Following in the wake of stories about a mother and daughter and about a father and son, Romain Gary's La promesse de l'aube (Promise at Dawn), published in 1960, offers a very powerful story about a mother and son.

The book opens with the author on the beach at Big Sur, California. He is 44, but he remembers how, more than 20 years earlier, his mother comes to see him off when he is heading out to fight with the French Air Force in World War II. She's full of extravagant love and vaulting ambition for him. She sees no point in hiding any of it from the eyes of his comrades and superior officers.

Gary says: "I don't think a son has ever hated his mother as much as I did at that moment."

Then, as he attempts to manoeuvre her to a less conspicuous place, comes that supremely manipulative question: "So, you're ashamed of your old mother?"

Which unmans him... He remembers all that she has done for him, battling alone in the world, without any partner by her side, and he resolves all over again to become the great man she has never for a moment doubted he will be: "I thought of all the battles I was going to fight for her, of the promise I had made to myself, at the dawn of my life, to do her justice, to give meaning to her sacrifice..."

This is actually the second of the dawn promises. The first is the one that lays the ground for it. Mariette, the young woman who helps them with the housework in their modest Nice establishment, comments on the extent of his mother's love, and tells him: "All your life, there'll never be another woman who will love you like that. That's certain." It is only when he approaches his forties, though, that he realizes that it is actually not good to be so loved, so young and so early, because it gives you bad habits. It makes you think that this love exists elsewhere, and you can find it again: "With maternal love, life makes you a promise at dawn that it never keeps." Because no love is ever good enough after that. Everywhere you go, you carry with you the poison of comparisons, and you spend your life waiting for something you have already received. He's not saying that mothers shouldn't love their children. But it's better if they also have someone else to love: "If my mother had had a lover, I wouldn't have spent my life dying of thirst next to every fountain."


Big Sur, California, 2001

So what is the story of this strange pair? Nina Borisovskaia, Romain's mother, was in her earlier days some kind of "dramatic artist", but he never quite fathoms her past. Around 1919-20 she had a pretty well established position, he thinks. He remembers going with her to her performance engagements. He remembers her dressing room in Moscow. His first childhood memories are of the theatre.

Ivan Mosjoukine, the film actor who meets up with Romain occasionally, was always evasive: "Your mother ought to have gone to the Conservatory; unfortunately, events did not permit her to develop her talent. And then, after you were born, young man, nothing really interested her apart from her son."

A moneylender in Nice, however, tells Romain that, for all her grand airs, his mother used to sing in the kind of caf'conc that soldiers frequented, which is where her powerful language comes from (she has a gift for colourful invective). He says Romain is the son of a mountebank and an adventurer...

What Romain does know is that she was the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker from Kursk, Russia. She left her family at 16. She married, divorced, remarried, divorced again. She had at some point spent time in Nice and in Paris. Romain also says he has Tartar ancestors.

As for his father, Romain is vague: "My father had left my mother shortly after my birth and every time I mentioned his name, something I did only very rarely, my mother and Aniela would quickly glance at each other, and rapidly change the subject." Romain knew that "the man who had given me his name" now had another wife and other children. He met him several times.

That Mosjoukine might be his father is implied, but never asserted in so many words. At various points, however, when Nina finds it impossible to make ends meet, she writes letters, and gifts appear. Someone somewhere felt responsible for something.

Nevertheless, the prime responsibility for bread-winning is Nina's. Through hard work, flair, persistence, and the occasional bit of deviousness, she succeeds not only in putting food on the table, but in educating Romain in the manner she feels is his due. Her son is not ungrateful, but as a child he lives with a permanent feeling of powerlessness and frustration: she suffers for him, and he can do nothing.



Before arriving in France, the mother-son pair lived in Vilnius/Vilna/Wilno, which was part of Poland at the time, and then in Warsaw. They arrive in Nice in 1928. After some more lean times, Nina successfully brokers the sale of an apartment building, and the buyer puts her in charge of its transformation into the Hotel-Pension Mermonts.

