Promise at dawn

The translation is credited to a certain John Markham Beach: a pseudonym created 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 client of the family boarding house in Nice: a Polish painter who asks Romain for permission to request his mother’s hand. She categorically rejects the suitor, again through the intermediary of the young boy, who acts as factotum charged with delivering the message and her refusal. Gary, having tried in vain to convince his mother of the merits of his prospective ex-future adoptive stepfather’s proposal, realizes for the first time a real difference of outlook with his mother, which he eventually comes to understand: “I will never understand how, even at seventeen, I could have shown myself so ignorant of femininity.”

Why this addition? “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 — moving into another cultural universe opens up the possibility of saying elsewhere, differently, what had not been heard at home. For the writer, it also allows him to react immediately to critical reception in the original language of writing. The impermeability of the French and American cultural worlds of the time was self-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).

At Gary’s request, this chapter was incorporated into the French version in 1980, translated by Gary himself, as though a last wish. The book, in this definitive edition, was in press when Gary took his own life on December 2, 1980.

A rare copy of the first printing of one of Gary’s masterpieces.

A good copy.