Excerpt: David Bellos' Romain Gary: A Tall Story

This excerpt from David Bellos; Romain Gary. A Tall Story is brought to you courtesy of The Excerpt Reader:

An Introduction to Romain Gary 

Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (Russia) in 1914, the individual 

later known as Romain Gary led an extraordinary multiplicity 

of lives. An immigrant to France at the age of fourteen, he was 

educated in Nice and studied law at Aix-en-Provence; after 

two penniless years in Paris, he did his military service in the 

French Air Force, but fled to Britain when France signed the 

Armistice in 1940. He served for the duration of the war in 

the Free French squadron of the RAFand was awarded high 

military honours for bravery. In 1945 he joined the Diplomatic 

Corps and rose to become French Consul General in Los 

Angeles, resigning his post in 1960 to live with and then to 

marry Jean Seberg, the star of Godard’s Breathless. In his early 

fifties, with a handsome flat in the smarter part of the Latin 

Quarter in Paris, a hideaway in Geneva and a millionaire’s 

retreat in the Balearic Islands, Gary could have considered 

himself an uncommonly lucky man with a vitato die for (a 

summary is given in Appendix I). 

But none of the above even hints at the reason why Gary 

continues to fascinate us now. From his teens until his last 

days, Romain Gary was a prolific and talented writer, producing 

more than twenty novels and volumes of memoirs that have 

never been out of print in France. Even more fascinating: he 

wrote some of his books under assumed names (Romain Gary 

being only the first of the names he adopted over the course 

of his life) and by inventing a character to go with the name 

he hoodwinked the entire literary establishment into believing 

he was someone else. In a manner equally unprecedented and 

strange, he wrote a good part of his oeuvre not in French but 

in English, a language he did not acquire until he was thirty 

years of age, as his sixth mother tongue. 

With a life so varied and exciting, Gary could have simply 

told stories about himself – Litwak, immigrant, airman, 

diplomat, Don Juan, novelist and globe-trotting celebrity 

spouse. He did indeed write several memoirs, including a cele- 

brated and infinitely seductive portrait of his early life, Promise at Dawn. 
But as we shall soon see, that charmingly unreliable narrative is best read 
like a novel or, rather, like a novel by Gary, in which characters and 
plots are the fruit not of recollection, but invention. 

In November 1945, impressed and moved by Gary’s first 

novel, A European Education, Jean-Paul Sartre, then at the 

height of celebrity, arranged to meet the young writer at La 

Rhumerie, a café on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Gary, still some- 

what flummoxed by the literary prize he had just been awarded, 

and bewildered by current buzz-words like ‘existential’ and 

‘absurd’, gave Sartre the main features of his life to date – 

from Russia to Poland, Nice, Britain, West Africa, Syria, then 

England again, ending with his Legion of Honour and his 

literary prize. Sartre listened, then turned to Simone de 

Beauvoir, who was sitting beside him, and said: ‘Quelle mine 

d’expérience!’ (literally: What a goldmine!). Implicitly: ‘I wish I 
had such a story to tell! This young man will be able to turn 

his life into a heap of novels!’ Sartre’s admiring exclamation 

is perfectly comprehensible, but even at that early stage of his 

career, Gary took great exception to it. Long after, he still felt 

angry about Sartre’s attitude to literature, to life and to him. 

At an academic dinner party at Yale University, around 1957, 

he entertained his hosts with a tall story about how Sartre 

had confided to him that, as a writer, he regretted not having 

been arrested and tortured by the Gestapo... 

Gary did not treat his own experience of life as a natural 

resource to be quarried, crushed and delivered to consumers 

wrapped up as books. He was especially averse to treating 

fallen comrades as literary stock, because they had died to 

save France, not to help a survivor make a bid for the Nobel. 

For Romain Gary, writing was not about life in the way Sartre 

imagined. The philosopher’s faux pas in that Paris café gave 

away the basic key of ‘existential’ or ‘committed’ literature: The 

Age of Reason, The Mandarins, The Blood of Otherstell the stories 

of their authors’ lives and those of their friends, lightly 

disguised by borrowed names and cosmetic changes of 

chronology and event. Gary’s work is of a different order. He 

made up his characters, including his own, where it appears 

in memoirs as well as novels, just as he made up some of the 

vocabulary and syntax he used. Gary sought to be a popular 

novelist and a topical one, but he wasn’t a cannibal or a hack. 

His life was extraordinary, but his career as a writer was exceptional 
to an even higher degree. 

