Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Only one essential source of happiness was missing: his mother. Romain had returned home from the war to learn that she had been dead for more than three years. How was that possible? He had received a steady flow of letters from her all along. That’s because just a few days before she died, Nina had written more than two hundred short, undated letters to her son and sent them to a friend in Switzerland, with instructions to forward them to Romain at regular intervals. And so, as far as he’d known during combat, his mother had been there for him, sending constant words of love and support. The last letter he’d received ended, “Be tough, be strong. Mama.”

  In 1945, the year after he was married, A European Education appeared in print to great acclaim and won the Prix des Critiques. The author and journalist Joseph Kessel raved, “In the last ten years, ever since we heard the names of Malraux and Saint-Exupéry, there has not been a novel in French fed by a talent as deep, new, and brilliant as this one.” Raymond Queneau declared Gary’s debut a triumph, with “such a particular and original tone.” Jean-Paul Sartre considered it possibly the finest novel about the Resistance. Gary received an admiring letter from Albert Camus. And in reviewing the American edition, published in 1960, the New York Times noted, “He can forge a great conception with all the incandescence of a romance novelist—then give it final definition by tempering it in sad irony.”

  This new toast of the literary world, thirty-one years old in 1945, was on his way to becoming what he’d always wanted: rich and famous, and one of France’s most prominent authors. Ultimately, his success would kill him.

  The year 1956 brought the publication of his fifth novel, the 443-page Les racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven), along with France’s premier literary award, the Prix Goncourt. (The eleven-member jury included Maurice Blanchot and Jean Paulhan.) In truth, the prize was a mixed blessing. For Gary, winning meant a surge in sales, of the kind that only the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey’s book club can inspire today. Along with that, however, came the need to address the demands of promotion and celebrity, while also managing a confused identity and increased self-doubt. He and other winners over the years found themselves derailed by what they had most coveted. One winner of the prize referred to the “GP” as his “General Paralysis.” Another, Jean Carrière (who won in 1972), expressed a similar sentiment. “After having believed that one was writing for a couple hundred or thousand readers, one finds oneself in front of an arena packed with spectators who gasp every time they spot a sign of failure—or the renewal of the artist’s exploit,” he wrote. “It is enough to paralyze your pen and call into doubt the slightest word traced by your hand.” Following his award, Carrière expressed a sense of resigned duty toward the writing that had once been his passion, saying he felt as though his identity had been hijacked and “a puppet was bearing it in my place.” His disillusion worsened over time, to the point, he said, that “names strike me as fraudulent.” Still, Carrière would survive his plunge into depression and feelings of profound alienation. Romain Gary would not.

  Between his celebrated debut and his fifth novel, a strange thing had happened: the adored Romain Gary had been neglected by his public. The novels published after A European Education were not well received, and Gary found his career stalled. He sent a despairing letter to his publisher. “I know full well that the public has forgotten me,” he complained. “I will have passed like a dream. It’s horrible. Sometimes when I look back and see my brilliant beginning and what I am today, a knot forms in my throat.”

  The Roots of Heaven marked a triumphant comeback. The author whom everyone had once celebrated was again relevant. Gary was no fool; he knew that he had to capitalize on his resurgence. He committed to hundreds of media appearances, and in interviews, he enjoyed inventing amusing and outlandish anecdotes about himself (including a story about his seduction of Clark Gable’s girlfriend in a London bar). He treated the “truth” behind his authorial persona like a piece of taffy, something to be stretched and pulled.

  One writer noted that “[Gary’s] legend as a charmer is not overblown.” It worked in his private life, too. In 1959, he met the Iowa-born film actress Jean Seberg. She was twenty-one; he was forty-five. Nine months later, Seberg divorced her husband, François Moreuil. Gary divorced Lesley Blanch in 1961. (She lived to the age of 102, dying shortly before her birthday in 2007.)

  In 1962, Gary and Seberg had a son, Alexandre Diego (known as Diego), and they subsequently married, but Gary would lie about the order in which these events occurred, transposing them so that marriage came first, and even falsifying his son’s birth certificate.

