Underneath Romain Gary’s Many Masks

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/books/review/romain-gary-promise-at-dawn-the-kites.html

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PROMISE AT DAWN A Memoir By Romain Gary Translated by John Markham Beach 337 pp. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.

THE KITES By Romain Gary Translated by Miranda Richmond Mouillot 311 pp. New Directions. $27.95.

In one of Romain Gary’s last acts, before placing a Smith & Wesson revolver in his mouth and pulling the trigger, he authorized the posthumous publication of a confession. He was responsible, he wanted the world to know, for one of the most elaborate literary deceptions of all time.

The tangled web turned knotty mess began when Gary, a celebrated French author two decades past his prime, decided in 1973 to write his new novel, his 20th, under a new name: Émile Ajar. To sustain the lie once his second Ajar book, “The Life Before Us,” became one of the biggest commercial and literary blockbusters of his career (and nabbed France’s illustrious Prix Goncourt 19 years after Gary had won it under his own name), he enlisted his cousin, Paul Pavlowitch, to play the flesh-and-blood Ajar. When the press caught on, Gary then had to write a faux-memoir for Pavlowitch-Ajar called “Pseudo,” claiming schizophrenia and tangling things still further. It was all very exhausting.

In the confession he left behind, “The Life and Death of Émile Ajar,” Gary tried to explain what compelled all the contortions. “I was tired of being nothing but myself,” he wrote. “The truth is that I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity.”

Gary believed all people suffered from this need, to break their bonds asunder again and again. For him, it was pathological. It was also the great theme of his art, as two newly published Gary books, one reissued and one only now in English, remind us. Gary’s craving for “multiplicity” and his refusal to accept its impossibility — to be stuck with our ho-hum human condition, that is — make him a literary figure worth revisiting, one of those striving, endlessly self-inventing individuals who streaked across the 20th century.

His many lives have been well documented (most recently in English in a 2010 biography by David Bellos). Born in 1914 as Roman Kacew, a Jewish boy raised by a single mother in Vilna, Lithuania, Gary eventually moved to Nice as a teenager, becoming an aviator for the French Resistance, then climbing the diplomatic ranks until he was consul general in Los Angeles, where he met and fell in love with the actress Jean Seberg, transforming with her into an iconic, dashing couple (think second-tier Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe), who both had early, tragic deaths. All the while Gary produced novel after novel. At his peak, he was the kind of literary rock star, with his dark brooding eyes and diabolical goatee, that no longer really exists — not even in France.

The memoir “Promise at Dawn” (translated into English in 1961 by his own hand using, of course, a pseudonym) was Gary’s attempt, as Bellos put it, “to create a character called Romain Gary.” An origin myth full of inventions and omissions, Gary framed his artistic emergence as an unusual love story about his long-suffering mother’s mad devotion to him.

She smoked three packs of Gauloise a day, spoke in a booming bluster to the accompaniment of “lava, stones and thunder,” and was a hopeless romantic in the crumbling mold of 19th-century Russian novels. And her enormous will had a singular objective: making her son not just a great man, but the greatest man, an achievement to spite a world that had left her, a onetime Moscow stage actress, lonely and ignored. “My son will be an ambassador of France, a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a great dramatic author, a second Ibsen, a new Gabriele d’Annunzio,” she yelled at anyone who would listen. “He will have his suits made in London!”

Somehow the intensity didn’t break the boy. He tried to rise to it, to become the dashing, devastating, man of the world — Vronsky from “Anna Karenina” — that she yearned for him to become as she suffered odd jobs, from palm reader to kennel keeper, and schlepped him across Europe to France to fulfill his destiny. Finally a nascent writer at his desk, Gary agonized over the perfect pseudonym, a name “to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.”

The memoir’s tragic denouement is that she is not there to gaze lovingly into her Romouchka’s blue eyes once he achieves the heights she predicted. But Gary, in the book as well as life, had already ingested her sense that reality was not enough. He continued to invent roles for himself straight out of Pushkin and Lermontov, his mother’s favorites. “I have always dreamed of being ruined, physically, morally and financially, by a woman,” he wrote in his memoir.

Around this time he met Seberg, that famous blond gamine whose newspaper-hawking stroll down the Champs-Élysées in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” gave many an art house geek his first sight of perfection. She fulfilled Gary’s fantasy of self-destruction. He even challenged Clint Eastwood to a duel when he discovered she was having an on-set affair with the cowboy. Seberg’s fragile mental health suffered in the 1970s when the F.B.I. infamously hounded her for supporting the Black Panthers (even planting rumors that she was pregnant with the child of one of the group’s leaders). She was found dead at the age of 40 in 1979, a horrid end, her body discovered days after she overdosed in the back seat of her car. Gary got his wish. He was dead within a year.

Just before he killed himself, Gary published his last novel — and one of his best — “The Kites,” which has never before appeared in English but has now been given a stylish translation by Miranda Richmond Mouillot. Like his memoir, it is a bildungsroman that begins in childhood and ends at the cusp of adulthood. It too covers the years of World War II and its main character, like Gary, is part of the Resistance. It’s also a love story that involves a woman who represents unattainable ideals.

The book’s hero is Ludovic Fleury, an orphan being raised by his eccentric uncle, a postmaster and kite maker, in a small town in Normandy. Like many of Gary’s characters, Ludo wants desperately “to become ‘somebody.’” When at the age of 9 he meets Lila, the daughter of faded Polish nobility, their mutual restlessness bonds them, cutting even through class difference (he the lovesick “Norman hayseed,” she mooning about her family’s chateau). “There’s nothing more depressing than only being who you are, some small work that’s the result of circumstance,” Lila, still a teenager, tells him in an echo of Gary’s own Émile Ajar confession. “I have a horror of anything that’s once and for all.”

With the start of the war, the two are separated for years, Lila stuck in Poland and Ludo in occupied France. He joins the underground resistance, and in some of the most exciting pages in Gary’s oeuvre, rescues downed Allied pilots and takes part in plots to undermine the Nazis who dine daily at the local Michelin-approved bistro, the Clos Joli.

When Lila finally returns, she has spent four years surviving any way she could, including using her body. Occupation demanded constant moral compromise, undermining her lofty idealism. “You invented her too much,” his uncle tells him. “The dream has landed, now.” Ludo and Lila eventually find their way back to each other and Gary leaves us with a striking image of their wedding day. After liberation, in retribution for her having slept with Nazis, the townspeople shaved Lila’s head. She decides to shave it anew just before the marriage ceremony, flaunting what was meant to bring shame.

Gary’s writing has not aged well. His characterization is weak — Lila, for one, feels hollow. And there’s a blush-inducing purple tint to many of his sentences (e.g., “When consciousness returned, I felt my heart arriving slowly at its anchorage with all the peace of great sailing ships after years of absence”). But, for all that, he is brilliant at capturing the existential emotion for which the title of “The Kites” is an obvious metaphor — sky-bound yet tethered by that string.

It’s a very French condition. But while Sartre and Camus (the former an early booster of Gary’s work and the latter his good friend) dwell in the misery of what it is to be human and want to be more, Gary’s life and art point to joyful reinvention as the way out. And yet, there’s that bride with a shaved head in the last pages of his last novel. Lila has accepted that she is who she is. Her frailty, her humanness, is laid, quite literally, bare. Rather than the Gary of “The Life and Death of Émile Ajar,” a chameleon whose only lament was that he ran out of colors to change into, this other ending points to something else: that he may have learned, for better or worse, that life is not elsewhere.