Dec 29, 2017 03:21 AM
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/...ade-up-man
EXCERPT: . . . His fabrications hold a particular fascination because of the moral authority asserted by his novels, and by his actions. [Romain] Gary’s example defines a fundamental distinction between the fabulist and the fraud. The higher forms of fiction and the lower form of fibs were, no doubt, born within minutes of each other. Anyone who is an inspired storyteller, as Gary was, knows that the essence of good storytelling is not assembling a heap of facts but having the imagination to leap through an arc of bright truths to create a great curve of invention. A story is a constellation of stars, with a recognizable shape made from shining bits of fact that may exist, empirically, at different levels and different spatial depths.
Yet even if the will toward art and the will to deceive others can be closely aligned, we readily distinguish between the liar and the littérateur. The fabulist wants to convey the dramatic experience of events, while the fraud wants to convey a false evaluation of them. The fabulist wants to dramatize himself; the fraud, to deceive others. With fable-makers like Gary, the artificiality of the material is almost always self-evident, and so is the dramatic point being sought by the story...
[...] Romain Gary was a great big liar. The French novelist, war hero, and diplomat made up stories the way other people make up beds: daily and conscientiously and without much premeditation. He lied all the time, and about many things. He lied about his background: born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, in 1914, right at the beginning of the European catastrophe, as a poor Jew among poor Jews. He lied about his mother, his father, his education, his literary history, his loves. His fine and patient and entirely admiring biographer, David Bellos, not only called his study of Gary “A Tall Story” but throughout uses words like “bullshit” and “eyewash” to characterize the tales his subject told.
But Gary was a big liar. This desperately poor Eastern European Jew reinvented himself as a French patriot and literary figure, titles he earned by fighting for France and by writing very good novels in French, one of which won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary award. And then, when he was famous under one made-up name and persona, he invented another name and persona, and wrote well enough in this very different voice to win a second Goncourt Prize. (The rules say it can be awarded to someone only once, so he remains the sole writer with this distinction.) No lie Romain Gary told was bigger than that he was Romain Gary.
Through it all, he was, puzzlingly but certainly, great: a great man of a special mid-century kind—great in form, in fable, in the entire fiction he made of his life, dedicated to an extravagantly complicated ideal of humanity. Here was a man of steadfast personal courage who spoke up in his writing for those called cowards, for the schlemiels and wise guys and pranksters who, faced with the unimaginable evils of human existence, feigned and dodged and, sometimes, survived. He allowed the contradictions in his own life to become identical to the absurdities of modern existence.
Gary has gone in and out of favor in America. Back in the nineteen-fifties and into the sixties, when he was often resident here—in the fifties, he was a French consul general in Los Angeles—he was a star, both as an exotic public figure at the center of the Higher Hollywood (he lunched with J.F.K.) and as a best-selling author. He married the actress Jean Seberg at the height of her fame, and despite the tragic end to their marriage—both died by their own hands, though in a way each died by the other’s...
MORE: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/...ade-up-man
EXCERPT: . . . His fabrications hold a particular fascination because of the moral authority asserted by his novels, and by his actions. [Romain] Gary’s example defines a fundamental distinction between the fabulist and the fraud. The higher forms of fiction and the lower form of fibs were, no doubt, born within minutes of each other. Anyone who is an inspired storyteller, as Gary was, knows that the essence of good storytelling is not assembling a heap of facts but having the imagination to leap through an arc of bright truths to create a great curve of invention. A story is a constellation of stars, with a recognizable shape made from shining bits of fact that may exist, empirically, at different levels and different spatial depths.
Yet even if the will toward art and the will to deceive others can be closely aligned, we readily distinguish between the liar and the littérateur. The fabulist wants to convey the dramatic experience of events, while the fraud wants to convey a false evaluation of them. The fabulist wants to dramatize himself; the fraud, to deceive others. With fable-makers like Gary, the artificiality of the material is almost always self-evident, and so is the dramatic point being sought by the story...
[...] Romain Gary was a great big liar. The French novelist, war hero, and diplomat made up stories the way other people make up beds: daily and conscientiously and without much premeditation. He lied all the time, and about many things. He lied about his background: born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, in 1914, right at the beginning of the European catastrophe, as a poor Jew among poor Jews. He lied about his mother, his father, his education, his literary history, his loves. His fine and patient and entirely admiring biographer, David Bellos, not only called his study of Gary “A Tall Story” but throughout uses words like “bullshit” and “eyewash” to characterize the tales his subject told.
But Gary was a big liar. This desperately poor Eastern European Jew reinvented himself as a French patriot and literary figure, titles he earned by fighting for France and by writing very good novels in French, one of which won the Goncourt Prize, France’s highest literary award. And then, when he was famous under one made-up name and persona, he invented another name and persona, and wrote well enough in this very different voice to win a second Goncourt Prize. (The rules say it can be awarded to someone only once, so he remains the sole writer with this distinction.) No lie Romain Gary told was bigger than that he was Romain Gary.
Through it all, he was, puzzlingly but certainly, great: a great man of a special mid-century kind—great in form, in fable, in the entire fiction he made of his life, dedicated to an extravagantly complicated ideal of humanity. Here was a man of steadfast personal courage who spoke up in his writing for those called cowards, for the schlemiels and wise guys and pranksters who, faced with the unimaginable evils of human existence, feigned and dodged and, sometimes, survived. He allowed the contradictions in his own life to become identical to the absurdities of modern existence.
Gary has gone in and out of favor in America. Back in the nineteen-fifties and into the sixties, when he was often resident here—in the fifties, he was a French consul general in Los Angeles—he was a star, both as an exotic public figure at the center of the Higher Hollywood (he lunched with J.F.K.) and as a best-selling author. He married the actress Jean Seberg at the height of her fame, and despite the tragic end to their marriage—both died by their own hands, though in a way each died by the other’s...
MORE: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/...ade-up-man