 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Boris Vian (1920-1959) |
|
French novelist and playwright, a jazz connoisseur and critic, Dixieland trumpeter, and author of more than 400 songs. As a writer Boris Vian is perhaps best remembered for his novels L'écume des jours (1947, Mood Indigo) and J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Spit on Your Graves), a literary bomb. It told of a black man named Lee Anderson, who has blond hair and fair skin. He avenges the lynching of his younger, darker skinned brother by raping and killing white girls. At the end he is lynched. Vian was prosecuted for obscenity. He died in a Parisian cinema at the age of 39 while watching a preview of the film adaptation of his book. Vian's collected works amount to more than 50 volumes. "Write," he said. "Write best-sellers. Nothing but best-sellers. Historical novels; novels where colored men sleep with white women and don't get lynched; novels about pure young girls who manage to grow up unblemished by the vicious small-town life which surrounds them." (in I Spit on Your Graves by Boris Vian, English translation by Boris Vian & Milton Rosenthal, Tam Tam Books, 1998, p. 5) Boris
Vian was born at Ville d'Avray into a bourgeois family,
that lost much of its wealth in the Depression. He was a second child
of his parents, Paul and Yvonne Vian. At the age of 12 Vian
developed rheumatic fever and later he contracted typhoid which left
him with an enlarged heart. However, it did not prevent him from
pouring his energy into a number of artistic projects later in his
life. Vian was first educated at home. At the age of 17 he learnt
trumpet after seeing Duke Ellinton play. He studied philosophy at
the Lycée Hoche in Versailles, and excelled in mathematics at the
Lycée Condorcet,
receiving a civil engineering diploma in 1942. During the 1940s Vian was
employed for a time by the AFNOR (Association Française de Normalisation), a
bureaucracy, which Vian satirized in his first novel, Vercoquin et
le Plancton (Vercoquin and the Plancton). It was written in 1943, but published in 1946. Vian left AFNOR to write L'Écume des jours (1947, Mood Indigo), his most famous love story. After the war Vian played a New Orleans-style trumpet in Claude Abadie's jazz orchestra, penned several hundred songs, mader a reputation as a cabaret singer, and wrote reviews for the magazine Le Jazz-Hot. He also contributed to Jean-Paul Sartre's magazine Les Temps Modernes. Vian's most beautiful songs include the pacifist 'Le déserteur' (1954), which sold thousands of records. Written in the form of a letter, addressed to Monsieur le Président, the song outraged the French patriots, and was forbidden to broadcast on the radio. The song was composed by Harold Berg and was first performed by Vian's friend Marcel Mouloudji. Monsieur le Président J'irai cracher sur vos tombes
(1946) was penned under
the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan in ten days in the hard-boiled style of
crime fiction. Vian had made a wager with his publisher that he can
compose a best-seller
novel. When a copy of the book – opened to scene where the
ptotagonist kills his mistress – was found on the Parisian hotel bed on
which a married man had shot his lover and then committed suicide, it
gained publicity beyond anyone's expectations. J'irai cracher sur vos tombes sold 100,000 copies before it was prosecuted for obscenity, the first such trial of a French novel since that of Flaubert's Madame Bovary
in 1857. Vian was fined one franc for every copy sold. The books were
to be "put outside the reach of young people . . . withdrawn from
circulation and destroyed." (Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher L. Miller, The University of Chicago Press, 2018, p. 83)
The very short last chapter, XXIV, contains only two sentences: "The
townspeople hanged him anyway because he was a nigger. Under his
trousers, his crotch still protruded ridiculously." (Ibid., p. 177) "Vian's book has a certain weary, mysogynistic humor – the chicks fuck like rabbits, or minks, and our hero gets a certain charge, or arrives at the mercy of a nearly unbearable ecstasy, out of his private knowledge that they are being fucked by a nigger: he is committing the crime for which his brother was murdered, he is fucking these cunts with his brother's prick. And he comes three times, so to speak, each time he comes, once for his brother, and once for the "little death" of the orgasms to which he always brings the ladies, and uncontrollably, for the real death to which he is determined to bring them." (The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin, 2000, pp. 43-44) At the court Vian insisted that it was not his own work but a translation of a book by the American writer Vernon Sullivan, and went on to provide a biography for his "alter-negro". The pseudonym combined the names of Joe Sullivan, an American pianist, and Paul Vernon, a French jazz musician, who played in Claude Abadie's band alongside with Vian. In addition to American jazz, Vian was familiar with American mystery and detective novels, although he never visited the US. He translated Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain for Gallimard's "Série Noire." In addition he translated with his wife – for a period, translating was the main source of their income – works by Nelson Algren, Strindberg, Pirandello, and Brendan Behan, and from the field of science fiction A.E. van Vogt, William Tenn, Henry Kuttner, and Ray Bradbury. New Vernon Sullivan thrillers followed in 1947 and 1948. At the same time Vian produced more or less serious novels, plays and poems. A short opera, Fiesta, which tells the story of a mysterious shipwrecked man, was written for Darius Milhaud. The opera was first performed in West Berlin in 1948. Vian also acted small parts in films and wrote film scenarios. In 1958, he and the director Louis Malle persuaded Miles Davis to play the music for Malle's film Lift to the Scaffold. In the preface of Mood Indigo Vian
