Nom de Plume (25 page)

Pavlowitch-as-Ajar even signed the publishing contracts and collected a check in person. He went so far as to enlist his wife, Annie, to play the role of Ajar's girlfriend. When the head of his publishing house wanted to spend more time with Ajar, a weekend together in Copenhagen was arranged, which went off without a hitch. During that weekend, Pavlowitch autographed a stack of “his” books as a favor to the publisher. He dutifully personalized his inscriptions, just as she requested, addressing them to members of various prize juries, including the Goncourt.

As Gary himself would explain later, the politics behind the Goncourt were rather heated, and authors had to make nice to become literary darlings. It was a highly rarefied and incestuous world. “I am not the only person to have spoken of the ‘literary terror,' of the coteries, of the cliques with their claques, of cronyism, of ‘you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours,' of debts repaid and accounts settled,” he wrote. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power.” The back-scratching was exhausting and humiliating, and after a while Gary had come to detest his critics and the phoniness of his milieu: “I developed a profound disgust of publishing anything.”

Pleased with the success of the encounters he'd concocted for Ajar, Gary upped the demands on his cousin, who complied with each new directive. Personal information was given to the press, but not too much; and with his unkempt appearance and slouchy demeanor, Pavlowitch had no trouble passing as a bohemian writer in exile. His performance wasn't always flawless (he occasionally got minor details wrong), but the public was so eager to embrace “Ajar” that discrepancies went unnoticed. After a while, he and Gary could simply sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Journalists did all the rest. “As soon as it became public,” Pavlowitch later revealed, “it no longer depended on us.” When a reporter once suggested to Gary the similarities between his and Ajar's work, Gary replied that he was flattered, and that perhaps Ajar was guilty of plagiarism.

For some factions in the literary world, the selection of Ajar for the Goncourt was highly controversial, and the usual protests took an especially ugly turn that year. There were bomb threats. Gary, growing nervous, attempted to heed the advice of one of his lawyers, who'd urged him to have “Ajar” decline the prize as a magnanimous gesture. Recusing himself, it turned out, was not Gary's choice to make. The Goncourt jury issued a terse, huffy, unambiguous statement, announcing that “the Academy votes for a book, not a candidate. The Goncourt Prize cannot be accepted or refused any more than birth or death. Mr. Ajar remains the laureate.” And that was that.

The problem? An author can be awarded the Goncourt only once. Romain Gary had already won. That he could (secretly) win again gave his ego a significant boost and confirmed that, at sixty-one, he was still an important cultural figure—even if under the cloak of someone else. He'd shown that his talent was still intact. To throw people off the scent, Gary provided a friendly but neutral comment in support of Ajar. “I liked
Gross-Câlin
,” he said, “but I haven't read
Madame Rosa
yet. I don't think the author will stay in hiding much longer.”

He was right. Events took another bizarre twist, though, when more than one reporter tracked “Ajar” to Pavlowitch's home, and even uncovered Pavlowitch's relation to Gary. But instead of recognizing that Pavlowitch was a proxy for Gary, who was the real man behind Ajar, the press assumed that the bold Pavlowitch had acted alone—and that the has-been Gary must have envied his relative's turn in the spotlight. Rather than attempt to seize control of this narrative, Gary and his cousin embraced it. Pavlowitch took the hit, crafting a story about how he'd adopted the Ajar pseudonym to launch his own career independently, so as not to exploit Gary's celebrity. This story made Pavlowitch a sympathetic figure and drew attention away from Gary. Meanwhile, Gary cheered on his cousin from the sidelines, joking to the media that there was no way he could have found the time to write Pavlowitch's books as well as his own—and encouraging the literary world to accept the talented Pavlowitch into its fold. He responded angrily to a journalist who persisted in suggesting that Gary himself, not Pavlowitch, was Ajar. “Your maneuver consists of cutting the balls off a newcomer by attributing his work to me,” he said, “all the while protecting yourself with a ‘maybe.' Even by Parisian standards, this is truly low.”

Gary was beginning to come undone, increasingly unable to deal with the pressure of keeping up his fabricated self. Determined to put a definitive end to lingering guessing games, he sat down to write. In a state of almost manic fury—just two weeks after the (false) revelation that Pavlowitch was Ajar—in his “Geneva hideout,” Gary finished another manuscript.

