Pedigree Read Free

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.
    â€”L UC S ANTE

PREFACE
    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