” I had fun. Goodbye and thank you,” he wrote a few days before his suicide (Life and death of Émile Ajar, Gallimard, 1981), on December 2, 1980, forever convinced of the “futility” of literature. Saying he feels empty of the illusions necessary for his accomplishment. Perhaps he was also severely depressed.
In this text he gave keys for the benefit of his readers and those of Émile Ajar, revealing that he had been the only author to receive the Goncourt prize twice, thanks to one of the most beautiful literary mystifications of the 20the century.
Roman Kacew has multiplied versions of himself: Romain Gary, Émile Ajar, Shatan Bogat, Fosco Sinibaldi. A chameleon, a mythomaniac, a juggler, the mastermind of the “total novel”, who lived like a character in a novel? Like a writer. Quite simply. A big.
Before confronting the author of The promise of dawn and of The life ahead, the Polish Agata Tuszyńska, novelist, poet and biographer, was interested in the figures of Bruno Schulz and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In The jugglerthe book half-investigation, half-tribute which she devotes this time to Romain Gary, the writer wonders: why seek to know the truth about a writer, where does “this need to seek the man in the ‘artist, to lay it bare’?
Through the twists and turns of her book and the letters she addresses to Romain Gary, Agata Tuszyńska asks many questions. To answer it, she can go through the classified ads in Wilno Mail, stroll from Rue Juive to Rue Jatkowa, between the Great Synagogue and the one which has survived “with its blue fence and its engraved pediment”. It takes us from Vilnius, current capital of Lithuania, where Gary was born in 1914, to Paris and Los Angeles, via Nice and Warsaw (where he lived for three years with his mother).
She slowly unravels the tangle of myths, false leads and blatant lies that Gary has peddled around him. Clouds of smoke to protect yourself as much as to fuel your legend. Agata Tuszyńska unearths from the archives the often unknown details of Gary’s early childhood in Vilnius and his mother’s acting career during their years in Moscow, separating fact from fiction where most biographers (Bona, Anissimov) are content of not knowing or accepting Gary’s “juggling” without insisting.
The biographer thus resurrects her mother’s first husband, Mina Owczyńska, a Russian-speaking actress and seamstress who “suffered from rampant Francophilia”. Just as she brings back to life this half-brother born to her mother twelve years earlier, and with whom Gary would have lived for a year: he had never even mentioned the existence of this brother who died of tuberculosis in 1923.
Same thing about his father, Leïb Kacew, a wealthy fur merchant from Vilnius who was present during his early years. “Revoked, suppressed, absent” from the writer’s legend — and perhaps with good reason.
A dense and personal book, a biography that reads like a novel and a sort of journey into the end of the night by Romain Gary.