Entitled
Pseudo
and published in December 1976, the book purported to be a complete, uncensored confession of the entire Ajar affair. It sold modestly. Written as a novel, it was nonetheless meant to be interpreted as autobiography. The narrator was a madman telling his story from a psychiatric ward, but many of the events and motivations he described were true. (They were, however, told in a highly distorted form, and ascribed to the wrong person.) To the world, it seemed that the story of Ajar had at last been unraveled by the man himself. This should be the end of the story, but it isn't. Not quite.

There was one glitch:
Pseudo
was presented as the confession of Paul Pavlowitch, not Romain Gary. This is a confusing twist, but Gary had largely told the truth about his own story, providing many accurate details—he had simply attached the wrong name to it. Some of the issues he “revealed” as belonging to Pavlowitch/Ajar were invented, but others were actually his own. (There's mention of a doctor telling the author that he masturbates too much, a colorful anecdote that may or may not have been true.) In this way, Gary was able to seek redemption and at the same time deny his identity. He'd told a story that was at once fictional and true. He even inserted himself into the novel as a character called Uncle Bogey. The Princeton University scholar David Bellos, who translated
Pseudo
for the 2010 American edition (as
Hocus Bogus
), called the book “one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature. . . . Almost every sentence of the book is a double take.”

In
Pseudo
, Ajar-as-Pavlowitch describes being pressured to adopt a pseudonym:

Publish! It'll be good for you. Use a nom de plume. And don't worry! Nobody will guess you could do it. If it's any good, they'll say it's got art and technique and that it can't have been done by a beginner. That it's the work of a real pro. They'll leave you alone. They'll say you're just a straw man or a ghost. Or a whore.

Because Gary was unable or unwilling to speak as himself, he hid yet again, like a coward, behind his cousin. (He phoned Pavlowitch to tell him what he'd done only after it was completed.) At his cousin's expense, Gary had cleared his own name for good, and
presto
! Mystery solved. Ajar was Pavlowitch, who was a lunatic.

But this time Pavlowitch was not a willing accomplice. He'd loved his cousin dearly—and felt grateful that Gary had paid for his education at Harvard—but now his devotion reached a breaking point. He felt used and discarded. The neurotic, paranoid, delusional “narrator” of
Pseudo
had been presented under Pavlowitch's
actual
name, and this was unforgivable. He worried that his reputation might be harmed beyond repair, and he had his wife to consider as well. To Pavlowitch, this book seemed an aggressive and repugnant act. The rift between the men did not heal, as Gary showed little remorse toward his cousin, no gratitude for all that Pavlowitch had done on his behalf, and no real grasp of the perilous implications of
Pseudo.

Nor does the story end there. Gary wrote yet
another
confession, but this one he gave only to friends, with the assumption that it should be released posthumously. (It was.) Titled
Vie et mort d'Émile Ajar
(
The Life and Death of Émile Ajar
), the piece explained his motivations and frustrations. “The truth is that I was profoundly affected by the oldest protean temptation of man: that of multiplicity,” he wrote. “A craving for life in all its forms and possibilities, which every flavor tasted merely deepened. . . . As I was simultaneously publishing other novels under the name of Romain Gary, the duality was perfect.”

He signed off the piece, dated March 21, 1979: “I've had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”

Upon the release of this text, the French literary establishment was outraged. They perceived Gary's doubleness as mockery directed at them, an attack on the very institutions that had crowned him, and they retaliated as they saw fit. Indeed, Gary's posthumous reputation would suffer as a result. Most of his books are out of print in the United States, some have never been translated into English, and those that are available are not easy to find. (In France, however, his books have never gone out of print.)

A
few months after the author had written the true confession of his Ajar pseudonym, he was shattered by devastating news: Jean Seberg was dead. On August 30, 1979, having gone missing for eleven days, she was found on the backseat of her car. Her death at age forty was an apparent suicide—a verdict some still consider questionable—caused by an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Gary was inconsolable.

On December 2, 1980, in the Paris apartment where he lived alone, he shot himself in the head. He left behind a suicide note in ninety-six words.

