Book reviewed by Patrick Marnham

From the Wall Street Journal

Pedigree by Georges Simenon (Trans. by Robert Baldick, with Introduction by Luc Sante) New York Review Books pp.544, $17.95.

“I was born in the dark and in the rain and I got away.  The crimes I write about are the crimes I would have committed if I had not got away”.  In this celebrated phrase – from an interview with the New Yorker – the novelist Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret, dramatised his own life with a characteristic mixture of self-congratulation and false modesty.  But Simenon was not just shooting a line.  The evidence is to be found in Pedigree, his lengthy but little-read autobiographical novel, written in the depths of Occupied France, first published in 1948 and now republished in Robert Baldick’s 1962 translation.  As Luc Sante suggests in his new introduction, Pedigree stands alone among the author’s mature novels because it is the only one not to be “composed in a willed trace state” and because it took him over two years, rather than three weeks, to write.  It is also the novel that provides the key to understanding Simenon’s genius and the connection between his life and his work. 

Pedigree provides an unforgettable picture of the Belgian city of Liège and its people as observed by the innocent but pitiless eye of a very unusual little boy.  It is a portrait on a Dickensian scale, with poverty, crime, lunacy, wealth and corruption and mockery, but a complete absence of Dickensian sentimentality. 

The story opens with the birth of Roger Mamelin in 1903 and ends with the liberation of the city from German military occupation in November 1918 when Mamelin/Simenon is 15.  The author objected to the description “autobiographical novel” but the details of Roger’s life are too close to those of Simenon’s childhood for argument.  The description of his parents, the houses the family inhabited in the working-class district of Outremeuse, the schools Roger attended, the aunts and uncles and cousins of his extended Flemish-Walloon family, the Russian and Jewish lodgers his mother takes in, are all the same as in Simenon’s life.  And in many cases the novelist has not even bothered to alter the names.  

This is Liège in the first two decades of the twentieth-century; a place where the crowded streets were dominated by lethal electric trams, where the market was made livelier by battling, foul-mouthed fishwives.  The little boy noticed and remembered the “fat, pink arms of the dairymaid”, the smell of eggs and bacon in the kitchen before a summer’s day picnic in the wooded heights outside the city and the rituals of Catholic life and, particularly, death.  Then there were the horrors of war and defeat – no fuel, no food, the terror of collective punishments and – in next to no time – all the prettiest girls on the arms of German soldiers. 

The only hero in the boy’s life is his father Désiré, an honourable failure, the tall trustworthy insurance clerk who the little boy adored.  In Pedigree, Désiré is married to Élise, Roger’s monstrous Flemish mother.  The battle between Roger and his mother dominates the story, with the child struggling to understand the volcanic, unloving personality that fate had given him for a mother.  This drama too comes straight from the author’s childhood.  “The Simenons” he once said, “took life as a straight line, the Brülls (his mother’s family) came from a tormented race.”  From the start of the story Simenon emphasises the contrast between his father’s French speaking Walloon family and his mother’s Flemish relations.  At the time of his birth in 1903, sophisticated or ambitious Belgians spoke French, the language of the country’s dominant group, and Flemish speakers were patronised and treated with contempt.  This division became worse during the twentieth century when Belgium suffered two brutal German occupations and Flemish Belgians were accused of being less anti-German. 

Shortly after the First World War ended Désiré died and one year later Simenon, aged 19, left Liège and never lived in Belgium again.  He moved to Paris, started to write pulp fiction that was published by Colette and eventually created Inspector Maigret.  One of the models for the inspector was undoubtedly Désiré, the merciful father, now brought back to life as the just policeman who exemplifies Georges Simenon’s motto, “Understand, don’t condemn”.  Maigret knows the criminal world and studies human nature; he operates on intuition, like a novelist.  Pedigree shows where the creator of Maigret gained some of his knowledge.  At the age of 15, Simenon (or “Roger Mamelin”) was living in a city made desperate by four years of military occupation.  He abandoned his schooling and hesitated on the verge of a life of crime.  He was tempted by the black-market, he joined his mother on food smuggling ventures, he had friends who procured young girls for prostitution and together they discussed opportunities for blackmail.  He was saved from the fate of his friends by chance; his father became gravely ill and Georges was instructed to leave school and find a job.

By1939, when war broke out again, Simenon, living in France, had become a highly successful popular novelist who had decided to terminate the Maigret series and win the Nobel Prize with his romans durs (hard novels), as he called his literary fiction.  His working methods were notorious.  He did not just write his stories, he lived them.  He immersed himself in the personality of his leading character, he went into “ a sort of trance” and possessed the world he was creating, and he worked in short bursts at tremendous speed.  He would type a page every twenty minutes, 1500 words an hour, 4500 words a day for twenty days.  In this way he could produce three or four books a year, and take nine or more months off. While he was writing he could drink two litres of red wine a day and still lose weight.  His children would watch him from the window, notice how his walk changed and try to guess what sort of character would emerge in the next book.  But Pedigree was different.  He did little else in 1942 except write this book.  He worked on it in 1941 and 1943 as well.  

The period when Pedigree was written explains much. With the return of German occupation Simenon’s imagination returned to his own childhood.  War had traumatised him as a boy and his relationship with Henriette was a lifelong trauma. For the purposes of the novel the author conflated the anguish, making “Élise” half-German, whereas, in real life, Henriette was entirely Flemish.  The other clear departure from biography was that “Roger Mamelin” is an only child, whereas Georges had a younger brother, Christian.  In 1944, as German forces retreated from Belgium, Christian Simenon went on the run, pursued by the Belgian Resistance and accused of collaboration.  On the advice of Georges he joined the French Foreign Legion and was killed fighting in Indo-China in October 1947, a year before the publication of Pedigree.  Henriette never forgave Georges for helping his younger brother to join the Foreign Legion.

When Simenon denied that Pedigree was an “autobiographical novel” he would insist that it was a book in which “everything is true while nothing is accurate”, making a distinction between fiction and biography that he guarded with understandable jealousy.  In fact the story was close enough to real life for three of Simenon’s fellow countrymen to sue him successfully for libel.  Was this because he had invented the facts, or because he had failed to do so?  His version of the truth was a novelist’s psychological truth, and the most important truth he revealed in Pedigree was the identity of his lifelong muse.  

Simenon married twice and enjoyed two long-standing affairs with domestic servants; he died in the arms of a maid originally hired by his second wife.  But the woman who drove his work was none of these, nor was it any of the 10,000 women he famously claimed to have conquered.  It was his mother, the over-apologetic, proud little lodging house keeper, whose standards he never managed to reach and who never loved him as she loved his younger brother.  Shortly before she died Henriette visited Georges in Switzerland, where he was living the life of a millionaire, and returned every penny of the money he had sent her over the years.  And when she died Simenon’s inspiration died too.  The man who had published 76 Maigrets and 117 dark novels battled on for twelve months and then gave up writing fiction.

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