One Writer, Two Names, Two Goncourts: The Story of Romain Gary and Émile Ajar

In November 1975, the members of the Académie Goncourt, which awards France's most prestigious literary prize, chose the novel La Vie devant soi (The Life Before Us) as the book of the year. Its author, Émile Ajar, was a new and mysterious figure in French literature.

But Émile Ajar did not exist, at least not as an independent writer.

Behind the name stood Romain Gary, a well-known writer who nineteen years earlier, in 1956, had won the Goncourt for his novel Les Racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven). According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the rules of the prize allow an author to receive it only once.

By creating a new identity, Gary became the only writer in the prize's history to win it twice. But the importance of the affair goes beyond the breaking of a rule. It raised a basic question about literature: do critics read the book, or the image of the author they carry in their minds?

Romain Gary: A Writer With Several Lives

Romain Gary was born Roman Kacew in 1914 in Vilnius, in a land that is today part of Lithuania. His childhood was spent in the shadow of his mother, a woman who imagined a brilliant future for her son and dreamed of his rising to a great position in France.

As a teenager Gary emigrated to France with his mother. Later he joined the air force and fought in the Second World War with the Free French forces. After the war he entered the diplomatic service and served in several countries. From 1956 to 1960 he was France's consul general in Los Angeles.

This eventful life was reflected in his literary work. The novel Éducation européenne and the autobiographical La Promesse de l'aube (Promise at Dawn) are among the books that turn the experience of war, emigration, aspiration and the human relationship with history into literature.

Gary reached the height of his fame in 1956 with The Roots of Heaven. The story is set in French Equatorial Africa, and its main character, Morel, is a man who fights to save elephants from slaughter. His campaign gradually becomes bound up with questions of colonialism, violence and human freedom.

Encyclopaedia Britannica describes The Roots of Heaven as a novel that balances a visionary idea of freedom and justice against a pessimistic understanding of human cruelty and greed.

The Goncourt placed Gary among France's major writers. But literary fame gradually revealed its limits to him as well.

A Writer Trapped by His Own Image

In the 1960s and 1970s Gary went on publishing novels, and his name was bound to a settled reputation.

For a writer who had always been drawn to changing the shape of a narrative and to living different lives, such a reputation could become a constraint. The name Romain Gary was no longer simply a writer's signature; it carried with it a set of expectations, earlier verdicts and fixed assumptions.

Seen this way, choosing a new name was a chance to test how the literary world would react. Gary could publish a work free of the preconceptions attached to his fame and see how readers and critics would meet it.

In 1974 the novel Gros-Câlin was published under the name Émile Ajar. The story of a lonely Paris statistician who lives with a python, and has an emotional and unusual bond with it, differed in its language and narrative manner from what the public expected of Romain Gary.

Ajar's prose was full of wordplay, surprising combinations, humour and broken syntax. Readers met a writer who seemed to come from outside the established literary circles.

A year later Ajar's second novel appeared and achieved a far greater success.

The Life Before Us: The World Through Momo's Eyes

The Life Before Us tells the story of a teenage boy of North African origin named Mohammed, known as Momo, who lives in the Belleville district of Paris. He is in the care of Madame Rosa, an elderly Jewish woman and survivor of Auschwitz, who once worked as a prostitute and now, in a clandestine boarding house, looks after the children of women in the same situation.

Momo describes the world around him in his own childlike language, full of apparent mistakes, comic misunderstandings and insights that are sometimes sharper than the judgements of adults.

Madame Rosa lives with terrible memories of the war, with illness and with the fear of death. Momo, for his part, faces poverty, loneliness and the question of his own identity. The emotional bond between the two, despite their differences of age, religion and cultural background, forms the human core of the novel.

In this book Gary turns to people on the margins of French urban life. Immigrants, abandoned children, forgotten women and the elderly are present in the story, yet the narrative keeps its distance from pity. The characters live with their weaknesses, humour, anger and hopes.

One of the novel's major achievements is its language. Momo hears adult expressions and rebuilds them in his own way. His grammatical and lexical errors are not the result of carelessness on the author's part; they are part of the work's literary structure. Through this unusual language the reader comes to know the child's mind and also sees the contradictions of society.

Compared with The Roots of Heaven, the change of tone is obvious. The earlier novel moves with a broad, many-charactered narrative and a historical horizon. In The Life Before Us the world is told through the mind of a child who does not yet recognise many of the rules of language and society.

Even so, at deeper levels one can see the continuity of Gary's thought. The defence of vulnerable beings, resistance to the humiliation of human beings and the search for affection in a violent world are present in both books. The form of the narrative has changed, but the author's moral concern continues.

This combination of fresh language and emotional depth made The Life Before Us one of the outstanding French novels of the 1970s.

Paul Pavlowitch: The Man Who Played the Author

The success of Ajar's books stirred journalists' curiosity about who he was. A writer who had won the critics' praise avoided public appearances, and little was clear about his life.

To protect the invented identity, Gary enlisted the help of Paul Pavlowitch, a young relative of his. Pavlowitch agreed to play the part of Émile Ajar in front of journalists.

In this way the pseudonym acquired a face.

Pavlowitch appeared in interviews and answered questions about the author. The public now saw a real person and could attach Ajar's literary identity to his face and life.

