73 Avenue de Saint-Cloud, 78000 Versailles, France
Boris Vian studied at Lycée Hoche in Versailles.
Gallery of Boris Vian
8 Rue du Havre, 75009 Paris, France
Boris Vian enrolled at Lycée Condorcet, Paris, where he studied special mathematics until 1939.
College/University
Gallery of Boris Vian
Boris Vian entered École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris and subsequently moved to Angoulême when the school moved there because of the war.
Boris Vian entered École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris and subsequently moved to Angoulême when the school moved there because of the war.
(Written under Vian’s famous “Vernon Sullivan” pseudonym, ...)
Written under Vian’s famous “Vernon Sullivan” pseudonym, I Spit on Your Graves tells the story of a “white negro” who avenges his murdered brother with a series of killings in a small town in the deep south. A bestseller in France, the book was notoriously used as a model for a copycat killing.
(Vian’s second noir novel under the Vernon Sullivan pseudo...)
Vian’s second noir novel under the Vernon Sullivan pseudonym is a brutal tale of racism in postwar New York City, as protagonist Daniel Parker is blackmailed by a long lost brother.
(The story is simple: Boy meets girl; boy marries girl; gi...)
The story is simple: Boy meets girl; boy marries girl; girl falls ill on their honeymoon with a water lily on the lung, which can only be treated by being surrounded by flowers; boy goes broke desperately trying to keep his true love alive. First published in 1947, Mood Indigo perfectly captures the feverishly creative, melancholy romance of mid-century Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
(Autumn in Peking takes place in an imaginary desert calle...)
Autumn in Peking takes place in an imaginary desert called Exopotamie, where a train station and a railway line are under construction. Homes are destroyed to lay the lines, which turn out to lead nowhere. In part a satire on the reconstruction of postwar Paris, Vian’s novel also conjures a darker version of Alice in Wonderland.
(To Hell with the Ugly recounts the tale of Rock Bailey, a...)
To Hell with the Ugly recounts the tale of Rock Bailey, a dashing 19-year-old lad determined to hold onto his virginity amidst the postwar jazz-club nightlife of Los Angeles-a resolution challenged by the machinations of the demented Doctor Markus Schutz, who has decided to breed beautiful human beings and found a colony in which ugliness is a generic crime. Vian's brutal depictions of American race relations in his previous Sullivan novels here give way to a frenetic fantasy of eugenics and uniformity-a parodic anticipation of the cosmetic surgery that was to rule Hollywood over the coming decades, as well as a comic-book reflection on Nazi Germany's visions of a master race.
(Blues for a Black Cat brings back the nimble Vian in a co...)
Blues for a Black Cat brings back the nimble Vian in a collection of his short fiction, initially published as Les Fourmis in 1949. The work has the unmistakable flavor of the time and place, Claude Abadie's jazz band, the coded and absurdist messages of rebellion, the wistful fables, verbal riffs, and goofy anarchic encounters; the mise-en-scene includes an expiring jazzman who sells his sweat, a cat with a British accent and a piano that mixes a cocktail when "Mood Indigo" is played.
(Red Grass is a provocative narrative about an engineer, W...)
Red Grass is a provocative narrative about an engineer, Wolf, who invents a bizarre machine that allows him to revisit his past and erase inhibiting memories. A frothing admixture of Breton, Freud, Carroll, Hammett, Kafka, and Wells, Red Grass is one of Vian's finest and most enduring works, a satire on psychoanalysis - which Vian wholly and vigorously disapproved of - that inflects science fiction with dark absurdity and the author's great wit. Much in the novel can be regarded as autobiography, as our hero attempts to liberate himself from past traumatic events in the arenas of religion, social life and - of course - sex.
(The Manual of St-Germain-des-Prés is a “guide” to the leg...)