For the press—

Nothing to do with Jean Seberg. Devotees of the broken heart are requested to look elsewhere. Obviously it could be blamed on a nervous depression. But if so it would be one which I've had since I became a man and which enabled me to succeed in my literary work. But why, then? Perhaps you should look for the answer in the title of my autobiographical book
The Night Will Be Calm
and in the last words of my last novel: “There's no better way to say it, I have expressed myself completely.”

She was bipolar and sexually confused

Chapter 13

James Tiptree, Jr. &
ALICE SHELDON

O
n May 19, 1987, a seventy-one-year-old woman and her eighty-four-year-old husband were found lying in bed together, hand in hand, dead of gunshot wounds, at their home in McLean, Virginia.

Just before midnight, the woman had phoned a family attorney to warn him that she planned to kill her husband and herself. She calmly asked that he notify the police. When the officers arrived at the house, they found the couple alive, concluded that the situation was under control, and left. Two hours later, the woman phoned the lawyer to tell him that she had killed her husband. Again she asked him to summon the police. Then she called her husband's son and said that she had shot his father. Although she claimed that she and her husband had agreed in advance upon a suicide pact, she had waited until he fell asleep to kill him. At about 3:30 in the morning, she shot herself in the head.

This event marked the tragic and dramatic end to the lives of Huntington Sheldon and his wife, Alice Bradley Sheldon. It was sick and scandalous, like something out of a gothic novel. In fact, Alice had been a wildly imaginative writer, intensely driven, producing science fiction for more than a decade using a male pseudonym. She kept her alter ego a secret even from those closest to her. (“At last I have what every child wants, a real secret life . . . nobody else's damn secret but MINE,” she wrote in her diary in 1970.) Assuming this guise gave her the confidence to write and allowed her to become the “son” she believed her father had always wished he'd had. It also freed her to explore another deeply buried self—one that harbored a shameful yet undeniable sexual desire for women.

Aside from becoming famous—and considered among the most important science-fiction authors of the twentieth century, along with writers such as Philip K. Dick—Alice Sheldon led many extraordinary lives. She was an exceptional painter, a brilliant storyteller, and passionately interested in science; she had eloped at age nineteen, become pregnant, and had an abortion in her first year of marriage; divorced, enlisted in the army, and worked for the CIA; she had become a poultry farmer; and she had earned an undergraduate degree at age forty-three, followed by a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. Literary success came later still.

Born in Chicago in 1915, Alice Hastings Bradley (later known as Alli) was the only child of charismatic, wealthy, glamorous, and eccentric parents. Her formidable mother, Mary, was a prolific travel and fiction author and a popular lecturer; her attorney father, Herbert, was also an explorer and hunter who led expeditions into unmapped regions of central Africa. Those trips into the Congo provided Mary with material for two children's books. Yet Mary did not just accompany her husband on African hunting expeditions; she carried her own rifle and killed lions and tigers herself, proudly bringing back the skins as souvenirs. The Bradleys, both Republicans, were often featured in the society and gossip pages of local newspapers. They had a large circle of friends; loved to give parties; and employed nannies, a chauffeur, and a cook. Alice was pampered and spoiled, but she was also lonely and never felt comfortable in her affluent surroundings. “I was unpopular,” she once complained, “except with dull adults.”

When Alice was four, her mother gave birth to another daughter, Rosemary, who lived for only a day. Mary never recovered from her grief. “She didn't provide a model for me,” Alice wrote later of her mother. “She provided an impossibility.” The barrier was, among other things, vocational, but above all, Mary's idealization of femininity left Alice anguished, her identity a blur. As Alice struggled throughout her life to achieve a sense of wholeness, to feel at peace with her gender, Mary projected confidence, accomplishment, and uncomplicated, effortless sensuality.

Alice's artistic inclinations were encouraged—but only so far. Mary's needs and her desire for attention (especially from male admirers) always came first. “She had emotion enough for 10,” Alli wrote of her mother, “but I got it all, and was always—perhaps wrongly—aware that had the others existed she wouldn't have cared much for me.” Later she would recall that having a mother who seemed to do everything well was “bad for a daughter because you identify with her. And without meaning to, you compete. And to be in competition with Mary was devastation, because anything I could do she could do ten times as well.” Alice's father was cool and distant, a welcome contrast to her mother's dependent, possessive behavior.

