Profile of Boris Vian on Famous Like Me

Boris Vian (March 10, 1920 - June 23, 1959) was a French writer, poet, singer, and musician, who also wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan. He was born in Ville-d'Avray, near Paris, and educated at the École Centrale Paris. His works were often highly controversial, but his writing and performance of jazz songs gained the admiration of many famous names.

Career

Vian received a degree as a civil engineer and began his career at the French Association for Standardisation. This was by all accounts an undemanding post, and Vian amused himself with pataphysical conundrums, by composing songs and sketching sub-aqueous plants, and by publishing a chapbook for friends, satirising his colleagues. Vian found serious work distasteful.

Vian wrote 10 novels, including popular hardboiled thrillers published under the name Vernon Sullivan, Vian's fictionalised American persona. The Sullivan oeuvre earned Vian opprobium and fame in equal measure, and he was fined 100,000 francs for the 100,000 copies sold of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes. His books were frequently banned.

Under his own name Vian published L'Arrache-Coeur (Heartsnatcher), L'Herbe Rouge, L'automne à Pékin and what critics regard as his masterpiece to be L'Écume des Jours. L'Écume des Jours appears in three english translations, but Stanley Chapman's translation, called Froth on the Daydream, is the most highly regarded. L'Écume des Jours was translated by an American in 1968 as Mood Indigo (named for the famous Duke Ellington song), and most recently by Paul Knobloch as Foam of the Daze.

The difficulty of translating Vian perhaps accounts for his relative obscurity in the English speaking world. L'écume in English means foam, froth or spume, but the expression l'écume des jours is a bizarre and unnatural concoction, typical of Vian's light and surrealistic touch. Critics comment that in L'Écume des Jours -- which Raymond Queneau called 'the most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written' -- Vian's imaginative and playful use of language constitutes a fourth dimension of meaning that supplements ordinary elements of plot and character. The difficulty of re-capturing the distinctively Vian-esque tone and charm of the text is the challenge confronting his translators. Although this may be the case in every translation, Vian's novels are emphatically franco-français -- that is, tied irrevocably to the language of their composition.

Vian was Raymond Chandler's French translator; he was intimately, if remotely, involved with American pop-culture and its reception in France.

He also authored plays, short stories and songs, including a 1958 collaboration on the opera Fiesta with Darius Milhaud. He often played jazz at the "Tabou", a club (now defunct) located in the Rue Dauphine, close to Saint-Germain des Prés, in Paris. He played a pocket trumpet, which he called "trompinette" in his poems. His most famous song was "Le déserteur", a pacifist song written during the Indochina War. His songs were recorded by a variety of other artists, including Juliette Gréco, Nana Mouskouri, Yves Montand, Magali Noel, and Henri Salvador. Serge Gainsbourg said that seeing Boris Vian on stage inspired him to try his hand at songwriting.

A jazz enthusiast, he served as liaison for, among others, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris. He wrote for several French jazz-reviews (Le Jazz Hot, Paris Jazz) and published numerous articles dealing with jazz both in America and France. Though he never put a foot on American soil, the themes of both jazz and America run thick in his work.

Vian's literary work was intimately tied to his love of jazz. In the foreword to L'Écume des Jours, he writes, "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..." Vian expressed himself in music and in literature, as it were, in the same breath.

Death

On the morning of June 23, 1959, Boris Vian was at the Cinema Marbeuf for the screening of the film version of his controversial "Vernon Sullivan" novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I will Spit On Your Graves). He had already fought with the producers over their interpretation of his work and he publicly denounced the film stating that he wished to have his name removed from the credits. A few minutes after the film began, he reportedly blurted out: "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" He then collapsed into his seat and died of a heart attack en route to the hospital. The heart attack is widely attributed to the fact that Boris Vian had been suffering from irregular heartbeat for a long time.

Selected bibliography

Prose

• As Boris Vian:
  • Trouble dans les Andains (1947, posthumously published in 1966)
  • Vercoquin et le plancton (1947)
  • L'Écume des Jours (1947, Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo, Foam of the Daze)
  • L'automne a Pekin (1947)
  • Les Fourmis (1949, short stories)
  • L'Herbe rouge (1950)
  • L'Arrache-coeur (1953, Heartsnatcher)
  • Le loup garou (posthumously published in 1970, short stories)
• As Vernon Sullivan:
  • J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I will Spit on Your Graves)
  • Les morts ont tous la même peau (1947)
  • Et on tuera tous les affreux (1948)
  • Elles se rendent pas compte (1949)

Dramatic works

• L'Equarrissage pour tous (1950)
• Le Dernier des metiers (1950)
• Tete de Meduse (1951)
• Les Batisseurs d'Empire (1959)
• Le Gouter des generaux (posthumously published in 1962)

Poetry

• Barnum's Digest (1948, a collection of 10 poems)
• Cantilenes en gelee (1949)
• Je voudrais pas crever (posthumously published in 1962)

Translations

• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler as Le grand sommeil (1948)
• The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler as La dame du lac (1948)
• The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt, as Le Monde des Ã… (1958)

etc.

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