Pedigree
Authors: Georges Simenon
GEORGES SIMENON (1903â1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. He went to work as a reporter at the age of fifteen and in 1923 moved to Paris, where under various pseudonyms he became a highly successful and prolific author of pulp fiction while leading a dazzling social life. In the early 1930s, Simenon emerged as a writer under his own name, gaining renown for his detective stories featuring Inspector Maigret. He also began to write his psychological novels, or
romans durs
â books in which he displays a sympathetic awareness of the emotional and spiritual pain underlying the routines of daily life. Having written nearly two hundred books under his own name and become the best-selling author in the world, Simenon retired as a novelist in 1973, devoting himself instead to dictating several volumes of memoirs.
ROBERT BALDICK was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He wrote a number of histories and biographies, and translated the works of a wide range of French authors. He was a joint editor of Penguin Classics and one of Britain's leading French scholars until his death in 1972.
LUC SANTE is the author of
Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings
, and
Folk Photography
. He has translated Félix Fénéon's
Novels in Three Lines
and written the introduction to George Simenon's
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
(both available as NYRB Classics). He is a frequent contributor to
The New York Review of Books
and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS
Dirty Snow
Introduction by William T. Vollmann
The Engagement
Introduction by John Gray
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By
Introduction by Luc Sante
Monsieur Monde Vanishes
Introduction by Larry McMurtry
Red Lights
Introduction by Anita Brookner
The Strangers in the House
Introduction by P. D. James
Three Bedrooms in Manhattan
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
Tropic Moon
Introduction by Norman Rush
The Widow
Introduction by Paul Theroux
PEDIGREE
GEORGES SIMENON
Translated from the French by
ROBERT BALDICK
Introduction by
LUC SANTE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Other Books by Georges Simenon
Copyright and More Information
A
MONG
the vast output of Georges Simenon,
Pedigree
stands alone. It is his longest novel by far, the one he kept “in the drawer” for as long as five years between writing and publication, maybe the only one not composed in a willed trance state, the one mature novel without a crime at its center. Although it was hardly his only autobiographical workâover the years he wrote two memoirs, twenty-one volumes of dictated reminiscences, and a settling of scores with his mother after her deathâit is his most fully realized merger of memory and imagination. He always claimed, as he does in his preface, that the work was spurred by the death sentence pronounced in 1941 by his doctor: a diagnosis of angina pectorisâbased on a faulty reading of an X-rayâ with a concomitant prognosis of two years to live. He allegedly wanted to leave his son Marc, then two, with an account of his background, his heritage, his ancestors, and thus wrote the text eventually published as
Je me souviens
â¦(1945). André Gide convinced him to recast it in the third person, and the result became
Pedigree
.
In fact, as his biographer Pierre Assouline established, the misdiagnosis was resolved two days afterward. Simenon was motivated primarily by literary ambition (but, as Assouline remarks, “he never accomplished anything significant without an alibi”). He envisaged quitting the production of crime novels altogether and immersing himself in a multi-volume epic based on his life, perhaps after the model of Romain Rolland's
Jean-Christophe
(Rolland received the Nobel Prize in 1915). And indeed, the first edition of
Pedigree
closes not with “The End” but with “End of the first volume.” The story begins the day before Simenon's birth and closes with the armistice, in 1918 when he was fifteen years old. A second volume would have continued with his later adolescence, his career as a fledgling journalist, and his flight from Liège, Belgium, to Paris; a third would have documented his early literary life and social maneuverings on the Parisian scene. Note that I am referring to the novel and its proposed continuation as if it were all pure autobiography, whereas Simenon in his preface insists that “it shouldâ¦be regarded as a novel, and I would not even wish the label of autobiographical novel to be attached to it.”
He made that somewhat disingenuous statement for the same reason he never wrote the two follow-up volumes. Not only is
Pedigree
autobiographical but it is such a faithful account that, since he didn't bother changing the names of some of the minor characters, he was pressed with a succession of libel suits. A certain Albert Meunier, a traveling salesman and former classmate of Simenon's, recognized himself as the subject of a brief scene in which a cook lures a boy down to the cellar of his school and molests him. He was joined in his suit by the Christian brothers, who ran the school, and together they obtained damages of 70,000 Belgian francs ($1,400 in 1950 values) from Simenon. Two years later an unnamed woman won a judgment for 20,000 francs. Soon after, an optometrist in Verviers, Belgium, who had been a student boarder of Simenon's mother, found his name in the book, along with an account of his rather mild adolescent misbehavior. This time Simenon elected to fight the suit in person, along with his lawyer, the renowned Maurice Garçon, but although his trip to the assizes in Verviers proved to be the occasion for a triumphal return of the native, he nevertheless lost the case and was ordered to pay the plaintiff 100,000 francs, reduced to 6,000 on appeal. The book's 1952 edition was issued with the offending passages piquishly left blank; not until 1957 did he establish the present edition. The molestation episode has vanished, but the optometrist, Marcel Chaumont, the son of dealers in clerical vestments, has merely become Monsieur Bernard, the son of Verviers grocers, with his antics left intact.
