Boris Vian: the alphabet of a centenary

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Boris Vian was one of the most brilliant figures in the French cultural and artistic world of the 20th century. Novelist, journalist, translator, lyricist, from the Centrale to the music hall, passionate about jazz, this disciple of Alfred Jarry and unconditional of Duke Ellington, was a man of many talents. If his literary work was unknown during his lifetime, his books are now part of the literary institution and the whole of France is celebrating its centenary this year. Back in nine letters on the journey of this gifted French literature.

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Like ... eternal adolescent

Do we conceive Tintin as a spoiled and toothless grandfather? Impossible to imagine Alice suffering from Alzheimer's and dying miserably in a London Epad, far from her " wonderland ". As for Boris Vian, whose 100 years are celebrated on March 10, 2020, he is necessarily a centenary like no other. The author of L'Écume des jours and the anti-military song Le Déserteur cannot age because he remains associated in our imaginations with this eternal adolescent whom he embodied throughout a too short life, marked with the seal of inventiveness and renewal. The man himself was worried about what kind of old man he would be, when one summer morning in 1959, his tired and sick heart suddenly dropped. Terrified by death at the age of thirty-nine, Boris Vian left behind him a work as prolific as it is plural, reflecting the image of a radiant youth that has not aged.

B like… Boris

Childhood and adolescence in western Paris. One of the ponds of Ville-d'Avray where the Vian children went to fish for frogs. Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

“ Slavic air, I look Slavic, I was born in Ville-d'Avray, my parents were very French. My mother was called Jeanne, and my father Victor, but my name is Igor ”, sang Boris Vian , mocking his genealogy. Admittedly, he was born on March 10, 1920 into a French family of old stock, in Ville-d'Avray, in western Paris, but his father was hardly called Victor, but Paul, and his mother Yvonne, nicknamed " Mother Pouche " by her children. A loving mother and music lover, she played the harp and the piano. It is to his mother's passion for Moussorgski's opera, Boris Godounov (1869), that the future novelist owes his first name to Slavic consonances. According to the writer's biographers, the Ville-d'Avray house was a wealthy and bourgeois house, a haven of peace for Vian children who benefited from progressive intellectual and literary training, sheltered from religious passions and soldiers of the time. Entertainment consisted mainly of language games, charades and other poetic exercises, while leisure was devoted to reading and music. Passionate about jazz from a very young age, Boris set his sights on the trumpet which he practiced in his spare time, before forming at the age of 12, with his brothers, a jazz group, Accord Jazz . Ruined by the stock market crash of 1929, Vian parents pushed their children to go to higher education. This is how Boris, particularly good in mathematics, will do Centrale in order to have " always a job to live on ". Moreover, the first profession he exercised was that of engineer at the French Association for Standardization (Afnor) where he worked from 1939 to 1946. In 1944, the death of his father Paul, killed by intruders in the family home, marks the end of an era for the carefree young man that was Boris Vian.

C like… " One hundred sonnets "

Office work at Afnor bothers her, but you have to make a living. This job, however, leaves enough time for the young engineer to play jazz and especially write. It is on papers with the header of his employer that Boris Vian wrote between 1942 and 1944 his first works: One hundred sonnets , which is a collection of poems, Fairy tale for the use of medium-sized people , considered to be his first work completed and that Vian wrote to distract his young wife Michelle Léglise, convalescent after a delicate operation. After a first novel written in the form of a serial novel and entitled Trouble dans les andains , the stammering novelist delivers with Verocquin and Plankton , his first major book. Both a hymn to jazz and to swing parties that made zazous dance, this novel is also a corrosive satire of office work. The manuscript lands on the desk of Raymond Queneau , then secretary general of Gallimard Publishing. The author of Zazie dans le métro is enthusiastic about this hilarious writing that challenges traditions. Gallimard published the novel in 1947, launching the literary career of Boris Vian. He will prove to be one of the most prolific authors of this post-war generation. In just 15 years of career, Boris Vian has written 10 novels, sixty short stories, 3 poetry collections, 3 volumes of jazz reviews and chronicles, 10 plays, 6 opera libretto, 500 songs, 30 scripts, letters, pamphlets, manifests and translations.