  Following the publication of his memoir, S. ou l’espérance de vie, in 2009, Diego recalled his father in an interview. “Even when he was present,” he told Paris Match, “my father was not there. Obsessed by his work, he greeted me, but he was elsewhere.” Today, Diego maintains his father’s literary estate and tends to his legacy.

  Seberg and Gary were a glamorous couple whose social whirl included dining with the Kennedys and spending time with famous actors. But the marriage collapsed in 1970. Its failure could be attributed in part to an affair Seberg is said to have had with Clint Eastwood, and another with a college student (while she and Gary were separated). That relationship resulted in a daughter. Seberg and Gary were divorced by the end of the year, yet they remained extremely close. They jointly filed a lawsuit against Newsweek, which, along with other publications, had alleged that the father of Seberg’s daughter was a Black Panther, a cousin of Malcolm X. The stress from this gossip led Seberg to attempt suicide and to give birth prematurely. The baby died two days later.

  Throughout the 1960s, Gary published a number of books, but he also acquired new credentials as a director and screenwriter. (Both of the films he directed starred Seberg.) Others adapted Gary’s books for the screen as well, and these productions involved some big names. John Huston directed The Roots of Heaven, starring Errol Flynn, Trevor Howard, and Orson Welles. The film The Man Who Understood Women starred Henry Fonda and Leslie Caron. Peter Ustinov directed Paul Newman, Sophia Loren, and David Niven in Lady L. Charlotte Rampling appeared in an adaptation of The Ski Bum.

  Gary’s amazing feat of self-invention now seemed complete. This Russian Jew turned Frenchman was a war hero, a diplomat, a renowned and widely translated author, and a film director, and for eight years he had been the husband of a young and beautiful Hollywood actress. He owned residences in Paris, Majorca, and Switzerland, and on the French Riviera. He was fluent in Russian, Polish, French, and English, and knew some German, Bulgarian, Arabic, and Hebrew. He was a legend of his own making, and against all odds, he had pulled it off. Even though his reputation as a writer had waned somewhat in the 1960s, he still seemed to lead a rather enviable life. His story should end there, it seems, but instead it starts anew. This is where things get really interesting, and deeply sad.

  With all the gaps in biographical information—and all the misinformation—concerning Romain Gary, it is difficult to assemble a comprehensive narrative of his entire life, though biographers in recent years have tried. One fact, however, is well established: at a certain point, Roman Kacew no longer wished to be Romain Gary. Feeling as though he’d been typecast, he reached an impasse. So he became someone else.

  In January 1974, the French publisher Éditions Gallimard received a manuscript called La solitude du python à Paris. It arrived in an envelope that appeared to have been sent from Brazil, by a French businessman on behalf of his friend. Eventually the publisher passed on it, but sent it along to Mercure de France, a division of Gallimard. The novel, later called Gros-Câlin (also known as Cuddles) was published that year. It told the story of a lonely IBM employee who lived in a Paris apartment with his pet python. The author was Émile Ajar. It was an immediate best seller.

  Only a select group knew that Ajar was Gary: his typist, his son, Seberg, his attorneys in Geneva and New York, and a longtime friend. They
carefully protected his secret. Once, when he was young, Diego watched a show on television in which a critic mercilessly trashed the work of Romain Gary. She then exclaimed, “Ah! Ajar—now there’s a talent of a quite different order!” The boy glanced toward his father and slyly winked at him.

  It’s unclear how Gary arrived at his nom de plume, but some speculate that “Émile” was derived from the bastard child of Gauguin, whom Gary had fictionalized in a novel. “Ajar” is Russian for “glowing embers” and was also the acronym for a Jewish veterans group.

  When Gros-Câlin was short-listed for the Renaudot Prize, Gary found himself in an ethical quandary. The prize was intended for the first novel by a new, undiscovered talent. Not wanting to deprive a young writer of a significant prize, Ajar withdrew his work from consideration. This honorable act merely fed the flame of public interest, and Gary quickly enlisted a cousin, Paul Pavlowitch, to play the “real-life” role of Ajar. Now people could put a face to the mysterious author (or so they thought). “Ajar” had his photograph taken and even gave interviews. “It was a new birth,” Gary admitted later. “I was renewing myself. Everything was being given me one more time.”

