Promise at Dawn
A true first printing, with the code K-L in the colophon: for decades, Harper & Brothers used a two-letter code system to indicate the month and year of a book's printing. Here, the first letter (K) corresponds to October, the second letter (L) to 1961, the correct date of the book's publication.
The translation is credited to a certain John Markham Beach — a pseudonym invented by Romain Gary. This edition is partly original and contains a long chapter, Chapter XXII, which does not appear in the French edition published in Paris the previous year. It is devoted entirely to his mother and to the figure of Mr. Zaremba, a wealthy resident of the family boardinghouse in Nice: a Polish painter who asks Romain for permission to seek his mother’s hand in marriage. She categorically rejects the suitor, again through the intermediary of the young boy, entrusted with delivering the message and her refusal. Gary, having tried in vain to convince his mother of the merits of his prospective future ex-adoptive-stepfather’s proposal, becomes aware, for the first time, of a real difference in outlook with his mother, which he eventually comes to understand: “I shall never understand how, even at seventeen, I could have been so ignorant of femininity.”
Why this addition? Writing in another language seems to have freed Romain Gary. Addressing reproaches to his mother in a language other than his native tongue — a language chosen by the mother, not given — and moving into another cultural universe opened up the possibility of saying elsewhere, differently, what had gone unheard at home. For the writer, it also allowed him to react immediately to the critical reception in the language of original composition. The separation between the French and American cultural worlds of the time was, for Gary, self-evident: indeed, none of the French critics who reviewed Lady L., Les Mangeurs d’étoiles, Adieu Gary Cooper or Charge d’âme ever mentioned the existence of these books in their original English versions (Benoît Desmarais, Romain Gary, l’impossible dérobade).
At Gary’s request, this chapter was incorporated into the French text in 1980, translated by Gary himself, as though it were a final wish. This definitive edition was at press when Gary took his own life on 2 December 1980.
A good copy, with light rubbing to the dust jacket.
Rare in a strict first printing.