The day he decided to kill himself, he dropped in at Charvet’s, in place Vendome, and bought himself a red silken dressing gown, similar to those loved by Willie Bauché, one of the chief characters of Les couleurs du jour, the most successful among his unsuccessful novels.

He wore it out of consideration for his fellow creatures, to ensure blood did not show up too much. In his rue du Bac home, so full of sunlight, books and memories, he carefully prepared everything. He sealed inside an envelope his “other” identity, entrusting his son and the publisher Gallimard with the task of deciding whether and when to make it public. He left a note explaining the reasons for his suicide: “Nothing to do with Jean Seberg. Broken-heart fans are kindly required to turn elsewhere. It can all be put down to depression, but then one would also need to admit that this has been going on ever since I reached the age of discretion and that, in any case, it has not prevented me from pursuing my literary career. So why? Maybe the answer lies in the title of my memoirs: The Night will be Peaceful...”
One year earlier Jean Seberg, his former wife, the sad adolescent girl of Bonjour tristesse who used to say about herself “I am free because I am unhappy”, the spoiled and a bit disorderly middle-class girl of A bout de souffle, had been found naked, drunk and dead inside a car. She was 40. They had married in 1962, when she was 24 and he was twice her age.
The pistol shot with which Romain Gary blew his brains on the night of 3 December 1980 caused a sensation but no noise at all. War hero, diplomat, traveller, cinematographer, tombeur de femmes, Goncourt prize winner, in the literary world Gary was regarded as a survivor, a national star covered with glory but now pathetic, a novelist who had reached the end of his career, having written himself out.
But the unexpected news which spread a few months later, when everybody found out that Emile Ajar, the most promising novelist of the seventies, who had won the Goncourt prize five years earlier with La vie devant soi, who had invented a slangy banlieu and emigration style and had celebrated the multiethnic France which had started to change Paris’ appearance, was no less than himself, had a really resounding effect.
Because of his hate for himself, Romain Gary had pretended to be somebody else. But which was his real identity? Born in 1914 in Lithuania, natural son of an untalented actress and of Ivan Mosjoukine, the most famous silent film star, together with Rodolfo Valentino, at the age of thirty Gary already was a legend. His mother Nina Kacew was a Russian Jewess who had escaped from the revolution and spent her life through failures and recoveries. In Warsaw Nina tried to appear a different person from who she was: a great lady with friends in Paris, who worked for the fashionable world for pleasure rather than for need; she was in Poland at the moment, but she would soon be back in Cannes and Beaulieu, among dukes, princes and barons, exchanging bon mots at the Negresco, or sunbathing at the Hotel d’Angleterre... Still, her original models were made in her home basement, the Maison Poiret for which she claimed to be an importer ignored her existence and Paul Poiret, the great tailor who one day came to open her new boutique was only an old Russian actor, one of Nina’s companions in misfortune on the Moscow stages, who accepted to back her up in her mise-en-scène in return for a lunch, a carton of cigarettes, a little money... Gary’s youth held all the elements required to justify his maturity and decline, his willingness to emerge and his fear of being forgotten, his eagerness to amaze and his boredom in pursuing success. In Russian, Gary mean “burns”, and Ajar, his last pen-name, means “ember”. Le brasier ardent, “The Burning Brazier”, was the title of Mosjoukine’s great unsuccessful film.
The meeting with de Gaulle left its mark on his life. When the war broke out Gary was 26, he had done many different jobs, written a few short stories, told many lies. He did his military service in the air force. While the army broke up and shame grew, this Russian Jew who, with his mother’s connivance had chosen France as his adopted country, was unable to accept to see France first defeated and then “allied” with Hitler’s Germany. It was an instinctive choice, even though in many ways unavoidable. Old France had accepted him, although with some reservations: new occupied France was highly unlikely to welcome him with open arms. During the four years of war Gary did a little of everything. In Northern Africa there were more flights ending in emergency landings than war missions. He contracted typhus, enterorrhagias, phlebitis, a paralysis of the left side of his face and doctors said he was done for. In London, expatriate Frenchmen would have liked to fight in the RAF, whereas the De Gaulle government wanted to keep them in mothballs until they had a sufficient number to create French squadrons. During a flight, he seized Chènevier by his feet to throw him off the plane. He found himself seizing his empty parachuting boots, and the sight of those naked heels froze him. When, together with the other members of the crew, he was asked to justify himself, he claimed it had only been a joke for the new commander’s “first flight”. But when cross-questioned, he burst out: “In France we are viewed as deserters and sentenced to death. We have come here and you do not allow us to fight. We are not interested in your calculations. We are tired of waiting.” Sitting at his desk, de Gaulle listened to him and his clipped moustache disguised a tic. He then got up “OK. I give you permission, you may go. Don’t forget to get killed...”