Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian): Et on tuera tous les affreux | To Hell with the Ugly (1948)

This edition, discovered in a boîte à lire in Bergues (Nord), is by 'Vernon Sullivan' but has Boris Vian on the cover. Of course, the title page states that it's by Sullivan and translated by Vian, although we all know it's written by Vian posing as the translator of an imaginary American author. As can be expected, this is a pretty zany story, the first sentence of which begins, and I translate: 'Being hit on the head is nothing. Being drugged on two separate occasions on the same evening isn't too painful... But going out for a breath of air and finding yourself in an unfamiliar room, with a woman, both of you in Adam and Eve gear, begins to get a bit much. As for what happened to me after that...'

And so begins a detective story mixed with strong overtones of science fiction and eugenics. Here we have kids, such as the very handsome, famously athletic and intentionally a virgin- until-he's-twenty Rocky, the narrator, surrounded by his mates and girls of the same age lusting after his flesh until he's suddenly hurtled into a world of murder, mystery, sex and sinister science. And he soon (massively) loses his virginity six months before time.

We have the disappearances of young girls, the creation of a new breed of super-beautiful people, a desire to destroy ugliness from the world, but also a desire for enormous power. But if everyone were beautiful what possible meaning would beauty have, and would it be a good thing?

Boris Vian: L'Herbe rouge | Red Grass (1950)

As this is Boris Vian, the reader would expect to be thrown into a strange space, but L'Herbe rouge (translated unsurprisingly as Red Grass in English) is particularly strange, and much darker than normal. This is science fiction of a hallucinatory kind, and the time and the place unknown. Here grass is blood red (and there's a great deal of blood in the novel), a dog talks, people appear and dissolve, nothing is as it seems, no character behaves as expected, mystery surrounds the most ostensibly ordinary object.

The four principal characters are the married couple Wolf and Lil and the sort-of couple Lazuli and Folavril. Lazuli is a mechanic building Wolf a kind of time machine in which Wolf will be able to revisit his past and in so doing destroy his memories he drags behind him like a ball and chain. Lazuli says that if anything goes wrong he'll learn Brenouillou to speak it for the rest of his life, to which Wolf retorts that he'll learn it too as Lazuli will need someone with whom to speak the language.

Like Brenouillou, there are a number of other neologisms in the novel, especially in the first part. Plouk is a game that seems similar to golf, and is played on the red grass; the dog Senateur is happy that Wolf has found a ouapiti for him, a strange green animal with round spikes that goes 'plop' when it hits water; cardavoines are blue umbelliferous flowers that give off a peppery smell; and saignette is a rather nasty violent game, although we never discover the nature of retroussis, another game.

Vian was undergoing an unfortunate situation at the time of writing this, when his wife Michelle had taken up with Sartre, and he seems to be using the book as a kind of therapy, almost as a form of psychoanalysis, although he hates the practice. This comes over strongly on Wolf's visits with his machine, when he meets various people who confront him with his past: his childhood, his religion, his schooling, his love life, and so on. There's a great deal of anarchism here, the rejection of religion, of the education system, in fact of virtually any values held dear to conventional value systems.

There's far more to this book than I mention above, and a re-read would certainly tease out more of it: what should we make, for instance, of the men, all identical to Wolf, whom he kills as they appear one after another (and later evaporate) as he's getting down to sexual business with Folavril? What would Doktor Freud have made of it all?

Boris Vian in Ville d'Avray, Hauts-de-Seine (92)

33 rue Pradier, Ville d'Avray.

'ICI VÉCUT

BORIS VIAN

ÉCRIVAIN POÈTE ET MUSICIEN

VILLE D'AVRAY 1920

PARIS 1959'

At the other side of the entrance is another plaque:

'ICI VÉCUT avec sa FAMILLE

de 1930 à 1955

YEHUDI MENUHIN

CITOYEN d'HONNEUR

de VILLE d'AVRAY'

And next door is yet another plaque:

'ICI VÉCUT DE 1922  À 1977

JEAN ROSTAND

BIOLOGISTE ET HUMANISTE'

In the small cimetière de Ville d’Avray there is no indication on Vian's grave that he does in fact lie here in the town of his birth, but then this is perhaps appropriate for a man with a huge number of pseudonyms.

