Sentimental Cliche

THE HEART OF A MAN (213 pp.)--Georges Simenon--Prentice-Hall ($3).

Emile Maugin has clawed his way to recognition as France's No. 1 actor; then his doctor hands him a part he cannot play. Maugin is a handsome 59 and looks much younger, but his heart, the doctor bluntly warns, is the tired heart of a 75-year-old man.

Bitterly, the great actor booms out his own prescription: "No women, no tobacco, no alcohol . . . not too much work." But once out of the doctor's office, he hurries to souse himself in cheap red wine, then makes love to his wife's redheaded chambermaid.

In The Heart of a Man, Novelist Simenon poses a standard fictional question: What does a man think, feel, and do when suddenly forced to face the imminent reality of death? Unfortunately, the answer in this case tends to dribble away in leaky flashback reveries with seamy Gallic overtones.

"An actor and a barman--they're brothers!" Maugin says. "Both of them live on other people's vices . . ." That is Maugin's record. At 14, he ran away from his home in the provinces with five sous in his pocket. The money was blackmail, squeezed out of a schoolboy pal whom he had caught raping his sister. Women paid his way more directly in Paris. An adoring prostitute kept him in meals and clothes; a mousy ingenue housed him (he left her pregnant); a nymphomaniac stage star married him and later took an overdose of morphine after he divorced her. Glandular charm plus superficial talent took him to the top of the theatrical heap. But inside, he was a psychic bankrupt who needed several stiff slugs of cognac to get past the first act. When he dies on the last page, it seems only reasonable to conclude that his bartender will miss him most.

In spots, Author Simenon writes with deft satire about his fellow countrymen. Where he tries for something like tragic irony, he achieves only the stale, sentimental cliche about the iron mask of success hiding suffering human clay.

Georges Simenon, 48, is fashioned of no ordinary human clay himself. With some 350 novels behind him, ranging from crime thrillers to racy pulp romances, he still maintains the working habits of a one-man assembly line. Up at 6:30 a.m., with a pot of coffee at his side, he types a 20-page chapter in 2 1/2 hours, completes a twelve-chapter novel (common in France) in twelve days. (His translators' pace: three to six months.) Explains Simenon in halting English: "I write fast because I have not zee brains to write slow."

International fame came to him when he created a slow-motion, absent-minded detective named Inspector Maigret, who got his man in a new book almost every month between 1929 and 1931. Maigret was later put on the shelf in favor of serious psychological novels, but Simenon still gets him down for an occasional workout to please such fans as T. S. Eliot, Deems Taylor, Claude Rains.

A U.S. resident since 1945, Simenon now lives in Lakeville, Conn, with his French-Canadian wife and two sons, plays a bad accordion and good bridge for relaxation. Mum about a novel and two novelettes in the plotting stage, Simenon says only: "I know I am not great. But I like to write."

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