Post Mortem

By Martha Duffy

LETTER TO MY MOTHER

by GEORGES SIMENON

91 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $5.95.

Simenon begins his letter, dated April 19, 1974: "It has been close to three and a half years since you died, at the age of 91, and perhaps it's only now that I'm beginning to understand you." One might well tremble before such comprehension. In his hundreds of thrillers and psychological portraits, Simenon is a level observer of the cramped quarters within the human heart where there is little room for love. Letter to My Mother is so grandly misanthropic that it finally seems perversely admirable.

Mother was Henriette, a grimly independent petite bourgeoise who lived in Liege all her life. "We never loved each other in your lifetime," Simenon says. Still, he was a dutiful son. The book takes the form of a meditation during the week Simenon spent at his mother's bedside while she was dying, slowly and peacefully, of old age. There had been no truce between them. Her first words to him were, "Why have you come, Georges?"

Georges pounced on that one. Though 70 years old at the time, he returned with gleaming malice to his sixth year, when he claims his mother first began to mistrust him. If his little brother Christian cried, Henriette always asked, "Now what have you done to him?" He is ever ready with proof of her dislike for him. Many years later she gave him "a long, inquiring look" and murmured, "What a pity, Georges, that it's Christian who had to die."

One of the odd fascinations of the book is that Simenon weights the battle--over which he, of course, has sole control--quite evenly. Henriette may have been frank in her displeasure with Georges, but he can dish it out too. Looking at the lady on her deathbed, he writes, "You haven't aged in my eyes. You've always had that thin face, that lusterless complexion, those lips that widen now and then."

Ferocious Volume. After reading several such displays of spite, one might ask why Simenon completed and published this exercise. Part of the book is an earnest, if unsuccessful, effort to find forgiveness in understanding. Henriette was the 13th of 13 children; her father lost what money he had when she was five. Simenon's father died young, and getting by was not easy. In his only long novel, Pedigree, Simenon has written about his childhood in Liege; Henriette appears as Elise, a hardworking, humorless, almost avaricious woman. She eventually remarried a man who had what she always wanted--a pension from the Belgian railway.

Simenon, who wrote his first book at 17, began sending her money before he was 20. That apparently was just what she did not want. Fifty years later, when he was a rich man, she returned every penny he had ever given her. She also gave him gold coins for his own children, and he is not ashamed to say that he has not parted with them.

He concludes that his mother actually liked reverses: "The harder the problem, the more you threw yourself into it. Is it surprising that you didn't take much interest in people you regarded as the spoiled darlings of fortune?" It is not an altogether convincing conclusion to a ferocious little volume. Perhaps the only real justification for the book is the admirable short story that runs alongside the litany of blame. To give away the truly surprise ending--revealed in what are apparently Henriette's last words--would be unfair, but it has to do with the man who gave her what she always wanted, a pension.

Martha Duffy

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