The metamorphoses of Romain Gary

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“Romain Gary is an iconoclastic writer who has been slow to find his place in the history of literature. The recognition of his work by literary critics came very late. Even today he does not make unanimity. However, Gary is the author of an important and complex work, which has been very successful within a very diverse audience. His work is published for Gallimard and its entry into the prestigious collection of the “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” has come to stand out as evidence, perhaps a necessity “, says Maxime Decout, full professor of French literature of the XX-XXI centuries. University of Aix-Marseille, curator in 2019 of the Gary Album for the Pléiade and leading specialist in France of the Lithuanian naturalized French writer.

It is an extremely rich work that, in its diversity, is the bearer of a constant and fascinating obsession: the desire to become someone else. Gary has never ceased, in his work as in his existence, to reject the prisons of the Ego, to be satisfied with a single identity. He has staged characters who flee in order to drastically reinvent themselves.

The “Ajar affair”

It is with the “Ajar affair”, in the course of which he transformed himself into another writer, and created a whole work, that he finally managed to make a real metamorphosis: in 1974 a novel was released, Gros Câlin , which under the name of Emile Ajar will be a veteran of a great success. Later, in 1975, Gary will publish another novel under the same pseudonym: La vie devant soi which wins the Goncourt Prize. But Gary has already won the coveted prize in 1956 with Les racines du ciel, and yet the prize in question cannot be awarded twice to the same author. So this second success pushes the press to discover the true identity of Emile Ajar. It is at this moment that Gary asks his young cousin, Paul Pawlovitch, to pretend to be Ajar in front of reporters.

«The mystification works, even if many suspect that Romain Gary is hiding behind Ajar. Ajar’s third writing, Pseudo, plays on these doubts: it is a self-fiction by Paul Pawlovitch who, under the name Ajar, stages Gary himself. Throughout this period Gary however continues to publish at the same time other novels under his own name and under the pseudonym of Emile Ajar, writing very different texts, before committing suicide on December 2, 1980, leaving deliveries for one last manuscript. , Vie et mort d’Emile Ajar, published by Gallimard, which reveals to everyone that Emile Ajar is Gary “, Decout tells us again. titles: Gary’s La promesse de l’aube and Ajar’s La vie devant soi; other magnificent texts, less known, also deserve to be rediscovered and read: Adieu Gary Cooper, Les Mangeurs d’étoiles and La Danse de Gengis Kahn by Gary; Gros Câlin and Ajar’s Pseudo.