Playwright, novelist, poet, and musician, born in Ville d'Avray, NC France. He was a pupil of the École Centrale in 1938, formed a one-man band at Saint-German-des-Près after the war, and became a jazz critic and columnist on Temps Modernes. As a trumpeter at the Tabou, he had formed his first jazz group in 1937, and twenty years later, with Henri Salvador, created Rock 'n' Roll à la Française. His poems and songs appeared in the collections Je voudrais pas crever (1962) and Chansons possibles et impossibles, which gave rise to the scandal of the Déserteur in 1955. As a writer, J'irai cracher sur vos Tombes, seen as a pastiche of the American black novel, was published under the name of Vernon Sullivan, one of many pseudonyms. Banned in 1946, it proved an unexpected success, but he disapproved of the film adaptation (1959). L'Equarissage pour tous (1947) was a nihilist farce. The best-selling L'Ecume des jours (1947) and L'Herbe rouge (1950) deal with love and alienation with astonishing verbal fantasy, and he remained provocative with Le Gôuter des Généraux (1964). Under the influence of Ionesco, he wrote Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire. None of his many scenarios survive, but Georges Delerue composed an opera on his libretto Le Chevalier de Neige, performed at Nancy in 1957. He did not complete his Traité de Civisme. His early death was the result of a heart condition.
Boris Vian (March 10, 1920 – June 23, 1959) was a French writer, poet, singer, and musician, who also wrote under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan.
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.
Under his own name Vian published L'Arrache-Coeur (Heartsnatcher), L'Herbe Rouge, L'automne à Pékin and what critics regard as his masterpiece, L'Écume des Jours.
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. 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. It should be noted, however, that despite the difficulties almost all of his works have been translated to Hungarian, German, Polish and Russian, a lot of them to Italian (the list of the translated works can be found on the Boris Vian Wikipedia pages of the given language).
Vian was Raymond Chandler's French translator; 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.
Vian's literary work was intimately tied to his love of jazz. Vian expressed himself in music and in literature, as it were, in the same breath.
The Jazz Conceptions of Boris Vian
Over the course of his thirty-nine years, Boris Vian managed to live not just one but several existences. A prolific writer, Vian authored plays, poetry, novels, philosophical treatises, songs, magazine articles and reviews, and “translations” of non-existent American pulp novels. At the same time, Vian played trumpet in Claude Abadie’s orchestra, one of the most successful amateur dance bands in postwar Paris, playing for American GIs and expatriates and French hipsters and existentialists in the smoky caves (underground nightclubs) of the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Though jazz was only one of Boris Vian’s occupations, the sounds and ideas of the music deeply affected his artistry and his existence in general. he expressed himself in jazz.” Vian himself revealed the depth of his attachment to jazz through his numerous articles and reviews in French publications such as Jazz-Hot and Combat, and in his jazz-inflected fiction, which included stories with names like “Blues pour un chat noir.” As a prominent figure in the jazz and literary scenes of mid-century Paris, Boris Vian’s opinions, especially those on music, deeply affected the progression of the direction and the self-image of the Parisian jazz scene for years to come.
Boris Vian was born in 1920 to an upper middle-class family in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Ville D’Avray. His liberal upbringing included, among other indulgences, frequent surprise-parties (the English word was used at the time), unscripted social gatherings where “convention gave way to invention, and the more wayward the invention the better.” Vian relished the novelty and absurdity of this childish pastime, and as an adult he continued to host surprise-parties from time to time. Before his teen years had expired, Vian was keeping a diary and had already written several works of fiction. (l’association française de normalisation), a classic bureaucracy whose primary function was “to justify and prolong indefinitely its own existence, constantly putting off important decisions while inventing new pretexts for its survival.” After the toil of A.F.N.O.R., Vian transferred to the Office Professionel des Industries et des Commerces du Papier et du Carton, “where—according to his musician friend Claude Léon—‘there was literally nothing to f*cking do.’” Vian finished two novels on the job in the year before he was fired.
