Why Romain Gary, the Greatest Literary Impostor of All Time, Deserves To Be Remembered

In the winter of 1974, following a highly secretive annual meeting at Paris’ lavish Restaurant Drouant, a group of judges announced that a relatively unknown writer named Émile Ajar had won that year’s Prix Goncourt—the most prestigious literary prize in France—for his novel La vie devant soi. Little was known about Ajar, who was supposedly living abroad in Brazil to escape legal problems back home and who had published his first book, Gros-Câlin, the year before. Some in the media, though, were suspicious of his sudden success, suggesting that Ajar could only be a pseudonym of an established writer, perhaps Louis Aragon or Raymond Queneau, the author of the cult classic Zazie in the Metro.

Few suspected, and—until his suicide six years later—fewer still knew for sure that the true author of these and other Ajar novels was the Lithuanian-born Free French aviator, onetime French consul general in Los Angeles, and award-winning novelist Romain Gary. Gary would refuse to let the joke end, even though he had already won a Goncourt, which cannot be awarded to any author more than once, for Les Racines du Ciel [Roots of Heaven] 16 years earlier. He hired his distant cousin Paul Pawlowitch to play the part of Émile Ajar and penned a rambling first-person account titled Pseudo in which he, as Pawlowitch, pretended to be an insane man named Émile Ajar.

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