La Promesse de l’aube [Promise at Dawn]
S.l.n.d. [Paris, 1980]
1 typewritten typing (210 x 300 mm) of 15 f. numbered 2 to 15.
1 carbon copy (210 x 300 mm) of 15 pages numbered 2 to 15.
The typing includes 11 autograph corrections in black ink on pages 6, 7, 8, 12 and 14: mostly spelling and punctuation corrections, and four additions and variants. This set corresponds to the version published by Gallimard in 1980.
The carbon copy is a duplicate of the same strike and of an even earlier version, with several corrections.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
On the first sheet, Gary’s mention: “unpublished chapter in French of La Promesse de l’aube” + chapter “XX[II]”.I have finished the first proofreading and I suddenly realise that I may be close to leaving an indelible mark behind me,” wrote Romain Gary to his publisher Claude Gallimard on December 8, 1958, as he was about to send him the corrected proofs of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Promise of Dawn (the final title was chosen by Gary in September 1958, after he had considered The Possession of the World, The Confession of Big Sur, and The Race Against Life).
A few months later, Gary started publishing the American edition of the text. With one important change: the addition of a whole chapter, this chapter XXII.
It was not included in the French version of 1960 and it was only in the final version of the book, published in 1980 by Gallimard, that this chapter was integrated.
It is entirely devoted to his mother and the figure of Mr Zaremba, a rich client – a Polish painter – of the boarding house in Nice, who asks Romain’s permission to ask for his mother’s hand in marriage. But she categorically rejects the suitor, through the young Gary, who is charged with conveying the message and his refusal. Gary, after trying in vain to convince his mother of the validity of his future ex-father-in-law’s request, becomes aware, for the first time, of a real difference of opinion with his mother, which he finally understands: “I will never understand how I could, even at seventeen, be so ignorant of femininity”.
“Why these changes? By writing in a different language, it seems that Roman Gary felt freer. Addressing reproaches to his mother in a language other than his mother tongue – a language chosen by the mother and not given to him – and moving to another cultural universe opens up the possibility of saying in another way, elsewhere, what was not heard at home. For the writer, it also allows him or her to react to the critical reception in the original language of writing. The watertightness of the French and American cultural worlds of the time is obvious to Gary, and besides, no critic in the French articles devoted to Lady L., Les mangeurs d’étoiles, Adieu Gary Cooper or Charge d’âme alludes to the existence of these books in their original English versions” (in Romain Gary, l’impossible dérobade by Benoit Desmarais).
This long chapter will be the only addition to Promise at Dawn, eight months after the French publication.
Mr. Zaremba and the questions he raises will be addressed again in 1974 in La nuit sera calme, as Gary foresees in the text: “Why do you always tell stories, against yourself, Romain Gary? (…) Maybe I’ll answer them one day”. The French version contains an asterisk after this mention, referring to this note: ” * See La Nuit sera calme, Gallimard, 1974″. This is the only named intertextual reference in Gary’s entire oeuvre that cross-references from one novel to another. The figure of Mr. Zemba is also interesting as Gary will feel close to this character: “Sometimes I think of Mr. Zemba, when I see myself in a mirror. It seems to me that I look like him, which is not without annoying me a bit, because well, what! I am still a few good years younger than he was then, when he was an aging man.”