E like… unclassifiable writer

Prolific, but unclassifiable. Boris Vian came to literary writing through his interest in language and his propensity to create parallel universes. His work is a mixture of Lewis Carroll fantasy, HG Wells science fiction, black humor inspired by the American black novel and absurd recalling the hallucinated logic of Alfred Jarry. This literary culture, he owed it to his early readings, which included classics (Kafka, Benjamin Constant, Marcel Aymé), but also Anglo-Saxon literature in its best (Melville, Kipling, Hemingway, Caldwell , Steinbeck). His family was anglophile and also a big fan of word games. For specialists in the literary work of Boris Vian, this family culture is at the origin of the novelist's taste for in particular neologisms (" pianocktail ", " antiquitarians ", " Exopotamia "), the anagrams of his name (" Bison Ravi ”,“ Baron Visi ”or even“ Brisavion ”) and the many pseudonyms which the writer regularly uses to blur his identity as an author. It is a multifaceted work, divided between romance novels, initiatory tales, parodies of fairy tales and black novels. After his first writings, he will publish four novels signed with his name ( L'Écume des jours , L'Automne à Pékin , L'Herbe rouge and L'Arrache-coeur ) and six other novels under various pseudonyms. At the same time serious and playful, tender and violent, this fiction is crossed by common themes such as " wear, deterioration, aging, on the one hand, and, love caught in a triangular conflict, of on the other hand, ”as Marc Lapprand, the great exegete of“ Vianesque ”speech, reminds us.

J like… jazz

The conductor, pianist and composer of Jazz, Duke Ellington gets his hand molded in the presence of the writer Boris Vian at the Hotel Claridge in Paris on April 8, 1950. AFP

" Without jazz, life would be a mistake ", liked to repeat Boris Vian. It was by listening to the blown trumpet of the Duke Ellington orchestra around thirteen or fourteen that the teenager's passion for jazz was born. Boris Vian dreamed of becoming a jazzman. He learned to play the trumpet, despite the heart murmur detected from the age of 12. It was as a trumpeter that he made himself known in the clubs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which he frequented assiduously in the post-war years, contributing to his reputation as " Prince of Saint-Germain." -des-Prés " Organizer of themed evenings in these night clubs, notably at Tabou, he took a good part of the Modern Times team there, including Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. According to legend, it was he who presented in 1948 Duke Ellington , " the only true genius of jazz " to Raymond Queneau and Gaston Gallimard, before serving as an intermediary the following year between Miles Davis, Sartre, Picasso and Juliette Gréco. Charlie Parker came to the Saint-Germain club, it was him again. In 1951 Boris Vian had to stop playing the trumpet because of his heart problems, but he would continue to share his science with the general public, writing until the end of his life in the jazz journals of the era, especially in Jazz Hot . It was this talented chronicler that the Philips record company came to seek in 1955 to take care of its jazz catalog.

L like… The foam of the days

For Raymond Queneau, L'Écume des jours is " the most poignant of contemporary love stories ". " Your novel [...], I like it in great detail and in detail, as Colin said to Chloé:" Details, she said. Well, I find it at the same time surprisingly sensitive, sensual, poetic, cruel, tender and true; especially true in tenderness, "wrote in a letter to the author Simone de Beauvoir. The latter had good sheets published in Modern Times , before the publication of the work by Gallimard in March 1947. At the heart of the novel, a story of tender and tragic love: Colin and Chloé love each other with tender love, but their happiness is interrupted by the heart disease which eats away at the young woman from the inside. A water lily is growing in Chloé's chest, crushing her lungs, diagnoses her doctor, advising her grieving husband to surround the patient's bed with a multitude of flowers whose scents together could, alone, slow down, according to him, the proliferation of the water lily. However, Colin's fortune will not be enough to stop the inevitable tragedy. This intrigue which has as central themes love, life, death is undoubtedly not very original in itself, but the novel is carried by the innovative writing of Boris Vian. Punctuated by jazz and blues, mixing the surreal and the everyday, it gradually takes the reader into a poetic and confusing universe. We do not emerge unscathed. Going unnoticed by the general public, L'Écume des jours had to wait for its reissue in 1963 to become the cult novel it is today. It is the novel of a generation which affirms the primacy of imagination, dream and emotion.

R like… black novel

Boris Vian owes his black legend of " youth pervert " and "His irreverent crime novel, J'irai spacher sur vos tombes , published in 1947 under a pseudonym that has become famous since, Vernon Sullivan. pornographer ". This novel was born out of a bet: disgusted at having missed the grand prize for the first novel for L'Écume des jours , the writer had bet to write a pastiche of a black American novel with a young publisher who dreamed of a success equal to that of No orchids for Miss Blandish , by James Hardley Chase, which appeared shortly before in the "Black Series". Written in fifteen days, with its dose of sex, violence and racism against the backdrop of the black question in the United States, the novel appears in the editions of Scorpion and it is signed by a black American half-breed that Boris Vian would have discovered and translated. Readers are not fooled, but the pastiche is so successful that the book breaks sales records. However, the scandal broke out when a sordid news item came to light: a strangler had taken care to leave next to his victim's corpse a copy of the book open to the page where the black hero kills his young white mistress. Boris Vian will be prosecuted for contempt of morality, but more serious, this case will tarnish the reputation of the author declared now persona non grata at Gallimard, who will systematically refuse all the novels that will follow. Vernon Sullivan will survive the scandal and the trial with the publication of new titles signed with this sulphurous pseudonym.

