black like boris: boris vian’s fictions of identity in post-world war ii paris

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Black Like Boris:

Boris Vian’s Fictions of Identity in Post-World War II Paris

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Submitted to the Faculty ofHaverford College’s Department of History

History 400: Senior Thesis Seminar

ByCeleste Day Moore

Haverford, PAApril 14, 2003



CONTENTS

PREFACE………………………………………………………………………………….i

SECTIONS

1. Introduction………..……………………………………………………………1

2. A Vianesque Style………………………………………………………………8

3. Beboproganda………..………………………………………………………..19

4. Jean-Pol Partre……………………………………………………….………..37

5. Black Like Boris……………………………………………………...……….57

APPENDIX

A. Photographs………………………………….…………………………….…67

B.

Samples of Les Temps Modernes………….…………………………………72

C.

Newspaper Accounts………………….……………………………………..76

REFERENCE LIST…………………………………………………..……………….…77

[illustration omitted to comply with copyright]

Cover photograph is of Vian with a bust of “Vernon Sullivan, taken around 1947. Photo is from thecollection of Michéle Léglise-Vian, copied from Jean Clouzet’s Boris Vian (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers,1957). The graphic on this page was found on the website, http://www.kiss.qc.ca/Forteresse/BioVian.html .



Preface

Several years ago, my interest in African-American intellectual history was

sparked by a course on the experience of African-American expatriates in Paris. This

engaging moment in history evolved into a senior thesis project in which I envisioned

exploring the complexities of the black expatriate. Boris Vian took me by surprise - I

never expected to study and learn to admire a white man of the Parisian avant-garde.

After months of reading his works in French and English, listening to his jazz recordings,

and laughing out loud at his linguistic play, I began to appreciate the nuanced and ethical perspective a white critic and jazz enthusiast can contribute to a complex racial discourse.

His words began to allay my own fears, as I struggled to honestly and thoughtfully

address my own identity as it relates to a field in which black voices are too often

silenced by white scholars. My approach to this project is mediated by my own white,

Southern and female identities, as well as the academic discourses that surround me, most

prominently feminist and post-modern theory. By ‘giving up’ my own identity in this

preface, I hope not to pseudonymically and racially pass through this text; rather, I see

my own background as necessary to the ways in which I chose and read Vian and the

cultural politics surrounding him.

Instrumental to this intellectual journey was the mentoring of Professor Paul

Jefferson, my advisor in studying history and tackling this project. I am grateful for his

challenging advice and insight into the ‘narrative’ of my blunders and triumphs.

Additionally, I would like to thank Professor Pim Higginson for his willingness to help

an unknown student, as well as his thoughtful and well-informed guidance. I am



indebted to Kris Jefferson for her hospitality and introductions to the participants of her

Black Paris School and documentary project, as well as to the participants themselves:

James Sallis, Hazel Rowley, and Tyler Stovall were particularly kind in offering advice

and direction for my interests. Robert Whyte and Tosh Berman, both responsible for

websites devoted to Vian, were also extremely helpful in clarifying some of my research

questions. My additional thanks go to Nora Cohen for her assistance in translating some

of the passages, particularly those of Vian’s which were, at times, dubiously French. And,

finally, my gratitude to Vian himself - his posthumous humor, criticism, satire, and love

for music seeped into my academic writing and life without me knowing it. I never knewhow much I could love jazz.



Introduction

“For Boris Vian is just setting out on the road to becoming Boris Vian” – RaymondQueneau1

In the post-war world of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Boris Vian was Prince –

champion of the existentialists, cultural broker of the jazz scene, and writer of their

exploits – in short, the tall and handsome poster-child of the rats de cave. During and

after the war, Vian was a prolific writer, producing ten novels, countless essays and short

stories, three plays, and many poems. His essays, novels, and life blurred the lines

between black and white, American and French, and performer and audience of blackculture.2 His “kingdom” was also the center of the Parisian expatriate community, a

“motley crowd of writers, artists, performers, students, and musicians whose paths

crossed and recrossed in Paris”3 – it was as historian Tyler Stovall indicates,

“existentialist ground zero.”4 Cultural refugees of the war returned to a changed Parisian

landscape, in which intellectual freedom was cherished above all. Vian catalogued this

atmosphere of jazz, literature, and avant-garde culture in his 1950 Manuel de Saint-

1 Raymond Queneau, forward to L’Arrache-Cœur (Heartsnatcher), by Boris Vian, trans. Stanley

Chapman (Paris: Pro-Francia Vrille, 1953; London: Rapp and Whiting, 1968), iv.2 Vian was born on March 10, 1920 in the Parisian suburb of Ville-d’Avray, raised by Paul and

Yvonne Vian. After receiving an engineering degree from l’École Centrale in Paris in 1942, he worked in a bureaucratic position with l’Association française de normalisation (A.F.N.O.R.), “alleged to be preparingnorms for the glassmaking industry.” In 1941, he married Michelle L église, with whom he would have twochildren – a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Carole. He stayed with A.F.N.O.R. during the war, quitting in

1946; during this period, he and Michelle worked as English-French translators, which became the mainsource of their income. Christopher M. Jones, Boris Vian Transatlantic: Sources, Myths, and Dreams (NewYork: Peter Lang, 1998) 7, 32. See also Marc Lapprand, Boris Vian: la vie contre (Ottowa: Presses del’Université d’Ottowa, 1993). See Appendix A, Figures 1, 2 and 8 for photographs of Vian.

3 Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American writers in France, 1840-1980, (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1991), 168.

4 Stovall’s history of the African-American expatriate community in Paris, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light , provides an excellent introduction to the topic. This summary of African-American expatriate history is gleaned from his early chapters. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir (New York:Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 133.



Germain-des-Prés,5 written proof of the extent to which Vian was identified with the

neighborhood by others and himself. Viewed superficially, this Manuel offers numerous

anecdotes, photographs, and descriptions of his community. However, the Manuel reveals

far more than Vian’s mild interest in Saint-Germain; it is infused with the undercurrents

of his own dissatisfaction and hints of his complex persona.

Vian begins the Manuel by describing the neighborhood’s geographic conditions,

history, climate, and its people, whom he dubs the troglodytes, or “cave-dwellers.”6 He

then explains the facts and myths of Saint-Germain, the different streets, and presents

photographs and profiles of prominent figures in the community: Jean-Paul Sartre, InezCavanaugh, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Duhamel to

name a few. Vian ends with the Catéchisme [“catechism”] du Germanopratin with its last

question: “Are you coming to have a drink?” answered with “Where then?”7 Vian also

includes the “Signalement de l’existentialiste,” signs of existentialist behavior of the

Germano-pratins, juxtaposed with the tongue-in-cheek “Emploi du temps de

l’existentialiste” [“Existentialist’s Schedule”], which instructs one to attend the Flore café

from three to six in the afternoon and go to the Tabou for the “Bal Nègre” on Saturday

nights.8 The original cover of the Manuel stated that it was a “Texte souvenir sur la

naissance d’une cave existentialiste,” [“Souvenir text on the birth of an existentialist

club”] certainly an apt expression in light of the language Vian had employed.

5 Boris Vian, Manuel de saint germain des prés, presented and drawn up by Noël Arnaud (1950;Paris: Chêne, 1974). According to Arnaud, the compilation of the Manuel started in September of 1949,and was finished in May of 1950. The Manuel was not published, however, until well after Vian’s death.Arnaud, Les vies parallèles de Boris Vian (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1970), 596.

6 Vian, Manuel , 38.7 Vian, Manuel , 286.8 Vian, Manuel , 67.



Vian’s whimsical tone reveals not only the emergence of an institutionalized

avant-garde in St-Germain but also his discontent with his role within the community’s

structures. This piece is ripe with Vian’s sarcasm and wit, devices that he put to use in

larger enterprises than the Manuel . It was a book much more useful as a moneymaking

tool than as an accurate or significant piece of existentialist culture. Retrospectively, the

Manuel would seem to disclose all that was necessary in understanding Vian’s

significance, painting him as merely the “court-jester”9 of St-Germain. In truth, Vian

crossed and passed through the cultural and racial boundaries in St-Germain, identifying

far more with the musicians who played in the caves than the rats de caves who heardthem. He mingled with figures such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, but he was also

the Parisian who welcomed and hosted Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie

when they came to Paris. Vian embodied the relationship between the black diasporic

community and the intellectual scene and brought to light the underlying racial tensions.

