From the August 21-28, 2020 issue of the /Times Literary Supplement/,
from the David Coward review of Album Romain Gary by Maxime Decout and
/Romans et recits,/ I & II by Romain Gary:
“Romain Gary’s biographers have called him a chameleon, a man who sold
his shadow, a tall story in his own right. Reviewers never knew what to
expect from him, were not sure what to make of what they got, and were
reluctant to give him a rumble seat in the great charabanc of
Literature. A decorated war hero, he led the cosmopolitan life of a
diplomat, married a Hollywood film star, won the Prix Goncourt twice . .
. and wrote nearly three dozen highly inventive fictions – some in
English, most in French, neither being his first language. His life was
made bearable, he said, by women and writing. In 1980, at the age of
sixty-six, he shot himself in the head with a Smith and Wesson revolver
out of disgust for the ways of the world and from a painful sense of the
‘futility of literature’. /War and Peace/, he said, did not put an end
to war; nor did /All Quiet on the Western Front/, though it reached
millions of readers in the 1930s. If literature does not make the world
a better place – its classic /raison d’etre/ – what is it for? No
amount of truth (whose truth?) and beauty (eternally rooted in the eye
of the beholder) an make up for its failure to persuade us to be kind to
each other.”
If Gary hadn’t taken himself quit so seriously, he might have seen the
futility of self as well as literature and beyond that been able to see
humanity’s wider scope; 200,000 years at least. He may have been able
to believe, as now seems incontrovertible, that we have always had
stories, stories just as much music. Does anyone insist that music is
to make the world a better place? And who has established that making
the world is a better place is literature’s /raison d’etre/?
We could with reason argue that we wouldn’t be human without our stories
and music, but we can’t agree with Gary’s argument (assuming Coward and
and Decout have it correctly) which would see literature as something
that persuades.
We told and sang stories around camp fires long before we knew how to
write, long before we knew how to read or put stories into books. Who
now since the relatively few years that we’ve been reading and writing
declares himself wise enough to know the reason we need to write and
read these stories? Who wise enough to make for these stories a /raison
d’etre/?
Gary suspected something beyond his puerile reason for suicide: Coward
wrote "Gary led a combative life and eventually the strain began to
tell. He wearied of the image he was saddled with and longed to be free
of it. He was constitutionally uneasy with himself and confessed: 'I
have always been someone else'. . . A book signed Gary might be
translated by John Markham Beach or Fancoise Lovat, and in the process
be extensively revised, for he was Beach and Lovat too. He had a
practical reason to be Fosco Sinibaldi in 1958, but he wrote
increasingly as other people. He published his cod-thriller /Les Tetes
de Stephanie /(1974) as Shotan Bogat ('Satan the Rich' in Russian) and
his own English translation as Rene Deville. But his greatest coup was
to become Emile Ajar, a name perhaps intended as an indication that a
door was not quite closed on a secret.
"Between 1975 and 1979, while continuing to publish as Gary, he wrote
four Ajar novels, the second of which , /La Vie Devant soi (The Life
Before Us/), won the Goncourt in 1976. . . Only in a posthumously
published essay did he reveal the truth. He had pulled off the greatest
deception since Macpherson foisted the fictitious Ossian on literary
Europe."
I'm probably not going to read any of Gary's novels, but I wonder if any
of them attempt to proved the /raison d'etre/ that he faults those of
Tolstoy and Remarque for not providing.
In addition to being a war hero, in 1970, he considered his honour to
have been slighted by Clint Eastwood and challenged him to a duel.
Eastwood declined.
Lawrence
