Pedigree (2 page)

His father, Désiré (who bears the same name as Simenon's actual father), is gentle, unambitious, content with his lot, a man who takes great pleasure in the smallest satisfactions. His family is long established in the neighborhood, the Outremeuse section of Liège, a large island in the river that to this day remains fiercely working class and proud of its traditions. Élise's family, on the other hand, is Flemish German and was prosperous until the paterfamilias was cheated out of his lumber business. Most of them have migrated to Liège and most of the women have married well. Élise, the youngest, is painfully aware that she has not, by her lights. She is fearful, pious, grasping, petty, obsessed with appearances, ostensibly self-effacing but seething with ambition—if not for herself then for Roger, who will be meticulously well-groomed and pure and superior to his peers, will fly effortlessly up the ladder of class, will fulfill all her wishes in one stroke by becoming a priest. Naturally, Roger will have none of it. His revolt is complicated primarily because he has so many oppositional strategies to choose from. Will he become a boulevard roué, a corner drunk, a black marketeer, a shuffling urban peasant? The energy and connivance he lavishes on each of these serially adopted roles reveals, of course, that he has much more in common with his mother than he would care to admit.

Simenon always insisted that
Pedigree
was the sole novel that told the truth about Belgian life. This is not an idle claim, at least if we allow for the era in which he was writing. Ambitious writers, especially from the Walloon side of the country, had long been siphoned off by the lure of Paris, and the ones that remained were content to practice a complacent regionalism. Simenon only set four of his crime novels in Liège, and lesser ones at that (by contrast he set some of his strongest works in Flanders, such as
The House by the Canal
—based on his mother's family—and
The Burgomaster of Furnes
). Into
Pedigree
, though, he pours his accumulated experience of mores and customs, language and cuisine, architecture and religion, with all the sharpness of observations made in impressionable childhood and adolescence and then burnished by two decades' absence. Inhabitants of countries more often depicted in literature may become blasé at reading the same old aperçus concerning their lands retailed again and again, but for Belgians who have only experienced things firsthand and unmediated, the effect is startling, a concentrated series of shocks of recognition. All the tropes of petty conversation are there on the page, all the minor superstitions, the strictures on dressing children, the religious-holiday baked goods, the precise cuts of meat that mark different grades of economic well-being, the exact shadings of social cruelty, the odors of shops, the styles of deviance, the disposition of rooms, the forms of address. A few of these details may be lost in translation—for example when Élise acknowledges that she cheats her husband and her tenants (“I'm going to
clip
them, I'm going to
clip
them all, whoever they are”), the verb she uses in the original is the Walloon word
strogner
. It is her only excursion into that dialect; for someone of her self-perceived class status it is a sign that she is wallowing in filth, and flaunting it.

Simenon famously prepared his novels by drawing up, on a yellow envelope, a chart of the characters' family backgrounds and connections, their educational attainments and career trajectories, their place in the hierarchical layout of their town. For
Pedigree
the yellow envelope was in his head, in fact the matrix that underlay all other such charts in his novelistic universe. The orienteering skills he acquired in Liège were so durable that for the rest of his life he could, on the basis of what were sometimes superficial visits, make a read of any town and find the plot in its geography. Furthermore, the relationships depicted in
Pedigree
were (his brother aside) the actual ones that dominated his childhood and provided the template for the view of the world he carried into adulthood and his mature fiction. Biography is notoriously unreliable—not to mention insidious and misleading—as a key to authors' works, but with Simenon the sheer mass of work and its catalogue of themes and variations make it possible to chart recurring obsessions in considerable detail. For example, the nihilistic forms of revolt he practiced as an adolescent were already suggested in
At the Gai-Moulin
(1931), and their consequences explored in
The Night Club
(1933), while the compelling mystery of the foreign student lodgers would be mined more fully in
Account Unsettled
(1954).

Simenon's work is replete with versions of both Henriette (his mother's actual name) and Désiré; the preponderance of domineering women and mild, undemanding men gives it an undeniable misogynistic bent. An extreme of sorts is attained in
The Watchmaker of Everton
(1954), in which the martyrdom of successive generations of men, at the hands of women who remain offstage, culminates in a sociopathic spree by the youngest, depicted as a justified act of rebellion. Simenon never ceased to harangue, argue with, and fulminate against his mother, most obviously in
Letter to My Mother
(1974; four years after her death) and various sections of his interminable
Dictées
(although, as Assouline points out, the actual letters he sent her during her life are notable for their warmth and lack of contention), as well as by proxy in many novels. And while there is evidence of conflict between Simenon and his father, Désiré died in 1921, aged forty-four, making him safe for canonization.

Simenon left Belgium for good a year after his father's death, waiting that long only to do his mandatory military service. His departure was spurred by ambition, of course, but he may as well have left the country in order to preserve it unchangingly in his head. He didn't visit Belgium often—the 1952 court appearance prompted the only trip he made to Liège after his departure—but on the other hand he preserved his Belgian citizenship to the end, refusing offers of naturalization from the French and the Americans, and perhaps also the Swiss, among whom he died.
Pedigree
is the embodiment of this homeland of the mind. It brings to mind Franco Magnani, an Italian American artist studied by Oliver Sacks (in
An Anthropologist on Mars
, 1995), who mentally created an accurate three-dimensional model of his native Tuscan village, unseen for many years, from which he could frame and highlight scenes in order to paint them. Simenon borrowed and transposed many elements of his primal landscape over the course of his career, and found avatars of Liège all over the Western world, but in
Pedigree
he constructed, polished, and set in motion the original. It is a dazzling clockwork miniature, in which no detail is too small and no nuance too slight for faithful reproduction.

