Chien blanc

In Beverly Hills, where he had joined his wife Jean Seberg, Romain Gary encountered a trained guard dog conditioned to attack Black people. The year was 1968, America was living through the darkest hours of segregation, and Gary produced a masterpiece. “I am beginning to tell myself that the Black problem in the United States raises a question that makes it practically insoluble: that of Stupidity. It is rooted in the depths of the greatest spiritual power of all time, which is Idiocy.”

Chien blanc offers multiple illustrations of this stupidity, lived through and at times reversed, since in the novel’s central plot, Keys, the Black trainer, does everything in his power to make “White Dog become Black Dog,” in a cold revenge that leads him to use the very same methods to oppress white people in turn. Beyond the fable, Gary is speaking of an America gripped by the demons of endemic racism and the problem of minorities, at a time when Jean Seberg’s activism had led Gary to spend considerable time among Hollywood’s liberal circles mobilizing in favor of Black Americans, circles toward which he showed a good deal of irony.

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

A fine copy of the first printing, in its rare dust jacket.