Exemplifying and ironizing the exchange between black and white intellectuals and

artists, Vian brought, as one of his “musical turns in the St-Germain caves,” Carribean

jazz singer Henri Salvador to “do a blues to a background of readings from Being and

Nothingness.”10 Existentialist philosophy paired with jazz epitomized the connections,

either real or imagined, between these cultural formations of jazz and philosophy in St-

Germain.

9 James Campbell wrote of Vian: “Boris Vian was the existentialists’ court jester. Playful,irreverent, iconoclastic, a man of likes rather than beliefs, he was the opposite of the rigorous intellectualtype of 1940s St-Germain-des-Pres, such as Camus.” Campbell’s other pieces on Vian offer a morenuanced view of his intellect and significance, but this particular piece, he expresses a simplifiedinterpretation of Vian, which many of those focused only on Sartre and Camus might adhere to. JamesCampbell, “Sullivan, the invisible man,” review of Philippe Boggio’s Boris Vian, Times LiterarySupplement, 28 January 1994, 7.

10 James Campbell, Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank, 1946-60 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1994), 270.



Before World War II, the black and American expatriate worlds had centered in

Montmartre and Montparnesse. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein exemplified the

white expatriate community’s “movable feast” in Paris, but meanwhile, hundreds of

African-American expatriates joined them in the City of Light. The black community was

united in escaping American racism and joining an increasingly international diasporic

community. The French intellectual and artistic community welcomed both black and

white expatriates but embraced them differently: the white Americans came as equal

partners in intellectual inquiry whereas the black Americans embodied the Parisian

interest in the “primitive,” as previously recognized in African art. The artisticmovements of the 1920s négrophilia found inspiration in African sculpture and masks,

believing that “the ‘primitive’ was an antidote to a stifling and civilizing bourgeois

modernity.”11 The primitive was utilized as a trope for non-conformism: “The Parisian

avant-garde exploited the word’s more negative readings – its links with blackness,

savagery and deviance – because it suited their needs to outrage.”12 Examples of this

phenomenon included Paul Gauguin and his interest in Tahitian art, as well as Matisse

and Picasso’s interest in African masks and l’art nègre.

Meanwhile, the African-American community settled in Montmartre, the former

center of Bohemian Paris in the late 19th century; by the 1920s, however, it was inhabited

by a combination of working-class communities, tourists, and immigrants. Of the jazz

musicians who came to Paris, many performed at Zelli’s and the African-American

owned Bricktop’s. Josephine Baker took Paris by storm in her Revue Nègre, wherein,

clad only in feathers and bananas, she performed the primitive dance so many Parisians

11 Petrine Archer-Shaw, Negrophila: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (NewYork: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 10.

12 Archer-Shaw, 11.



sought. Black musicians joined black writers and artists in Paris, including Harlem

Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Bennett, and

Loïs Mailou Jones. Generally, the performances of black musicians in Montmartre were

visited by white expatriates, who made their own home in Montparnasse, echoing the

geographical split in New York between the musicians in Harlem and the white patrons

in Greenwich Village.13 The Parisian tumulte noir remained strong until World War II,

when the gaiety of the interwar period yielded the terrain to a new post-war

existentialism.

The haunts of Montmartre gave way after World War II to the caves of Saint-Germain: “It was as if they’d been underground so long, they decided to stay – bebopping

and drinking from dusk to dawn in the dank existentialist caves.”14 These clubs included

the Tabou Club, Club Saint-Germain, the Rose Rouge, and the Club du Vieux Colombier,

all featuring an atmosphere celebrated by those who frequented them.15 Vian himself

played at the Tabou, one of the favorite late-night cafés, eventually moving on to the

Club Saint-Germain in 1948. Some African-American musicians played regularly in

Paris, including Kenny Clarke, Bill Coleman, and Sidney Bechet, each representing a

different period of jazz evolution. Additionally, Coleman Hawkins, Miles Davis, and

Duke Ellington were regular visitors and performers. However, in Saint-Germain, jazz

was generally created and promoted by white French musicians whose clubs were visited

by black jazz musicians.

13 Tyler Stovall, “Music and Modernity, Tourism and Transgression: Harlem and Montmartre inthe Jazz Age,” Intellectual History Newsletter22 (2000): 40.

14 Julia Older, introduction to Blues for a black cat & other stories, trans. and ed. by Older(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), xv.

15 Stovall, Paris Noir , 165.



Outside of jazz performance, writers such as James Baldwin, Herbert Gentry,

Richard Wright also lived and worked in Saint-Germain, or the Left Bank, as it was

known: “Not until the years after World War II would Paris develop a unified presence of

black expatriate writers and musicians, and it was only fitting that the world of Richard

Wright was located on the Left Bank, the home turf of the Parisian intelligentsia, not in

Montmartre.”16 As Stovall has also noted, the black Diaspora in the 1940s and 50s was

more politicized than in years past: “To a much greater extent than during the 1920s,

blacks who moved from the United States to Paris after World War II often did so as an

overt protest against American racism.”

17

These musicians, writers, and artists brought toParis the mystique of American culture along with the trauma of its racial history.

In post-World War II Paris, the presence of American culture was felt more

deeply than ever before. European cultural and political hegemony was no longer the

normative international model. Vian, like many Parisians, had a deep fascination with

American culture, most specifically with the culture of Hollywood and African-American

music. He acted as musical spokesperson and agent for the African-American jazz

community upon visiting Paris. His novels, jazz criticism, and columns all spoke to that

intellectual and emotional investment, as did the circumstances of his death. On June 23,

1959, Vian died of a heart attack while watching a film adaptation of his most famous

novel, supposedly crying out, "These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!" Vian

had never traveled to the United States but nevertheless, felt he had the authority to know

what was or was not American. To this end, he quite literally passed through lines of

race and culture, and though Vian was not the politique engagée that many of his peers

16 Stovall, “Music and Modernity,” 45.17 Stovall, Paris Noir , 131.



claimed to be, his writing still subverts the romantic racialism and blatant racism of the

time.18

Three sets of texts by Vian – his novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, several

essays on jazz in Combat and Le Jazz Hot magazines, and his essays entitled Chroniques

du Menteur (Accounts of the Liar) in Les Temps Modernes – offer compelling and

intriguing textual evidence for his relationship with music, identities of ‘the other,’ and

America, particularly that of the black population. His writing is at times self-consciously

ironic, calling into question both his role as interpreter and critic. Vian actively promoted

the Parisian black community in his commentary on jazz, decolonization, Frenchintellectual hegemony, but most significantly, by complicating his audiences’ interest in

black music and writing. As Jacques Prévert wrote in the Manuel ’s introduction, “Boris

Vian n’est pas un Diplomate, c’est un Voltigeur.”19 Boris Vian was in fact the great

acrobat of his time, maneuvering the ‘circus’ of Saint-Germain and the cultural borders of

Paris, reconfiguring the borders of race, culture, and literature, and performing and

playing with language in powerful ways, yet all the while defiantly speaking of his love

and respect for black communities.

18 According to Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper’s book on post-liberation Paris, Vian once“pretended that Heidegger was a new brand of Austrian tractor.” Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation: 1944 – 1949 (New York: Doubleday, 1944), 345. For Vian’s obituary in the New York Times, see Appendix C, Figure 1.

19 “Boris Vian is not a Diplomat, he is an Acrobat.” Prévert quoted in the introduction to the Manuel , 10.



A Vianesque Style

Post-war Paris experienced the vogue of American culture and literature like

never before; according to one of Vian’s contemporary critics, the “traduit de l’américain

has become a magical phrase in Paris and a quick-selling device for book publishers”20

As Smith and Miner note in their study of American literature in France, critics

acknowledged the extent of its impact:

The new novels of Faulkner, of Hemingway, of Caldwell are awaited withfeverish impatience far beyond the crossroads of St. Germain-des-

Près…Monsieur Jean Paul Sartre, while smoking his pipe, has given themhis benediction, and all the adolescents who formerly looked to Gide,Montherlant or Malraux now turn their eyes toward Texas andOklahoma.21

In particular, American hard-boiled crime novels, or French romans noirs, were

immensely popular; they were first brought into the French literary scene by Marcel

Duhamel. In 1946, with the Gallimard publishing house, Duhamel began and edited a

series of detective stories – La Série Noire.22 This series, and American literary

developments in general, captured the attention of many French audiences with regular

releases: “Between Duhamel’s Série Noire and the other series, about twelve hard-boiled

American detective stories are released each month to the French reading public.”23 It

was during this influx of American crime novels that Jean D’Halluin, the publisher of

20 Henri Peyre, The Contemporary French Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 263.

Additionally, French critic Robert Kanters also wrote, “in today’s style, just about anything is translated, asif the mention translated from American were a mark of magic fiber.” Kanters, in Spectateur (26

November 1948), 6 quoted in Alfred Cismaru, Boris Vian (New York: Twayne, 1974), 32.21 The American authors mentioned are William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Erskine

Caldwell, author of Trouble in July (1940), which details a Southern lynch mob, God’s Little Acre (1933),and Tobacco Road (1932). The other authors mentioned are, respectively, André Gide, Henry deMontherlant, and André Malraux. Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner, Transatlantic Migration: TheContemporary American Novel in France (Durham: Duke University Press, 1955), 32.

