French title: L’Ours en peluche
Year: 1960
Englished: 1972, tr. Henry Clay
Teddy Bear – Georges
Simenon
Our parents and society impose three rules on us. Be
sane. Be heterosexual. Be gainfully employed. Hardcore readers like us, because reading has turned our brains, have long had suspicions that the world did not in fact work the way adults would
have it and doubting most things we had better be ready for anything. And we always knew that most people go through life following the basic rules not mindfully. And when they have a crisis, they have no answer. Life questions them when somebody dies, a relationship
blows up, or something terrible happens and they stamp their foot. “I
followed the damn rules. Why is this happening to me? This! To me!”
And this foot-stamping is what most of Simenon’s
non-Maigret existential novels are about.
In this short novel, Professor Chabot, a renowned gynecologist who
runs his own obstetrics clinic, is a pillar of Parisian society, counting among
his patients the rich and famous. Loyal women return to him confinement after
confinement for support.
Yet this doctor, at forty-nine years old, has become weary of an
exhausting existence. Life has come to a halt. Both family and professional life are nothing but
routine, as he feels lonely and isolated all the
while constantly surrounded by patients, colleagues, nurses, and clerks who are
depending on him for a stream of opinions and decisions. The doctor is
being questioned by life - daily and hourly – how’s this endless work for
things you don’t even want working out for you? In what sense is being on
automatic all the time showing fairness and respect to people? How is it you
have no relationship with your own kids? What's with this secret drinking of copious amounts of brandy?
And he is doing his damnedest to avoid the responsibility
of identifying how he feels about those questions. Distracting himself with
work and affairs and dopey parties.
His love affair with a simple country girl, the Alsatian Emma, is
sabotaged by his mistress. After Emma is fished out of the Seine, the miserable
Chabot starts to feel alarming symptoms like anxiety, irritability, confusion, and
a loss of sharpness in his professional focus and powers. The eagle-eyed
patients and nurses see the cracks in his professional mask. But he feels the
need to escape his duties, while, however, remaining the all-powerful
decision-maker, the center of attention. He
feels aggrieved that he is the one that is always giving care and never getting
anything in return from all the voracious takers around him. Anger sometimes drives people to reform – but it also gets them to foot-stamping, making irrational demands of other people, of the world, of himself.
Simenon shows his usual power in evoking backdrops: Chabot’s
too-large apartment and the luxury clinic are described superbly. He also
includes a great party scene of soulless wealthy people and idle celebrities
and an aside in which Chabot’s mother expresses her contempt for the rich and
all their pretentious trappings.
But central to the story, as usual, is his depiction of the
psychology of a middle-aged guy - provoked by an accident, illness, or chance
human encounter - who realizes he’s been living all wrong, evading the duty to
answer life’s hard questions, and feeling he has to escape his shame,
self-disgust, and hopelessness.
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