Obviously, Vian did not see the life of an engineer as a particularly rewarding or engaging enterprise. There, surrounded by zazous (the young hipsters of the forties), impecunious writers, Sartrean existentialists, musicians, and hedonists, Vian found himself at the heart of a thriving bohemian subculture where he could simultaneously express many of his parallel identities—the musician, the critic, the writer, the philosopher, and the jazz partisan. Vian himself never traveled to the United States to hear jazz in its native environment, relying instead on recordings and performances in Europe; consequently it was primarily in this environment that Vian nurtured and developed his sense of jazz. Vian modeled his playing style after that of the trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, whose recordings he cherished, while the Abadie band played in a complementary style, attempting to recreate the pure sounds of Dixieland and early swing.
The liberation of Paris would end the “golden era” of the artificially-isolated jazz scene wherein European musicians were the only available practitioners of the American art form. Boris would reply, ‘No, we won’t play ‘Besame Mucho;’ we’re going to play some Duke Ellington for you.’ In the end, everyone was happy—the soldiers danced and we played ‘our music.’” However, an influence that was not so easily tackled by the French jazz establishment was arrived in the GIs’ footsteps: le bebop. The endless debate over the new style resulted in the fragmentation of the community of jazz fans in France and provided endless fodder for the pens of French critics, including Boris Vian.
Though it did have a couple of stints at jazz festivals around Europe, the regular habitat of the Abadie orchestra was in the caves, the basement nightclubs full of jazz and existentialists (and presumably a fair number of poseurs). Later, Boris Vian would describe the entry into the club as follows: “one descended a torturous stone stairway…ending up in a long vaulted passage, like a subway station only much smaller and dirtier… It took some time to make all this out, since the cigarette smoke produced a fog of London-like proportions and the uproar was so intense that one reacted by not seeing anything.” As other clubs sprung up in imitation, the “amateurish, spontaneous air” of the Tabou club gave way to a more subdued professionalism, and the Abadie band moved down the street to the Club Saint-Germain.
Though the caves may have initially presented an atmosphere of anarchy and abandon, they, along with their pre-war aboveground counterparts, also served as important rallying points for the organizers of the Parisian jazz scene. In 1937, Vian had joined the Hot-Club de France, then headed by Hughes Panassié and Charles Delaunay, who together had introduced serious jazz scholarship to Europe.
It was in this ideologically-charged environment that Vian crafted his first attempts at jazz criticism. Goebbels shows up at Vian’s door with the salute “Heil Gillespie,” to which Vian replies “Heil Parker!” Goebbels, “draining his glass of marijuana elixir,” then proceeds to instruct Vian in the intricacies of propaganda and cultural infiltration, consisting primarily of wordplay to fool the food service population: “Une poule au riz-bop…du riz-bop au curry-bop, avec pain bis-bop et du thé-lonious.” The humorous connection to the Nazis so soon after the atrocities of war is a rather uneasy one, but nothing is taboo for Vian, and he succeeds in driving the point home in his typically raw and cynical manner. Though many of his contributions to Jazz Hot would be less raucous, the pages of the magazine would serve him well as a bully pulpit for the propagation of his often-unconventional conceptions of jazz and the jazz scene. Vian would assign the same criticism to his own playing—no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to equal the playing of a thirty-seventh-rate black musician. In his journal, he wrote “I played the trumpet a bit like a porker, I think.” Of course, many musicians have felt this same kind of existential despair while listening to the recordings or concerts of musicians whose superb skills seem totally unattainable, but for Vian, the one thing that practice couldn’t change—the color of his skin—was the major impediment to mastery of the jazz idiom.