22 This series eventually published and translated American Chester Himes’ detective stories.23 Smith and Miner, 37.



Éditions du Scorpions, was inspired to publish romans noirs as well. In August of 1946,

D’Halluin challenged Vian to write such a crime novel in a fortnight.24 Rising to the

challenge, Vian completed J’irai cracher sur vos tombes [“I spit on your graves”] in less

than two weeks. 25 At that time, Vian had achieved some success with his 1946 novel,

L’Ecume des jours [“Froth on the Daydream”],26 through it achieving runner-up position

in the popular literary contest, the Prix de la Pléiade, in June of 1946. His success clearly

marked him for d’Halluin’s eyes, as did Vian’s own arrogance; before writing, he is

reported to have said to Georges d’Halluin: “A best seller? Give me ten days and I shall

manufacture one for you.”

27

J’irai cracher sur vos tombes is the story of a mulatto man named Lee Anderson

who murders two wealthy white girls in revenge for the lynching of his youngest brother.

Throughout the novel, Anderson passes as white and seduces white women, of whom the

“most white” are the best revenge for his brother’s death. Vian used the pseudonym of

Vernon Sullivan, a fictional black American man, for the publication of the book but used

his own name to promote it as the work of a new writer. Vian indicated in his preface that

it was “not surprising that [Sullivan’s] book should have been refused in America: we

wager it would be banned the day following its publication.”28 The notion that the

24 Vian knew Jean D’Halluin through his brother, Georges d’Halluin, who played with Vian inCharles Abadie’s orchestra. According to Cismaru, Jean d’Halluin’s Editions was in “deep financial

trouble.” Cismaru, 28.25 Vernon Sullivan [Boris Vian], J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (Paris: Editions du Scorpion,1946); Vian, I Spit on your Graves, trans. Vian and Milton Rosenthal (Paris: Vendome Préss, 1948. Thefollowing English passages from the novel are from Vian’s earlier translation but from a later edition. Vian, I Spit on Your Graves, intro Marc Lapprand (Los Angeles: TamTam Books, 1998). See Appendix A,Figures 5 and 6 for cover of novel and photograph of Vian during the scandal.

26 This English translation was used in England; in the United States, the novel was translated as Mood Indigo. Cismaru, 55.

27 Vian, source not provided, quoted in Arnaud, Les Vies Parallèles, 163.28 Vian, “Preface” to J’irai cracher , xii.



material that Vian was presenting was too racy for American audiences added to its

appeal, for in France, as Vian wrote, “we strive for more originality.”29

The book was the best-seller in France in 1947, selling over half a million copies

by 1950. In April 1948, Vian rewrote the book in English with the assistance of

American Milton Rosenthal, originally in order to “validate the existence of the supposed

original text behind his translation,”30 but by the time of publishing, the secret was out.

J’irai cracher was banned in 1950 after pages of it were found at the crime scene of a

murder in Montparnesse; more controversy ensued after Vian’s own trial for falsifying

the authorship.

31

This trial did not damper sales nor Vian’s spirit; instead, he displayed blatant insolence in the minds of the Cartel d’Action Sociale et Morale that tried him:

In an article for the daily Combat, Vian recounted that all the witnesseswere asked whether they would put his books into the hands of theirchildren. ‘It seems,’ Vian commented, “that the witnesses had nothingmore important to do in life but to rush up to their children with their armsloaded with realistic novels.’ As for himself, Vian confessed, despite his‘perverse’ desire to force his son, Patrick, to read Henry Miller and theMarquis de Sade, the 8-year-old boy stuck stubbornly to his comic booksand Tarzan stories.”32

Though Vian wrote three more “Vernon Sullivan” novels, the first remained the

most controversial in its reception by the French population and effect on Vian’s career.

The other novels – Les Morts ont tous la même peau (“All Dead People Have the Same

Skin,” 1947), Et on tuera tous les affreux (“And All the Dreadful Ones Will Be Killed,”

29 Vian, “Preface,” xiii.30

Marc Lapprand, introduction to I Spit on Your Graves, vii.31 “In February, 1947, in a small hotel of Montparnasse, a young man called Edmond Rougé killshis concubine. Next to the corpse, the police find a coy of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes opened to the

passage when the hero also kills his mistress. Vernon Sullivan is immediately described by the press as anindirect assassin, and the President of the Cartel d’Action Sociale et Morale introduces a lawsuit against theauthor. The case is debated in Court and in the press for a number of years, but it is only in November,1948 that Vian admits to the judge that he is the writer of the controversial novel. In the summer of 1950the government officially forbids further sales of the book, and in the following year Vian is sentenced foraffront to public morals and has to pay a fine of one hundred thousand francs.” Cismaru, 21.

32 Joseph A. Barry, “A Literary Letter from Paris,” New York Times, 23 July 1950, BR8.



1948), and Elles se rendent pas compte (“They Do Not Realize,” 1950) – also reflected

much of the racial imagery and complications that Vian was unveiling, though not as

financially or rhetorically successful as the first. In Les Morts, Vian’s protagonist, Dan

Parker, is in fact named after the president of the Cartel that tried him; in the novel,

Parker is a white man who believes he is black.

The pseudonym ploy fooled many audiences, including American magazine

Newsweek , which noted the new author in 1947:

The latest “victim” of the Cartel d’Action Sociale et Morale (the ParisianWatch and Ward Society) is an American nègre blanc whose nom de

plume is Vernon Sullivan and whose first, semi-autobiographical novel is“J’irai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes” – literally, “I Shall Spit on YourGraves”…Sullivan, as a result, now shares top French popularity withsuch Americans as Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, andHorace McCoy, author of the hard-boiled “They Shoot Horses, Don’tThey?” A 26-year-old mulatto from Chicago, Sullivan met Jean d’Halluin,founder of Le Scorpion press, while he was still a GI last spring.D’Halluin read his tale of a Negro who turns criminal after his father islynched, and signed a contract for exclusive first rights to all Sullivan’swriting. Sullivan, under his own name (which his publisher has agreed notto disclose), now is in New York earning a living as a translator in order togo on writing like James M. Cain, his obvious inspiration.33

The article identifies Vian’s pseudonym as a “mulatto from Chicago” who as a GI spent

time in Paris. Additionally, the Newsweek short incorrectly informs its readers that the

mulatto man avenges his father’s lynching, rather than his brother’s death. These

mistakes indicate the extent to which such a literary figure would be possible in the

imagination of Newsweek ’s editors and readers. Indeed, given the racial climate at the

time, such a response was not surprising, given the race riots and boycotts erupting across

33 “Watch and Word in Paris,” Newsweek , 24 February 1947, 104. The reference is to James M.Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), both of the hard-

boiled crime fiction genre. Vian does acknowledge the influence of Cain in his “editorial” preface to thenovel, in which he says: “We meet, besides, in these pages, the extremely clear influence of Cain.” Vian,“Preface,” J’irai cracher , xii.



America. Though the Newsweek short clearly misinforms the reader, the writers, news,

and American G.I.s that Vian encountered influenced his creation of “Vernon Sullivan.”

William Faulkner’s Light in August, translated to French in 1935, depicted a character

named Joe Christmas as a mulatto passing for white. Faulkner’s work had influenced

many French writers and his name certainly a recognizable one for Vian.34 Vian knew of

Richard Wright’s novels and short stories, some of which he had translated, which

alongside Faulkner’s work propagated the violent myths of a gothic American South.