. Gary did not die, but he was awarded the Croix de la Liberation: during the mission, the pilot of his bomber was blinded when the cockpit glass blew up in front of him, whereas he, who was the navigating officer, had an abdomen wound and splinters on his buttocks. Gary got everything from the war. At the age of thirty he was a hero with annexed Legion d’honneur, he had written a story book, Education européenne, which Sartre consider the best text on Resistence, and he was able to enter the diplomatic service. Sophia, Berne, UNO as France’s spokesman, Consul General in Los Angeles. Twenty years later, when asked by the young Bernard Henri-Lévi to tell him (again...) about his war adventures or about the Hollywood experience - husband of a star, film director, connected to the star-system - he replied with mingled feelings of anger and dejection: they relish the zero degree in writing, they are happy with structuralism... but he had written Pour Sganarelle, a study in several volumes on the reasons for literature, on the meaning of the novel...”Nobody talks about it, nobody mentions it, nobody takes my ideas seriously.” Gary’s tragedy was that all readings following war victory interpretation were somewhat influenced by this. Whether he was aware of it or not, such ideas always ended up becoming part of the same trend. That victory ended up being the cross he had to wear against his will: the post-victory period had not been as good as its promise and he had to reckon with the disillusion of the present day. Not being satisfied with his gifts as a novelist, Gary tried in any case to reckon with the situation, which however was wan ideological one. In Les couleurs de jour, a novel which was some sort of literary manifesto of Gary’s philosophy, he tackled the problem.
Even though he wasn’t a communist, during the war Gary had found himself to be “so often on the same side, that I can no longer excuse them for anything”. But his left-wing, during the years of the cold war, of the Iron Curtain, of Indochina, of Korea and of the decolonisation, looked like a china vase: it was noble but fragile; it pertained to individuals but it did not succeed in embodying an ideal, a nation, a people. It was a problem shared by all the democratic left-wing, which during the war had turned a blind eye to the communist ally, pretending it was something else, and now found it was much greater and stronger, not at all willing to draw aside, ready to charge its previous alleys with betrayal, defending its own role, its victims and its martyrs. Gary, who was a writer who had lent himself to politics and to the diplomatic service, was not backed by a vision of the world and of history he could refer to, and he lacked that superman behaviour and absolute individualism which enabled for instance Malraux to identify with an ideology whilst preserving his own autonomy. Between the Fifties and the Seventies, Gary wrote about twenty books, he was in the diplomatic service and in film production, he was an international character. He led a crowded life, which was also a new life compared to his early years, which he had lived with pride and participation. But, as one of the leading characters of Les couleurs du jour remarks “we only live once”, after which we only pretend. He married Jean Seberg in 1962. He was 20 years older than her, but his wife, who had reached success at the age of 17, at the age of 24 was already at an end. It was a union between two losers. In Les couleurs du jour, which had been written ten years earlier, Gary had already described it: “Grace is always on the side of the poor. It once used to manifest itself to shepherds, to humble fishermen, to prostitutes. Nowadays these are no longer the most calumniated or despised. Nowadays you need to go and look for a Hollywood star and an old non-communist left-winger to drink your fill of contempt, humiliations and slander. We have tried grace out: we have drawn its attention for the hatred and insults which have been directed to us”. As long as it lasted (that is eight years) this was a happy marriage, in its own way, and when it ended it did not leave feelings of hatred behind, but a son in common and a somewhat tender feeling. Gary still had a public of his own, but he no longer enjoyed critics’ praise and interest. The 60s had sentenced novel to death, but he persisted in writing novels as if nothing had changed. The years of global protest had shaken the foundations of Gaullist power, but he continued to identify with that Gascon and cockaded France that no longer existed. A human form of socialism could have represented his ideal, but he talked about it too early, and in politics precursors are always wrong. And that was when Gary wrote his masterpiece. He invented a new name, Emile Ajar, he provided this name with an identity, that of his nephew, and wrote a novel, La vie devant soi. There were no ideas to be defended, no values to be shown, no ideological themes to be treated, or existential and political choices to be explained. This was full-blooded narration. He won another Goncourt prize, but based on the statute the prize could only be awarded once, and since he viewed the literary institution as a symbol of that France which still held him in awe, he did not feel like cheating... he forced his nephew to refuse the prize, a decision which nobody understood and which created even more confusion around this false-true identity.
In Vie et mort d’Emil Ajar, his literary testament, Gary claimed that a good critic should have been able to detect that Ajar was himself, since too many traces recalled the original. It was his way of saying that critics were incapable of doing their job, they had always been. This could in fact have been true, but it only proved that Gary believed in critics more than these believed in writers. However, he did not realise that, to write his best novel, he had had to make a clean sweep of all his previous life. The most successful and interesting Gary was the one that had never really existed. Talk about burning out one’s life!