In truth, Vian believed in the universality of this distinction. “The problem is the following,” he wrote in a 1948 editorial in Combat, “black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements.” Vian believed, in theory, in the idea of racial mixing among musicians. But if only they could all just die suddenly…” Obviously, as a white musician himself, Vian is overstating his case. But for various reasons, Vian is continually frustrated by the Whites in jazz, especially when they take attention away from Blacks. Of the commercially successful English pianist George Shearing, Vian wrote “[he] is nothing but a shitty platter of Huntzo-progressive style.” Benny Goodman’s sextet, despite its integration, is similarly subject to Vian’s caustic criticism: “aside from Eldridge, what a constipated band!” It is hard to believe that Vian’s musical racism was simply a conscious and bitter reaction to the pressures of commercialism or an attempt at some kind of early musical affirmative action; Still, it seems likely that these perceptions, even with Vian’s emphatic claims of his receptiveness to all types of music, were colored by his deeply ingrained racial essentialism (which, in turn, may have been derived from an association of whiteness with commercialism.) While Stan Kenton’s attempts at “serious” composition are met with ridicule—“Kenton never played jazz anyway, and I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with him in the columns of this supposedly-serious publication”—those of Duke Ellington in his early Reminiscing in Tempo are cited as an example of a good attempt at “serious jazz,” despite the piece’s initially-checkered critical reception. Vian thus betrays the fact that he shares some of Panassié’s inability to accept innovation and synthesis as part of the jazz aesthetic, especially if that innovation is coming from white composers.
If Vian’s jazz ideal is a progressive and professional music played by black musicians, then why does he choose the white trad-jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke as his idol? Although Beiderbecke is indeed a formidable presence in early jazz, a white musician whose playing style is as unique as that of any of his contemporaries, white or black, it seems odd that even after the arrival of bebop, Vian continues to consider him his idol. Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham are much more frequently cited in his columns, but Vian would never deign to model himself after them. The temporal separation of Beiderbecke’s era also lends itself to an escape from this model, for it allows Vian to avoid the pretext of playing a popular and commercially viable music; why does Vian play in public at all if he feels like white performance is inherently exploitative of the black tradition?
The music which Vian played in the Abadie orchestra and in his own groups was entirely derivative, even if it was played well. Vian almost certainly committed some of Beiderbecke’s recorded solos to memory to aid him in this quest. Though he believed himself incapable of true musical innovation, how did Vian view the role of spontaneity among true jazz musicians in general? One might expect that, in his bohemian liberalism, Vian would have favored a true and total freedom of form and color. In fact, weaned on big band and Dixieland charts, Vian never lost his love for the arranged side of jazz. Strikingly, none of the hundreds of bebop combo concerts that Vian saw in Paris, including ones by Miles and “the Zoizeau” (Parker), made the list of “great moments.”
Vian’s fear of purely spontaneous and unarranged jazz was that it left too much to chance. But even without the ready-accessibility of the big-bands, Vian recognized Charlie Parker’s mastery when he saw it at the 1949 Paris Jazz Festival:
“Ah! Indeed, in watching him we are far removed from the overintellectualized conceptions that our misdirected society and atrophied century have given to music.”
Next, Vian crafts a pseudomusicological analysis of the first dozen notes of Bird’s solo, dealing less with the music itself and more with Vian’s literary self-indulgence. “Have you noticed with inflexible necessity of the me to insert itself between the sol which precedes it and the sol which follows it?” Vian believes (and he is not alone) that a good solo has the same kind of artistic intent and finality about it as a through-composed arrangement, or for that matter a poem. However, thriving alongside the concrete and “inflexible necessity” of the notes’ arrangement is an antithetical impulse—the primal, savage, and anti-structural urges which lie deep below the foundations of our “atrophied century.” In listening to Bird’s solo, Vian hears the release of huge amounts of the same energy that he hears in other black music—the release of the human soul.
For Vian, this was the ultimate power of jazz, “the potential for at least a partial escape from the strictures and inhibitions of the intellect.” The source of jazz—America—was the only potential source of such a mid-20th century anachronism. Boris Vian forswore the stereotype of the noble savage again and again as he elevated the “popular music par excellence” of jazz to the level of high art, but in the end we find ourselves with that colonialist image staring us in the face. But suffice it to say that, even in the most complimentary sense, the praise of black music for its primal urges may rest on even shakier ground than the jokes Vian makes about the Nazis even before the smoke from the camps has completely cleared. If Vian was not so insistent about the superiority of Blacks in the arena of l’expression jazzistique, then his call for jazz to leave the sterile concert halls and return to the caves of the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés would not be as perplexing. Vian was definitely not a racist in an anti-Black, Jim Crow sense—Duke Ellington was the godfather of his daughter Carole.
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 Shall Spit On Your Graves). The heart attack is widely attributed to the fact that Boris Vian had been suffering from irregular heartbeat for a long time.
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