I Don’t Exist
The author of the forthcoming novel Part of Your World on the literary politics, and geo-politics, behind her decision to publish under a pseudonym.
—J’étais las de n’être que moi-meme….
Romain Gary, Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar
I cannot honestly tell you who I am, and the reason is that I don’t exist, although a novel written by me does exist. What does it matter?
At the end of the 1970s, Romain Gary wrote that the world as it then appeared to him presented to the writer “a question fatal for all forms of artistic expression, the question of futility.”
Many writers who have been called great write chiefly about themselves. From Proust, the malinger, to Hemingway, the adventurer, this tradition has proved durable. In our time there are Richard Ford, and Philippe Djian (whose work I prefer). Robert Stone, a greater master than either of these, has a much more diverse representation of different types of human being; still in each of his novels is at least one major character whose sensibility is recognizably close to his own.
One supposes that such writers are never moved to say, with Romain Gary above, I was sick of being nothing but myself.
I have been a fanatic of Romain Gary since discovering a copy of Les Cerfs Volants when I was quite young. A used copy, of course. My country is sometimes called a pays pépé, whose commodities are handed down from more prosperous societies: used clothes, used cars, expired medicines and old bicycle tires. Attired in cast-off garments of the West, we are often reduced to picking through your junk-piles in search of other discarded articles we might be able to return to service of some kind. Of course there is more to our country than that. We have a glorious, wretched history, pride in our Revolution, which succeeded handsomely before it began to fail. We have our determination, tenacity, our extraordinary endurance in the face of ever-more-crushing adversity. We have our spirit, and our ancestral spirits too—the latter an asset long lost in the West.
Ayisien-nou, we are sick of not being permitted to be ourselves.
And so, I was shocked to learn, from the fly-leaf of that same worn copy of Les Cerfs Volants, that Romain Gary had killed himself, many years before the novel fell into my hands. For Gary had everything a person like me could hopelessly aspire to. Not only did he rule the French literary world for a time, he also enjoyed success in Hollywood, the veritable land of dreams. He was all at once, as others told him, “aviator, diplomate, writer.” Fortune, fame, beautiful lovers (including the tragically lovely Jean Seberg)—all were his. And yet,
“I was sick of the image of Romain Gary I’d been saddled with once and for all since thirty years. But perhaps I unconsciously lent myself to it. That was easier: the image was ready made, there was nothing to do but inhabit it.”
What was Hemingway thinking when he put the shotgun to his head? By then, almost certainly, his image had become too large for him to occupy fully; it hung on the remains of him, like an oversized suit of clothes. I who loved Romain Gary, who delusively believed that this writer spoke only and especially to me, am reluctant to accept that his final solution also was suicide. But in between, there was Émile Ajar.
For some of us, anonymity is a condition of simple survival. Marie Vieux Chauvet, who signed her own name to Amour, Colère, Folie, finished her days in exile. Though her family bought up and destroyed the first edition of this work (which then disappeared for a generation), that effort was not sufficient to excuse her offense to the Duvalier dictatorship: merely to have written it.
Gary lived under no such pressure, yet kept Émile Ajar’s secret until his own death. Part of the comedy is that he could not give it up. Gros Câlin, the first of four novels to be published under the name of Ajar, was first intended as a work by Gary. Acquaintances who’d seen the manuscript on his desk declared that Gary was the true author, but could not get a hearing. Gary was judged incapable to have written such a book. “Gary is a writer at the end of the road,” one of his close friends insisted: “It’s unthinkable.”
“I was an established, catalogued, classified author, which excused the professionals from examining my work enough to know it.”
One begins to sense the airlessness of his claustrophobia. In a manuscript left to be discovered after his death, Gary describes his invention of Ajar as a “new birth…. I had the perfect illusion of a new creation of myself, by myself.”
But perhaps it is true, after all, that Ajar’s work could not have been written by Gary. The typical Gary protagonist is a crusader of good faith and intellectual honesty, struggling in a world where most people not only lack these qualities but would be hard put to define what they are. Emile Ajar’s protagonists tend to be holy fools. This position allows the Ajar’s books a certain whimsy which would not have been accessible to Gary writing as Gary. A Gary hero sees the world clearly and struggles for “the progress and development of man.” The Ajar hero gets everything backwards and so permits the reader to laugh at the horror and the madness of things as they are.
My little novel has both a hero and heroine. The former is an alumnus of American Special forces, employed as a military “contractor” at the time the story takes place. The latter is a peasant child from an impoverished Caribbean island, twice sold into slavery, first as a restavek and then as a whore. I have reluctantly been made to understand that the value and worth of the work depend entirely on which of these two characters can be assimilated to the author.
How did Gary understand the futility of which he complained? Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar asks the question without really answering it. To each her own futility. I understand mine this way: if we are only allowed to speak as ourselves, we find that we are speaking only to ourselves.
Gabrielle Chavela, Deshaies, Avril 2013
Gary’s original language, translated above (extraits de Vie et Mort d’Émile Ajar par Roman Gary) :
“une question mortelle pour toutes les formes d’expression artistique: celle de la futilité.”
“J’étais las de l’image de Romain Gary qu’on m’avait collée sur le dos une fois pour toutes depuis trente ans…. Peut-être m’y prêtais-je, inconsciemment. C’était plus facile : l’image était toute faite, il n’y avait qu’à prendre place.”
“J’étais un auteur classé, catalogué, acquis, ce qui dispensait les professionnels de se pencher vraiment sur mon oeuvre et de la connaître.”
Gabrielle Chavela’s first novel, Part of Your World, is published by Dymaxicon and available on Amazon.