According to Werner Sollors’ exploration of interracial literature, Vian was inspired by

these novelists as well as the notion of an “alter Negro,” an idea gleaned from HenriMagnan’s article in Le Monde.35 Additionally, African American expatriate Claude

McKay’s novel Banjo: A Story Without A Plot , published in 1929, included a description

of lynching that may well have influenced Vian’s own treatment of the subject.36

Vian’s acquaintance with American culture and American racism came mostly

from French news coverage, literature, and his relationships with American expatriates. 37

Vian found some factual basis for his interest in passing in Herbert Asbury’s article in

Collier’s magazine entitled “Who is a Negro?”; Asbury claimed that “more than

2,000,000 U.S. Negroes have crossed the color line, contributing, among other things, an

34 Jones, 34. Additionally, Sartre’s article in an Atlantic article in 1947 described the influence ofFaulkner on the writing style of Mme. De Beauvoir. Jean-Paul Sartre, “American Novelists in FrenchEyes,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1946: 114-115.

35

Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 270. Albert Cismaru writes that later, Magnan wouldcriticize Vian’s own criticism of the Algerian war, writing that Vian “was spitting on tombs that were stillfresh.” Cismaru, 20.

36 McKay writes: “I seen [a lynching] down in Dixie. And it was own li’l brother. Jest when hewas a-growing out of a boy into a man and the juice of life was ripening a pink temptation kept right onafter him and wouldn’t let be until he was got and pulled the way of the rope.” Claude McKay, Banjo: AStory Without a Plot (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929; 1957), 24 quoted in Jones, 44.

37 Sartre himself had written a play entitled La Putain respectueuse which “attacked the status ofrace relations in America,” and likely was read by Vian. Cismaru, 29.



surgeon, but at that time studying pharmacology, and ‘brown’ musician of Claude

Abadie’s band: Sullivan, because of Joe Sullivan, jazz pianist, one of the best of the

Chicago style.”42 These namesakes explain the public presentation of Vernon Sullivan as

a black man from Chicago; the literature and media sources gave rise to Vian’s interest in

the “tragic mulatto” who could passe-blanc in white America.

J’irai cracher sur vos tombes includes episodes of sexual violence and racism, as

well as stereotypical and subversive images of white and black interactions. Lee passes

for white in a small town, but he fears recognition when those around him recognize and

point out his musical talents: his manager tells him that “the women will all fall for youwith that voice of yours” and a girl notes, “He’s got a voice just like Cab Calloway’s.”43

His ‘true’ black voice, reminiscent of black jazz musicians threatens to undermine his

“white” social status. In a conversation about music, Lou Asquith, the youngest of Lee’s

white female conquests, says to him:

‘I’ve never heard singers or guitarists with a voice like yours. I have hearda voice that yours reminds me of, yes, it was back in Haiti. Some black men.’

‘Well, that’s really a compliment.’ I said. ‘They’re just about the bestmusicians you can find.’

‘Oh don’t talk nonsense.’‘It’s not nonsense. They’re the source of all American music,’ I said.‘I don’t think so. All the big dance orchestras are whites.’‘Of course – the whites are in a better position to exploit the Negro’s

inventions.’44

Lou connects something in Lee’s voice to her experience with black men in Haiti, where

her parents own sugar-cane plantations. This moment sits uneasily with Lee, as he fears

discovery of his racial identity before he is able to effect his revenge on Lou and her

42 “Vernon, à cause de Paul Vern aujourd’hui chirurgien-dentiste, alors étudient en pharmacie, etmusicien ‘marron’ de l’orchestre Claude Abadie: Sullivan, à cause de Joe Sullivan, pianiste de jazz, un desmeilleurs du style Chicago.” Arnaud, Vies Parallèles, 153.

43 Vian, J’irai cracher, 9, 17.44 Ibid., 94-95.



sister. Nevertheless, he is unable to hide his indignation at her ignorance of musical

origins. He refutes her notion that the white, big band orchestras are the source of musical

innovation and rather, portrays them as exploitive. Later in the conversation, Lee tells

her:

‘All the great popular composers are colored. Like Duke Ellington, forexample.’

‘What about Gershwin, Kern, and all of those.’‘They’re all immigrants from Europe,’ I said: ‘They’re the ones best able

to envelop it. But I don’t think you’d find a single original passage anywhere inGershwin’s work – one that hasn’t been copied or plagiarized. Just try and findone in the Rhapsody in Blue, for example.’

‘You’re funny,’ she said. ‘I just hate the colored race.’”45

Again, Lou has referenced her own familiarity and preference for musical creations by

white musicians, refusing to recognize the black musicians’ contributions. She ends the

conversation as she began, returning to a blanket disinterest in, and hatred of black

people. Critic J.K.L. Scott refers to this conversation as an opportunity for Vian to “set up

a dichotomy between white (ignorant and racist) and black (cultured and intelligent).”46

Though the sisters, with their pure whiteness, fit this dichotomy, not all of the white

characters are so easily categorized. At the beginning of the novel, Lee meets the owner

of a bookstore, where Lee himself eventually works, who has greater dreams than what

his small town offers. The manager wants to write “best-sellers” that are also “historical

novels; novels where colored men sleep with white women and don’t get lynched.”47

Additionally, there are many references in the novel to black Americans in

subordinate positions, including servants in all-white households, a twelve-year-old

female prostitute, “une grosse négresse” who runs a brothel, and most intriguing, workers

45 Ibid., 95.46 J.K.L. Scott, From Dreams to Despair: An Integrated Reading of the Novels of Boris Vian

(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 152.47 Vian, J’irai cracher , 5.



in plantations owned by Lou and Jean’s parents. Lou and Jean’s parents are part of a rich,

white family that owns a plantation in Haiti; Lee describes hearing about them:

[There were] stories about Mr. and Mrs. Asquith, a fine pair of crooks who

had inherited a lot of money, which is alright, but they used it exploit people whose only crime is that they have a different color skin thantheirs. They owned a flock of sugar-cane plantations in the West Indiesand, according to Dex, all they ever drank in their place was rum.48

The daughters of these people, Jean and Lou Asquith, represent the ultimate goal

for Lee. Once he has slept with and murdered these two girls, he will have achieved his

objective and avenged his younger brother, who “would squirm in his grave with joy.” 49

The novel ends with Lee’s death, and though he dies by gunfire and in many ways by hisown accord, “the townspeople hanged him anyway because he was a nigger. Under his

trousers, his crotch still protruded ridiculously.”50 This final utterance by Vian depicts a

man literally inscribed by the townspeople’s notion of black identity – he is in his final

incarnation marked only by his sexual identity. The complexities of Lee’s racially mixed

identity are erased as his sexuality persists beyond his life.

In J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, Vian presents the white voice as the

authoritative editor, prefacing the text in his own name, yet speaks through the black

voice, assuming Vernon Sullivan’s name for the text itself. Vian takes the American

literary genre of crime novels and transforms it into a black vocal device in France.

Writing as black, and successfully duping the French population, Vian questioned the

authenticity of a solely black voice in expressing black identity and additionally,

questioned the French reader’s status in reading exotic tales of erotically-tinged violence

in black and white America. Was it in fact necessary to be black in order to convince

48 Ibid., 85.49 Ibid. , 36.50 Ibid., 177.



Parisian audiences that you were? His portrayal of Lee Anderson alternates between a

representation of essentialist blackness – full of rhythm, music, and sexuality – that is

fundamentally racist and one which undermines all prior bases of understanding race.

According to Sollors’ critique of the novel:

Vian seemed drawn to a shrill, misogynous account of racial violence inwhich siblings are also mysteriously prominent, set in a world of jazz,whisky, drugs, and film-noir existentialism. Passing is connected not toassimilation but to blood vengeance. The absurdity of racial lines and theirviolent consequences for the characters are placed into the foreground ofthe fictionalization of passing …Literary hoaxes such as the anonymous publication of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and theinvention of the author “Vernon Sullivan” suggest the possibilities of

connecting the theme of passing to formal plays with truth-telling andauthenticity, as James Weldon Johnson and Boris Vian play hide and seekwith their readers’ expectation of an authentic identity of the author – evenin fictions that thematize the fluidity of lines of identification.51

Indeed, there is a relationship between passing and “blood vengeance,” but this

relationship does not reveal the necessity of a single black motivation in passing. Rather,

passing intricately transforms the sort of “blood” that one could revenge and identities

that one claims into a fluid mixture of racial and cultural identity. Sollors points out the

“absurdity of racial lines,” a notion which Vian himself would certainly echo – he

performs the ultimate hoax of racialized identities, as he passes for black while writing

about a man passing for white. He undermines the literary expectations of a fixed

authorial voice, a trick all the more resonant when the subject matter itself justifies the

absurdity of fixed racial identity.

