Boris Vian, born Mars 10, 1920 in Ville-d'Avray (Seine-et-Oise) and died June 23, 1959 in Paris (7th arrondissement)1, is a writer, poet, lyricist, singer, music critic, musician of jazz (trumpeter) and French artistic director. An engineer trained at the École centrale, he also devoted himself to the activities of screenwriter, translator (American English), lecturer, actor and painter.

Under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan, he published several novels in the American style, including I will spit on your graves which caused a scandal and earned him a resounding lawsuit. If Vernon Sullivan's writings got Boris Vian into a lot of trouble with the law and the tax authorities, they temporarily enriched him to such an extent that he could say that Vernon Sullivan kept Boris Vian alive. He often used other pseudonyms, sometimes in the form of an anagram, to sign a multitude of writings.

Boris Vian has tackled almost all literary genres: poetry, documents, chronicles, short stories. He also produced plays and screenplays for the cinema. His work is a mine in which we continue to discover new manuscripts in the 21st century. However, his bibliography remains very difficult to date precisely, as he himself does not always date his manuscripts. Thus, Noël Arnaud in the Parallel Lives of Boris Vian, and Claude J. Rameil who did very in-depth research, do not give the same dates as those close to the author on the year of publication of certain works, notably the One hundred sonnets.

He is also the author of paintings, drawings and sketches, exhibited for the first time in the annex to La Nouvelle Revue française in 1946. An exhibition at the National Library of France was dedicated to him in 2011-2012.

For fifteen years, he also campaigned in favor of jazz, which he began practicing in 1937 at the Hot Club de France. His columns, which appeared in newspapers such as Combat, Jazz-hot, Arts, were collected in 1982: Écrits sur le jazz. He also created forty-eight radio broadcasts Jazz in Paris, whose texts, in English and French, were intended for a New York radio station and whose manuscripts were collected in a bilingual edition in 1996.

His literary work, little appreciated during his lifetime, was praised by young people from the 1960s-1970s. L'Écume des jours in particular, with its language games and key characters, has passed into posterity. It is now a classic, which is often studied in middle and high schools.

    “If, during his brief existence, he multiplied the most diverse activities, his name is today among the most significant in French literature2. »

Known as a pessimist, Boris Vian loved the absurd, parties and games. He is the inventor of words and systems including imaginary machines and words, which have become common today. But he also developed real invention projects when he was an engineering student at the École centrale Paris. His most famous imaginary machine remained the pianocktailnote 1, an instrument designed to make drinks while letting oneself be carried away by the musicnote 2.

He died in 1959 (at age 39) following a heart attack that occurred during the screening of the film adaptation of his book I'll Spit on Your Graves. A follower of Alfred Jarry and a certain form of surrealism, his membership in the College of Pataphysics made him a Satrap to whom the college paid homage by announcing the apparent death of the “Transcendent Satrap”.
Biography
Childhood and origins
One of the ponds in Ville-d'Avray where the Vian children go fishing for frogs.

Despite his first name and his physique which have long fueled the legend about his Russian origins3, Boris Vian comes from a family in the Alpes-Maritimes. The name Vian, according to Philippe Boggio4, is of Piedmontese origin: Viananote 3. The ancestor Séraphin Vian was born in 1832 in Gattières, in the Alpes-Maritimes, not far from the Italian border5. Séraphin, son of a shoemaker, grandson of a farrier, embarked on the alchemy of metal4. His son Henri, Boris's grandfather, trained in artistic bronzework, married Jeanne Brousse, heiress to the Brousse6 paper mills whose fortune complemented that of the Viannote 4. Henri is the author, among other things, of the grilles adorning the library of Edmond Rostand's Villa Arnaga in Cambo-les-Bains7, and of the bronzes decorating the Palais Rose on avenue Foch8 by Boni de Castellane.

Henri and Jeanne live on a high note. They lived in Paris at the Hôtel Salé, then at the Château de Villeflix, in Noisy-le-Grand. They have their dressing room at the Opera, a house in the countryside. It was into opulence that their son Paul was born on Mars 4, 18979, who married on December 3, 191710, Yvonne Ravenez11, eight years his senior, daughter of the rich industrialist Louis-Paul-Woldemar Raveneznote 5. Paul Vian has ace

Alain on September 24, 1921 and Ninon on September 15, 192415,16. The Vians lead a carefree life there: they have a driver, a teacher at home, a hairdresser at home, a gardener17. Yvonne is a musician, she plays Erik Satie, Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel on the harp and piano. She gave the two eldest first names from operas: Boris for Boris Godounov by Modeste Mussorgsky18 and Lélio for Lélio ou le Retour à la vie by Hector Berlioz17. Their neighbor is Jean Rostand and the Vian children will go fishing in the surrounding frog ponds with his son François19.

But the crash of 1929 ruined Paul Vian who lost most of his fortune in stock market manipulations on the Cochinchina rubber company20 and who could not return to the bronze factory because it had changed hands21. He was forced to abandon the main house and go live with the children and the gardener in the caretaker's house which he had raised by one floor while retaining a narrow strip of land and a square of lawn22. The villa is rented to the Menuhin family with whom the Vians have excellent relations, the children play with their son Yehudi Menuhin who is a prodigy and who invites the Vian family to come and listen to him in Paris in concert22, which delights Yvonne . These are the rare outings where Yvonne doesn't worry about her children. Anxious and authoritarian in character, she favors all their games on the condition of keeping her brood within earshot23.

