Charge d’âme

Five years after the publication of The Gasp, Romain Gary decided to produce a French version of the text. Having described the dust jacket illustrations in precise detail to Claude Gallimard, he told a journalist: “I’m about to turn sixty-four and I’m enjoying life as I never have before, because I’ve gotten rid of a certain number of affectations. […] I can take my pants down in public without feeling like a genius or a fool.” Nothing, indeed, could restrain the author any longer: he entered into a dispute with his publisher, in a tone free of any such affectations, over a press kit put together with no sense at all: “My dear fellow, this is unbelievable, what a mess. […] I wrote a special preface. Such ineptitude borders on sabotage. I want an explanation. […] Damn it! Who made this irreparable blunder?” (letter to Robert Gallimard). The “blunder” in question was to have announced too early that Charge d’âme was the sequel to Frère Océan — something Gary had himself announced in Pour Sganarelle. Be that as it may, the novel does continue on from La Tête coupable, another novel first written in English and likewise part of the Frère Océan cycle, of which Charge d’âme is undoubtedly the sequel: we find again in Charge d’âme the character of Marc Mathieu, the French scientist living in hiding in Tahiti, whose work had allowed France to acquire the hydrogen bomb.

But Gary wanted to detach it from that cycle, as he made clear a few days later to another Gallimard at the publishing house, Claude: “I’m being put on the market with no regard whatsoever for the event. And who is in charge of managing, of bringing back into circulation, the whole of my twenty-five books? No one. It’s practically a copyright deposit. That is not my idea of publishing. […] Who gave Le Figaro the completely false description of my book…?”

A fine copy.