  Before the birth of Ajar, Gary had already begun planning a second act. Initially he’d considered a kind of performance art ruse, in which an old friend named Sacha Kardo-Sessoëf would sign his name to detective fiction that Gary had written. His friend declined, as did another, so the role-playing idea was tossed. Instead, Gary produced a trial run for Ajar, under a different guise. In the spring of 1974, a spy novel called Les têtes de Stéphanie, by Shatan Bogat, was published. This unknown author was praised by critics for writing “with the stroke of a master.” The press release featured a detailed (and peculiar) biography: “Thirty-nine years old, son of a Turkish immigrant, Shatan Bogat was born in Oregon. He directs a fishing and shipping business in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. The black market arms trade inspired one of his novels. He won the Dakkan Prize in 1970 for his coverage of international gold and weapons traffickers.” The prize did not actually exist, nor any earlier novels, but no one had bothered to verify the information.

  The critics loved Bogat. One reviewer said that the author’s style was “100% American, both explosive and relaxed, but with an appreciation of the Persian Gulf’s local color that is not from the eye of a tourist.”

  Unfortunately, sales were sluggish. The publisher, Robert Gallimard, decided to out the author in a radio interview, hoping the news might provide a much-needed sales boost. He revealed that “Bogat” was actually Romain Gary. In a later edition of the novel, Gary explained his use of a pseudonym in that instance: “I did it because I sometimes feel the need to change identities, to break free of myself, if only for the duration of a book.”

  If Gallimard had not exposed the hoax, would anyone have discovered the author’s identity? Perhaps not. Journalists can be a lazy bunch.

  In any case, now Gary was ready to become Ajar.

  His alter ego was an Algerian immigrant, born in 1940, and a former medical student who, after performing an illegal abortion, had fled to Brazil, where he now lived. Some critics were suspicious about Ajar’s identity, wondering whether an eminent figure such as Raymond Queneau or Jean Paulhan might have taken a pseudonym. Yet as the scholar Ralph Schoolcraft notes in his fascinating 2002 study, Romain Gary: The Man Who Sold His Shadow (the first major examination in English of Gary’s life and work), the author had left plenty of clues that Ajar was a mask. Anyone who poked around enough would have found evidence linking Ajar’s work to Gary’s own novels. (Gary later admitted that Ajar’s books “often contained the same sentences, the same turns of phrase, the same human beings.”) Yet no one picked up on the trail of crumbs. With Ajar, Gary was trying to shed the influence of the literary establishment of which he was now a familiar member. “I was an author who was classified, catalogued, taken for granted,” he later complained. Ajar opened the door to experimentation and novelty, and to another new start for his career. Critics would have to approach the work from a fresh perspective because Ajar was an unknown quantity, free of baggage.

  Following the success of Gros-Câlin, in 1975 Ajar published a second novel, La vie devant soi (also known as Madame Rosa). A reviewer in Le Monde proclaimed it “a Les Misérables for the twentieth century.” The novel explored the relationship between an orphaned Arab boy named Momo and Madame Rosa, a heavyset sixty-eight-year-old Auschwitz survivor who was once a “lady of the night.” (A film adaptation was released in 1968.) With this work, Ajar’s reputation was assured. The first printing of fifty thousand copies sold out quickly and the book became a best seller. The author could count Marlene Dietrich among his fans. Today, the novel remains the top-selling French novel of the twentieth century, with more than a million copies sold.

  Although some suspected that Ajar was a pseudonym, no one associated it with Gary. In news accounts, Gary’s name had been mentioned, but simply as another example of a pseudonymous author. Some were convinced that Ajar was a Lebanese terrorist; others believed that the eccentric author was an American; still others said that the work was the product of a clandestine collective. And once, Gary met a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Ajar. “He was a terrific fucker,” she said.