Through thick and thin, though, she invests everything in her son. What she herself has not been able to achieve, she looks to him to realize, apparently never aware of the terrible burden she is creating. He'll be a French ambassador, she decides (she is entranced by France, and will hear no bad word about it). He'll drive a big car, become a member of the Legion of Honour, be a great author -- and buy his clothes from the best tailors in London... Unfortunately, she can't keep these dreams to herself, and there is a searing scene in which she summons her neighbours in Vilnius out onto the stairwell to make them aware of Romain's glorious future. Gary writes: "I don't think that any other event has played a more important role in my life than the burst of laughter that met my ears in the stairwell of that old block of flats in Vilnius... I owe to it what I am: for better and for worse, that laughter has become me."

In return for her absolute faith in him, she requires his absolute engagement in the defence of her honour. Later, in Warsaw, there is another terrible scene after a schoolmate tells Romain that he and his mother won't get to France because France doesn't accept "former whores". Upset, he tells his mother this story. She is at first silent and hostile. But the next morning she says he is not going back to that school; they're going to France. Then she tells him: "The next time something like this happens -- the next time someone insults your mother in front of you -- I want you to be brought home on a stretcher. Do you understand?... If not, there's no point in leaving. There's no point in going there." His eyes fill with tears. Then she hits him, repeatedly... It's the first time she has ever done that. "Remember what I am telling you. From now on, you're going to defend me. I don't care if they set about you with their fists. It's what people do with the rest of them that hurts. You'll get yourself killed if necessary."



In Nice, when she is already successful with her hotel, she rejects the courtship of M. Zaremba, who is very aware of all that is problematic in the mother-son relationship, but who himself comes across as searching for a mother figure. Romain is disappointed at the way things turn out, even though he feels guilty that he is disappointed: "I wanted to yell that this was her last chance, that she needed a man beside her, that I couldn't be that man, because sooner or later I would go, leaving her alone. I wanted above all to tell her that there was nothing my love could not accomplish for her except one thing -- which was the renunciation of my life as a man, of my right to live that life as I wanted." She explains to him that there was just one time when she loved someone passionately. It was a long time ago, and she loves that person still. He didn't respect her, and he never treated her as a gentleman should. But he was a man, not a little boy in search of a mother. She has a son. She doesn't want another one in the shape of M. Zaremba.

For all its oppressive qualities, it is her love, he feels, that carries him through the dangers of the war. Which are many. On France's capitulation, he absconds to join De Gaulle's resistance forces. Hardly any of the aviators he serves with survive to the end of the conflict.

For a long time, however, he doesn't get to fight: "You can imagine the feeling of frustration and shame with which I read the letters where my mother trumpeted her confidence and her admiration... But it wasn't my fault if my war wasn't brilliant. I did my best."

He almost dies of typhoid fever in Africa, and feels he remains alive simply because no-one ever cut the umbilical cord: it is his mother's unrelenting belief in his invulnerability that prevents him from dying.

His description of his war efforts is strangely muted (there is more on his frustrations and his idiocies than on his achievements), but he ends up with several decorations, including La Croix de la Liberation, so we have to assume those achievements were significant.

All through the war, he has been receiving letters from his mother, dispatched via an intermediary in Switzerland. But when he finally gets back to Nice, he finds that his mother died three and a half years earlier, a few months after he left for England. Before she died, she wrote 250 letters, and arranged with a friend for them to be mailed out to him regularly...


Nice, 1990

Aside from this massive, overarching theme of maternal love, there is a subtheme that surfaces from time to time: that of Jewishness.

The mouse-like M. Piekielny is one of the tenants of the block of flats in Vilnius. "When you are everything your mother says you will be," says this neighbour, "and you meet lots of great people, promise me you will tell them that M. Piekielny lives here." Romain gives his word. Duly successful, he honours his promise with the Queen of England and various other people of status: "Today the kind mouse of Vilnius has long since ended his tiny existence in the crematoriums of the Nazis, along with a few million other Jews in Europe. However, I continue to scrupulously fulfil my promise whenever I have the opportunity to meet with the great of the world..."

In similarly shocking vein, he tells us that his father died in a gas chamber during the war, along with his wife and children. He later finds out that his father actually died of fright before getting to the gas chamber. He feels that the man who died in that way was a stranger to him, but on the day he found out that information "he became my father for ever".