Mary's emotional neediness was too much pressure for a child to bear. Alice felt compelled to be a compliant “good girl,” managing her own anxieties, anger, and unhappiness so as not to upset her mother. Although Alice suspected that “everybody wants to wipe the world out a couple of times a day,” she kept such notions to herself. Decades later she admitted that she'd lived with “a silent inner terror” of not succeeding enough to warrant her parents' praise. “[A]ll my early life was lanced with that fear; if I wasn't somehow Somebody, it would represent such a failure I'd have to kill myself to keep my parents from knowing how I'd betrayed their hopes.”

She also had to suppress her intense dislike of her own name, which carried “joyless connotations of ‘Alice, eat your spinach.' ‘Alice, go to bed.'” As she discovered early on, there was power, and a thrilling sense of escape, in naming yourself, in reclaiming your identity. She fled the unpleasantness of daily life through books. Alice was an avid reader and especially loved Kipling. Later she insisted that everything she knew about writing stories and plotting “came from Kipling, and will probably end there.” Eventually (following the unmasking of her pseudonym), Alice gave an interview in which she pointedly quoted the end of his poem “The Appeal”:

And for the little, little span

The dead are borne in mind,

Seek not to question other than

The books I leave behind.

As a child, Alice also enjoyed reading science fiction, including H. P. Lovecraft and a pulp magazine called
Weird Tales.
It was exactly the kind of literary material that her mother would have found vulgar and unseemly, and this made her love it even more.

Alice was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where she did her best to fit in, but she was socially awkward, moody, and a poor student. She made her first suicide attempt there, cutting herself with razor blades. Lonely and struggling with what would be a lifelong battle with depression—fifty years later, Alice was diagnosed as bipolar—she was desperate to return home. But her father wrote to her that “it would not be fair to your school, nor to us, nor to you to come home in the middle of the year.” Convinced that the challenge of an academic experience abroad would build character, Herbert urged her not to give up. In any case, he gave her no choice. “I'll trust you to be a good sport and see it through like a little lady,” he wrote in another letter. Mary, who deplored candid displays of emotion as much as her husband did, wrote to Alice cheerily, “You are taking life the right way, darling, if you keep jolly and keep going—that's all any of us can do.” Eventually Alice attended a small boarding school in New York, and even though she felt happier there, the headmistress observed astutely that “[t]he task of adjusting herself to her contemporaries is not an easy one.”

As her sexuality developed, Alice felt ambivalent toward other girls. In some ways she preferred the company of boys, who seemed much more straightforward emotionally. Her relations with them were flirty, easy, and fun. In the presence of girls, Alice often felt annoyed by their frivolous, superficial behavior and their hierarchical approach to friendship, yet she felt strongly attracted to them as well. Girls turned her on. They excited her in ways she found deeply unsettling, but she did not pursue her feelings beyond a few fumbling encounters. The passion she felt was unrequited, anyway, and remained so: her desire for women would never be fulfilled (at least, not as far as anyone knows; it has never been confirmed that Alice had any affairs with women). Sexual love provoked frustration and torment, but nothing more. The only coming out Alice experienced was as a debutante, in 1934, when she was nineteen years old.

That was the year she met a wealthy twenty-one-year-old Princeton student, Bill Davey, who was a guest at her debutante party. Alice was still an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. They eloped almost immediately—the wedding was front-page news in the
Chicago Tribune
—and Mary coldly informed Alice that she had broken her father's heart. The marriage lasted just six years. “He was beautiful, he was charming, he was a poet, he had references from the deans at Princeton,” Alice would recall years later, “but they forgot to mention that he was an alcoholic and supporting half the whores in Trenton.”

