Flying High

I have a friend with bipolar disorder. She self-medicates with books, reading widely, constantly. Highbrow, lowbrow; fiction, non-fiction. They flow in and out of our local library and charity shops. Recently, she held one back for me.

‘You need to read this, Timothy!’ she decided. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You look like you need cheering up!’ I studied the book jacket. ‘Second World War. Nazis. Occupation. That should do it.’ ‘Just read it,’ she said. ‘You’ll understand.’ Romain Gary’s novel The Kites (1980) opens in the early 1930s. Ludo Fleury, the novel’s narrator, is growing up in the Normandy countryside with his uncle and guardian Ambrose, postman and eccentric kite-maker. Snoozing in the woods after picking wild strawberries one June afternoon, 10-year-old Ludo is surprised by a blonde girl beneath a wide straw hat. She polishes off most of Ludo’s strawberries and then decrees that ‘They’re better with sugar.’ Ludo jumps up and runs home to fetch a bag of sugar. When he returns, the girl, Lila, tells him she’s had enough strawberries for today, but she might come back for more tomorrow. Lila is a whimsical narcissist, and Ludo has already fallen under her spell, as in a fairy tale; reading, we too fall under the unsettling spell of the novel. Ludo waits for her in vain. Eventually, four years later, she returns. Lila Bronicki is the daughter of a Polish noble family with a summer place in Normandy. Ludo is drawn into the family’s orbit: Lila’s cynical brother Tad, who predicts civilization’s well-deserved ruin; Bruno, a kind of orphan attached to the family, a budding Chopin; and Hans, a German cousin, Ludo’s rival in love. Lila’s chief pastime is imagining glorious futures for the five companions, but particularly for herself: she flits from one illustrious path to another: ‘Lila crossing the Atlantic solo, Lila writing novels translated into every language, Lila becoming a lawyer and saving people’s lives with feats of eloquence.’ Ludo is both a holy innocent and a narrator able to depict his own naïvety, no less than the foibles of those around him, with a wry irony. Gradually, Lila is enchanted by Ludo’s puppyish adoration, and returns his love. Her father, Stas, is a high-stakes gambler and stock-market speculator. Discovering that Ludo has an idiot savant’s gift for memorizing numbers and performing calculations (he is cursed by the Fleury familial affliction of being ‘unable to forget’) Stas employs him as a ‘mathematical clerk’. Using Ludo’s misguided numerical system, Stas loses a fortune at the casino and is forced to retreat to the family’s property in northern Poland. Ludo visits in the summer of 1939. He absurdly equates his love for Lila with their countries’ mutual solidarity in the face of the German threat: his love will keep her safe just as France will protect Poland. It’s an illusion shared by the residents of the local Polish village: the beret-wearing youth with a tricolore badge is greeted with cries of ‘Vive la France!’ which he returns with ‘Long live Poland!’ Only cynical Tad perceives clearly the brute force of history pressing at the border. In August, Ludo returns to France just before the German Blitzkrieg bludgeons Poland. He can only follow the news from afar Romain Gary was born as Roman Kacew in 1914, in Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius in Lithuania), at the western edge of the Russian Empire. His Jewish mother, Mina, was the boy’s sole guardian. Alone and poor, she nevertheless dreamed, like Lila, of a great future – not for herself but for her son: they would make their way to France one day, where Roman would become a great diplomat, or pianist, or writer . . . As a child first dreaming of literary fame, the boy’s chief endeavour was imagining new names for himself. ‘We have to find you a pseudonym,’ Mina tells him. ‘A great French writer cannot have a Russian name.’ After many iterations, Romain Gary was settled on. (But it would not be the only one.) Somehow, Mina made it, step by step, to Nice. After school, and university, Gary joined the French air force. On completion of initial training, he was refused a pilot’s licence by anti-Semitic superiors but, after France’s capitulation and armistice in June 1940, he was among those who followed de Gaulle to England, to join the Free French squadron in the RAF. One of only five of his original comrades to survive the war, Romain Gary did so as a decorated war hero. He also had his first novel, written at night between flying sorties, published in 1945 Romain Gary (right) to wide praise and high sales. The same year he was invited to join the Diplomatic Corps, eventually becoming French Consul General in Los Angeles, while continuing to write successful novels – he won the Prix Goncourt, France’s august literary award, in 1956 with The Roots of Heaven. In California he met Jean Seberg – American star of the French Nouvelle Vague – and left his first wife Lesley Blanch to marry her. He got to write, and even direct, movies. Romain Gary had everything, it seemed. But it was not enough. Having spent his childhood inventing the persona for which his mother had groomed his imagination, he did not wish to stop. In interviews and memoirs Romain endlessly embellished the narrative of his life, and subsequent research by his biographers suggests there is virtually nothing – characters, anecdotes, locations – that can be taken at face value. In Promise at Dawn (1960), the entrancing memoir of his early years, its rich thread the romance between mother and son, the inveterate mythomaniac interjects a wonderful line: ‘Here, I think, I should make a confession. I do not often indulge in lying, because, for me, a lie has a sickly flavour of impotence.’ Truly, Gary did not see his fabulism as dishonesty but as a way of telling a story in order to reveal its essential rather than mundane truth, and his life was no less suitable for reinvention than the plot of a novel. All middle-aged artists for whom success comes early find their status usurped by younger pretenders and critics eager for novelty. When this happened to Romain Gary, he gave French literary culture what it wanted, in the form of novels composed apparently by a new writer: a certain Emile Ajar. The first was well received; in 1975 the second, The Life before Us, was awarded the Prix Goncourt – a prize a writer could only be given once. It became the biggest selling French novel of the twentieth century. The hoax was revealed only after Gary’s death. Gary played similar games with the translations of his novels. Having grown up speaking Polish and Yiddish, he subsequently mastered French and English and wrote his novels in one or other language, interchangeably. These he then translated – under further pseudonyms – retelling them as he did so. The Talent Scout of 1961, for example, he wrote in English but published as a ‘translation’ by an entirely fictitious ‘John Markham Beach’. He then wrote the French ‘original’. Each translation of one of his own novels presented Gary with the opportunity, indeed the obligation, for further creation. How could it not? In his endless reinventions, both on the page and in his life, Gary was, as David Bellos put it in his biography Romain Gary: A Tall Story, ‘a man of successive and concurrent selves’. It seems Gary believed less in the existence of a fundamental human self than in essential values – courage, honour, integrity – that we might aspire to, and in doing so forge our humanity.

