Life Made Lifelike
Pedigree. By Georges Simenon. Translated by Robert Baldick. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.) SIMENON is the proverbial horn of plenty dis- guised as the twentieth-century literary artist. His offerings pour out shaped to their inevitable short length. Their breadth, however, is only bounded by that of the souls of the characters they contain, exactly drawn down to the last spiritual pockmark, pinpointed in a psychologi- cal geography by means of a complete inter- penetration with the essence of the place which forms their setting.
Pedigree is no exception to the rule, even if the author's feeling for perfect proportion seems at first to have gone berserk. But the fact that it is almost four times his average book-length is in itself a key to the special circumstances of its composition. In 1941, so Simenon tells us, he was living at Fontenal -le-Comte and a doctor, on the basis of an inaccurate X-ray, in- formed him that he had at most two years to live and condemned him to almost total inac- tivity. His desire that his son, then aged two, should know something about his father and his father's family resulted in his temporary abandonment of the typewriter. Simenon's memory was so accurate that a number of people issued writs against him on the grounds that certain mannerisms, descriptions of facial features and similarities in names and profes- sions, were libellous references to themselves. The second edition contained punctuated blanks in the controversial places, and these were attributed, in a preface, to the judgment of the courts. In the new edition the blanks have been entirely removed and a chastened Simenon con- fesses: 'Not without a certain melancholy, I have renounced even irony and pruned my book of everything which could appear suspicious or offensive.'
What is surprising, then, is that this narrative which traces the existence (life comes with con- sciousness on page 161) of Roger Mamelin from the moment of his birth in 1903 in Liege up to the point, fifteen years later, when he gets the sack from his first job as bookseller's assistant, should succeed in propelling the reader onward through 543 pages of family trees, however mar- vellously animated. Exciting action is virtually over in the first few pages, with the description of the anarchist's bomb whose explosion preci- pitated the hero's birth. The anarchist himself, a youthful stooge, is followed for a time, but lost from sight somewhere in France at the beginning of the First World War.
His benefactor, the hero's uncle Leopold, fades out rather more mysteriously, since he forms a valid part of Liege and its daily life which embraces everything from his brother-in- law's sugared carrots to the kitchen where his sister is unobtrusively 'clipping' her lodgers.
These vanish, it is true, but seem to be re- placed by teeming thousands, all caught, if only for a moment, in actual postures so unremark- able for literary purposes that they can only be life. And, paradoxically, these hold our attention.
ARTHUR BOYARS
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