Vian was not, however, the only “black voice” to succeed in this genre. In the late

1950s, African-American expatriate Chester Himes arrived in Paris, publishing crime

novels that became immensely popular in France. Himes gave an “authentic” black voice

51 Sollors, Neither Black nor White, 271.



to a familiar white literary genre, transforming something outside of the African-

American tradition into a successful – at least in France – and significant black work.

Himes’ romans noirs were as ripe with many of the racial struggles as Vian’s “Vernon

Sullivan” pieces were, focusing specifically on sexual relationships between black men

and white women:

Symbolic both of the racist oppressor and of the forbidden fruit denied to black men by racism, white women were a constant preoccupation of theyoung Chester Himes. The theme of tragic miscegenation runs through hisearly works. Both If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade revolve around a black male protagonist who is manipulated, seduced, andthen destroyed by a cunning white woman. Such tortured relationships

could end only in violence. The Primitive (1955) depicts the murder of awhite woman by her black intellectual lover.52

Clearly, the seduction of black men by white women was a known theme, and as If He

Hollers Let Him Go was written in 1945, Vian possibly was familiar with it prior to

writing his Vernon Sullivan series. Himes’ exploration of this black man-white woman

relationship yielded many questions, including his query “Is sex the ultimate that a black

man can offer to a white woman?”53 Vian raised this relationship to the forefront once

again, though inverting the roles of seducer and seduced. In his rendition, white women

become the sexual property of a black man and the object of sexual violence. This move

shifts the power positions of white and black, for though the “black” man has exerted his

power over a white woman, she is the signifier of ignorance and he the representative of

culture.

Given the dramatically different backgrounds of Vian and Himes, questions arise

regarding their absolute knowledge of the subject matter. Neither Himes nor Vian spoke

52 Stovall, Paris Noir, 208-209.53 Chester Himes, The Autobiography of Chester Himes: Vol. 2, My Life of Absurdity (New York:

Paragon House, 1971-72, 1976), 323-324 quoted in Stovall, 209.



from a traditional construction of black identity, Vian more obviously not, yet both defy a

singular definition of blackness. Though Himes speaks from a black American

experience, Vian is the writer who is able to invert gender and racial roles. However,

Vian is unable to present a coherent vision of America, often drifting in his narrative

from historical and geographical accuracy, and instead drawing upon his own

imagination of America. Referring to Himes, historian Tyler Stovall points out in Paris

Noir , “It was one more aspect of the absurdity of black American life, no doubt richly

appreciated by Himes himself, that an African American had to come to Paris in order to

take part in a tradition of American popular culture.”

54

Certainly, it is no less absurd thata French intellectual wrote in this “tradition of American popular culture” as a black

voice, having never gone to America. As both men lived through different cultures, their

identities and writing took on new forms of exploration, challenging notions of a single

way a black American might have lived.

54 Stovall, Paris Noir , 213.



Beboproganda

“Jazz is not sad, it is living music, it is swarming and bustling with life! It is only fifty years old. Fifty! Imagine! They are already trying to bury it.”55

In addition to the highly controversial J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, Vian was

fully engaged in the black Parisian musical community. According to black expatriate

James Baldwin, Vian’s involvement in jazz was the foundation of Vian’s cultural

resonance in his novels: “What informs Vian’s book, however, is not sexual fantasy, but

rage and pain: that rage and pain which Vian (almost alone) was able to hear in the black

American musicians, in the bars, dives, and cellars, of the Paris of those years… Vian

would have known something of this from Faulkner, and from Richard Wright, and from

Chester Himes, but he heard it in the music, and indeed, he saw it in the streets”56 These

streets, people, and bars, like the Tabou and the Club Saint-Germain,57 were indeed the

physical elements of Vian’s cultural experience in Saint-Germain. Unlike the white jazz

aficionados who came before him, who frequented the clubs of Montmartre while living

on the Left Bank, Vian lived and wrote in a diverse community of African, African-

American, and Parisians who communed with one another. His predecessors were

engaged in a very different relationship with African-American and African people. Their

experience was limited to viewing performances by black musicians and an overall

interest in African (or what imitated African) art. French musicians appropriated black

music and like their American counterparts, performed “cleaned-up” jazz. Vian, on the

55 All of the titles and translated text from Round About Close to Midnight were translated byMike Zwerin. Vian, “Half a Century of Jazz (1),” La Parisienne (February 1953) in Vian, Round AboutClose to Midnight: The Jazz Writings of Boris Vian, trans. and ed. Mike Zwerin (London: Quartet, 1988),167.

56 James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial, 1976), 38-39.57 The club was founded in 1947 and was located on 13 rue St. Benoit off of the Boulevard St-

Germain.



other hand, sought to include that “rage and pain” in his musical and literary work, yet

always reminded himself of his own inadequacies.

For the existentialists and many of the surrealists of 1920s, African-American jazz

figured as a trope for modernism. According to historian Bernard Gendron, “The Paris

avant-garde’s engagement with jazz was really a double engagement, representing an

infatuation with two quite distinct objects: popular music, particularly American, and

‘primitive’ cultures, particularly African.”58 Gendron describes the Parisian flâneur of the

interwar period, who fetishized Africans and African-Americans alike in his quest for a

suitable stimulus for his art. Artist and surrealist Jean Cocteau epitomized this cultural“slumming”:

For the Cocteau flâneur , the consumption of jazz functions as a brutestimulant of, rather than as an aesthetic exemplar for, the modernist production that follows upon it. ‘The shower from this noise has woken usso that we can now produce a different noise’…In effect, jazz became the paradigmatic object of the avant-garde slummer, the new signifier for bohemian life.59

The “different noise” produced was the noise of modernity, the noise of jazz merely

acting as a point of departure. Vian himself commented on this sort of attachment to it:

“Jazz can also be a means of protest, something to like just because your parents do not

like it. Non-conformism, violence…Paradoxically, this is one pretext for scandal the

surrealists have never explored.”60 His comments suggest that he is well aware of the

ways in which surrealists “explored” and used jazz as a “pretext” in the past, noting that

the notion of “non-conformism” was one of the few avenues not invoked. In the interwar

58 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 103.

59 Cocteau, Jean, 1946-51, “La Jeunesse et le scandale,” in Oeuvres Complètes, v. IX (Lausanne:Marguerat), 141 quoted in Gendron, 97.

60 Vian, “What’s Jazz to Youth?” (Combat 29, January, 1948) in Vian, Round About Close to Midnight, 27.



period, surrealists appreciated jazz in much the same way as other forms of ‘primitive’

art, finding it an inspiration for disrupting society. Vian, on the other hand, believed jazz

to be more than a noise, more than an excuse for shocking society – instead, an

independent and evolving movement that shifted with or without the interest of the

Parisian avant-garde.

The objectification of jazz and jazz musicians continued after the war, but under

different terms and with different styles. Vian appeared to be forging closer and less

hierarchical relationships between the performers and writers. He first picked up the

trumpet after hearing Duke Ellington in concert in 1937, but later was forced to quit theinstrument due to his weak heart. He described this experience of Ellington’s concert as

one “of the three great moments of [his] life,” and the one that first inspired his love of

jazz, leading him to join Claude Abadie’s jazz orchestra in 1943.61 He continued to play

throughout the 1940s and additionally took on the role of host for the African-American

musicians who came to Paris. Two significant concerts during this time included Dizzy

Gillespie’s 1948 performance and the 1949 International Jazz Festival, in which Charlie

Parker and Sidney Bechet played. The latter concert’s inclusion of both Bechet and

Parker reveals the querelle de bebop that dominated jazz criticism at the time.

