La Promesse de l’aube
1 carbon copy (210 x 300 mm) of 15 leaves numbered 2 to 15.
A few months before his suicide, Romain Gary decided to finally have this chapter added to the reference edition, the French one. He therefore undertook to translate it himself and asked for it to be incorporated into a new edition of La Promesse de l'aube due to appear in December, three weeks after his suicide.
The typescript bears 11 autograph corrections in black ink on pages 6, 7, 8, 12 and 14: mostly corrections of spelling and punctuation, along with four additions and variants. It includes a copy of another, earlier typescript of the text, with several corrections. On the first leaf of this copy, Gary noted: “chapitre inédit en français de La Promesse de l'aube” + chapter “XX[II].”
“I have finished the first correction of the proofs and I suddenly realize that I may be within a hair’s breadth of leaving behind an indelible mark,” Gary wrote to his publisher Claude Gallimard on 8 December 1958, as he prepared to send him the proofs, corrected in his own hand, of his autobiographical masterpiece La Promesse de l’aube (the definitive title was chosen by Gary in September 1958, after he had considered “La Possession du monde,” “La Confession de Big Sur” and “La Course contre la vie”).
A few months later, Gary undertook to publish the American edition of the text, with one significant change: the addition of an entire chapter, Chapter XXII, absent from the French version. It is devoted entirely to his mother and to the figure of Monsieur Zaremba, a wealthy Polish painter and guest at the family boarding house in Nice, who asks Gary for permission to propose to his mother. She categorically rejects the suitor, once again through the intermediary of the young boy, entrusted with conveying her refusal. Having tried in vain to convince his mother of the merits of his prospective, and soon-to-be-former, adoptive stepfather’s proposal, Gary realizes for the first time a genuine difference in outlook between himself and his mother, which he eventually comes to understand: “I will never understand how, even at seventeen, I could have been so ignorant of femininity.”
“Why these changes? In writing in another language, Romain Gary seems to have felt freer. Addressing reproaches to his mother in a language other than his mother tongue — a language chosen by the mother rather than given — and moving into another cultural universe opens the possibility of saying elsewhere, and differently, what had gone unheard at home. For the writer, it also allows him to react in the moment to the critical reception in the original language of composition. The impermeability of the French and American cultural worlds of the time is evident to Gary, and indeed, 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” (“Romain Gary, l’impossible dérobade” by Benoit Desmarais).
A moving and important document, for such an addition can hardly be fortuitous: in Gary’s mind, it was a necessary addition to his emblematic text, and a final tribute to his mother before his own death.