The Manual of St-Germain-des-Prés is a “guide” to the legendary creative and intellectual playground of mid-20th-century Paris. With boundless energy and a delicious sense of humor, Boris Vian takes readers on a star-studded romp through the underground culture of jazz clubs, Left Bank cafés, surrealist and existentialist literature, and the various eccentrics and artists that made up this legendary scene. Paris in the ‘50s was an incredible place and time: With the end of the war, everything seemed possible. The list of luminaries Vian ran with, and who are captured here in previously unpublished photographs, includes Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Juliette Gréco, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Jacques Prévert, and Jean Cocteau.
(Set in a bizarre and slightly sinister town where the eld...)
Set in a bizarre and slightly sinister town where the elderly are auctioned off at an Old Folks Fair, the townspeople assail the priest in hopes of making it rain, and the official town scapegoat bears the shame of the citizens by fishing junk out of the river with his teeth. Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.
Boris Vian was a French engineer, poet, novelist, songwriter, jazz trumpeter, and record producer. Boris Vian was truly a symbol of the young post-war intellectuals of France.
Background
Boris Vian was born on March 10, 1920, in Ville-d'Avray, France into an upper-middle-class family. His parents were Paul Vian, a young rentier, and Yvonne Ravenez, amateur pianist and harpist. From his father, Vian inherited a distrust of the church and the military, as well as a love of the bohemian life. Vian was the second of four children: the others were Lélio (1918-1984), Alain (1921-1995) and Ninon (1924-2003). The family occupied the Les Fauvettes villa. The name "Boris" was chosen by Yvonne, an avid classical music lover, after seeing a performance of Mussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov.
Boris' later childhood was also marked with sickness as he suffered from Rheumatic fever when he was 12. From then on Boris parents became overprotective toward him, and he would later judge them harshly for this in L'Herbe rouge and L'Arrache-coeur.
Education
From 1932 to 1937, Vian studied at Lycée Hoche in Versailles. In 1936, Vian and his two brothers started organizing what they called "surprise-parties". They partook of mescaline in the form of a Mexican cactus called peyote. These gatherings became the basis of his early novels: Trouble dans les andains (Turmoil in the Swaths) (1943) and particularly Vercoquin et le plancton (Vercoquin and the Plankton) (1943–44). It was also in 1936 that Vian got interested in jazz; the next year he started playing the trumpet and joined the Hot Club de France.
In 1937, Vian graduated from Lycée Hoche, passing baccalauréats in mathematics, philosophy, Latin, Greek, and German. He subsequently enrolled at Lycée Condorcet, Paris, where he studied special mathematics until 1939. Vian became fully immersed in the French jazz scene: for example, in 1939 he helped organize Duke Ellington's second concert in France. When World War II started, Vian was not accepted into the army due to poor health. He entered École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris and subsequently moved to Angoulême when the school moved there because of the war.
Boris Vian’s notoriety as a writer began when he was twenty-six, with the publication of J'irai Cracher sur Vos Tombes; he died thirteen years later of a heart attack while watching a preview of a film made from the same novel. A prolific writer, he left behind some twenty volumes of published work, with many others published posthumously.
Vian wrote novels, short stories, plays, essays, reviews, screenplays, and libretti for several operas. While Vian lived, his novels were more controversial than successful, and he supported himself by writing magazine articles and translating books into French, notably works by August Strindberg, A. E. van Vogt, and Nelson Algren. He was also a jazz trumpeter and singer who performed at numerous Parisian cabarets and wrote over four hundred songs. Since his death, popular and critical respect for his works has increased, and several pieces of his writing have been translated into English.
Vian's work reflects his preoccupation with death, but he appears to have embraced life fully. He developed an interest in jazz when he was eighteen, after hearing Duke Ellington's orchestra in Paris, and learned to play the trumpet. By age twenty-two, he was performing with the Claude Abadie orchestra, and he later became a songwriter and composer. His schooling pointed him toward engineering, a profession which he practiced for five years during his early twenties. At the same time, he began writing articles. His friendship with Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Bouvoir, among others, provided him with the influence to publish short stories in the important periodical Temps Moderne. After the appearance of his Froth on the Pudding, at age twenty-seven, he abandoned engineering and turned to writing full time.