During World War II, many writers, including Vian, were culturally

‘submerged,’62 though Vian continued to play jazz, read banned American novels, and

engaged in the then forming zazou culture.63 During a 1940 visit to Paris, Adolf Hitler

61 Vian developed rheumatic fever at age twelve, a medical condition that would haunt the rest ofhis life. Cismaru, 15. The other great moments were also concerts – one with Dizzy Gillespie in 1948 andthe other with Ella Fitzgerald in 1952. Vian, Jazz Hot (June 1952), 17, quoted in Cismaru, 16-17. For a

photograph of Vian with Abadie’s orchestra, see Appendix A, Figure 3.62 He would later recount this experience in his short story, “Le Brouillard” [“The Fog”]. Julia

Older, “Introducing Boris Vian,” introduction to Blues for a Black Cat , xiii.63 Cismaru, 19.



decreed, “no mixed café shows or shows composed of all black American performers or

entertainers would ever again entertain in the city.”64 The zazou culture was born out of

this pronouncement, as its white poster-child Johnny Hess declared at Chez Jimmy that

“Je suis swing” [“I am swing”], indoctrinating with his words a short-lived but significant

era. Hess and his fellow defiant Parisians drew their name from Cab Calloway’s out scat

singing, their image from his particular “zoot-suit” dress. The jazz classics were literally

appropriated and renamed in these new spaces of all-white performers and audiences,

turning the “Tiger Rag” into “La rage du tigre” and “Take the A-Train” into “L’attaque

de train.”

65

This generation of youth was generally middle-class, prompting heavycriticism from the French press, collaborationist and otherwise.66 They were intimately

connected with the Hot Club de France, though this relationship was problematic for its

founder and figurehead, Charles Delaunay. He feared the decadence of the youth, as well

as their misconceptions of “true” jazz; their apparent self-indulgence prompted one critic

to write, “The zazous had not been the amateurs of jazz, the connoisseurs, but they had

been amateurs of rhythm.”67

Shack ends his account of the zazou era by describing the moment of liberation by

the Allied forces:

…some female Zazous darkened their faces as French women had doneover a decade before, to celebrate Siki’s victory over Georges Carpentier.In their final gesture of defiance to the Nazi occupation, they looked like

64 William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 113.

65 Shack, 116-117.66 Michael Zwerin, Swing under the Nazis: jazz as a metaphor for freedom (New York: CooperSquare Press, 2000), 147.67 Emmanuelle Rioux, “Les zazous: un phénomène socio-culturel pendant l’occupation” (master’s

thesis, Université de Paris – X, Nanterre, 1987), 164, quoting from an interview with George Guetary, 20December 1986, quoted in Shack, 123.



actors in extravagant dress rehearsal for a grand finale, like clusters ofBojangles Robinsons ready to usher in the approaching Allied liberators.68

This moment of blackface, with the zazous wearing the mask of the oppressed at the

moment of liberation, is particularly telling of their relationship to jazz. By performing a black identity, they appropriated the tool of battling oppression – jazz itself was a

performative tool for the zazous, disconnected from the African-American history that

created it. The zazou “blackface” resonates with the anthropological work on carnivals

and the “rituals of reversal” which occurred in these liminal moments. As the zazous took

up the mask of blackness, the masquerading created a space of ambiguity, a cultural

saturnalia in which identities remained in flux, unlike those who were unmasked and

more tied to a particular identity. As James C. Scott indicates in his work on peasant

resistance, “In some forms, these rituals of reversal may be seen as a sanction and

contained ritual effort to relieve temporarily the tension unavoidably produced by a rigid

hierarchy.”69 In this moment, as Paris was liberated from the Vichy regime, the act of

masquerading concurrently inverted its social structures, liberating the zazous from

cultural oppression. Boris Vian shared, in many ways, the masking with blackness to

fight oppression, but unlike this zazou culture, his defiance was rooted in his own

understanding of the African-American experience. Much of Vian’s cultural “coming of

age” took place during this era, but his cultural subversion took a different direction. He

later referred to this earlier attitude more critically: “…the most complete indifference to

68 The “Battling Siki” was an African boxer who in 1922 defeated boxing champion GeorgesCarpentier. Shack, 123.

69 In this text, Scott examines the causes everyday peasant resistance, rather than open revolt – thiswork was based on his anthropological fieldwork in Malaysia in the late 1970s. Resistance is rooted inevery concerns and not “revolutionary consciousness.” James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 331.



the serious problems of the hour, which were really serious that were the dead.” 70 Vian

did indeed remain relatively unengaged with mainstream political matters, though his

disengagement was fundamentally more radical than that of his zazou peers.

After the war, Paris experienced the “the rise of jazz modernism” firsthand, as

well as heated debate, the querelle between well-known jazz critics.71 According to critic

Mike Zwerin, the arrival of “Salt Peanuts” – a joint bebop record by Charlie Parker and

Dizzy Gillespie – prompted the “Great Schism” between Hugues Panassié and Charles

Delaunay.72 Delaunay was one of the most vocal supporters of bebop in France but more

fundamentally, he was a supporter of what he felt to be “pure,” black jazz. Delaunayfounded the jazz journal Jazz Hot , established a jazz record label, and was heavily

involved in the promotion of jazz concerts and radio broadcasts in Paris. He believed that

bebop was an extension of the energy and originality he found in all African-American

jazz. He dehistoricized jazz, finding that it transcended the bounds of culture and art; as

he wrote in a column in Down Beat :

And jazz is not white, nor black, nor Jewish, nor Aryan, nor Chinese, norAmerican!...Jazz is much more than an American music – it is the firstuniversal music. It may be termed international because, instead ofaddressing itself solely to the mind (which is dependent on nationaltradition and culture), it speaks directly to the hearts of men (who, whenthe fictions of ‘education,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘nation’ are ignored, are verysimilar, just as the Lord intended them to be).73

Delaunay found universal relevance of jazz to be in every stage of jazz development,

including swing and bebop, finding that the traditions of jazz to be irrelevant to its

70 “…la plus complète indifférence aux graves problèmes de l’heure qui n’étaient graves au fondque pour ceux qui en sont morts.” Arnaud, Vies parallèles, 38 quoted in Jones, 53.

71 Gendron, 4; Jones, 72-74.72 Zwerin, Swing Under the Nazis, 135-136.73 Charles Delaunay, “Delaunay in Trenches, Writes ‘Jazz Not American,’” trans by Walter E.

Schapp, Downbeat (May 1, 1940): 6-19 quoted in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. RobertWalser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131.



bearing on listeners. Panassié, on the other hand, was a strong supporter of swing, but

believed bebop to be a poor distortion of New Orleans jazz. In Jazz Away From Home,

Chris Goddard discusses Panassié’s jazz criticism, which Goddard terms as one

exhibiting “disastrous conservatism.”74 Panassié grudgingly admitted that jazz might

need to evolve musically but did not see the need for it. He writes, “the basic nature of

jazz has not been damaged by evolution, because the essential element, swing, or, if you

prefer it, the natural pulsation of the black race (it is a question of words) is still

present.”75 Additionally, Panassié finds that jazz music is tainted by conservatory training

and technical proficiency, for this “excess” stifles the energy of the form:We must go further and say that in music, primitive man generally hasgreater talent than civilized man. An excess of culture atrophiesinspiration, and men crammed with culture tend too much to play tricks, toreplace inspiration by lush technique, under which we find music strippedof real vitality.76

The “vitality” Panassié found early jazz, unsullied by culture, again echoes the interests

of early Surrealists and the interwar avant-garde; Delaunay also heard a “purity” in jazz,

but differed greatly in his opinions of newer forms of jazz. As Tyler Stovall notes, their

private quarrel would continue: “By the 1950s, Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay

were no longer speaking to each other, and would remain antagonists for the rest of their

lives.”77

This personal conflict echoed the controversies that dominated much of jazz

criticism in the 1940s. There were two major jazz battles at the time: the first was

between swing and “Dixieland, which in turn set the stage for the battle viewed as more

74 Chris Goddard, Jazz Away From Home (London: Paddington Press, 1979), 153.75 Panassié quoted in Goddard, 153.76 Panassié quoted in Goddard, 154.77 Stovall, Paris Noir , 174.



significant in jazz history, that which raged between swing and bebop.78 In 1942,

American jazz magazine Metronome names the revivalists, who advocated for New

Orleans jazz, “moldy figs.”79 The modernists were at the other end of the spectrum, their

musical tastes associated with Gillespie, Parker, and Bud Powell. Eventually, and

officially in 1948, bebop prevailed, only to “die” two years later.80 Gendron explains his

contextualization of this conflict as revealing the discursive shifts at play in this moment

in jazz development:

My purpose is neither to contest the canonical accounts of therevolutionary changes in jazz musical form in the 1940s, nor to

rehabilitate the Dixieland revival, but rather to highlight the crucial role ofwhat Foucault has called “discursive formations” in the constitution of jazz modernism...the Dixieland war, as a war primarily of words, indeed a profusion and superabundance of words, engendered a new mapping ofthe jazz discursive terrain – a new construction of the aesthetic discoursesof jazz – which was only to be amended, rather than radically transformed, by the bebop revolution.81