Gary’s own account of his magical life puts it all down to 

his mother. In the novelised account he gives of her in Promise 

at Dawn, but also in response to questions in many radio, 

press and television interviews, Gary explained that she had 

had inordinately high expectations of her only child. With 

uncommon force of fantasy, she saw little Roman not as ‘my 

son the professor’, as in a thousand Jewish jokes, but as ‘my 

son the ambassador’, and also, simultaneously, as a great writer 

in French. He absorbed his mother’s desperate yearning for a 

brighter future, internalised her aspiration for success. The 

main premise of Promise at Dawnis that Gary’s life followed 

a script laid down for it long before. For four years, as French 

Consul General in Los Angeles, he was only an inch away 

from being Ambassador to Hollywood. How close he came to 

being the twentieth century’s Victor Hugo is the main subject 

of this book. 

To tell the true story of Romain Gary is a decidedly problematic 

undertaking. The main difficulty in pinning him down 

and making sense of the relationship between his life and his 

work is the awkward but unavoidable fact that he was, among 

many other things, a skillful liar. Lies and art have a long asso- 

ciation. In the fifth century BC Plato proposed to banish poets 

from the Republic on the grounds they were liars; in the last 

century the French partisan-poet Louis Aragon counter- 

attacked with the concept of art as le mentir-vrai (truthful lying); 

but Gary took the issue to a confusing extreme. He did not 

do so out of maliciousness or for personal gain (on the contrary, 

in fact). 


Like many novelists, Gary wrote stories in order to enjoy, 
if only for the length of composition, the experience of 

being someone else. The aesthetic pleasure that he drew from 

a change of mental clothes he also applied to his own exis- 

tence. What he sought many times over, and sometimes at the 

cost of a blatant lie, was the intoxicating experience of being 

born again. Each new birth – as a Frenchman, as an airman, 

as a diplomat, as a novelist, as Romain Gary, as ‘Fosco Sinibaldi’ 

or as ‘Émile Ajar’ – was also a way of taking leave of a previous 

and often equally invented self. However, each of Gary’s 

different identities never really died, even when buried beneath 

lies and deceptions or replaced with a new set of clothes. In 

his writing, which was after all what he spent most of his time 

doing, he was a man of successive and concurrent selves. It’s 

largely for this reason that parts of this book are not laid out 

in straightforwardly chronological fashion. Gary’s lives loop 

back in and out of each other, and half the fun of his incred- 

ible story would be lost if it were presented as a one-track 

Lebenslauf. Introducing The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr 

Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson speculated that all men might 

come to be seen not as unitary individuals but as a ‘polity of 

multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens’. It’s a 

pity he lived too soon to have met Romain Gary, perhaps the 

only significant writer of the twentieth century who never 

bemoaned the losses he suffered in his several exiles, but 

looked on new lives as positive gains. 

*    *    * 

Gary was born in a Jewish family in a predominantly Jewish 

city on the western fringe of the Russian Empire a few weeks 

before the First World War broke out. Over the following four- 

teen years he was brought up in Russia and Poland, to begin 

with in places not known or forgotten, then in a city that 

changed hands a dozen times (between Russia, Germany, 

Lithuania and Poland), in several languages, by a relatively 

aged mother, already divorced, and then divorced a second 

time. You can go back to Wilno nowadays – it’s called Vilnius 

and is the capital of Lithuania – and find a few tiny traces of 

the city he grew up in. I’ve been there, I’ve seen the apart- 

ment building that was his boyhood home and met the 

archivists who unearthed the surviving documents that record 

his birth. But even by the time Gary was thirty, absolutely 

nothing remained of the polyglot Wilno he had known. All 

trace of his early life (including the majority of his close and 

distant relatives) had been swept away by another war and by 

ethnic cleansing of the most atrocious kind the world had ever 

seen. History gave Gary a free hand to reinvent his past; but 

you could also say that history obliged Gary to cut free of a 

sunken ship and to remake himself as something else. 

Nothing can be recovered of Gary’s life as a child save for 

a few possibly flawed documents, a couple of photographs, 

and the memories – but are they memories? – that Gary retails 

in Promise at Dawn. Penned at great speed in a second-rate 

hotel in a Mexican seaside resort, these memories coalesce 

into a coherent and persuasive story of how a poor Jewish lad 

from the East was groomed for a career as a great man of the 

West. The story is a simple one, close to some spectacular real- 

life models and to a well-known variant of the American dream: 

hand-reared by a powerful, coarse, ambitious and overwhelm- 

ingly loving mother, he had only ever striven to fulfil all her 

dreams of him. It really wasn’t his fault. 

