Romain Gary: A Tall Story by David Bellos

Author:David Bellos [Bellos, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446402863
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

18

Masquerade

Gary in London, 1954–1955

LESLEY BLANCH GAVE Up her career as a journalist when she married Romain Gary and shortly after became a diplomatic wife. Ten years later, as she approached her fiftieth birthday, she launched on a new life as a writer of books. The Wilder Shores of Love – brief lives of four European women fascinated by the allure of the East (Jane Digby, Isabelle Eberhardt, Aimée Dubucq and Isabel Burton) – appeared in 1954 with Simon & Schuster, Gary’s own US publisher, and was a runaway success.1 In America it far outshone Gary’s achievements with The Company of Men and The Colors of the Day. In French translation it took Paris by storm and was serialised in Elle.2 Gary’s eventual response to this cruel blow to his pride was a partly self-mocking piece, also for Elle, ‘Lesley est une sorcière’ (Lesley is a Witch).3 Meanwhile, Lesley had already built on her newfound standing to sign herself up for two easy books intended to make her financially independent. Alongside an edition of the memoirs of an English courtesan mentioned on page 149,4 she concocted Around the World in Eighty Dishes, a children’s cookery book. Apart from her pen-and-ink sketches, most of it seems to have been copied out from pages of Tante Marie and Mrs Beeton (veal Marengo, brandade de morue, colcannon, kedgeree, toad-in-the-hole …). She did slip in a couple of items picked up from life with Romain Gary, Roqué-brune Tartine and Polish Pickled Cucumbers, though the first tells you more about Lesley’s incompetence in French and the second does not tell you how to pickle the cucumbers in the first place.

As Lesley’s career took off, Gary’s seemed to be running into the ground. With the end of his two-year stint at the UN coming on to the horizon in the summer months of 1954, he had still not finished his ‘elephant book’. He’d been kept so busy by his job that all his writing had been done in lunch breaks: ‘The Roots of Heaven was written between twelve and two,’ he later told Patrice Galbeau.5 Evenings were taken up with the receptions and dinner parties that were part of a diplomat’s job, as well as with Gary’s need for sex. Where would his next posting be? As is apparently customary in the Diplomatic Service, Gary spent a lot of time putting out feelers for a new posting – Venice and Tehran were raised as possibilities – but he set his sights in the end on the job of press attaché at the London Embassy. His appointment came through, he was all set to leave, he was about to board the liner when news arrived that it had been vetoed by Jean Chauvel. Gary caught the boat nonetheless, but sailed to England with no clear prospect ahead.

Gary soon learned why he was being blackballed by Chauvel. The Ambassador, acutely worried about being outed as a gay since his contretemps in Washington in 1951 (see here), had jumped to

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