Gendron posits both jazz wars as integral in creating a new space for jazz discourse – one

in which the language used to describe jazz was as necessary to its existence as the music

itself. He is careful to assert that this new discourse was not a purely aesthetic one but

indeed, was and is “laced with the idioms of commerce, politics, gender, and race.”82

Delaunay and Panassié’s divergence of opinion also underscores the racial dynamics of

jazz criticism at the time: “…white males dominated the emerging institutions of

criticism so crucial to the acquisition of cultural legitimacy, with discursive results that

were at best racially skewed.”83 The predominance of white jazz critics gave a certain

78 Gendron, 123.79 Ibid.80 Ibid., 124.81 Ibid., 125.82 Ibid.83 Ibid., 9. Additionally, Gendron references the “small and short-lived black magazine,” Music

Dial , which offered an early black critical stance on jazz: “While white ‘progressives’ critiqued the



slant to the privileging and naming of jazz forms - be they “revivalist”, “pure”, or

“modernist”; these signifiers are greatly complicated by the issues of race that so

prevalent in jazz writing in the 1940s.84

In 1947, Vian formally entered this “discursive terrain” of jazz when he was

published in the Jazz Hot magazine, to which he was soon to become a regular

contributor. Vian’s columns were a representational realm in which the modernist

relevance of jazz could be debated and he could respond within the discourse to critics

with whom he disagreed. Most frequently, he participated in the jazz discourse by writing

and responding to others’ writing on jazz. In particular, he responded on numerousoccasions to the querelle between Panassié and Delaunay, saving his harshest criticism

for Panassié, or as Vian referred to him, “the clown of Montauban,” “Pain-ass-ié” or “a

walking insult.”85 Unlike Panassié, Vian saw the evolution within jazz as necessary to its

development, seeing no shift in legitimacy between “real jazz” and bebop:

The musicians, in fact, tend to agree with each other – they understand thesituation well enough to see that jazz is only undergoing a normal, logical,inevitable evolution. Because one thing is certain: the definition of theword is not divided by any date, everything before begin ‘real jazz’ and allthat follows somehow phoney.86

He saw the evolution of jazz as “normal” and “inevitable,” rather than as a problem that

could be combated by returning to some essential form; unlike Panassié, Vian did not

hear a missing “vitality” in newer forms. Vian often satirized Panassié’s jazz criticism,

Metronome editors vaguely for their ‘snide’ and ‘reactionary attitude, Music Dial quite pointedly identifieda fascist strain in their tendency to treat music as a ‘fetish’ or an ‘opiate.’” This criticism would be echoedyears later in problematizing the French interest in jazz and black culture. Mick Eckles, “Too MuchMusic,” Metronome, 1944 (March): 9 quoted in Gendron, 138.

84 Gendron, 125.85 Montauban was the village that Panassié lived in during the Nazi Occupation. Zwerin translates

Vian’s “Pain-acier” to “Pain-ass-ié.” Vian, “Bebop Time,” in Combat 20/21 (June, 1948) quoted in Vian, Round About , 60. The last quote is from Vian, “High-Powered People: Hugusse Pain-ass-ié, a not quite jazzcritic, has doubts about bebope,” in Jazz News (November 1949), quoted in Vian, Round About , 102.

86 Vian, “Woodshed Your Axes,” in Combat 4 (March 1948) quoted in Vian, Round About , 38.



undermining Panassié’s hegemonic power in the terrain of jazz criticism. In another

column, entitled “Papal Decrees,” he drew up a catechism of jazz, or what he called a “a

collective improvisation on sacred themes by M. Panassié.”87 This tongue-in-cheek

approach was given substantial basis in Panassié’s own commentary. Vian sees the

humor in Panassié’s limited viewpoint but also the critical danger - as Vian writes:

An editing error distorted my quotation from the Master of Us All in my previous column. Everybody’s Master Pain-ass-ié really said, as he cameout of that Dizzy Gillespie concert: ‘I love jazz, but that’s not jazz…’ Thesecond half of the phrase was omitted. I want to set the record straight. It’sa funny record.88

He garnered his knowledge of jazz primarily from American sound recordings.However, he was no stranger to jazz performance, but he lamented his participation in a

jazz band that he saw as a far cry from the quality of all-black bands. Reflecting a

particularly racialized ranking of jazz, Vian wrote that his band could play only as well as

“nègres de trente-septième ordre” [“negroes of the thirty-seventh order”].89 Vian believed

that white jazz performers must necessarily defer to the performances of black musicians;

he wrote in the Jazz Hot , “Les noirs ont forcément raison quand il s’agit de jazz.”

[“Blacks are necessarily right when it is a question of jazz.”].90 Years later, however, he

reacts negatively to critic Berta Wood’s comment that “Music as an expression has lost

its meaning to Negroes.” In response, Vian highlights the racist societal constructions that

necessitated that choice in the past, precluding black participation in other arenas, as well

as pointing to the opportunities for new black expression in other artistic mediums:

87 Vian, “Papal Decrees,” in Jazz Hot , special edition (1950), quoted in Vian, Round About , 124-131.

88 Vian, “After They’ve Gone,” in Combat 4/5 (July, 1948) quoted in Vian, Round About , 66.89 Vian, Vercoquin et le Plancton, 1947 (Paris: Christian Bourois, 1981), quoted in Jones, 70.90 Vian, Jazz Hot , 1948, quoted in Frank Ténot, Boris Vian: Le Jazz et Saint-germain (Paris, Du

May: 1993), 39.



Maybe, the material conditions of Blacks having improved, they need lessto express themselves musically; maybe they want to do it more freely,more quietly, by other means not devoid of interest called literature, painting, film: and so what? The rich roots of the blues were pulled up,sobs Berta; hum…the roots that one beats joyously, if I dare to express

myself ...perhaps Blacks are not so sorry to have lost these roots…”

91

Vian describes a fanciful vision that Wood might have had, dreaming of “good Blacks

who act like clowns...and dance with the grace of jungle animals.”92 This criticism

reveals Vian’s belief in the effect of material wealth and socio-economic security on the

cultural interests and values of black people. He is reluctant to see black Americans as

needing to “express themselves musically,” a supposition that correlates to an essentialist

vision of black identity. Vian sees the white expectation of jazz performance as ‘rooted’

in the white expectation of “jungle” or “clown performance. He likens Wood’s viewpoint

to the surrealist understanding of the primitive, or “jungle” noise, in African art and

91 My translation of the French text follows this passage. “Berta Wood a lu des légendes du temps jadis, elle a rêvé de bons Noirs qui faisant les clowns, riaient bien et dansaient avec la grâce d’animaux dela jungle….(elle a sûrement pensé ça comme ça). Or, elle s’aperçoit que ces gens ont des frigidaires, descravates et des Ford, et regardent Bob Hope à la TV. Typique est cette phrase où elle s’exclame “A Negro

child does not dare act like a “Negro”” (un enfant Noir n’ose plus agir comme un “Noir”). Cela veut diretrès exactement: un enfant Noir ne veut plus agir selon la conception que les Blancs avaient des Noirs autemps où Berta Wood a commencé à former ses concepts dans sa tête… “Music as an expression has lostits meaning to Negroes”...assure Berta. Peut-être que, la condition matérielle des Noirs s’étant améliorée,ils ont moins besoin de s’exprimer par la musique: peut-être vont-ils le faire plus librement, pluscalmement, par d’autres moyens non dénués d’intérêt qui se nomment la littérature, la peinture, le cinéma:et alors? Les riches racines du blues ont été arrachées, sanglote Berta; hum…des racines sur lesquelles ontapait joyeusement à coups de trique, si j’ose ainsi m’exprimer…peut-être que les Noirs ne sont pas sifâchés d’avoir perdu ces racines…”“Berta Wood has read the legends of times past, she has dreamt of good Blacks who act like clowns, laughwell and dance with the grace of jungle animals…(she has surely thought something like that). Now, shenotices that people have refrigerators, ties and a Ford, and watch Bob Hope on T.V. Typical is this passagewhere she exclaims: “A Negro Child does not dare act like a “Negro””…It means very exactly: a Negro

child wants no longer to act according to the conception that whites have of blacks at a time when BertaWood has begun to form her concepts in her head…”Music as an expression has lost its meaning to

Negroes” assures Berta. Maybe, the material conditions of Blacks having improved, they need less toexpress themselves musically; maybe they want to do it more freely, more quietly, by other means notdevoid of interest called literature, painting, film: and so what? The rich roots of the blues were pulled up,sobs Berta; hum…the roots that one beats joyously, if I dare to express myself ...perhaps Blacks are not sosorry to have lost these roots…” Vian, Jazz Hot (June 1957) quoted in “l’American Way of Life,” achapter in a compilation edited by Lucien Malson, Chroniques de Jazz (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1967;Societé Nouvelle des Éditions Pauvert, 1996), 52-53.

