Romain Gary

The Man Who Sold His Shadow

Ralph Schoolcraft

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812203202
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

In this book Ralph Schoolcraft explores the extraordinary career of the modern French author, film director, and diplomat—a romantic and tragic figure whose fictions extended well beyond his books. Born Roman Kacew, he overcame an impoverished boyhood to become a French Resistance hero and win the coveted Goncourt Prize under the pseudonym—and largely invented persona—Romain Gary. Although he published such acclaimed works as The Roots of Heaven and Promise at Dawn, the Gaullist traditions that he defended in the world of French letters fell from favor, and his critical fortunes suffered at the hands of a hostile press. Schoolcraft details Gary's frustrated struggle to evolve as a writer in the eye of a public that now considered him a known quantity. Identifying the daring strategies used by this mysterious character as he undertook an elaborate scheme to reach a new readership, Schoolcraft offers new insight into the dynamics of authorship and fame within the French literary institutions.In the early 1970s Gary made his departure from the conservative literary establishment, publishing works that boasted a quirky, elliptical style under a variety of pseudonymous personae, the most successful of which was that of an Algerian immigrant by the name of Emile Ajar. Moving behind the mask of his new creation, Gary was able to win critical and popular acclaim and a second Goncourt in 1975. But as Schoolcraft suggests, Gary may have "sold his shadow"—that is, lost his authorial persona—by marketing himself too effectively. Going so far as to recruit a cousin to stand in as the public face of this phantom author, Gary kept the secret of his true authorship until his violent death in 1980 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The press reacted with resentment over the scheme, and he was shunned into the ranks of literary oddities.Schoolcraft draws from archives of the several thousand documents related to Gary housed at the French publishing firms of Gallimard and Mercure de France, as well as the Butler Library at Columbia University. Exploring the depths of a story that has long remained shrouded in mystery, Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow is as much a fascinating biographical sketch as it is a thought-provoking reflection on the assumptions made about identities in the public sphere.

Chapter 1

The Invention of Romain Gary, 1935–1952

Little is known of Kacew’s activities in 1936–37, though one can probably discount his claims of having fought in the Spanish Civil War, completed a Slavic languages degree in Warsaw, or traveled in Ethiopia. In 1938, he enlisted in the French Air Force but the following year suffered the affront of being the only one in his officers’ training class to be refused promotion (putatively because of his recent citizenship). Despite this snub, Kacew’s service to France turned out to be exemplary. At the armistice, he escaped France in an Air Force plane and flew to North Africa, where he was admitted to the Lorraine, “the oldest and most glorious bomber squadron in the Free French forces” (Kessel 42). Serving as spotter, navigator, and bombardier, Kacew fought with his unit against Rommel’s forces (among others) throughout Africa for two years before being recalled to England. Assigned to the Hartford Bridge Air Base, Lorraine now included future French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France and Pierre Louis-Dreyfus (uncle of Adidas and Olympique de Marseille soccer team owner Robert Louis-Dreyfus, great-uncle of American actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Kacew’s reluctant bunkmate). It is at this time that Kacew began using Gari (soon anglicized to Gary) as a nom de guerre. Over a seven-month period in 1943–44, he flew many perilous missions over northern France, Belgium, and Holland. Having already survived typhoid in Syria and a crash near Lagos that killed the other passengers, Gary was one of the few from his squadron to reach the Liberation alive. In 1944–45, he was decorated with high honors. He received the French equivalent of the Purple Heart (la Croix de guerre) and the Legion of Honor and was named by de Gaulle as one of the general’s 798 surviving Companions of the Liberation (Larat 49). Gary married English author Lesley Blanch upon his return to Paris and was named embassy secretary, second class. His first diplomatic assignment, beginning in December 1945, was to the French embassy of Sofia, Bulgaria. Sympathetic to the cause of the Bulgarian liberals, Gary would watch powerless as Georgi Dimitrov gradually brought down the monarchy and installed a Communist regime. Gary was then named to a position in Moscow, but the nomination was never carried out—doubtless his former associations in Bulgaria would have compromised him in the eyes of Soviet authorities (Larat 75). In February 1948, Gary returned to Paris, where he worked on a team monitoring reconstruction in central Europe, under the orders of Paul Claudel’s son-in-law, Jacques-Camille Paris. After one-and-a-half years at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Gary was sent to Berne, Switzerland, where he took on the post of first secretary in the French embassy. The ambassador was Henri Hoppenot, formerly assigned to Washington, D. C., during the war and friend of Claudel and Saint-John Perse.

