A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
|
|||
|
Date
and Place of birth: |
|||
|
Life and Works: French novelist and playwright, a jazz connoisseur and critic, Dixieland trumpeters, and author of more than 400 songs. He patterned his literary style on that of terse American crime fiction. Vian's collected works amount to more than 50 vols. In the preface of L'écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream, 1947) Vian wrote - echoing in his uncompromising tone Voltaire: "There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans ot Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go because everything else is ugly." Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered for novels such as (Froth on the Daydream and Heartsnatcher. He is also known for highly controversial "criminal" fiction released under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and some of his songs (particularly the anti-war "Le Déserteur"). Vian was also fascinated with jazz: he served as liaison for, among others, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in Paris, wrote for several French jazz-reviews (Le Jazz Hot, Paris Jazz) and published numerous articles dealing with jazz both in the United States and in France. Boris Vian was born in 1920 to an upper middle-class family in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Ville D’Avray. His early childhood was a privileged one, and even after his father lost most of his wealth in the crash of 1929, the family still managed to maintain a comfortable existence, renting out the main villa at the Ville d’Avray to the Menuhins of later musical fame while living in a small cottage on the property. At the age of 12 he developed rheumatic fever and later he contracted typhoid which left him with an enlarged heart. Vian was first educated at home. At the age of 17 he learnt trumpet after seeing Duke Ellinton play. He studied philosophy at the Versailles lycée, and excelled in mathematics at the Lycée Condorcet, receiving a civil engineering diploma in 1942. During the 1940s he was employed for a time by the French Association for Standardization, a bureaucracy, which Vian satirized in his first novel,Vercoquin et le plancton. It was written in 1943, but published in 1947. Vian wrote 10 novels, including L'Arrache-Cœur (Heartsnatcher), L'Herbe Rouge (Red Grass), L'automne à Pékin (Autumn in Peking) and what critics now regard as his masterpiece, L'écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream). At the time, however, Vian could only publish his novels through a friend at Editions Gallimard, contemporary critics wrote down the books, and they had lousy sales figures. Vian was devastated (as well as increasingly worried for his personal economy) by these failures, and vowed he could write best-selling fiction if he wished to do so. In a 10-day tour-de-force, he wrote the popular hardboiled thriller, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall Spit on Your Graves), and published it under the name Vernon Sullivan, Vian's fictionalised American persona. The book sold 100,000 copies before it was banned - Vian was fined 100,000 francs. American hard-boiled fiction was familiar for Via - he translated from Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain . Other writers included Nelson Algren, Strindberg, Pirandello, and Brendan Behan, and from the field of science fiction A.E. van Vogt, William Tenn, Henry Kuttner, and Ray Bradbury. At the same time Vian produced more or less serious novels, plays and poems. A short opera, Fiesta, written for Darius Milhaud, was performed in Berlin in 1948. 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" (1955), a pacifist song about the Algerian war. It sold thousands of records, outraged the French patriots, and was banned. 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. Vian's avant-garde plays had much connections to the theater of absurd. L'équarissage pour tous, written in 1946, was a "paramilitary vaudeville in one long act." It was set in a Normandy knacker's yard, and depicted farcical marriage problems of a family on D-Day. The place is destroyed by wartime allies, the Free French, and other military personel. Les Bâtisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz (1959, The Empire Builders) was about a bourgeois family whose new apartment is invaded by a terrifying noise. The play was staged in England in 1962 and in New York in 1968. The General's Tea Party was first presented in France seven years after Vian's death. It portrayed war as a "nursery tea-party," and mocked military leaders, church and the government. The play was inspired by General Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story which Vian translated into French. Several of Vian's books reflected his interest in science fiction, although sf made up only a small part of his activities. In Vercoquin et le plancton joys of life are threatened by standardization, represented by the Association Française de Normalisation. L'Automne à Pékin (1947) was a desert utopia, set in the imaginary land of Exopotamia, where a pointless railway is constructed. L'herbe rouge (1950) was a time-machine story, in which one character is haunted by a double. Vian's first marriage, to Michèle Léglise, ended in 1952 in divorce, and two years later he married Ursula Kübler, a Swiss dancer. Although Vian was not taken seriously as a writer during his life time, he was a famous personality among the existentialist and post-surrealistic circles of Paris. In 1952 he was inducted as a Transcendent Satrap of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, an unconventional literary association founded to perpetuate the memory of Alfred Jarry . On the morning of June 23, 1959, Boris Vian was at the Cinema Marbeuf for the screening of the film version of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Shall 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. He was 39. |
|
||
|
Selected works:
|
|||
|
|||
Download here our book search engines