*

In the second half of The Kites, with German forces now looming on the French border, Ludo goes to Paris to seek news of Lila. He finds none, but he is rescued from destitution and despair by Julie Espinoza, the Jewish madame of a brothel. Like Tad in Poland, Madame Espinoza is certain of invasion and prepares for it. She trusts Ludo with her secrets, she says, because ‘You’ve got that firing-squad look in your eyes.’ When the Germans invade, in May 1940, she drives out of Paris, taking Ludo with her. With the German occupation, uncle Ambrose flies messages for the Resistance in his kites, while Ludo nurtures his reputation as a simpleton, an idiot wanderer around the countryside. Thus under the radar, he becomes an indefatigable courier for the underground. There are two other major characters in the village: Marcellin Duprat is chef and proprietor of Le Clos Joli, a restaurant serving unlikely haute cuisine, which he continues to do for the occupiers and their collaborators, much to the distaste of some. Duprat sees it as his duty to assert a pinnacle of French culture, to have the Germans appreciate, and bow down, before it. He’s at one and the same time a collaborator and a true patriot. The other is also both compromised and heroic: Lady Esterhazy is a Hungarian aristocrat who hosts a kind of salon and high-class brothel for German officers, while at the same time eliciting information from them for the Resistance that she passes on via Ludo. She is none other than Julie Espinoza, who has transformed herself. Looking back, recounting episodes of Resistance, Ludo writes, ‘Nowadays these stories are so well known they’ve been forgotten,’ a line typical of our narrator’s paradoxical logic. Lila’s eventual reappearance is devastating: she has survived as a courtesan, and is now the mistress of a German officer. Ludo has kept her alive in his imagination but now, after recovering from the shock, he must adapt to the new Lila, his love undaunted. ‘You don’t know the world yet, Ludo,’ Julie Espinoza tells him. ‘You’ll never know it, actually. Which is a good thing. We need people like you.’ At war’s end, as the Germans retreat before the Allies’ advance through Normandy, Ludo returns from Resistance activity to find that Lila, for shamefully sleeping with the enemy, has had her head shaved by the villagers. When Lila and Ludo marry a couple of months later, he marches into the same barber’s and demands he give her a repeat haircut. Afterwards, while Lila looks in the mirror and says, ‘It really suits me,’ Ludo insists on paying the nervous man. When he adds a tip, the barber throws down the clippers and flees to the back of the shop. At the town hall, silence falls when the guests, who include Ludo’s surviving comrades, see Lila. ‘Only Julie Espinoza rose to the occasion. She walked up to Lila and gave her a kiss. “Darling, what an excellent idea! It looks fabulous on you!”’ The Kites was Romain Gary’s last novel. Shortly after its publication in 1980, Gary, now 66 and increasingly unwell, committed suicide by gunshot. One might imagine, given his state of mind and the subject matter of German occupation, that The Kites would be a heavy, morbid work. In fact it’s the opposite: a twinkling concoction of heroic naïvety and ironic compassion.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © Tim Pears 2025