He Remembers Mama

PROMISE AT DAWN (337 pp.)--Romain Gary--Harper ($5).

French Novelist Romain Gary belongs to a passing breed of men: he admits that whatever he is, he owes to his mother.

Now only 45, Gary has a chestful of medals as a World War II flying hero, serves his country as an able diplomat, knows after seven novels that he can write, and has won for one of them (The Roots of Heaven) the Prix Goncourt. All this, he maintains in this freewheeling autobiography, might not have happened at all had there not been Mama.

Mama was the daughter of a Russian Jewish watchmaker. She grew up to be a beautiful but not great actress who had bad luck with men. Gary's father walked out on them right after his son was born. From the first, Mama knew her son would be the greatest. She took on a bewildering series of jobs so that he might be well dressed and well fed. She designed clothes, read palms, hawked jewelry, ran a tourist hotel. He would be a great violinist, a great actor, a great dancer.

To most Russian intellectuals and artists of the day, France was the cultural capital of the world, and Gary's incurably romantic mother decided that was the place for her genius son. By painful contrivance and slow stages, she got herself and her son out of Russia, across Poland and at long last to France. In succession, Romain failed her as a violinist (his teacher used to hold his hands over his ears when the boy played), as a dancer (Mama took after his homosexual instructor with her cane), and as an actor.

She embarrassed him, of course. When he sold his first story to a Paris magazine, she carried a copy of it in her purse and read it with eloquence to shoppers and merchants. So fearful was Romain of disappointing her that when he failed to sell another story for months, he sent her others, written, so he said, under pseudonyms. She believed him.

The war brought out all his mother's Francophilia. At one point, she commanded him to go to Berlin and assassinate Hitler. He prepared for the trip but she called it off. When he failed in his first effort to get a commission at flying school, he couldn't bear to tell her. Hadn't she already bragged about her officer son at every vegetable stall in Nice? So he told her that he had seduced the commanding officer's wife. She not only believed him; she was proud of him.

Gary went on to become an authentic hero as a bomber pilot. Of his entire squadron, only half a dozen came out of the war alive. Admirable sentimentalist that he is, Gary prefers to believe that his mother took care of him. Regularly throughout the war, he had gotten letters from Mama, the one human being who could keep him going. But when he got back to Nice, a captain and the hero his mother had always said he would be, he learned that she had died of diabetes 3 1/2 years before. But before her death, and knowing she was going to die, she had written 250 letters to her son. A friend mailed them for her at regular intervals.

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