Pedigree Read online

  GEORGES SIMENON (1903–1989) 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— 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.

  OTHER BOOKS BY GEORGES SIMENON

  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

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Other Books by Georges Simenon

  Introduction

  Preface

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Copyright and More Information

  INTRODUCTION

  AMONG 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 work—over the years he wrote two memoirs, twenty-one volumes of dictated reminiscences, and a settling of scores with his mother after her death—it 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 pectoris—based on a faulty reading of an X-ray— 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…(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 should…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 relatives—the Simenons become the Mamelins and his mother’s family, the Brülls, become the Peterses—and completely eliminating his brother, Christian (1906–1947). 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 Élise, 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 circumstances—with 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, Élise, 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 —until the beginning of the war—Félix (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 Élise’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 sudden—he had never been able to determine the precise moment when it began—something 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 here—the 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.

  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 m
ake 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.