Romain Kacew (1935)

Having adopted a French spelling of his first name, “Romain Kacew” signed his first publications in 1935: two short stories, “L’orage” and “Une petite femme,” appeared in the French paper Gringoire. Neither has been reprinted, an anomaly for a writer who in the course of his career would often publish the same piece in two or three venues or recycle entire novels for republication decades later under different forms and titles.

In “L’orage,” a sullen stranger’s arrival on a remote colonial island disrupts the lives of a French doctor and his wife, Hélène. Kacew’s description of the couple’s failed marriage—“the tropical sun had killed the man in him and the love in her”—paves the way for a dramatic triangle, which is not long in materializing. The mysterious visitor (Pêche) has come to see the doctor, but stumbles first across Hélène and is immediately seduced by her beauty and vulnerability. Unfortunately, Pêche is no Paris; rather, he is a bearded brute more in the image of Zola’s Jacques Lantier. A mute animal rage invades him, and he is on the point of raping Hélène when suddenly he releases her and turns away in despair. Later, after Pêche has met briefly with the doctor (a consultation from which the reader and Hélène are excluded), Pêche heads back to his raft under stormy skies that would surely mean his death were he to set to sea. Despite the violence to which she has just been subjected, Hélène wants to prevent him from leaving under such dangerous conditions. It is now she who forces herself upon him, and they make love despite Pêche’s reticence. This fails, however, to dissuade Pêche from his suicidal departure, and only upon Hélène’s return to the bungalow do we learn from her husband the reason for Pêche’s visit and the fate that now threatens Hélène: Pêche wanted confirmation from the doctor that Pêche had in fact contracted leprosy.

Kacew’s second story, “Une petite femme,” takes place in Indochina, where a French railroad crew is laying down tracks in the sodden jungle. Here, it is an engineer’s wife (Simone Lacombe) whose arrival from France sets the tale in motion. The story initially appears to call into question the authoritarian attitude of its narrator, camp foreman Fabiani, who disapproves of the charming but capricious woman. Though Fabiani’s discipline over the crew is undermined by her presence, Madame Lacombe’s record player, dancing, and impetuous good humor improve the spirits of the bored and lonely workers. But when Fabiani is unable to prevent her from accompanying the crew on a visit to the potentially hostile neighbors (a tribe identified as the Moï), Madame Lacombe inadvertently brings about disaster. Having strolled off on her own, she witnesses a gravely ill woman, the wife of the tribal chief, languishing in a hut. Wanting to ease the woman’s suffering, Madame Lacombe administers her a sedative. The elderly woman dies immediately thereafter, and the tribe is convinced that Madame Lacombe has poisoned her. They attack the French crew, taking several workers hostage, Mr. Lacombe among them. The Moï chief, whose men are notorious for torture (says Fabiani), will release his captives only in exchange for the woman who “killed” his wife. At story’s end, Madame Lacombe evades the foreman and his assistants and turns herself over to the Moï in order to secure the freedom of the prisoners. The tale ends with captives being allowed to rejoin their camp, and we are left to assume that Madame Lacombe’s fate was an unkind one.

Both tales are cut from the same exotic cloth, obey a similar plot pattern, and differ markedly from anything that would appear under Romain Gary’s name after 1944. Despite Kacew’s mere twenty-one years, these short pieces are surprisingly mature in their mastery of suspense and structure; arguably, they even compare favorably with many of his later works in these respects. The writing style is terse, sober and without symbolic adornment.