It is a story that Gary undoubtedly wished to believe. But 

how much literal truth is there in the tale of a life forged by 

a mother’s intense love for her son and her dreams of his 

success? It’s no longer possible to know what Mina Kacewa 

was really like. (Gary calls her ‘Nina’ in Promise at Dawn, substituting 

a Russian for a typically Litwak name.) Witnesses of her 

Russian period have all disappeared. Testimonies gathered in 

the 1990s by Myriam Anissimov from two very aged people 

who knew Mina in her Polish years are not very informative, 

nor can they be considered reliable after such a long period 

of time Mina lived in Nice from 1928until her death in 1941 

and only a handful of witnesses have ever dared to comment 

on her portrayal in Gary’s legend of his life in pre-war France. 

The Swiss journalist François Bondy, who was a classmate of 

Gary’s at his secondary school in Nice, certainly concurred 

that Madame Kacewa was a woman of unusual strength, but 

he recalls her as a loud-mouthed, imperious, agitated old lady 

rather than as an inspiring force. But Gary’s art of deception 

undermines even this seeming qualification. Bondy’s comments 

come from a long conversation that he had with Romain Gary, 

published in 1974as La Nuit sera calme(I refer to the volume 

henceforth under the English title Gary gave his own still 

unpublished translation of it, A Quiet Night). The idea of this 

book probably came to Gary from another Polish enfant terrible, 

Witold Gombrowicz, who had recently published a fake inter- 

view with Dominique Deroux.3 In the same manner, all of A 

Quiet Night – including the lengthy questions and comments 

attributed to Bondy! – was written by Romain Gary. So the 

slightly negative side of Madame Kacewa that the text allows 

us to glimpse is not external corroboration at all, just another 

part of Gary’s portrait of the woman he wants us to believe 

was the scriptwriter of his life. 

Gary’s loving portrait of his mother in Promise at Dawn– 

pushy and much put upon, a taker of liberties absolved by all 

the liberties that history had taken with her, intensely, almost 

oppressively devoted to the ascent of her one treasure, her 

son – is too familiar to be entirely untrue. It is also too much 

of a caricature to be completely right. Most of all, it is part of 

a broader pattern of belief, which makes imagination the prime 

mover in human affairs. Mother Mina is both an explanation 

of Gary’s successful reinventions of himself and a retrospective 

example of the power of dreams. 

Such was the intensity of Gary’s commitment to the shaping 

of the world by the imagination that his own work occasion- 

ally seems to be prophetic of his life, rather than dependent 

on it. During home leaves on the Riviera when he was serving 

in the French Embassy in Berne in 1950–51, Gary wrote a novel 

describing a passionate love affair between a former Free 

French fighter and an American film star. Ten years later the 

former Free French fighter called Romain Gary fell in love 

with the star of Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. 

What Gary experienced then was not exactly predetermined by his prior imagination

of it: life is surely too haphazard for such eerie patterns 

to work out. All the same, the greatest affair of his life fitted 

into a place he had already imagined in his work. Similarly, 

The Talent Scout, a novel written in English within the first 

year of Gary’s affair with Jean Seberg, portrays a gorgeous 

young woman from a strait-laced home in Iowa (as Seberg 

was) whose naive idealism pushes her into becoming the alcoholic, 

heroin-addicted mistress of a brutal dictator (which Gary 

might have seemed to others, and to himself). Unhappily, Jean 

Seberg, whose passion for social and racial justice is the trans- 

parent object of this satire of good intentions, became a victim 

of substance abuse within a few years. 

In these instances, experience must have seemed to Gary 

to vindicate his underlying belief that imagination can pattern 

events and to make his belief in the power of his mother’s 

dreams to shape his own life seem less strange to him than 

it does to us. Literature, for Gary, is not the transcription of 

life, in the manner of Sartre or Beauvoir. Art nourishes life; 

myths and legends are not explanations of what is, but moti- 

vating scripts that can draw us on to higher things. Conversely, 

the only real life that we live is the one we imagine. ‘I have 

almost always invented everyone I have met in my life and 

particularly those who are close to me and share my life,’ Gary 

wrote in the less fictionalised part of his American memoir, 

White Dog.4 Reading his life like a novel is therefore not too 

wide of the mark. Being sure of what is true and what is not 

is quite a different kettle of fish. 

Obviously, Romain Gary is not a character from a novel of 

his own invention. He existed and actually did many, if not 

quite all, the things that are attributed to him (by himself, by 

others and by his own fictional stand-ins). Most writers who 

have tackled the bewilderingly multiple lives of Romain Gary 

have sought to elucidate the true identity of the man behind 

the many masks. I, too, believe that there is a solid centre to 

the complex entity called Romain Gary. However, it is not 

anything as clear as a ‘real self’. In any case, who can know 

truly who someone else really is? Gary had several lives thrust 

upon him by the history of the twentieth century and, like the 

great nineteenth-century novelists he admired, he also aspired 

to lead innumerably many more. I prefer to allow this remark- 

able hero of modern times to be not one, but many. He was 

Russian, and also Polish, as well as being completely French. 

