’s own image.

...With intellectuals as with anybody else, jealousy is one of the ways that friendship can sadly resemble love. It is not uncommon for two close friends to resent a third person who may seem to be coming between them—or for that third party to resent a close friendship that appears to shut him out, and to seek means of retribution. The novelist Paul Theroux, for example, blamed the breakup of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul on the latter’s marriage to a woman regarded by Theroux as aggressive and interfering. Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998) was the vengeful and vitriolic result—a risible and finally unsuccessful attempt to reduce Naipaul by mocking his pretensions and highlighting his cold-bloodedness.

Theroux may possibly fall into another category—that of the person who, having no real talent for friendship himself, looks to others as ostensible friends in order to be let down by them. “He was inordinately vain and and cantankerous,” wrote Max Beerbohm about the painter James Whistler. “Enemies, as he had wittily implied, were a necessity to his nature; and he seems to have valued friendship . . . as just the needful foundation for future enmity. Quarreling and picking quarrels, he went his way through life blithely."