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BOOKS: The Dance of Romain Gary
Nicholas Simon

Novelist, diplomat, war hero and champion lover, Romain Gary finally gets the biography he deserves

Nearly a quarter century after he put the barrel of a revolver into his mouth, lay down on his bed in his Paris apartment and shot a hole through the back of his head, writer, diplomat, film director and quintessential French lover Romain Gary has been "rediscovered" by the French public and by the Paris literary intelligentsia.

"All his books are being republished and I am regularly asked to appear on television and in all sorts of forums to talk about Romain and his work," says Myriam Anissimov, whose 745-page biography of Gary was published earlier this year. It is that book, "Romain Gary, le Cam�l�on," that sparked the revival of interest in Gary, who was 66 when he killed himself, in 1980. The book�s publisher is negotiating the rights to publish the work in several other languages, notably English. Gary was well known in the United States, since the multilingual author -- who served as a French consul in Los Angeles from 1956 to 1960 -- wrote several of his books, including "Lady L.," "The Ski Bum" and "White Dog," in English. He also directed two films, "Birds Go to Die in Peru" and "Kill," and wrote screenplays. His posting in L.A. -- the French press called him "Ambassador to Hollywood" -- followed more conventional diplomatic missions to Bulgaria, Switzerland, Bolivia and the U.N.

But the flamboyant Gary was also noted for his presence in international gossip columns and screen magazines because of his marriage, divorce and subsequent close but complicated relationship with U.S. film star Jean Seberg. Her lifeless body was found in the back seat of a car in Paris in 1979, and initial conclusions were that she died of a drugs-and-alcohol overdose. Anissimov says police and Gary suspected her then-husband, an Algerian, "helped" her die in order to grab her dwindling fortune. He spent eight months in prison before being released for lack of evidence, and was later expelled from France.

One of the main themes of Anissimov�s book (not the first Gary biography, but the most exhaustive), which took more than five years to write and has left her Paris apartment cluttered with boxes of documents dug up around Europe and the U.S., is to highlight Gary�s Jewish dimension. Anissimov says others played down his Jewish origins because they saw him as a purely French literary hero, whereas Gary�s own ambivalence had to do with his complicated ties with his father.

Anissimov says that Gary, though he wrote mostly in French, had a style far closer to that of Russian greats "like Gogol, or Jewish-American authors such as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, than to Gustave Flaubert." The characters and situations in his novels have a timeless and universal quality, which may explain why they sold so much better than those of many other French authors, whose writings were sometimes more polished but whose subjects were intimately linked with specifically French situations or social mores.

Detective work by Anissimov in Eastern Europe has produced previously unavailable documents that definitely prove Gary was born Roman Kacew to Jewish parents in Vilna in 1914, when the city (regarded as "The Jerusalem of the North" by Jews until the Holocaust) was still part of the Russian empire. Gary, who also used the noms de plume of Fosco Sinibaldi, Shatan Bogat and Emile Ajar, never denied his Jewish background, but also described himself in various periods of his life as equally having Tartar or Cossack origins on his father�s side, as well as hinting he was the illegitimate son of (non-Jewish) Russian film idol Ivan Mosjoukine, whose somber good looks he did in fact share.

"But all that was entirely fake," Anissimov told The Report. "It was simply Gary�s hatred of his father, who had left his mother when Gary was a small boy, which led to the denial and to a world of make-believe that he invented and wrote about so well."

Gary�s real father, Arieh Leib Kacew, and both a half brother and a half sister born of his father�s subsequent second marriage, all died in atrocious circumstances during the Holocaust, a subject Gary increasingly wrote about in his last years, particularly in "The Dance of Genghis Cohn" (1967).

The greatest influence on Gary�s life, as all those who read his best-known book, the autobiographical "The Promise at Dawn," will know, was his formidable mother, Mina, n�e Owczynska. More than one critic, both in France and abroad, has argued that no mutual love and devotion between a mother and son has ever been described with more passion and emotion than that contained in Gary�s book. Israeli actor Assi Dayan played Gary in the film version of the book (1970), which was directed by Jules Dassin and hated by Gary, who stormed out of a first screening in rage.

"Promise" recounts the difficulties Mina and Romain faced when they reached France in 1928, virtually penniless, settling under false pretenses in a country then experiencing strong xenophobic and anti-Semitic influences. Mina ran a small boarding house in Nice, where she led a life of self-sacrifice so as to enable her son to study and otherwise prepare himself to become the war hero, lionized intellectual and famed international womanizer she correctly predicted he would be. All the people interviewed by Anissimov who remembered Gary�s mother told her that Mina made such forecasts about him publicly and frequently, much to her son�s embarrassment. But by his late teens, Romain had begun to develop the charm that would serve him so well throughout his life, and he started to embark on multiple, sometimes simultaneous love affairs. (Anissimov says he had an extraordinary appetite for women, and that even late in his life, he claimed he developed a headache if he had not had sex by midafternoon each day.)