  Eventually, this mystery would prove to be the most scandalous event in the French literary world since the publication of Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O. One half-joking theory was that the savvy culprit behind Ajar was Réage’s illegitimate son.

  All was mere fun and games until La vie devant soi won the 1975 Goncourt. Because Paul Pavlowitch had done such a fine job selling himself as Ajar, the jury members had all they needed to see that the author was real, that they were not being played for fools. Satisfied that Ajar really did exist, they awarded the deserving young author his prize.

  This event was no happy accident. Gary had worked tirelessly behind the scenes, managing his accommodating cousin like a puppet. Pavlowitch eventually gave in-person interviews, but first he had to trick Ajar’s own publishing house, Mercure de France, into believing, beyond any doubt, that Ajar was flesh and blood. It was an absolutely brilliant scheme. As Ralph Schoolcraft recounts in his book:

  Gary then prepared a couple meetings, plotting out Pavlowitch’s role in minute detail. The impersonation would be something of a high-wire act, for Pavlowitch had to improvise his demeanor and remarks within the boundaries of Gary’s prearranged script. Pavlowitch began by sending Mercure de France a blurry photograph of himself for promotional use (the photo, taken years earlier in Guadeloupe, had the advantage of showing him prior to the growth of the bushy, long hair and extravagant moustache that he was sporting in 1975).

  Pavlowitch-as-Ajar even signed the publishing contracts and collected a check in person. He went so far as to enlist his wife, Annie, to play the role of Ajar’s girlfriend. When the head of his publishing house wanted to spend more time with Ajar, a weekend together in Copenhagen was arranged, which went off without a hitch. During that weekend, Pavlowitch autographed a stack of “his” books as a favor to the publisher. He dutifully personalized his inscriptions, just as she requested, addressing them to members of various prize juries, including the Goncourt.

  As Gary himself would explain later, the politics behind the Goncourt were rather heated, and authors had to make nice to become literary darlings. It was a highly rarefied and incestuous world. “I am not the only person to have spoken of the ‘literary terror,’ of the coteries, of the cliques with their claques, of cronyism, of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,’ of debts repaid and accounts settled,” he wrote. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power.” The back-scratching was exhausting and humiliating, and after a while Gary had come to detest his critics and the phoniness of his milieu: “I developed a profound disgust of publishing anything.”

  Pleased with the success of the encounters he’d concocted f
or Ajar, Gary upped the demands on his cousin, who complied with each new directive. Personal information was given to the press, but not too much; and with his unkempt appearance and slouchy demeanor, Pavlowitch had no trouble passing as a bohemian writer in exile. His performance wasn’t always flawless (he occasionally got minor details wrong), but the public was so eager to embrace “Ajar” that discrepancies went unnoticed. After a while, he and Gary could simply sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Journalists did all the rest. “As soon as it became public,” Pavlowitch later revealed, “it no longer depended on us.” When a reporter once suggested to Gary the similarities between his and Ajar’s work, Gary replied that he was flattered, and that perhaps Ajar was guilty of plagiarism.

  For some factions in the literary world, the selection of Ajar for the Goncourt was highly controversial, and the usual protests took an especially ugly turn that year. There were bomb threats. Gary, growing nervous, attempted to heed the advice of one of his lawyers, who’d urged him to have “Ajar” decline the prize as a magnanimous gesture. Recusing himself, it turned out, was not Gary’s choice to make. The Goncourt jury issued a terse, huffy, unambiguous statement, announcing that “the Academy votes for a book, not a candidate. The Goncourt Prize cannot be accepted or refused any more than birth or death. Mr. Ajar remains the laureate.” And that was that.

  The problem? An author can be awarded the Goncourt only once. Romain Gary had already won. That he could (secretly) win again gave his ego a significant boost and confirmed that, at sixty-one, he was still an important cultural figure—even if under the cloak of someone else. He’d shown that his talent was still intact. To throw people off the scent, Gary provided a friendly but neutral comment in support of Ajar. “I liked Gross-Câlin,” he said, “but I haven’t read Madame Rosa yet. I don’t think the author will stay in hiding much longer.”