Initially, getting married seemed to promise Alice a chance to liberate herself from her parents, and from her sense of inertia and sexual confusion. It would prove that she was a “normal” heterosexual woman fulfilling what was expected of her. But this marriage was hell. Bill was as mercurial as his wife, who also drank too much. Both of them slept with other people. Their fights were often physically violent, and their reconciliations were short-lived. The sex was mutually unsatisfying. (Alice described it in her journal as “a mechanical farce.”) She was uncomfortable with her own body, and quite miserable having sex with a man. “Oh god pity me I am born damned they say it is ego in me I know it is man all I want is man's life,” she wrote in a notebook five years before her death, “my damned oh my damned body how can I escape it. . . . I am going crazy, thank god for liquor.” It was not surprising that Alice's gender dysphoria would lead her to inhabit a male self so that she could feel in control as an author. Even after her second marriage, to Huntington Sheldon, her struggles with sex and sexuality continued. “I am (was) notoriously fucked up about sex,” she once admitted in a letter to a friend.

Meanwhile, during her tempestuous first marriage Alice was beginning to find her way as an artist, though as a painter, not as a writer. She started to show her work and was included in a group exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. For the next five years, she toiled away at her paintings while struggling through her moribund marriage. “Happy is the person who has never loved another,” she wrote in her journal in 1941. Alice became convinced that she was constitutionally incapable of intimacy, and realized that she had to end her marriage. That summer, she left Bill. He promptly filed for divorce and remarried within a few months.

The collapse of this relationship ended her ambitions as a painter, too. Although she knew that she was talented, Alice felt certain that her true vocation lay elsewhere. She offered a harsh self-assessment of her potential as a visual artist: “I was a good grade B, no more, only with a quickness at new tricks which made ignorant souls call me an A.” She decided to invest her intellect and energy in writing instead. Her parents helped her get a job as an art critic for the recently launched
Chicago Sun
, where she earned sixty dollars a week. She didn't especially like journalism, but she knew she had to start somewhere.

In 1942, when the controversial Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps) was created by Congress, Alice decided to join. She wanted to serve her country, move toward a different kind of career, and feel useful and accomplished. She also wanted to put more distance between herself and her failed marriage, and to cultivate more structure and discipline in her life. The pretty twenty-seven-year-old arrived at the recruiting office in “three-inch heels and my little chartreuse crepe-de-chine designer thing by Claire somebody, and my pale fox fur jacket.” When she showed up for basic training in Des Moines, Iowa, she marveled at the sight of women “seen for the first time at ease, unselfconscious, swaggering or thoughtful, sizing everything up openly, businesslike, all personalities all unbending and unafraid.” At the time, it was the most exciting experience of her life to be surrounded by twelve thousand women. “What a range!” she later marveled.

Eventually she went to the Pentagon, where she did intelligence work during World War II, and spent the next few years having affairs with men. She seemed to have resigned herself to the fact that her romantic future, however imperfect, inauthentic, or unsatisfying, would be with a man. And she spent her spare time writing fiction. Her efforts, filled with autobiographical elements, fell flat. (“‘Ouch' simply is not a story,” she wrote years later, in a letter to a friend.) It would take the authority and secrecy of a male pseudonym, and the genre of science fiction, to transform her pain, anguish, and desire into compelling material.

Stationed in London in 1945, Alice met the man with whom she would spend the rest of her life: Huntington “Ting” Sheldon, a forty-two-year-old army colonel who had been a Wall Street banker. He fell in love with her—hard. Ting came from the “right” social class; like Alice, he'd found a sense of purpose during wartime and had used military service to escape the confines of his past. He was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to a family that had earned a fortune in banking and lost it in the Great Depression. He attended boarding school at Eton and university at Yale. Though Ting was a calm, steady, dependable presence, he was not without baggage—he'd already been married and divorced twice and had three children.

But now Ting wanted to marry her, and as a thirty-year-old woman, Alice felt she was in no position to refuse. She wanted children; she wanted to feel cared for and secure. For the most part, Ting proved a supportive, easygoing partner who gave her space when she needed it. He also put up with her mood swings. But there were problems. Like her first husband, Ting drank a lot. He was emotionally distant and did not share her love of reading. And their sex life was terrible. A year later, Alice's literary agent, Harold Ober, submitted a short story she'd written to the
New Yorker
, and it appeared in the magazine on November 16, 1946. “The Lucky Ones” was the first and last piece she would publish under her own name. Nor would she ever submit another story to the
New Yorker.
She had been unhappy with the intensive editing process, complaining that “it was astounding how they edited me into
New Yorker
ese,” and she found the magazine as a whole too polished and genteel.