Part of The Process: Romain Gary

Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process. 

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Romain Gary, also known by the pen name Émile Ajar, was a French novelist, diplomat, film director, and World War II aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt twice and is considered a major writer of French literature in the 20th century.

Born Roman Kacew in Vilnius in 1914, his books and interviews present various versions of his parents' origins, ancestry, occupation and his own childhood. His mother, Mina Owczyńska was a Jewish actress from Lithuania and his father was a businessman named Arieh-Leib Kacew from Trok, also a Lithuanian Jew. The couple divorced in 1925 and Arieh-Leib remarried. 

Gary later claimed that his actual father was the celebrated actor Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom his actress mother had worked and to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Mosjoukine appears in Gary’s memoir Promise at Dawn, though this claim was impossible to verify because of Gary’s itinerant childhood. Deported to central Russia in 1915, Gary and his mother stayed in Moscow until 1920.They later returned to Vilnius, then moved on to Warsaw. 

When Gary was fourteen, he and his mother emigrated illegally to Nice in France. Gary studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force following this. Despite completing all parts of his course successfully, Gary was the only one of almost 300 cadets in his class not to be commissioned as an officer. He believed the military establishment was distrustful of him because he was a foreigner and a Jew. 

Despite over 250 hours flying time and various battles during World War II, it was only after three months' delay that he was made a sergeant in February 1940. Despite being lightly wounded on an air raid in June 1940, he continued to fly and was disappointed with the armistice, which formally ended hostilities between France and Germany. 

Gary rejected de Gaulle’s stance at a time when the country was split into various zones and heavily occupied by Nazi soldiers. He decided to go to England to train and joined the Free French, a resistance ‘government in exile’ that operated from London. He was made adjutant and participated in air raids and other action across Africa. In 1944, when another pilot was blinded temporarily, Gary talked him to the bombing target and back home over radio, the third landing being successful. This and the subsequent BBC interview gave him a reputation in the English-speaking world. 

Gary finished the war as a captain in the London offices of the Free French Air Forces. After the end of the hostilities, he changed his name to Romain Gary. He was decorated for his bravery in the war, receiving many medals and honours, including Compagnon de la Libération and Commander of the Légion d'honneur. In 1945 he published his first novel, Éducation Européenne, which was later translated as Forest of Anger. 

Gary began a career as a diplomat in the service of France, in consideration of his contribution to the liberation of his chosen country of residence. In this capacity, he held positions in Bulgaria, Paris, Switzerland, New York, London and then as Consul General of France in Los Angeles for years in the late 1950s. While maintaining a diplomatic career, he became one of France's most popular and prolific writers, writing more than thirty novels, essays and memoirs, some under pseudonyms that were only revealed later.

Gary's first wife was the British writer, journalist, Vogue editor and novelist Lesley Blanch. They married in 1944 and divorced in 1961. From 1962 to 1970, Gary was married to celebrated American actress Jean Seberg, with whom he had a son. After learning that Seberg had an affair with Clint Eastwood, Gary challenged him to a duel, but Eastwood declined.

He wrote a couple of screenplays while in Los Angeles, but returned to France in the 1970s, where he pulled off one of the most infamous literary ‘heists’ in history. In 1973, having already notched up one Prix Goncourt, two divorces and over twenty published books, he invented his most famous alter ego: Émile Ajar. Purportedly a 34-year-old Algerian who’d performed a botched abortion as a medical student and fled to Brazil, Gary got a friend in Rio to mail the manuscripts and Gary’s cousin son, Paul Pavlowitch, was roped in to play Ajar in public appearances.

Gary, who had already received the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for The Roots of Heaven, was ineligible according to the strict stipulations that meant an author can only win the award once. However, the Académie Goncourt awarded the 1975 prize to the author of The Life Before Us, Emile Ajar, without knowing his identity. Gary's cousin's son Paul Pavlowitch posed as the author but in a posthumous book called The Life and Death of Emile Ajar, Gary revealed his alternate identity, making him the only person in history to win the prize twice. 

Gary died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1980 in Paris. He left a note which said that his death had no relation to his ex-wife Jean Seberg's suicide the previous year. A man who lived so many different lives across continents, who was shaped by multiple wars, careers and possibly multiple identities, his story is truly stranger than fiction, and he remains influential in the world of French literature. 

Photo Credits: Facebook / Romain Gary