In spite of his black moods, he wasn’t entirely gone. He loved reading books (but hated talking about them), and consumed about eight a week—always novels, no poetry or nonfiction. Contemporary British and American fiction appealed to him; he had catholic tastes and read widely, but he refused to read Georges Simenon or C. P. Snow. Like Simenon, Henry idolized Faulkner, and meeting him in 1950 was one of the highlights of Henry’s life. He told an interviewer that he wanted Faulkner, more than anyone else, to read his books. (It isn’t known whether Faulkner did.)
Over the years, Henry alienated many of his friends with his drunken, maudlin, self-destructive behavior, and they stopped calling on him. He’d become a charmless embarrassment. One friend recalled observing his rare presence at a dinner party, “talking away as if driven by a demon, looking very much the worse for wear.” Another compared him to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “He drank because he couldn’t write and he couldn’t write because he drank.” This was perhaps the most succinct diagnosis of Henry’s predicament. And in a letter to Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, who could be quite vicious about Henry’s diminished state, described him with sheer disgust: “He looked GHASTLY. Very long black dirty hair, one brown tooth, pallid puffy face, trembling hands, stone deaf, smoking continuously throughout meals, picking up books in the middle of conversation & falling into maniac giggles, drinking a lot of raw spirits, hating the country & everything good. . . . I really think Henry will be locked up soon.” In 1968, after much coaxing, Sebastian convinced his father to accompany him to an event at London’s Albert Hall, to which Henry came unshaven and wearing bedroom slippers.
What had become of the promise of Henry Green, a writer who, as the author and translator Tim Parks put it, “must be the most highly praised, certainly the most accomplished, of twentieth-century novelists not to have made it into the canon, not to be regularly taught in universities, not to be considered ‘required reading’”? One critic astutely described Green as having shown “more subtlety and virtuosity than any other novelist of his generation in England. And yet Green’s very mastery of his medium has kept him from the recognition he deserves.” Eudora Welty, who’d met Green once and adored him, lavished praise on his underappreciated work in a 1961 essay: “The intelligence, the blazing gifts of imagery, dialogue, construction, and form, the power to feel both what can and what never can be said, give Henry Green’s work an intensity greater, this reader believes, than that of any other writer of imaginative fiction today.” And the critic James Wood has written that after D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, Green was the greatest English modern novelist.
The fact remained that despite occasional success (Loving had appeared briefly on best-seller lists in the United States), no single book of his had sold more than ten thousand copies in England. His novels had slipped in and out of print even in his lifetime. Of course, Green had sabotaged himself through bizarre financial and marketing decisions: declining offers for paperback sales because of paranoia about income tax debt, and refusing to provide photographs or biographical information to his publishers. Though he reluctantly agreed to come to New York to help launch Loving, he registered at his hotel under another pseudonym, H. V. Yonge, whose initials at least matched those of his real name. But he didn’t mask his hatred of publicity and made it as difficult as possible for admirers to meet him. Considering how disinclined he seemed to achieve a wider readership, it is no surprise that his publishers were unable to earn a profit from his work. They promoted him as best they could under rather challenging circumstances, undoubtedly out of absolute belief in his prodigious talent. As with everything else to do with him, nothing was straightforward or even rational.
After he’d stopped publishing, Green succumbed to sporadic bouts of inconsolable weeping, telling anyone who would listen that he suffered from a lack of recognition and believed he was a failure. Once, while visiting his brother and sister-in-law, he cried as he complained, “I’ve never won any of the good prizes.” If Green was misunderstood or neglected, he seemed oblivious that any of this was his own doing.
Of the relatively few people who were aware of Green’s novels, perhaps too many shared the view of the New York Times critic who found his work baffling to the point of irritation, and who dismissed Green as another case of Emperor’s New Clothes. Green was blasted by the critic for writing “peculiar, artificially mannered novels of limited appeal which are extravagantly overpraised by a few critics whose pride it is to admire books which lesser mortals don’t appreciate.” This naysayer, however, later revised his opinion, admitting, “I didn’t like green olives the first few times, either. Maybe Mr. Green is an acquired taste.”
Henry Yorke died at the age of sixty-eight on December 13, 1973, from bronchial pneumonia, after being bedridden for quite some time. Henry Green had been dead for years. “He was a very very complicated and tricky person,” Anthony Powell recalled of his old friend. “And although we knew each other so well, of all the people I’ve ever known I really never got to the bottom of him.”
He could fool some of the people all of the time
Chapter 12
Romain Gary & ÉMILE AJAR
He was a war hero, a Ping-Pong champion, a film director, a diplomat, and an author who wrote the best-selling French novel of the twentieth century. Being famous made him tired. He wanted to be someone else, but one invented persona was not enough.
Roman Kacew was born on May 8, 1914, in Vilna, Russia, and raised by a Jewish single mother, Nina Owczinski, a former stage actress. By the age of thirteen, he believed that he was destined to become a great writer. At this age, too, he took up smoking, a habit encouraged by his mother. (She would smoke three or four cigarettes when she woke each morning, and happily shared her Gauloises with her son.) Nina was a devout Francophile, and emigrated with her son in 1928 to Nice, where she instructed Roman to change his name so he could become famous. “You must choose a pseudonym,” she said. “A great French writer who is going to astonish the world can’t possibly have a Russian name.”