wrote
–
echoing in his uncompromising tone Voltaire: "There are only two
things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of
New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go because
everything else is ugly, and the few pages of proof which follow derive
all their strength from the fact that this is a compltetely true story,
since I imagined it from start to finish." ('Foreword', in Mood Indigo by Boris Vian, translated by John Sturrock, Grove Press, 1968) The title of its Amerian translation, Mood
Indigo, referred to Duke Ellington's famous composition. This tale of amour fou ('mad love') was set in the world where all material is organic, an eel sucks pineapple flavored toothpaste through the cold water tap, and elephants walk on the streets. Vian used deliberately naïve style with surrealistic images. The protagonist, Colin, is a rich young man, who is surrounded by his intellectual friends, one of whom is obsessed with the philosopher Jean Pulse Hearthe. Colin meets a pretty girl, Chloe. A strange illness is eating her away. "Chloe was still surrounded by flowers. Her hands were lying on the blankets, lightly grasping a huge white orchid, which looked beige compared with her diaphanous skin. Her eyes were open, but she barely stirred when she saw Isis sit down deside her. Nicolas saw Chloe and turned his head away. He would have liked to smile at her." (Ibid., p. 180) A mysterious water lily grows inside Chloe's chest, Colin gives her more flowers, and she dies. Chloe is buried in a pauper's grave, and the verger and pallbearers dance away. Vian's avant-garde plays had much connections to the theater of absurd, especially the work of Alfred Jarry. L'équarissage pour tous
from 1946 was a "paramilitary vaudeville in one long act." Set in a
Normandy knacker's yard, it depicted farcical marriage problems of a
family on D-Day. Their home is destroyed by wartime allies, the Free
French, and other military personel. Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le
Schmurz (1959, The Empire Builders) told of a bourgeois family whose new apartment is invaded by a
terrifying noise, and an annoying being, the Schmürz. The play was
staged in England in 1962 and in New York in 1968. The General's Teatime was first presented in France seven years after Vian's death. It portrayed war as a "nursery tea-party", and mocked military leaders, church and the government. The play was inspired by General Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story which Vian translated into French. Several of Vian's books reflected his interest in science fiction, although sf made up only a small part of his activities. In Vercoquin and the Plankton joys of life are threatened by standardization, represented by the Association Française de Normalisation. L'Automne à Pékin (1947, Autumn in Peking) was a desert utopia, set in the imaginary land of Exopotamia, where a pointless railway is constructed. One way of arriving the country is by taking the 975 bus. Occasionally the driver becomes insane and drives to Exopotamia instead of taking the normal route through Paris. No extra charge. In L'herbe rouge (1950), a time-machine story, one character is haunted by a double. Vian's first marriage, to Michèle Léglise, ended in 1952 in
divorce,
and two years later he married Ursula Kübler, a Swiss dancer. Among the existentialist and post-surrealistic
circles of Paris, Vian was a
famous personality, but largely ignored by academic literary criticism; he was "the existentialists' court jester." (Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank by James Campbell, 2003, p. 85) In 1952 Vian was inducted as a Transcendent Satrap of
the Collège de 'Pataphysique, an unconventional literary association
founded to perpetuate the memory of Alfred Jarry. Due to his serious heart condition, Vian was forced to give up trumpet playing – "each note played on it shortens my life by a day," he said. ('Vian, Boris', in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 1489) Boris Vian died of a heart attack on June 23, 1959, in a small cinema near the Champs Elysées, where he had sneaked to watch the preview of the screen adaptation of his I'll Spit on Your Graves. Vian was thirty-nine. According to Louis Malle, this poorly made movie, directed by Michel Gast, had finished Vian: "I've always thought that Boris died of shame from having seen what they'd done to his book. Like anything else, the cinema can kill." ('Foreword' by Louis Malle, in Blues for a Black Cat & Other Stories by Boris Vian, edited and translated by Julia Older, 1992, p. viii) The film was banned in Finland. For further reading: Boris Vian by David Noakes (1964); Boris Vian: La Poursuite de la vie Totale by Henri Baudin (1966); Boris Vian by Jean Clouzet (1966); Boris Vian by M. Rybalka (1969); Les Vies parallèles de Boris Vian by N. Arnaud (1970); 'Vian, Boris,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); From Dreams To Despair: An Integrated Reading of The Novels of Boris Vian by J.K.L Scott (1998); Boris Vian Transatlantic: Sources, Myths, and Dreams by Christopher M. Jones (1999); The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian by Alistair Charles Rolls (1999); Black Like Boris: Boris Vian's Fictions of Identity in Post-World War II Paris by Celeste Day Moore (2003); Irresponsibly Engagé: Boris Vian and Uses of American Culture in France, 1940-1959 by Julie Kathleen Schweitzer (2005); Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in post-World War II Paris by Rashida K. Braggs (2016); Boris Vian, faiseur de hoax: pour une démystification de l'affaire Vernon Sullivan by Clara Sitbon (2019); La poésie du prosaïque: de Boris Vian à Frédéric Dard by Bernard Lathuille (2021) Selected works:
|