The most noteworthy aspect of Kacew’s literary beginnings is the venue of publication, however. Founded in 1928 by Horace de Carbuccia, Gringoire cannot be deemed fascist in the strictest sense, but its relentless attacks on the “anti-fascists” (the French Communists and Socialists in particular) place it in that neighborhood. A strong dose of anti-Semitism boils on the surface as well, as shown by the tenor of the paper’s haranguing of Popular Front leader and French president Léon Blum (see Soucy 42–43). By 1935, Gringoire was fully engaged on the path that would lead it to become one of the most notorious papers in twentieth-century France. In the two issues containing Kacew’s work, for instance, one finds tributes to Abel Bonnard and Benito Mussolini, as well as articles by Philippe Henriot and Drieu La Rochelle. For figures such as these, Nazi Germany’s eventual defeat would in essence be a death sentence.¹

Reconsidering this stage of Gary’s career raises some awkward questions about a writer best known to the public as a Resistance hero, Gaullist diplomat, and liberal humanist. How do we reconcile these literary submissions with the fact that just three years later Kacew would begin his officers’ training in Salon-de-Provence and in 1940 would reject without hesitation Pétain’s pact with Hitler?

In later years, from 1956 to 1960, Gary sidestepped the issue on several occasions, downplaying the contributions as youthful ignorance. In his brief comments, he gave conflicting accounts of how he and his mother perceived Gringoire.² Given that in 1935 the foreign-born Kacew was freshly arrived in Paris from the provinces, it is possible—though unlikely—that the budding lawyer and writer was not fully aware of the paper’s politics. In Gringoire’s favor, from a young writer’s point of view, was its audience of nearly a million readers during this period (Soucy 42–43). Kacew could have been swayed, too, by the prior participation of famous authors like Kessel, François Mauriac, Somerset Maugham, Roland Dorgelès, Bernanos, and André Maurois. Be that as it may, however, the content of Kacew’s stories inclines us to consider the issue more carefully.

First of all, while Kacew’s oft-announced debt to Malraux is undeniable in both stories, Kacew has borrowed only the colonial settings, the emphasis on virility, and the unflinching violence, without the metaphysical or revolutionary dimensions that were the innovative elements in Malraux’s first novels. Far from questioning the colonial status quo (which Malraux had done to some extent in his 1920s newspapers Indochine and Indochine enchaînée), Kacew’s tales unreflectingly reproduce the most abusive aspects of it. In “Une petite femme,” for instance, the narrator guns down his native interpreter for no better reason than a fit of frustration. The death is dismissed as inconsequent, with neither the crew nor the Moï making any note of it. Moreover, Kacew’s use of the term “Moï” to identify the indigenous population is telling, for in the prewar period it was a pejorative label applied by the Vietnamese to various mountain tribes in the Annam region. “L’orage” portrays the French colons as debauched beings, a characterization in line with the editorial cartoons drawn by Pavis for Gringoire, where criticism of colonial lifestyles took issue only with the decadence of French mores.³ Like Pavis, Kacew makes no objections to the economic and physical enslavement depicted within his works. And in both of Kacew’s stories the pidgin French of the servants is accompanied by a blissful, unthinking docility. With respect to the sexes, the tragic fates that befall the women characters are seen as stemming from their own “inherent” weaknesses.

While these stories constitute a meager output and are clearly derivative, one cannot easily dismiss the portrait they suggest of “Romain Kacew, French author in 1935.” Kacew certainly never embraces, nor even for that matter discusses, the fascist and neofascist ideas already sprinkled throughout Gringoire’s columns at the time. To be more precise, these stories steer clear of any deliberate moral lesson or explicit political philosophy. But their narrative implications and character development depend upon a vision of life in the French colonies not inconsistent with the content of Gringoire in 1935. The authorial persona one deduces from these stories would have to be placed well out on the Right.