—L
UC
S
ANTE

N
OT
so long ago, it was still fashionable for an author to introduce each of his works with a preface, a foreword or a brief note which put him so to speak in direct contact with the reader, to such an extent that the formula: ‘Dear Reader' was almost as common as the pulpit introduction: ‘Dear Brethren'.

Is it because nowadays the newspapers, with their interviews, their gossip columns and their literary inquiries, keep the public fully informed of both the intentions and the activities of the writing fraternity that this fashion has fallen into disuse?

On the occasion of this new edition of
Pedigree,
I am giving in to the temptation to follow the old custom, for various reasons which are probably not very conclusive. I have been asked, and I am still asked, a great many questions about this book; a great deal has been written about it, not all of it accurate. I know too that André Parinaud has done me the honour of devoting an important study in three volumes to me, under the crushing title of
The Truth about Simenon
, a study which is in the Press and which I have not yet read, and that he seeks in
Pedigree
the explanation, if not of all my writings, at least of certain of their aspects and certain tendencies.

Shall I be accused of presumptuousness if I provide here and now, very simply, a few first-hand details?

Pedigree
was written neither in the same way, nor in the same circumstances, nor with the same intentions as my other novels, and that is doubtless why it forms a sort of islet in my writings.

In 1941, when I was living at Fontenay-le-Comte, a doctor, on the basis of an inaccurate X-ray, informed me that I had at the most two years to live and condemned me to almost total inactivity.

At that time I had only one son, aged two, and it occurred to me that when he grew up he would know practically nothing of his father or of his father's family.

In order to do something to fill this gap, I bought three notebooks with mottled cardboard covers and, abandoning my usual typewriter, I started recounting in the first person, in the form of a letter to the big boy who would read it one day, anecdotes about my childhood.

I was engaged at that time in regular correspondence with André Gide. His curiosity was aroused. About a hundred pages had been written when he expressed a desire to read them.

The letter Gide sent me shortly afterwards was in fact the starting-point of
Pedigree.
In it he advised me, even if I still intended to address myself only to my son, to start my story again, not in the first person this time, but, in order to give it more life, in the third, and to type it as I did my novels.

It was the original hundred pages or so from the notebooks which were published in 1945, in a limited edition, by the Presses de la Cité, under the title, chosen by the publisher in my absence, of
I Remember.
Even so this text had been altered so as to omit anything which might have been taken for a portrait.

As for the new text, composed after I had received Gide's letter, if it resembles the original text in its first part, it should none the less be regarded as a novel, and I would not even wish the label of autobiographical novel to be attached to it.

Parinaud questioned me at some length on this point in the course of our conversations on the radio in 1955, trying at all costs to identify me with the central character, Roger Mamelin.

I answered him with a formula which may not be my own invention, but which I shall none the less use again, to wit that, in my novel, everything is true while nothing is accurate.

I admit too that, when I had finished the book, I searched for a long time for the equivalent of the wonderful title Goethe gave to his childhood memories:
Dichtung und Wahrheit,
a title which has been translated more or less accurately as:
Poetry and Truth.

Roger Mamelin's childhood, his environment, the settings in which he develops, are very close to reality, as are the people he observes.

The events, for the most part, are not invented.

However, particularly with regard to the characters, I used the writer's privilege to re-create reality from composite materials, keeping closer to poetic truth than to truth pure and simple.

People so completely failed to understand this that because of a facial feature, a mannerism, a similarity in name or profession, a good many insisted on recognizing themselves in my characters, and some had writs issued against me.

I am not, alas, the only one in this position: many of my colleagues have had the same experience. It is difficult nowadays to give a name, a profession, an address, even a telephone number to a character in a novel without incurring the risk of a lawsuit.

The first edition of
Pedigree
concluded with the words: ‘End of Volume One', and I still get letters asking me when the following volumes are going to appear.

I left Roger Mamelin at the age of sixteen. The second volume was to recount his adolescence, the third his arrival in Paris and his apprenticeship in what I have called elsewhere the business of being a man.

They have not been and never will be written, for, among the hundreds of minor characters which I should have to bring on to the scene, how many would result in my being condemned all over again to pay heavy damages? I dare not imagine.

When
Pedigree
was reprinted in 1952, in a new type, I cautiously, and perhaps somewhat ironically, left the incriminated passages blank, keeping nothing but innocent punctuation marks, and attributing these gaps, in a brief prefatory note, to the judgment of the courts.

In the present edition, the reader will find no blanks. Not without a certain melancholy, I have renounced even irony and pruned my book of everything which could appear suspicious or offensive.

I none the less reiterate, not out of prudence but out of a concern for accuracy, that
Pedigree
is a novel, hence a work in which imagination and re-creation play the most important part, although this does not prevent me from agreeing that Roger Mamelin has a great deal in common with the child that I once was.

G
EORGES
S
IMENON
Noland, 16 April 1957

S
HE
opened her eyes and for a few moments, several seconds, a silent eternity, there was nothing changed in her, or in the kitchen around her; besides, it was no longer a kitchen, it was a mixture of shadows and pale gleams of light, without any consistency or significance, Limbo perhaps?

Was there a specific moment when the sleeping woman's eyelids parted? Or did the pupils remain fixed on the void like the lens over which a photographer has forgotten to lower the shutter of black velvet?

Somewhere outside—it was just in the Rue Léopold—a strange life was flowing by, dark because night had fallen, noisy and hurried because it was five o'clock in the afternoon, wet and slimy because it had been raining for several days; and the pale globes of the arc lamps were flickering in front of the dummies in the dress shops, and the trams were passing by, extracting blue sparks, as sudden as flashes of lightning, from the ends of their trollies.