He began experimenting with pen names—spending hours each day hunched over his exercise book and testing out “noble-sounding” noms de plume in red ink. He toyed with “Hubert de la Vallée” and “Romain de Roncevaux,” among many others. “The obvious trouble with pen names,” he discovered, “even with the most inspired and impressive ones, was that they somehow failed to convey truly the full extent of one’s literary genius.”
Such healthy self-regard was inspired in no small part by his mother, who considered her son the center of the universe. Anyone who failed to recognize that fact was an idiot. Neighbors who were annoyed by Nina’s constant proclamations of his glory were denounced as “dirty little bourgeois bedbugs.” If her son scored poor marks at school, it was everyone else’s fault. In his fictionalized 1960 memoir Promise at Dawn, he recalled an exchange that occurred one day when his mother asked how things were going at school:
“I got another zero in math.”
My mother thought this over for a moment.
“Your teachers don’t understand you,” she said firmly.
I was inclined to agree. The persistence with which my teachers kept giving me zeros in science subjects seemed to indicate some truly crass ignorance on their part.
“They’ll be sorry one day,” my mother assured me. “The time will come when your name will be inscribed in letters of gold on the wall of their wretched school. I’ll go and tell them so tomorrow.”
Roman found his mother’s relentless adoration both awe-inspiring and paralyzing. She encouraged him to become a “giant of French literature” only after suffering disappointment that he was not a violin prodigy, a budding Jascha Heifetz. She’d pointed out that if he were to become a famous violinist, “our real name, Kacew, or even better, my stage name, Borisovski, would be excellent.” But it was not to be. After Nina bought Roman a secondhand violin when he was seven years old, she’d signed h
im up for private lessons, but the instructor dismissed him after three weeks. “A great dream had left us,” Roman recalled.
He and his mother led an itinerant life, dependent mostly on the latest way she’d devised to reinvent herself. He would grow up in Russia and Poland and on the French Riviera. “My mother was always waiting for the intrusion of the magical and marvelous into her life,” he wrote, “for some deus ex machina that would suddenly come to her rescue, confound the doubters and the mockers, take the side of the dreamer and see to it that justice was done.” She earned a living making hats, running a hotel, selling furs and antiques, and other occupations, but perhaps her most memorable venture was in “second-hand teeth”—buying teeth containing gold or platinum, then reselling them at a highly marked-up price.
Though Nina eventually achieved financial security, her dream of being a famous actress never left her. This larger-than-life woman was the consummate stage mother, pushing her son to succeed as the artist she would never become. Roman was instilled with ambition, fear, frustration, and dread, but he was always determined to please her, to lay the world at her feet. In search of the vocation that would bring them acclaim and fortune, they exhausted various possibilities—such as painting, acting, and singing—before settling on literature, which he later noted “has always been the last refuge, in this world, for those who do not know where to lay their dreaming heads.” Not only did Nina expect her son to become an artist of renown, but she dreamed that someday he would become an ambassador of France and wear bespoke suits made in London. (Both came to be true.)
As mother and son plotted his future, Roman applied himself to crafting the pseudonym that would inspire literary masterpieces to flow like water. It was, he later recalled, no easy task to discover a name “grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me.” Despite Roman’s intensive brainstorming, nothing seemed right—and both he and Nina were chagrined that names such as “Shakespeare” and “Goethe” were already spoken for. “We were both getting terribly impatient to know, at last, under what name we were to become famous,” he recalled. Fifteen years later, when he heard the name “Charles de Gaulle” for the first time, he felt it would have been the perfect pseudonym. None of the names he came up with satisfied him or his mother: “Alexandre Natal,” “Armand de la Torre,” “Romain de Mysore”—these just weren’t good enough.
Nina suffocated her son in a more significant way: she believed that no other woman should ever have him. He belonged to her alone. Worse, she refused to give herself to another man, and took great offense at the suggestion that she ought to try. Any attempts by the teenage Roman to explore his sexual appetite with beautiful young women were invariably crushed by his mother. “I am not saying that mothers should be prevented from loving their young,” he wrote later. “I am only saying that they should have someone else to love as well. If my mother had had a husband or a lover I would not have spent my days dying of thirst beside so many fountains.”
The grievous effect of such vast and forceful love was that for the rest of his life, Roman would seek, in vain, to recapture it. His craving for companionship was best fulfilled by a succession of devoted friends—notably, Mortimer, Nicholas, Humphrey, and Gaucho, all of them cats—and a dog named Gaston.
As he and his mother steeped themselves in French culture, Roman became “Romain.” Whenever Nina was harassed in France as an outsider, mocked as a “dirty foreigner,” she would retort by coolly informing the moronic offender that her son “is an officer of the French Air Force and he tells you merde!” Romain noted his mother’s inability to distinguish between “is” and “will be.” (Her ardent idealism and willful denial were part of her charm.)
