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 includes a long chapter — Chapter XXII — not found 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 guest at the family boarding house in Nice: a Polish painter who asks Romain for permission to seek his mother’s hand in marriage. She categorically rejects the suitor, again through the intermediary of the young boy, acting as go-between to convey her 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 genuine difference in 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, not 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 in real time to the critical reception in the original language of writing. The impermeability of the French and American cultural worlds of the time was obvious 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 a kind of last wish. The book, in this definitive edition, was going to press when Gary took his own life on 2 December 1980.

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

A fine copy, in a dust jacket in excellent condition.