When Gary enlists in the air force, he is the only one in his cohort not to be promoted to sublieutenant after training (he stays a sergeant). He later finds out that this is because his naturalization is too recent, and the reason the powers-that-be delayed his training for a month was that they were investigating his background. He does not dare admit this to his mother, as he doesn't want to sully her image of the ever-glorious, ever-meritorious France, so he spins her a story about being punished for seducing the commandant's wife...

All this makes for a very powerful read.

At times, Gary's self-immolating humour is quite painful. "Humour is a declaration of dignity," he says, "an affirmation of people's superiority over what is happening to them." What friends see as masochism and self-hate he sees as a way of attacking not himself but the human situation. "It's not only about me. It's about the 'me' in all of us -- our poor little kingdom of 'me', so comical, with its throne room and its fortified enclosure." You wince sometimes, though...

You wonder, as well, as he dwells on all those comrades who never made it through the war, whether he is still suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

And you can't help but be irritated by the cavalier way he deals with women...

Nevertheless, there's a mythic quality to the experiences he describes -- with their larger-than-life characters, their burdens and sorrows and acts of heroism -- that it is impossible not to respond to.



Then you discover that "mythic" is the right word.

Because, as Adam Gopnik puts it, "Romain Gary was a great big liar..."

OK, so I guess no-one writes under oath...

It's disconcerting, though... Are there any memoirists out there who stick to the objective truth? Or is there simply no such thing?

What's been distorted, then, or left unsaid, in the account offered by La promesse de l'aube?

-- Romain Gary was born Roman Kacew in 1914 in Vilnius/Vilna/Wilno.

-- His father, Leiba Kacew, was conscripted, but between the ages of seven and eleven, Romain almost certainly knew him. Leiba's life probably ended when he was shot on the outskirts of Vilno.

-- Nina was actually Mina, was never a success as an actress (to be fair, Gary does hint that this might have been the case), and may never have appeared on the Moscow stage.

-- Gary was 100% Jewish, not "half-Tatar".

-- The touching story of the little Jewish neighbour is an adaptation of something out of Gogol. Maybe it happened to Gary, too, or maybe it didn't. As Gopnik says: "It almost doesn't matter; the moral point of the adapted anecdote is apparent: there are no little lives, or little people."

-- His mother was not as poor as he makes her out to be.

-- She didn't pre-write and send those letters...

As you read Gopnik and other accounts, you realize how much Gary left out as well. He tells us about contracting a traditional marriage during the war to a young African woman whom he can't communicate with, and who turns out to have leprosy... But he says nothing of his marriage in 1944 to British journalist Lesley Blanch. They divorced in 1961, so maybe this is the part of the "end" he talks about on the beach at Big Sur.



Gary's most notorious piece of fabulism was his creation of an alter ego, Emile Ajar, whose book La vie devant soi (The Life Before Us) won the Prix Goncourt (Gary had already won it, and you're not supposed to win it twice). The success of this work (it became of the best-selling French novels of the 20th century) turned, according to Gopnik, "a small feint into a big serial deception".

What a curious life... It's somehow unsurprising that he was fluent in six languages (Yiddish, Russian, Polish, French, German, and English). One, or even two, would never have sufficed.

His multiple versions of himself, his multiple aliases and identities, remind me of Lev Nussimbaum (aka Kurban Said or Essad Bey), who may or may not have been the author of Ali and Nino.

At the end of the day, the compassion apparent in Gary's work makes it hard to resent his slippery relationship with reality. Gopnik again: "Gary's stories are rarely fraudulent: they are dramatically keyed-up versions of the truth... 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 fabulist in many small ways, he was in possession of one big compound truth: to believe that the human and the humane are naturally the same is one of the worst lies we tell ourselves; to think that they might yet become so is one of the better stories we share."

Hephzibah Anderson agrees, noting of this "hoaxer extraordinaire" that "his myriad falsehoods tend to express emotional truths of such undeniable clarity that fact checking feels grubby".

Romain Gary committed suicide in 1980.