He was Jewish, but also Catholic, in a secular sort of way. He 

was a man of great charm, and also a boor and an oaf. He clung 

to high ideals and was also profoundly cynical about the human 

race. He was a skilled aerial navigator, but prone to getting 

hopelessly lost on the ground (even in the side streets of Paris). 

He hid his identity again and again, but gave a great deal of 

himself away through the recurrent motifs of his work. That is 

why the true story of Romain Gary has to be sought in a close 

reading of his fiction. Conversely, Gary’s fiction is particularly 

enriched by being read – with great caution! – through the 

lens of his actual life. To separate literature from life, the two 

have to be read in conjunction, side by side. 

*    *    * 

As a writer Gary had a wide audience in France and an even 

larger mass readership in the English-speaking world for most 

(but not all) of what he wrote (often more than once, in English 

and in French). He had a gift for narrative that endeared him 

to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics 

in an era dominated by figures far more intellectual than he 

could ever be (but that is not to say there were any smarter). 

From the heyday of committed literature through the years of 

the ‘new novel’ to the emergence of postmodernism and the 

Oulipo, Gary marched to his own drummer along a path unre- 

lated to the main trends of post-war French literature. Yet he 

was also a formidable innovator of form and language, and far 

more engaged with the broader history of the European novel 

than any of his Parisian contemporaries. Gary’s varied and 

entertaining writing career tells a different story about the 

making of French and European literature from the one we 

are accustomed to hear. 

Nowadays, Gary is little known in the English-speaking 

world. Yet his first moment of fame came not in France, but 

in London, in late 1944, when his first novel appeared as 

Forest of Anger with the Cresset Press, and was widely and 

favourably reviewed. In the USAGary scored a second major 

hit in the English-speaking world with The Company of 

Menin 1951, and for the following twenty-five years he was 

a well-known personality nationwide, as a writer, public 

figure, journalist and celebrity in his own right, as well as 

being a celebrity spouse. His personal memoir, Promise at 

Dawn, touched the hearts of a whole generation and became 

a Broadway play; most of his major novels were made into 

big-budget Hollywood films. He slipped from the limelight 

when his own creation, the fictional writer Émile Ajar, 

displaced ‘Romain Gary’ from the literary headlines in Paris. 

When the hoax was made public after the writer’s death in 

1980, Gary’s international reputation crumbled to dust, for 

America is peculiarly sensitive to literary heists. All but three 

of his books (Promise at Dawn, Life Before Us, and White Dog) 

went out of print in English; it seems only folk old enough 

to remember having fallen in love in their teens with the boy 

hero of Promise at Dawnstill remember the name of Romain 

Gary. Over the last fifteen years Romain Gary’s rich, funny and fascin - 

ating work has been rediscovered by critics in France, Israel 

and America. The principal path to his rediscovery has lain 

through rereadings of the four novels published under the 

name of Émile Ajar, which now seem to anticipate contemporary 

modes of Holocaust memoir and comedy, as well as being 

overwhelming strikes against modern forms of false piety. 

Gary’s imposture as Émile Ajar has also fascinated students 

of literary frauds and hoaxes, of which we have seen rather a 

large number in recent years, and which seem to have some- 

thing important to tell us about the nature of writing itself. I 

myself certainly came to Gary par ajar,5 if I may permit myself 

a French pun at the start of a book that contains a great 

number of Gary’s linguistic games (in English as well as in 

and between all the other languages he spoke). Georges Perec’s 

love of pastiche and ‘passing off’ led me to look again at the 

Ajar hoax (Perec’s mentor, Raymond Queneau, was involved 

in it, and, to his honour, was the only literary figure to smell 

a rat). This in turn led me to investigate the wider literary 

universe of the perpetrator of such a skilful impersonation, 

and it proved a long, absorbing and rewarding pursuit. What 

I learned is that there is a great deal more to the man and 

the work than just a good joke. In strange and unexpected 

ways, rereading Gary’s intentionally middlebrow novels, with 

their rattling yarns and page-turning style, has made it clearer 

to me what literature can do. Comedy, kitsch, sentimentality 

and high ideals don’t have to be treated as crimes. They can 

also be the vehicles and the freight of sophisticated verbal art. 

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