The Guilty Head
[Los Angeles, 1968-1969].
469 p. autograph and 69 p. typescript (carbon or copy), 538 f.
Autograph manuscript, with a few typewritten leaves, extensively worked and corrected: 1,350 words or passages crossed out and then corrected, 2,000 cross-outs, and nearly 300 additions of words or lines by the author’s own hand.
This English version contains many variations from the version published in French [La Tête coupable].
Romain Gary wrote at least part of this novel directly in English; it wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1969, but the two versions seem to have worked in tandem, although the French version was probably completed before the American.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
The idea for the book apparently came to him during a trip to Tahiti in September 1958. It features Marc Mathieu, the French scientist behind the French H-bomb, who hides in Tahiti under the name Cohn, pretending to be a painter. He is wanted by all the world’s secret services, who want to capture or eliminate him.
The Guilty Head allows Gary to indulge in his new favorite game, that of hidden identities. Not only is Cohn in fact Mathieu, but his girlfriend, the beautiful vahiné Meeva, turns out to be a young German girl named Liebchen (“little love”), while the Dominican priest Tamil is in fact the representative of the French secret service. There really is no innocence left on earth: stripped of its identity, the island is no longer the paradise it was meant to be, but a vast Disneyland subject to international tourism, which exploits it, right down to the myth of Paul Gauguin, to attract tourists. “In a perpetual round of the true and the false, a host of characters with the most diverse specialties enter: swindlers, matamores, hypocrites, blusterers, tricksters, forgers, charlatans, mystifiers, seducers, pranksters, simulators, usurpers, defectors, traitors, spies, double or triple agents, barbouzes and a whole range of mythomaniacs, not forgetting discreet plagiarists. […] Trompe-l’oeil is everywhere. The most typical vahina turns out to be a German who studied ethnology in Tübingen. The Maoris are now of Chinese origin and speak with a Corsican accent. As for the pirogues’ songs, they were composed for a film.” (Claude Leroy, Éros géographe, Presses univ. du Septentrion, 2010).
In its French version, La Tête coupable is presented as the third volume of the Frère Océan cycle, begun with Pour Sganarelle and continued with La Danse de Gengis Cohn. In La nuit sera calme, Gary announces his intention to change the book’s title to La Fête coupable, having previously thought of calling it Les Années lumières, Le Remords or La maison du jouir (the name Gauguin had given to his house in Tahiti).
