On the Holocaust Comedies of “Emile Ajar”

Throughout the 1970s, a period during which American academics seemed poised to absorb from France ever more “radical” doses of literary “theory,” the readership of France itself unwittingly embarked on an unprecedented literary experiment, of remarkable speculative import, under the tutelage of a French man of letters so apparently conventional as to identify his years of service as French consul general in Hollywood as a high point of his career. ¹ For these were the years during which Romain Gary published a series of three tonally innovative novels under the pseudonym “Emile Ajar”: Gros-Cdlin (1974), The Life Before Us (La vie devant soi; 1975), and King Solomon (L'angoisse du roi Salomon; 1979). The critical success of the books was such that attempts were made, beyond what all took to be a fabricated biography on the book jacket of Gros-Câlin (a pied noir physician and sometime abortionist, living in Latin America, in flight from French authorities), to identify the actual author of books that were emerging as the literary achievement of France in the 1970s. Press speculation concerned only the highest echelon of the French literary pantheon: Raymond Queneau and Louis Aragon. ² “Ajar”'s publisher, Mercure de France, as much in the dark as everyone else, prevailed on its author, through an intermediary, to grant an interview to the press. Gary requested his “nephew,” one Paul Pavlowitch, to play the role of “Ajar” in an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, in an apartment in Copenhagen, and to do so on the condition that his “actual” identity not be divulged. ³ Pavlovitch, however, revealed enough of his own life for an old acquaintance to be able to identify him as Ajar. When that (astute, but erroneous) attribution surfaced in the French press, shortly after “Ajar” himself, in what seemed to many a parody of Sartre's rejection of the Nobel Prize, had refused the Prix Goncourt for The Life Before Us, Gary's sublime reaction was to write Pseudo, the memoirs of Pavlowitch, alias Ajar, now revealed to be a psychotic, writing for reasons of therapy, and paranoiacally obsessed with his uncle, referred to only as Tonton Macoute, and the nefarious designs that relative seemed to have on “Ajar’ ”s emerging career.