Vian wrote two novels in the early 1940s, but his first published novel was J’irai cracher sur vos tomhes (1946; translated Shall Spit on Your Graves). He wrote it in response to an editor friends request for advice on an American author he might publish in order to improve his business. Instead of advice, Vian wrote a book for him in ten days, while on vacation. Vian pretended that he had merely translated the novel of one “Vernon Sullivan,” an “American novelist.” The book’s narrator is a mulatto who passes easily as a white person; to avenge his lynched brother, he sleeps with two beautiful sisters, both rich and white, then kills them brutally. (Vian’s knowledge of race relations in the United States was based on what he had learned from black American jazz musicians.) The book was an instant success, selling over one hundred thousand copies and earning Vian a great deal of money.
Sales were further enhanced in 1947 when a salesman in Paris strangled a woman and left a copy of the book next to her body, opened to the page describing the death of one of the sisters. The book was banned in 1949 as “objectionable foreign literature” and Vian was brought to trial, accused by the press of having inspired the murder. In the meantime, he and an American writer produced an English translation of the work, presenting it as the original, “American version.” Nevertheless, in 1951, Vian was fined one hundred thousand francs. Although he wrote four other novels under the name Vernon Sullivan and five novels under his own name, J’irai cracher sur vos lombes was his only important publishing success to appear during his lifetime.
In 1948, Vian continued his literary career by writing Vernon Sullivan novels, and also published poetry collections: Barnum's Digest (1948) and Cantilènes en gelée (Cantelinas in Jelly) (1949). Vian also started writing plays, the first of which, L'Équarrissage pour tous (Slaughter for Everyone), was staged the year it was written, 1950. The same year saw the publication of Vian's third major novel, L'Herbe rouge (The Red Grass). This was a much darker story than its predecessors, centering on a man who built a giant machine that could help him psychoanalyze his soul. Like the previous two books, it did not sell well; Vian's financial situation had been steadily worsening since late 1948, and he was forced to take up translation of English-language literature and articles in order to get by.
Vian had contracted rheumatic fever when he was twelve, which left him with a heart condition; he expected to die at any time and certainly not live past the age of forty. The major themes in his fiction and plays were freedom and spontaneity, humor, nonsense and absurdity, anti-clericalism, hatred of bureaucracy, sexual situations, violence, pacifism, and death. His titles often bore little relation to the content; for example, L'automne a Pekin(Autumn in Peking) has nothing to do with either; its characters construct a railroad in a desert, and route it through a hotel. Les batisserurs d'empire (The Empire Builders) depicts a family of three moving to progressively smaller apartments, hounded by “the Noise.” L’herbe rouge(Red Grass) is about a man who travels endlessly through his own past after building a time machine that was supposed to take him to the future. In the words of critic Zvjezdana Rudelic, Vian consistently “rejected boundaries, classifications, and traditions in favor of spontaneous and apparently illogical thought.”
Vian presents death as violent, sudden, unexpected, and unimportant. It happens at any time to anybody. The General’s Tea Parry ends with the protagonists, one by one, losing at Russian roulette; their deaths are accompanied by the joyous laughter of the survivors. At the end of the surprise party in Vercoquin et le plancton, a protagonist machine guns every fourth guest then ravages the entire block. In the play Knackery for All (L'equarrissage pour tous), a Boy Scout shows up at a farmhouse with a box of dynamite; only one person survives the resulting explosion. In Vian’s work, the behavior of the living is unaltered by a large number of fatalities around them. In contrast to the violence and death in his work, Vian’s language is inventive, fresh, and fluid.
