GARY Romain (1914-1980). Autograph manuscript, [Farewell Gary Cooper, ca. 1968];…
Description

GARY Romain (1914-1980).

autograph manuscript, [Farewell Gary Cooper, ca. 1968]; 578 folios in-fol. or in-4. 10,000/12,000 Complete working manuscript of this American novel, in its French version. In 1963, Romain Gary wrote a screenplay in English, Millions of Dollars, from which he immediately drew a novel, also in English, published in October 1964 in Ladies Home Journal, and in a more developed version, in February 1965, by the New York publisher Harper & Row, The Ski Bum (le vagabond des neiges). A French translation was commissioned from Jean Autret (Jack Kerouac's translator), but Romain Gary rewrote the entire French novel, developing the original text and introducing new developments. Adieu Gary Cooper was published by Gallimard in May 1969, as the second part of The American Comedy. The novel is the story of Lenny, a young American who has fled his country to escape the war in Vietnam, bringing with him only a picture of Gary Cooper. He takes refuge in a chalet in the Swiss Alps, with a community of other tramps, passionate about skiing. Pressed by the need for money, he gets involved in a gold bullion deal, and has a desperate love affair with Jess, a young American political activist. In his presentation text, Romain Gary said he wanted to show "the end of this self-confident America", embodied by Gary Cooper; "Lenny and Jess are for me the typical representatives of a youth not lost, but 'lost'"; Lenny having chosen to flee, "his lost and found meadow, are the snow slopes and ski slopes"; but despite their efforts "to escape all ties and responsibilities, but in their love jousts, thrown into a perilous adventure, Lenny and Jess irresistibly resume the places that traditional American ceremonial has assigned them, where money plays a big role and where the female tends to dominate the male... The manuscript is written in blue or brown felt-tip pen on the front of in-4 sheets (28 x 21.5 cm, Eaton's Corpasable American watermarked paper Bond...) for pages 1-14, 16 bis -101, and then on folio sheets of a punch pad (35.5 x 21.5 cm) for pages 1-3 (of a second version), 15-16, 102-586. It is paginated by Gary, with some inconsistencies. It presents numerous erasures, corrections and additions: 252 words or passages crossed out and replaced, more than 2000 crossings out and 88 additions, and a few scotch-taped dots. There are two versions of the first pages of the novel, different proper names (Maurissot will become Alec, Mint Lefkovitz will first be called Chubby, Cook Slavitch will become Cookie Wallace, Big Coleman will be replaced by Charlie Parker, Jeanne d'Arc by Louis XIV, etc.), and numerous variants, including more frequent references to De Gaulle. But the main interest of this manuscript lies in the numerous unpublished passages that will disappear from the final text. We will only give a few examples here, all taken from chapter I, referring to the Pléiade edition. F. 28 [bis] (p. 8), about Cookie Wallace's parents, who were unable to smell anything: "they didn't even smell the dildo any more, and believed that there was a difference between Kennedy, Castro and Mao Tse Tung"... F. 33-34 (p. 9), on the trumpeter-skier: "Salter took more risks on his skis than anyone else. It was scary. Tourists would pay to see him slalom down the Grasse forest, three kilometres of fir trees, if you please, it was worth it. He would then collect money. In the evening, in the chalet, he played the trumpet. He really said what was on our minds. The Blacks had invented that to express themselves"... F. 41 (p. 11), about the mountain that makes you think of God: "That's why a truly liberated day must know how to stop in time. You think of God once, twice, and then it becomes a habit. The peaks, the white, it makes you propaganda. The icy cold washes your brain, and you'll start having stupid thoughts. It's unbelievable how much you have to defend yourself in life. F. 43-45 (p. 12), about other people's language: "It already existed when you were not born, strings with which you are tied. You're always being fucked with words, you're obliged to be for or against, but who wants to be for or against, when the real thing you could be for doesn't exist, it hasn't even begun, you don't even know what it looks like? The Flatters brothers, from Albuquerque, had invented a language of their own, a hundred or two hundred words, just enough to defend themselves, that nobody understood but them, they were safe. Bug Moran said that if you could invent a whole new language, with words that had no equivalent in

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GARY Romain (1914-1980).

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