Small wonder, then, that Simenon opted not to try his luck with the people and incidents of his later youth. (Also contributing to his decision may have been the fact that
Pedigree
was one of his worst-selling books. According to a 1962 inventory, it had the second-lowest press run of all his works since 1945. The top ten, by contrast, all had the name of Maigret in their titles.) Anyway, the lawsuits give an idea of just how closely
Pedigree
sticks to the truth. He really only made two significant alterations to the historical record, insofar as it is known: changing the names of his relativesâthe Simenons become the Mamelins and his mother's family, the Brülls, become the Petersesâand completely eliminating his brother, Christian (1906â1947). The reason for that last decision may perhaps be surmised from something his mother said to him in 1952: “Georges, it's really too bad that Christian was the one who died.”
Nevertheless, for all that
Pedigree
sticks closely to the dates, the addresses, the personalities, and the highlights of his childhood, and incorporates seemingly every useful anecdote Simenon could remember, it is very much a novel. How could it be otherwise? No memoir could possibly furnish a childhood with such density of texture and incident, or probe so deeply and so mercilessly into the mind of Ãlise, the mother, who virtually shares the spotlight with Roger, the author's stand-in. It does, on the other hand, pursue a resolutely linear course, bounded by the natural milestones of his birth and the end of the war, without any attempt made to impose a formal design on the circumstancesâwith one exception. That exception is sufficiently strange and off-kilter to prove the rule. At the very beginning of the book, on the evening of the night that will culminate in Roger's birth, Ãlise, hurrying to fetch a friend, stops in an alley to fix her garter and sees two men in some sort of furtive conversation. One of them seems to be her eldest brother, Léopold, a drunk who lives on the margins; the other is a pale adolescent.
Soon after, an anarchist bomb damages the front of a department store a few blocks away. The reader immediately suspects the two men, and indeed the culprit turns out to be the younger one, Félix Marette, whom Léopold assists in escaping. Thereafter, for nearly half the book âuntil the beginning of the warâFélix (who changes his name to Félicien Miette) puts in regular if widely spaced appearances as he establishes himself in Paris, dodges the seedy anarchist who put him up to the bombing, falls in love, obtains a better job, becomes engaged, gets gradually embourgeoisified⦠The story loses connection with the rest of the novel, apart from a thin thread in which Léopold tries and fails to raise money for him. Léopold becomes a frequent visitor to Ãlise's kitchen, but the matter of Félix is never raised between them. (Léopold's connection to the bombing, if any, is never broached at all.) Most critics have guessed that Simenon was trying to create a sort of shadow destiny for Roger, suggesting a metaphor for the author's later course of life, but if so the strategy is so oblique that the gambit fails. The story, an unaccountable and asymmetrical distraction, just hangs there.
The novel is inevitably classified as a bildungsroman, but it is an unusual one, since while it charts the development of a sensibility it never specifies what shape that sensibility will eventually assume. It is delicately evocative when it depicts the infant Roger forming his earliest impressions:
He stared at this plain blue rectangle, and all of a suddenâhe had never been able to determine the precise moment when it beganâsomething transparent, a long, curling shape, left one corner of the rectangle and zigzagged towards another, sometimes staying motionless for a moment before being swallowed up by the infinity hidden by the window-frame.
But on the other hand it never shows him developing an early relationship with language, or even with stories. According to Simenon's other autobiographical works, his mother's student lodgers from Russia and Poland had him reading Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Gogol before he entered secondary school, but nothing like that happens hereâthe student lodgers appear to Roger almost like members of a different species. It is not until the very end of the book that we see an embryonic novelist's sensibility beginning to form (“Contrary to what he would have imagined in the past, it was the passers-by who were in the aquarium and it was he who, through the bookshop window, watched them with a curiosity tinged with pity”). What Roger mostly develops is his capacity for revolt, which is predicated on escaping his mother's control and opposing every aspect of her approach to life.