T like… tubes

Rue Dauphine, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in Paris, where the jazz club Le Tabou was located, which Boris Vian regularly frequented in the post-war years. Wikimedia commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Everyone sang or will sing the songs of Boris Vian one day. Who hasn't hummed one day on the tunes of I'm a snob or We're not here to get yelled at , or his cult song: I drink? Anti-militarists know by heart Le Déserteur and La Java of atomic bombs , censored on the radio during the colonial wars that France delivered in the years 1950-1960 in Indochina, then in Algeria. After the commercial and popular fiasco of his books, Boris Vian found some comfort in the song which allowed him to combine writing, composition and stage performance. He has written more than 500 songs, a good ten of which have become "hits" (neologism whose authorship goes to Vian) interpreted by singers as prestigious as Mouloudji, Henri Salvador and Juliette Gréco. Lyricist, Boris Vian sometimes went up on stage himself to defend his own songs. His reputation as a jack of all trades was not a legend.

V like… life (year) after death

On the morning of June 25, 1959, during the projection of a film from his novel J'irai spacher sur vos tombes , Boris Vian died suddenly, victim of a cardiac arrest. Sixty-one years after his disappearance, what remains of this major and eclectic figure of Saint-Germain-des-Prés de Sartre and Beauvoir? The writer's specialists point out that Boris Vian was not recognized until after his death. This is perhaps particularly true for his literary work, which was rather abused during his lifetime. Since their republication in the 1960s, his books have sold 4.8 million copies of all titles. " 50,000 copies of L'Écume are sold every day," recalls Marc Lapprand. Posterity also remembers the Deserter , the pacifist hymn, translated into forty languages ​​and made famous during the Vietnam War, sung by Joan Baez. So many elements that continue to feed the legend of Boris Vian that the Literary Magazine described, from 1968, " one of the heroes of youth and perhaps the greatest myth that the French literary world has created " of the XXth century.

Three questions to Marc Lapprand (1)

RFI: What distinguishes Boris Vian from French authors of his generation such as Camus or Marguerite Duras?

Marc Lapprand is a Boris Vian specialist and professor of French literature at the University of Victoria in Canada. University of Victoria, Canada

Marc Lapprand: What essentially distinguishes Boris Vian from the authors of his generation is the multifaceted aspect of his production. Difficult to qualify him as a "novelist" or "a man of the theater" as one could say for Camus or Duras, because Vian was all that but also poet, short story writer, screenwriter, songwriter, pamphleteer, columnist and translator. He carried out all of these activities at the same time, never as a handyman but as a jack-of-all-trades. Did you know that he also wrote texts for the opera? In the French tradition, it is difficult to find someone as eclectic as him. Its true ancestor would be Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland . Behind this pseudonym hides a brilliant Englishman who lived in the 19th century and who was at the same time a novelist, essayist, photographer, chess player and, last but not least, a renowned mathematician. Boris Vian was an engineer, trained at the prestigious Centrale Paris. He worked in this profession for five years before embarking on writing. He was an unclassifiable writer.

What also differentiates him from his peers is his choice of writing away from politics, while commitment characterizes the literary production of his time.

I do not agree with you because Boris Vian was committed in his own way, even if in L'Ecume des jours , he kindly laughs at Sartre whom he calls "Jean-Sol Partre". In reality, he was close to the Sartre-Beauvoir couple and regularly participated in their review Les Temps Modernes , a showcase of existentialism. When one thinks of Boris Vian's theater or his songs, one cannot really say that he was not engaged. His famous song "The Deserter", which he himself sang during the period of the colonial wars and which has become an anti-militaristic hymn sung all over the world, shows on the contrary a deep political sensitivity. Vian was committed in his own way which I would describe as " committed disengagement ".

Who are the heirs of Boris Vian in literature today?

There are not any. Boris Vian has no followers because he was unique. L'Ecume des jours is an inimitable novel.

(1) Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada, Marc Lapprand is a specialist in Boris Vian. He co-edited the edition of Boris Vian's Complete Works for Fayard (15 volumes, 1999-2003) and led the editorial team for Boris Vian's Complete Romance Works at the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (2 volumes, Gallimard, 2010 ).

He is also the organizer of the conference devoted to the French writer hosted by the University of Victoria from March 12 to 14, 2020, entitled "Boris Vian in his second century".

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