Paul tried his hand at work, he began to translate some texts provided to him by Louis Labat (translator of Walter Scott and Arthur Conan Doyle), but the income was insufficient and he became an associate representative for the homeopathic laboratory of the Abbot Chaupitre. Paul abandons his luxurious Packard for a van which he uses to make his rounds among merchants24. He then became a salesman for a real estate agency on Avenue de l'Opéra until his death on November 22, 194425. In the opinion of Noël Arnaud “this ruined grand bourgeois kept a head that he carried high (1.90 m) […] and never turned into a false-collar proletarian, embittered and vengeful, but rather into a fine-bred aristocrat26”.

But the Vian family still has another “paradise”, in Landemer, in Cotentin, west of Cherbourg, a property where three pine chalets are built located at the top of the cliffs where his mother maintains a lush gardennote 6. It is this universe that Boris reproduces in his novel The Heartbreaker by inventing many flower names: “The Garden partially clung to the cliff […] wild orma, with filiform stems, bumped with monstrous nodules, which bloom in dry flowers like meringues of blood, tufts of lustrous pearl-gray reviola […]28”.

At the age of twelve, following an infectious angina, Boris suffered from acute rheumatic fever, which caused aortic insufficiency. From there, the boy is raised in cotton, much like Wolf, the brooding child in Red Grass where entire passages describe how he was overprotected. Wolf explains to Mr. Pearl who questions him about his parents: “They were always afraid for me, I couldn't lean out of the windows, I didn't cross the street alone, it was enough for there to be a little wind so that they put my goat skin on me […]29. »

Paul Vian subsequently built a room where his children could organize parties. This games room, which Paul “as a famous handyman” connected to the house, also allows table tennis tournaments and balls to be organized. Neighborhood friends (among whom is the future minister François Missoffe) join the Vian30. This is where Boris and his brothers set up their first group: L'Accord jazz from 193831. The fact that her children can have fun there reassures Yvonne, but has the consequence of further cutting off Boris and his brothers from the outside world. Boris will partly regret this comfort of life which kept him in ignorance of political and social facts, and he will subsequently revolt like Citroën32, one of the “trumeaux” of L'Arrache-coeur (with Joël and Christmas)note 7.
Family
View of the village of Gattières

From the beginning of the 18th century, the Vian family was established in Gattières, today in the Alpes-Maritimes department, at the time a parish of the County of Nice, which by the Treaty of Turin of Mars 24, 1760, was ceded to the kingdom of France – from which it is separated by the Var river – by Charles-Emmanuel III, king of Sardinia, duke of Savoy and prince of Piedmont from 1730 to 1773.

    Paul Georges Vian, born in Paris (3rd arrondissement) on Mars 4, 1897, died in Ville-d'Avray (Hauts-de-Seine) on November 22, 1944, married in Marnes-la-Coquette (Hauts-de-Seine) on December 3, 1917 Yvonne Fernande Louise Alice Ravenez, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine) on April 5, 1889, died in Paris (14th arrondissement) on the 21st Pseudonyms

The complete list of Boris Vian's pseudonyms is difficult to establish. There are certain connections and others assumed. Marc Lapprand analyzed twenty-seven, but there are others. Among the twenty-seven pen names, we find twenty-two journalistic figures, four purely literary figures (Joëlle du Beausset, Bison Duravi, Bison Ravi, Sullivan) one sociopolitical figure (Jacques Dupont), four women's names, for the chronicles jazz: Josèphe Pignerole, Gédéon Molle, S. Culape, for other press articles Gérard Dunoyer, Claude Varnier, Michel Delaroche, Anne Tof de Raspail, Eugène Minoux, Xavier Clarke, Adolphe Schmürz. In Vernon Sullivan, the last letters are taken from Vian's name, Sullivan also being the name of several jazz musicians including Michael Joseph "Joe" O'Sullivan. “The pseudonym Agénor Bouillon was discovered during the publication of his complete works, the full list of his pseudonyms was published on page 563, OC volume 15110. » This list, complete or not, is reproduced on various sites278,279. According to Marc Lapprand with his pseudonyms, Boris Vian “marks his texts with a seal appropriate both to the style and the place of his production. A writer anchored in his time, he quickly used all the pseudonyms [...] but by a reversal of fortune, Sullivan quickly supplanted Vian as a novelist280. »

Most pseudonyms are only attested once, with the exception of: Michel Delaroche (more than a hundred times), Anne Tof de Raspail (9) Eugène Minoux (7), Gédéon Molle (5), Vernon Sullivan ( 4)281, Claude Varnier (4) including two to write articles on the 1911 Brazier282, Hugo Hachebuisson (3), Xavier Clarke (3), Adolphe Schmürtz (2)281.

A list, as exhaustive as possible, of all of his pseudonyms is presented in the foreword to the work by Valère-marie Marchand dedicated to the artist and called: Boris Vian - The creative smile283 and including the list (non-exhaustive) follows:

    Honoré Balzac284 (without particles).
    Baron Visi (anagram). This name is also given to a character at the end of Trouble in the Andains, but as an old bearded man, “valiant debris” father of Antioch.
    Bison Ravi (literary) (anagram) to sign the poem Referendum in the form of a ballad published in Mars 1944 in the magazine Jazz Hot110.
    Boriso Viana (jazz) pseudonym associated with Lydio Sincrazi110 (cf. below).
    Brisavion (anagram).
    Great captain (literary).
    René M. Maumoclan (literary).