Romain Gary

Vilnius, Warsaw, and Nice, 1914–1938

Roman Kacew was born in Vilnius on 21 May 1914 to Jewish parents, Mina Owczyńska, an actress turned tailor, and the businessman Arieh-Leib Kacew. The family was deported to Russia in 1915 and returned in 1923; his parents divorced in 1925. Gary later told many different versions of his own childhood, including the claim that his real father was the silent film star Ivan Mosjoukine, whom his mother had worked with and whom he resembled.[3]

At fourteen he and his mother reached Nice, entering France illegally. He studied law at Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris, and became a French citizen in 1935. His mother's fierce ambition for him, and her insistence that he would become a great man of France, became the subject of his memoir Promise at Dawn.[3]

The Free French Air Force, 1938–1945

Gary joined the French Air Force in 1938 and trained as a pilot. Of nearly three hundred cadets in his class, he alone was not commissioned as an officer, which he believed was because he was a foreigner and a Jew. He was made a sergeant only after a three-month delay, and was lightly wounded in June 1940.[3]

The armistice disgusted him. After hearing Charles de Gaulle's radio appeal he escaped to Algiers by plane and joined the Free French, serving as a bombardier-observer with the Lorraine bombing group in North Africa and Europe. On 25 January 1944 his pilot was temporarily blinded, and Gary talked him to the target and home again, landing at the third attempt. He flew more than twenty-five sorties, finished the war a captain, and was made a Compagnon de la Libération. During these years he changed his name to Romain Gary.[3]

The diplomat and the first Goncourt, 1945–1961

Gary published his first novel, Éducation européenne, in 1945, and entered the French diplomatic service on the strength of his war record. He served in Bulgaria, Switzerland and at the French mission to the United Nations in New York, where he came to know the Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. From 1956 to 1960 he was Consul General in Los Angeles, which introduced him to Hollywood.[3]

In 1956 he won the Prix Goncourt for Les Racines du ciel, a novel about a man defending the elephants of French Equatorial Africa, and one of the first novels anywhere built on what would now be called ecology. He married the British writer and Vogue editor Lesley Blanch in 1944, and the marriage lasted until 1961, the year he left the foreign ministry.[1]

Jean Seberg, the films, and White Dog, 1962–1979

In 1962 Gary married the American actress Jean Seberg, twenty-four years younger and already famous from Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Their son, Alexandre Diego Gary, was born in 1962, and later described his father as physically present but absorbed in work. Gary wrote for the screen, co-wrote the film The Longest Day, and directed two films, one of them starring Seberg. The marriage ended in divorce in 1970.[2]

His 1970 book White Dog came out of their Los Angeles years and the American civil-rights struggle, taking its title from a dog trained to attack Black people. When Seberg died in 1979, after years in which the FBI had run a campaign to discredit her over her support for the Black Panther Party, Gary called a press conference and blamed the agency publicly for destroying her.[2]

Émile Ajar and the second Goncourt, 1974–1980

By the mid-1970s critics had written Gary off as a spent commercial novelist. He answered by inventing one. Under the name Émile Ajar he published Gros-Câlin in 1974 and La Vie devant soi in 1975, the story of an elderly Jewish former prostitute in Belleville raising the son of an Arab prostitute. The Académie Goncourt gave it the 1975 prize, not knowing who had written it.

The prize can be awarded to a writer only once, and Gary had already won it in 1956. To sustain the deception he recruited his cousin's son, Paul Pavlowitch, to appear in public as Ajar and meet the press. The critics who dismissed Romain Gary praised Émile Ajar as the freshest voice in French fiction. Gary let the trick stand for the rest of his life, explaining it only in a posthumous book, The Life and Death of Émile Ajar.[1]

Death in Paris, December 1980

Gary died by suicide on 2 December 1980 at his apartment in Paris, shooting himself with a revolver. He was 66. He left a note insisting that his death had nothing to do with Jean Seberg's the year before, and stating plainly that he was Émile Ajar. His body was cremated at Père Lachaise, and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean off Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, where he had lived in the 1950s.

How Gary wrote

Gary wrote fast, warmly and in many voices, and he distrusted a fixed literary identity more than most writers distrust failure. He published under at least four names besides his own. The Ajar books show how far the disguise went: a looser, slangier, more broken French, close to the speech of immigrant Belleville. Nobody recognised the man who had won the Goncourt twenty years earlier.

His constant subjects come from his life: exile and statelessness, the mother who demanded greatness, the fight against cruelty, and the survival of dignity where none should be left. Les Racines du ciel argues for the elephants; La Vie devant soi puts an old Jewish woman and an Arab boy in one room and lets love be the whole argument. He wrote in French but spoke five languages, and translated several of his own books into English.

Reception and legacy

Gary is now counted among the major French novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, and the Ajar affair is one of literature's most famous hoaxes. It is also read as a case against critics: the same reviewers who found Gary exhausted found Ajar brilliant, without knowing they were the same man. La Vie devant soi remains one of the best-selling French novels ever, filmed in 1977 as Madame Rosa, which won an Academy Award.

France has honoured him steadily since: a square in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris carries his name, the French Institute in Jerusalem is named for him, and in 2019 his work entered the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. His life keeps returning to the screen, with Yvan Attal playing him in the 2019 film Seberg and Denis Ménochet in a 2022 adaptation of White Dog.[3]