In L’ecume des jours, (1947; Froth on the Dream or Mood Indigo), for example, Vian tells a tragic love story set in a world where figures of speech assume literal reality, and familiar objects fight back surrealistically. Streets are named after jazz figures Sidney Bichet and Louis Armstrong; Colin, the hero, has a “100,000 doublezoons;” before dinner, Colin and Chloe drink “pianococktails” created by a machine which mixes exotic drinks according to the music of Duke Ellington; Chloe becomes fatally stricken when a water-lily grows on her lung. There being no money for a funeral, the Undertaker throws her coffin out the window, where it strikes an innocent child and breaks her leg.
Vian's last novel, L'Arrache-cœur (The Heartsnatcher), was published in 1953, yet again to poor sales and Vian effectively stopped writing fiction. The only work that appeared after 1953 was a revised version of L'automne à Pékin, published 1956. He concentrated on a new field, song-writing and performing, and continued writing poetry. Vian's songs were successful; in 1954 he embarked on his first tour as a singer-songwriter. By 1955, when he was working as an art director for Philips, Vian was active in a wide variety of fields: song-writing, opera, screenplays, and several more plays. His first album, Chansons possibles et impossibles (Possible and Impossible Songs), was also recorded in 1955. He wrote the first French rock and roll songs with his friend Henri Salvador, who sang them under the nickname Henry Cording. He also wrote, "Java Pour Petula" (a song about an English girl arriving in France, written in Parisian argot) for Petula Clark's first concert performances in France.
Still, in 1955, Vian decided to perform some of his songs on stage himself. He had been unhappy about the fact that French singer Marcel Mouloudji (1922-1994), who had interpreted "Le Deserteur" (The Deserter) on stage the year before, had not accepted the original lyrics because he thought that they would lead to the song being banned. Although Vian accepted a change to one verse, the song was banned from TV and radio channels until 1967. The record of Vian's songs performed by himself was not successful in France until ten years after his death.
On the morning of 23 June 1959, Vian was at the Cinema Marbeuf for the screening of the film version of 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 from sudden cardiac death en route to the hospital.
During Vian's lifetime, only the novels published under the name of Vernon Sullivan were successful. Those published under his real name, which had real literary value in his eyes, remained a commercial failure, despite the support of famous authors of this time. Almost immediately after his death, L'Écume des jours, and then L'automne à Pékin, L'Arrache-coeur, and L'Herbe rouge, began to get recognition in France and became cult novels for youths of the 1960s and 1970s.
Over the years, Vian's works have become modern classics, often celebrated and selected as subjects for study in schools. Vian is still viewed by many as the emblematic figure of Saint Germain des Prés as it existed during the postwar decade when this district was the center of artistic and intellectual life in Paris.
(The Manual of St-Germain-des-Prés is a “guide” to the leg...)
1950
Personality
Boris Vian used lots of pseudonyms: Bison Ravi, Andy Blackshick, Xavier Clarke, S., Aimé Damour Culotte, Michel Delaroche, Joëlle Du Beausset, Gérard Dunoyer, Jules Dupont, Bison Duravi, Fanatics, Hugo Hachebuisson, Zephirin Hanvelo, Onuphre Swallow, Amélie de Labmineuse, Odile Legrillon, Otto Link, Thomas Quan, Eugene Minoux, Gideon Molle, Josèfe Pinerole, Adolphe Schmürz, Vernon Sullivan, Lydio Sincrazi, Anna Tof, Anna Tof of Raspail, Claude Varnier, Boris Viana, Thomas Quandeloro, Kevk.
Connections
In 1940, Vian met Michelle Léglise, who became his wife in 1941. She taught Vian English and introduced him to translations of American literature. The same year, Vian graduated from École Centrale with a diploma in metallurgy, and his son Patrick was born. The year 1948 saw the birth of Vian's daughter, Carole. Vian separated from his wife, and in 1950 he met Ursula Kübler (1928–2010), a Swiss dancer; the two started an affair, and in 1951 Vian divorced Michelle. Ursula and Boris married in 1954.