"Promise at Dawn" tells of the years 1940-1944, when Gary (who had changed his name when he joined the Free French, to protect his mother) flew French bombing missions over Africa, the Middle East and occupied Europe. On return to base from low-level attacks in which most of his initial squadron mates were killed, Gary sometimes found waiting for him letters from his mother, which had been smuggled out of Occupied France. When he finally came home, covered with decorations, he found out that Mina had died of illness years before, but had spent her last months writing hundreds of letters, which friends were asked to send periodically to her beloved son through neutral countries.

"Of course my mother was Jewish," Gary once wrote. "It was an absolutely unsolvable dilemma since my Tartar ancestors on my father�s side were pogrom perpetrators while my Jewish ancestors were pogrom victims. I have a problem. When I was in Israel [in 1969], during a news conference which was carried live on local radio, a journalist for the newspaper Ma�ariv questioned me about this. He looked like Ben-Gurion, but much older, and asked me before a hall full of people, if I was circumcised! It was the first time the press took an interest in my penis, and on live radio too. Of course I could not deny it, it would have been like spitting on my mother�s grave," he wrote.

Anissimov is particularly well-suited to have written Gary�s biography. The daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants to France, she wrote a noted biography of Primo Levi, "The Tragedy of an Optimist" (1996), and her nine novels include the prize-winning "His Majesty, Death," about her own family�s tribulations during the Holocaust. But above all, and despite a 30-year age difference, Anissimov was herself once one of Gary�s many lovers. "We were together nearly a year," in the early 70s, she says.

Gary unsuccessfully tried to steer her away from writing about the Holocaust, she explained in a long conversation with The Report. "He told me that when he wrote about Jewish subjects, his books were always failures. Once in the street, he turned to me and said dramatically, �les Goys don�t understand us. Don�t throw away your career.� In fact, he was disappointed by the reception in France of his novel �The Dance of Genghis Cohn,� which must be one of the most fabulous stories ever written about the effects of the Shoah," she says. "Cohn," which sold extraordinarily well outside France, is the story of the dybbuk of a murdered Jewish comedian, that decades later comes to haunt the SS officer who killed him.

Anissimov said life with Gary was anything but simple. "We once had a major shouting match in the street in Saint-Germain-des-Pr�s, when I told him my Yiddish was better than his," she recalls. In the end, despite their similar backgrounds, their affair was destined to fail, because he was a man of innumerable women.

Gary had no ties with religion or the organized Jewish community. A born rebel, "he refused to sign petitions for Soviet Jews when he could have made a difference. This was on the grounds that if he signed one petition, he�d have to sign them for every other cause," says Anissimov. But when then-French president Charles de Gaulle, the man Gary most admired, made what were seen as derogatory comments about Israel and Jews in a 1967 news conference (he referred to the Jews as "an elite people, domineering and self-confident," and implied that French Jews should have no loyalties other than to France), Gary penned a protest "Letter to My Fellow Jews," which was published on the front page of the daily Le Figaro. He said if the Catholics could have the Vatican, the Jews were perfectly entitled to feel attachment to Israel. Gary remained fanatically Gaullist to the end, accepting de Gaulle�s explanations to the French chief rabbi that he could hardly be accused of anti-Semitism since he restored citizenship to Jews after Vichy and was always surrounded by Jewish aides. Gary attended de Gaulle�s funeral, in 1970, wearing his wartime uniform, which no longer fit, and had a public row there with a -- Jewish -- wartime buddy, who accused him of being a clown.

During World War II, Gary had flown combat missions from the Haifa area over the Mediterranean; later, in 1969, he visited Israel to lecture in universities. But Anissimov says Gary felt most at home with a Jewish world that no longer existed, because it was the world of his childhood and the only one where he felt he truly belonged and was not an outsider. "He felt more at ease in Yiddish restaurants in New York, but when he killed himself, he had a long stay planned in Israel in the months ahead," says Anissimov.

Gary had a monumental, synagogue-size menorah at the foot of his bed when he died, according to Anissimov. Hinting at what might happen, a depressed Gary told a friend a few days before: "If my mother were here, this would not be taking place." But he was growing increasingly moody, and could not accept that he was starting to show the signs of age. And he was shaken by a public debate, which even made its way into TV talk shows, about whether he could still have sex. (He offered medical certificates to prove he was still potent.)

The last words in his suicide note were: "I have finally expressed myself entirely."

Romain Gary, le Cameleon (in French) / By Myriam Anissimov. Denoel: 784 pp; 31.50 euros