Romain Gary (1940–45)

“Romain Gary” is another writer altogether. Unlike Kacew’s economical short stories, the plot in Gary’s texts is nearly always secondary to a morality tale. Gary’s tireless championing of humanist values is one of the most characteristic features of his work, his occasional overreliance on allegories or symbolism one of the most disappointing. Though still situated right of center, Gary from the outset would break definitively with a world-view that allowed Kacew to publish in the same pages as fascists and virulent anti-Semites. Indeed, in the postwar period, some of Gary’s fiercest critics would come not from the Left but from a new generation of right-wing journalists much in the tradition of Gringoire (to some degree Kléber Haedens of Paris-Presse but especially the pseudonymous editorialists of Rivarol and Minute).

At what point did Gary make this move from the company of the future villains of Vichy to the opposing ranks of liberal humanism (philosophically) and Gaullism (politically)? The question is more difficult than one might suppose. The biography circulated from 1946 to 1948 by Gary’s French publisher states, “On June 19, 1940 [Gary] answered General de Gaule’s [sic] call and set out for England with his plane.”⁴ Based also on Gary’s articles in conservative venues like Le Figaro and France-Soir, his book of conversations with François Bondy (La nuit sera calme), and the definitive edition of A European Education, the commonly held belief is that Gary fully and permanently espoused Gaullist humanism from the moment he committed to the French Resistance. In large part because of his reputation, Gary would bear the mantle of being one of de Gaulle’s most unflagging, long-term supporters in the world of letters.⁵

There is no question that Gary’s refusal of the armistice was immediate and complete. Gary repeatedly risked his life to join up with French forces in North Africa and England. He continued to fly right up to the Liberation, even though it would have been far more prudent for him to retire from active duty owing to the gravity of his accumulated war injuries. What is dubious, however, is the claim that Gary’s Gaullist allegiance—one of the founding blocks not just of his political beliefs and public persona but of his literary project as well—dates from de Gaulle’s famous June 18 call to resist the German Occupation.

To begin with, Gary did not leave France on June 19, 1940, as the Calmann-Lévy press release asserts. Gary flew out of Bordeaux’s Mérignac Airport on either June 15 or 16 and therefore cast his lot with armed resistance before Churchill granted de Gaulle access to BBC radio.⁶

The evidence provided by Gary’s writing itself is even more important for deducing his opinions at this juncture, for it suggests that his adoption of specifically Gaullist politics did not occur until several years after the Liberation. In looking more closely at Gary’s literary production from this period, we discover that he managed a remarkable sleight-of-hand in revising his first novel for subsequent editions. Begun in 1940 aboard a steamer bound for Libya and completed in the fall of 1943 in his barracks in Surrey, England, A European Education was written during Gary’s combat duty. It was first published before the war’s end in an English translation as Forest of Anger (1944), and then in its original version in France with Calmann-Lévy in 1945 (under the title Éducation européenne). After Gary switched publishers in 1948, Gallimard eventually purchased the rights to A European Education. It was not until 1956 that the first Gallimard edition of A European Education appeared, however, the one that is currently considered the definitive text. Gallimard editions bear no mention of any changes from the original publication, and at first glance the new text seems essentially the same (one short chapter has been added and two others have traded places). A closer comparison of the 1945 and 1956 editions, however, reveals that important alterations were made that fundamentally transform the meaning of the novel. While Gary’s best-known works are undeniably Gaullist (e.g., The Roots of Heaven, Promise at Dawn and the 1956 edition of A European Education), it turns out that the original version of A European Education is not in the least.

A European Education is the tale of a young boy’s encounter with a Polish Resistance unit that has taken refuge in the forest outside of Wilno. The episodes are quite bleak as the partisans perish one by one, succumbing to starvation, frostbite, and the German forces. No adventure is found in the harrowing experience of combat, which is shown here as empty of any real glory. In keeping with the tone of European romanticism, which characterizes the novel, temporary relief from the partisans’ desperate circumstances comes primarily through occasional contact with the masterpieces of the creative spirit—music, poetry, and novels.

Ultimately, however, in the 1956 edition, those partisans that survive are sustained by an unusu...