Far removed from the many strollers around much larger cemetries within the Périphérique such as Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre, this is in a more distant quiet town, and is a little haven that nevertheless receives occasional visits from Vian's followers:

Boris Vian: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes / I Shall Spit on Your Graves [1946]

Les Éditions du Scorpion was a French publishing firm created in 1946, and its founder, Jean d'Halluin, asked Boris Vian in the same year if he would write a novel in the same genre as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Vian wrote the book between 5 and 20 August and later described it as principally influenced by James M. Cain, a writer of hardboiled crime novels perhaps best known for his (filmed) The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943). (There are also, of course, some (mainly sensational) similarities between this novel and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940).)

But Vian wrote this under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan (a name he would use for three more novels), an invented person whose work he claimed to be translating from the American, and who he also claimed was an American black who could pass as a white but identified himself as black: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes concerns Lee Anderson, an American black who passes as white, and one of whose brothers has been lynched in a racist attack.

The book was banned in France in 1949 for its (at the time extreme) sexual and violent content: Anderson narrates the whole book apart from a few very short chapters at the end, and much of its concern is with his sexual pursuits on moving to Buckton, but his obsession with two sisters from a wealthy family (in Prixville(!)) turns from mere interest in sexual conquest to violent retribution for the his brother's death. This is a long way from L'Écume des jours.

Vian, whose health was quite delicate, died of a heart attack aged 39 in 1959 during the showing of the rather different cinematic version of the book, and had previously declared that he wanted nothing to do with it.

In 1948 The Vendôme Press in Paris (a one-off imprint of Éditions du Scorpion?) published Vian's translation of his own book into English (with an Introduction by Vian, and apparently in collaboration with Milton Rosenthal) as I Shall Spit on Your Graves; the American publisher Audibon Ace rendered the title as I Spit on Your Grave in 1971; and this was re-pluralized to I Spit on Your Graves by Canongate of Edinburgh in about 1982, and then in a new edition in 2001. But surely a better translation is 'I'm Gonna Spit on Your Graves'?

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Boris Vian: L'Écume des jours

Boris Vian: L'Écume des jours (1947)

The first paragraph of L'Écume des jours (variously translated in English, and two publications have rendered it Mood Indigo¹ and the rather ugly Foam of the Daze) begins with a man's blackheads shrinking back into his skin out of the shame of seeing themselves in the mirror, and the reader knows almost immediately that this will be no ordinary read. Sure enough, we soon learn of a cook feeding the mice, and beheading an eel that's been popping out of the tap to feast on his pineapple-flavored toothpaste, and many conventional situations are turned on their head. I'm not too certain why I'd avoided reading this book so far (probably put off by reading his J'irai cracher sur vos tombes first, I imagine), but I'm very happy I finally got round to it: this is a very funny book which also has a number of very serious things to say.

The main character is Colin, who has enough money to live on to avoid having to work, unlike his friend the engineer Chick, who has far less money than the workers he's in charge of, so Colin often invites him over for a meal cooked by his chef Nicolas, who derives his culinary inspiration from the 19th century master Jules Gouffé.

Colin soon meets Chloé, the love of his life, and quickly marries her in a wildly extravagant wedding. Meanwhile, Chick has found Alise, but the couple don't have much money for long: although Colin very generously gives his friend a quarter of his 100,000 doublezon wealth, Chick is obsessed with the philosopher Jean Sol Partre (obviously a very thinly veiled satirized version of Vian's friend Jean-Paul Sartre), and must own everything he writes, including very expensive limited editions.

Colin too will soon have money problems as a water lily is discovered growing in Chloé's lung, and the best cure is to send her to a mountain retreat and keep her surrounded all the time by flowers. Almost as soon as she gets better, the other lung begins the same complaint, and Colin will have to consider the unthinkable: working for a living.

The end is catastrophic for all four main characters. Chick has spent all his money on Partre's books and souvenirs, but Partre is working on a multiple-volume encyclopedia of nausea: Alise kills Partre as he refuses to cease publication, she dies while burning bookshops, and the police kill Chick during an argument over him not paying his taxes. Chloé dies, a heartbroken Colin decides to drown himself, and even the pet mouse, in sympathy with his dead friends, resorts to suicide by sticking his head in the jaws of the cat.