Meanwhile, Romain felt desperate to somehow make his mark. He discovered that despite his failure at sports such as swimming, running, and tennis, he had a real knack for Ping-Pong. One of the engraved medals he later won at a tournament sat on Nina’s bedside table until the day she died.
In his late teens, he also grew more serious about writing. “Attacked by reality on every front, forced back on every side and constantly coming up against my own limitations, I developed the habit of seeking refuge in an imaginary world where, by proxy, through the medium of invented characters, I could find a life in which there was meaning, justice and compassion,” he recalled. But because Romain had inherited that marvelous flair for self-mythologizing, he could not simply sit down and write. Under the watchful eye of his mother, as ever, he took a Method-acting approach to his craft. That was the only way he could become, as he hoped, “the youngest Tolstoy of all time,” and thus reward his mother for all the sacrifices she had made on his behalf.
Romain flung himself headlong into his task. His dramatic first step was to assemble a pile of three thousand sheets of paper, which he estimated to be equivalent to the manuscript of War and Peace. Then, he recalled,
My mother gave me a dressing gown of ample proportions, modeled on the one which had already made a great literary reputation for Balzac. Five times a day she opened the door, set a plate of food on the table and tiptoed out again. I was, just then, using François Mermonts as a pen name. Since, however, my works were regularly returned to me by the publishers, we decided that it was a bad choice, and substituted for it, on my next effort, that of Lucien Bulard.
Still no luck. But in 1933, at the age of nineteen, Romain finally won a respite from his mother’s overwhelming expectations. He enrolled, as a practical consideration, in law school at the University of Aix-en-Provence. He described the experience of bidding good-bye to Nina as “heartrending.” It was a healthy and much-needed separation. He spent his free time lingering at cafés, and managed to write a novel. He promptly sent the manuscript to various publishers, and one responded by including a report from an acquaintance—a well-known psychoanalyst to whom he had shown the novel. She indicated in her report that the author of this demented book suffered from a castration complex, a fecal complex, necrophilic tendencies, and other pathologies. In any case, the manuscript was politely declined. Undaunted, Romain took pride in being told that he had a fecal complex, which he felt marked him indisputably as a tormented soul—and a genuine artist. He completed law school in Paris, neglecting his studies to spend several hours a day on his writing. Eventually, he published a few of his stories, and was thrilled to learn that one had even been translated and published in the United States. His early work, signed as “Romain Kacew,” was marked by a maturity and economy of prose that was impressive in someone not yet twenty-two years old. In 1935, he became a naturalized French citizen.
During the Nazi occupation, Romain was admitted to what was regarded as the oldest and “most glorious” bomber squadron, the Lorraine, serving under de Gaulle in the Free French forces. Around this time he had begun using the surname “Gari,” anglicized as “Gary.” For some reason he never explained this rather crucial fact in Promise at Dawn. The name was not a random choice; it was yet another tribute to his mother, who had used “Gari” as one of her stage names.
During World War II he had various postings throughout Europe and North Africa. Despite the physical and emotional battering he suffered, he was nonetheless chastised from afar by his ever-looming mother, who insisted that he ought to keep up with his writing. He knew that it would be futile to defend his inactivity by reminding her that there was a war on. So the obedient son set himself to work.
Noting that it was hard to unleash his creative genius “on a ship’s deck or in a tiny cabin shared by two others,” he persisted, attempting to cobble together stories that might turn into a coherent whole. Part of what would become his first novel, Éducation européenne (A European Education), was written on a steamer ship that carried him into battle. The latter half was composed at night, in a shared corrugated-iron hut. Every night, Romain—wearing his flying jacket and fur-lined boots—would write until
three or four in the morning, “with numbed fingers, my breath rising in visible vapor in the freezing air.” He completed the novel in 1943, in Surrey, England.
Later, Romain recalled his harrowing wartime experiences, the aftermath of which left him in a state of alienation unlike any he had ever known—and one he would never quite shake. “After four years of fighting with a squadron of which only five members are still alive, emptiness has become for me a densely populated place,” he recalled. “All the new friendships I have attempted since the war have made me only more conscious of that absence which dwells beside me.” He also shared an insight about himself that would acquire an eerie and profoundly tragic meaning after he died. “A fool I shall always be, when it is a matter of . . . smiling in the face of nothingness,” he admitted. “There is no despair in me and my idiocy is of the kind that death itself cannot defeat.”
His combat service transformed him in many ways. He had survived dangerous missions, typhoid fever, and a plane crash that killed everyone aboard but himself. He was decorated with some of France’s highest honors, including the Cross of the Liberation, the Legion of Honor, and the Croix de Guerre. Upon his return to Paris, he married Lesley Blanch, a British writer and former features editor at Vogue. He also entered the diplomatic corps, serving first with the French embassy in Bulgaria, then Moscow, then Switzerland. Later, he became first secretary of the French delegation to the United Nations, as well as the French Consul General in Los Angeles. The postwar years were an exciting time and would launch the amazing Romain Gary in earnest. (In 1951, it became his legal name.) He would satisfy his mother’s great expectations after all.
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