This part of the story makes the literary deception more complex. Pseudonyms have a long history in literature, but Gary did not stop at changing the name on the cover. He brought another person into the act so that his new identity could withstand the media's curiosity.

Pavlowitch later wrote about this role: first in 1981, in L'homme que l'on croyait (The Man We Thought He Was), and then in 2023 in Tous immortels (All Immortal), which its publisher presents as a look behind the scenes and into the secrets of Gary's literary family, and which won the Prix Roger Nimier.

So the episode cannot be seen simply as a writer's clever joke. Gary's literary success was made possible by the participation of another person, who also bore the consequences of this invented identity.

The Second Goncourt: Victory for an Unknown Name

In 1975 the Académie Goncourt gave its prize to The Life Before Us. For the members of the Académie, the book belonged to Émile Ajar, a writer who had never received the prize.

But Romain Gary, the book's real creator, had been a Goncourt laureate since 1956.

After the announcement the affair grew more tangled. The lawyer Gisèle Halimi announced that her client was declining the prize "for reasons of the peace of mind needed to develop his work." Hervé Bazin, president of the Académie Goncourt, replied that the Goncourt "can be neither accepted nor refused": the prize belongs to the book, not to the author.

In those same days the press set out to find the real author, went after Paul Pavlowitch and took him to be the true writer. The weekly Le Point tracked him down in the Lot region and interviewed him.

Gary's secret stayed hidden for another six years.

The Author's Death and the Secret Revealed

Romain Gary took his own life in Paris on 2 December 1980, at the age of sixty-six.

In the months after his death, the veil over Émile Ajar's identity was lifted. In 1981 Paul Pavlowitch announced that he had not been the real author of the books published under Ajar's name and that his role had been limited to standing in for Gary.

The publication of a text by Gary himself, Vie et mort d'Émile Ajar (The Life and Death of Émile Ajar), made the truth clearer. In this text, dated 21 March 1979 and published after his death in 1981, Gary explained how he had built the Ajar identity and kept it hidden.

The text ends with a short, ironic sentence:

"I had a really good time. Goodbye and thank you."

The sentence, still quoted years later whenever the story is told, has a playful tone. Yet Ajar's story does not end with the joke. The affair shows how far a writer can become a prisoner of his own name and fame, and what price he may pay to escape it.

What Had the Critics Judged?

The Gary–Ajar affair is one of the most debated examples of the relationship between an author's name and the value of a literary work.

On the one hand, Ajar's success can be seen as proof of Gary's ability to create a new language. After years of writing, he managed to step away from his familiar habits and produce works that surprised readers and critics alike.

On the other hand, the welcome given to Ajar raises the question of whether the same books, published under the name Romain Gary, would have met the same response.

No definitive answer is possible. No one can rerun literary history by changing the name on a book's cover. Still, the Ajar experiment shows that an author's reputation plays a part in shaping the expectations of readers and critics.

Critics do not meet an anonymous text. They know things about the author's life, earlier work, social position and literary standing, and that knowledge can affect their judgement.

There is also an ethical question. By hiding his identity, Gary got around the rules of a prize meant to be given only once to any writer. And by bringing Pavlowitch into the affair, he crossed the line between a literary pseudonym and a public impersonation.

Both sides must be seen together: as literature, Ajar was a brilliant experiment, but the way his identity was maintained raised serious questions about a writer's responsibility towards readers, publishers and literary institutions.

One Writer or Two Literary Voices?

Once the secret was out, Émile Ajar's books were added to Romain Gary's body of work. We now know that the author of Gros-Câlin, The Life Before Us, Pseudo and L'Angoisse du roi Salomon (King Solomon) is the same as the creator of The Roots of Heaven.

But reading these works only to find traces of the author's real identity hides part of their literary value.

In the Ajar books Gary managed to create a creative distance between himself and his usual language. The characters think and speak differently. Humour, verbal disorder and an unexpected view of the world give the narratives a new structure.

From this angle, Émile Ajar can be seen as one of Romain Gary's literary characters: a character whose name, instead of appearing in a story, was printed on the cover of a book.

This imaginary character produced real novels, won a prestigious prize and pushed critics to reconsider the talent of a writer they thought they knew well.

Today the names Romain Gary and Émile Ajar are written side by side. The mystery of the author's identity no longer exists, but the question the affair raised is still alive: if the name on a book's cover changes, will our view of what we have read change too?

Perhaps Gary's most important achievement in this affair, beyond his two Goncourt prizes, was to expose the gap between a literary text and an author's fame, a gap that critics and readers alike must face.

Sources:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Romain Gary". https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romain-Gary
Wikipedia, "Romain Gary". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romain_Gary
French Wikipedia, "La Vie devant soi". https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_devant_soi
French Wikipedia, "Émile Ajar". https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émile_Ajar
French Wikipedia, "Gros-Câlin". https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros-Câlin
Wikipedia, "The Roots of Heaven (novel)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roots_of_Heaven_(novel)
Livres Hebdo, "Paul Pavlowitch remporte le prix Roger Nimier 2023". https://www.livreshebdo.fr/article/paul-pavlowitch-remporte-le-prix-roger-nimier-2023
Larousse, "Journal de l'année 1982: Lettres". https://www.larousse.fr/archives/journaux_annee/1982/218/lettres