Chien blanc

In Beverly Hills, where he had joined his wife Jean Seberg, Romain Gary encountered a trained wolf-dog, trained to attack Black people. It was 1968, and America was living through the dark hours of segregation; from this experience Gary wrote a masterpiece. “I am beginning to think that the Black problem in the United States raises a question that makes it virtually insoluble: that of Stupidity. It has its roots in the depths of the greatest spiritual power of all time, which is Bloody Stupidity.”

Chien Blanc offers multiple illustrations of this “stupidity,” lived through and sometimes reversed, since in the central thread of the text, Keys, the Black trainer, does everything he can to turn “White Dog into Black Dog,” a cold act of revenge in which he uses the same methods to oppress white people in turn. Beyond the fable, Gary is writing about an America gripped by the demons of endemic racism and the problem of minorities, at a time when Jean Seberg’s activism gave him the opportunity to spend a great deal of time among the radical Hollywood circles mobilized in support of Black causes, toward whom he shows considerable irony.

The book was brilliantly adapted for the screen by Samuel Fuller.