This is an anarchic book, and the author of it is of course a kind of anarchist as he takes shots at almost every institution. Another book that once did that, and which led to the author abandoning novels altogether, was Thomas Hardy with Jude the Obscure (1895). In Jude, though, work is all important, whereas for Vian it is the opposite.

Vian once said that it's not possible to see a man working without cursing the person who made him do it, because that man could be swimming, lying on the grass, reading, or making love to his wife. Ignoring the fact that the mention of the word 'wife' ² of which Vian seems to approve alludes to another (sometimes poisonous) institution – and one for which Hardy was severely punished for taking such a strong, er, poke at – this shows us where Vian's sympathies clearly lie: in the love of freedom.

Throughout the novel, institutions represent enslavement and/or tyranny: the brutalization of work, the enslavement of everyone to money, the thuggery of the police, the callousness and avarice (and a mild suggestion of pedophilia) of the clergy, the violence of the government, etc.

To return to Vian's satire of Sartre through Partre, though, the novel makes a number of obvious references to the philosopher's works, particularly to La Nausée, and the allusion to Sartre's famous lecture on L'Existentialisme est un humanisme at the Club Maintenant in 1945 – in which Partre arrives on an elephant in an armored howdah and begins by exhibiting a pile of stuffed vomit – is hilarious. There are also references, for instance, to a 'duchesse de Bovouard' (Simone de Beauvoir) and 'Don Evany Marqué (an anagram Raymond Queneau, surprisingly, didn't find himself), but the main point is clear: celebrity cults are tyrannous too, and we have seen the destructive results of one on Chick and Alise.

Very funny, very frightening, surprisingly modern: a wonderful book.

¹ This relates to the jazz theme running thoroughout the novel, in which the character Chloé's name is taken from the jazz song 'Chloe (Song of the Swamp)' (to which the water lilies obviously allude), and Vian also claims that he wrote the Foreword in New Orleans and the book itself in Memphis and Davenport – although in reality he never went to any of these places.

² He in fact said 'femme', which can also mean 'woman', so do we give him the benefit of the doubt?

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Boris Vian: J'irai cracher sur vos tombes / I Shall Spit on Your Graves

Boris Vian – Le Déserteur

It is sad that English people tend to know little of French singer-songwriters (or chanteurs à paroles.) Nevertheless, Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens, Georges Moustaki and a few more are known by many in anglophone countries. Boris Vian is a different case: I'd only known him as a writer, and was delighted to discover this song in particular, which is written in very simple French to express a simple message: we won't accept your [i.e. the government's] demands that we should kill others, and we shall walk away from your insane dictates.

I'm trying to think of an English person who might have sung this, but am completely unsuccessful: perhaps unsurprisingly, Renaud recorded a slang version of Le Déserteur, and Joan Baez sang a cover version, but apart from other French singers, this lovely song has perhaps not been covered by any other anglophone singers. England has never had a Phil Ochs, or a(n early) Dylan, or a Baez.

By extension, of course, the song is a plea to all sane people to refuse to participate in any war. If the spirit of Vian's song had been heeded by just a few of the sycophants of Britain's New Labour government before the obscene war on Iraq, for instance, Tony Blair would have been forced to resign, Gordon Brown would have disappeared into the black hole where he belongs, and the world would perhaps look a far less forbidding – certainly a far less racist – place. As it is though, New Labour neo-liberal politics continue to influence European countries: the very right-wing Sarkozy, for instance, is a thoroughgoing Blairite. As is Gordon Brown: only the newspapers fabricate differences to sell copy:

Boris Vian: Le Déserteur

Significantly, someone has posted a comment on YouTube pointing out that the end of this song is 'censored', which is true, because it now reads:

'Prévenez vos gendarmes

Que je n'aurai pas d'armes

Et qu'ils pourront tirer.'

Apparently the original last two lines read:

'Que je tiendrai une arme

Et que je sais tirer.'

This is wildly different from the version sung here, but according to http://fr.lyrics-copy.com 'Boris Vian a accepté la modification de son ami Mouloudji pour pour conserver le côté pacifiste de la chanson !' (1).

OK, but as a pacifist I ironically prefer the original version because I detest authorial compromise, and the altered lyric compromises the force of the song. As the person who posted the comment says: 'Je préfère l'original, la fin est beaucoup plus Boris Vian.'

(1) However, another site is perhaps more exact in this matter: Vian was forced to change the words because the government had banned the song as it stood.