92 Vian, Chroniques de Jazz, 52.



intrinsically tied to such a medium indefinitely in order to “mean something.” Bechet

writes of his own family’s relationship to music:

My story goes a long way back. It goes further back than I had anything to

do with. My music is like that…I got it from something inherited, just likethe stories my father gave down to me. And those stories are all I knowabout some of the things bringing me to where I am. And all my life I’ve been trying to explain about something, something I understand – the partof me that was there before I was. It was there waiting to be me. It wasthere waiting to be the music. It’s that part I’ve been trying to explain tomyself all my life.97

Music reveals experience from “a long way back,” and is a form that tells the stories of

those who were not able to tell them in any other fashion. This “something” he cannot

explain is disclosed in jazz, a notion that removes black identity from the constructs of

music. Rather, the music of memory collects the stories of black communities, revealing

other narratives to the one who chooses to play it. Theorist Stuart Hall speaks to this

“narrative” element to identity: “The fact is ‘black’ has never been just there either. It has

always been an unstable identity, psychically, culturally and politically. It, too, is a

narrative, a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found.”98

The ‘black’ in black identity is a narration, something “inherited,” but also nonetheless

present in every iteration of it, either in music or in a story. As Bechet writes, “No matter

what he’s playing, it’s the long song that started back there in the South. It’s the

remembering song. There’s so much to remember.”99 The song remembers that which a

singular black identity cannot, for the song emerges from the memory of past songs and

is passed on through the singing. The performance of the song, inscribed with the

97 Bechet, 4.98 Stuart Hall, “Minimal Selves,” in Identity: The Real Me (London: ICA Documents 6, 1987), 45

quoted in Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Women, Autobiography and Theory: A Reader (Madison: Universityof Wisconsion Press, 1998), 65-66.

99 Bechet, 202.



memory of many generations, is where one locates authenticity, not in the performer’s

essential knowledge.

Vian’s criticism was often a mixture of music-centric analysis, social

commentary, and ruminations on his love and respect for jazz. His work was published

often in Combat , “a left-wing daily” headed up by Albert Camus, and Le Jazz Hot . Many

of his columns included new information on upcoming albums and his own perception of

changes within jazz. He wrote often about bebop and was emphatically opposed to many

of Panassié’s criticisms of jazz. Throughout all of his writing, however, he echoes a deep

respect for the music and musicians, though he is less forgiving to white critics andmusicians. He criticized the white appropriation of black music, as in an essay entitled

“Should All White Jazz Musicians be Executed?” in which he writes, “I used to be all in

favour of racial integration in principle. But I’ve been obliged to rethink my position.

Sure, it’s fun to play with black musicians. But who profits from it? Surely not the

blacks.” 100 Interjected into his satirical challenge to white jazz musicians is Vian’s racial

commentary, revealing the extent to which he understood the power imbalances in the

political economy of jazz. This passage is even more striking given Vian’s own

occupation as a jazz performer; clearly, he is not above self-ironizing. He points to the

“profits” in jazz performance, arguing that white owners and performers benefit most in

an integrated jazz performance terrain. His reference to integration also illustrates his

consciousness of racial struggles in the United States, a knowledge that will be discussed

below.

100 Vian, “Should All White Jazz Musicians be Executed?” (Combat 4, April 1948) in Vian, Round About , 48-49.



In another essay, Vian depicted performer Fred Astaire as the true “monkey”

when he appears in blackface and questions the “class” of black and white performers in

the 1944 film, Jammin’ the Blues101: “Cab [Calloway]? He’s perfect. At least he’s

wearing his own skin, not blackface, and we hear his own voice. And at least jazz is

something basic and honest for him…Whereas that imbecile Astaire, with his Negro

costume and his silent trumpet…A monkey, I tell you, that’s the monkey.”102 This

striking example reveals Vian’s determination to oust and disempower traditional

beneficiaries of French admiration, namely, the culture of Hollywood cinema. French

audiences at this time were inundated with images from American cinema, and gainedadmiration for the white actors and performers only. Vian inverts the figure of the black

monkey, used normatively in reference to African and African-American people, and,

quite dramatically, finds that the white performer who ‘apes’ black performance is in fact

“the monkey.” By performing a “monkey,” the white entertainer has simultaneously

appropriated black performance and reinforced the racist stereotypes that forced black

entertainers into that position initially. This instance shifts the audience’s perception of

which person should be emulated and admired – Vian points to the black musician as the

object of envy. Angered at the Broadway musical’s appropriation of black music, Vian

criticized Ira Gershwin dramatically in another piece: “On le savait nous, que Gershwin

101

Arthur Knight commented on the Warner Brothers film in his 1995 essay: “When Jammin’ the Blues was created late in 1944, jazz and its discourses were undergoing profound shifts. The end of the big- band swing era was at hand, and its replacement, small-group bebop, was percolating ‘underground’ (inHarlem, of course), soon to surface.” Arthur Knight, “ Jammin’ the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 14. It is not clear whetherVian was indicating that Astaire appeared in the film.

102 Vian is referring here to Fred Astaire’s performance in the film Swing Time, in which Astaireappears in blackface and dances to “Bojangles of Harlem.” This appears to be the only occasion on whichAstaire performed in any sort of minstrel show. Vian, “Hugo Hackenbush and the Monkeys” ( Jazz Hot ,

November 1947) in Vian, Round About, 25.



and another man recognize each other as jazz compatriots; they exchange “ Heil

Gillespie” and “ Heil Parker” in a moment of mutual recognition, evoking a Nazi-esque

camaraderie. Here Vian presents a self-deprecating sense of jazz culture in Paris in which

jazz lovers act as brainwashed followers. The piece is inflected at every turn with the

rhythmic onomatopoeia of jazz, as the men order “une poule au riz-bop” and “curry-bop”

at a Chinese restaurant, and exclaim “zoot alors” to one another.107 As in this example

and others, Vian often incorporated the onomatopoeic words associated with jazz into his

French descriptions – Charlie “The Bird” Parker was thus Charlie “ Zoiseau” Parker –

hence inflecting the French language with the rhythmic wordplay of jazz.

108

Historian Christopher Jones writes of the great significance of jazz to Boris

Vian’s changing identity. Jones also points to jazz’s place in Vian’s feelings of

estrangement:

Jazz for Boris Vian was not simply a form of musical expression, it was anentire universe from which he drew much of his subjective self-definition,a universe with actors and conventions he was well-suited to engage, yetwhich contributed in certain ways to a tendency toward self-marginalization.109

With so much of Vian’s writing on jazz reflecting a complex and broad understanding of

the African-American experience, Jones’s analysis is helpful in developing insights into

Vian’s personality, motivations and responses. Vian’s simultaneous love of jazz and

pseudonymic exploration of blackness reveal a man both liberated by and constructed by

107 Vian, “En Rond Autour de Minuit,” in Autres Écrits sur le Jazz, Tome I , ed. Claude Rameil(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981), 68-72. Vian incorporates the language of bebop in the creation of newwords, changing a “une poule au riz” [“chicken and rice”] and “curry” to bop-inflected phrases.Additionally, he changes the French exclamation of “zut alors” to “zoot alors,” shifting the phrase toinclude the “zoot” swing of jazz. Translation of the this particular essay’s title and content was found inZwerin’s introduction to and translation of Round About Close to Midnight .

108 In French, “bird” is translated to “l’oiseau.” This nicknaming of Parker can be found in Vian,Chroniques de jazz, 39.

109 Jones, 100.



his social identity. As Vian learned about jazz and African-Americans, he gained new

language with which to refigure his own experience as a white performer and white

Parisian. The language necessitated some shift in his own understanding of himself and

blackness for he could not identify as black while also recognizing the racism that shaped

the development and performance of jazz. The cultural language surrounding jazz,

transformed by Vian into French, and the playing of jazz jointly liberate Vian from a

singular interpretation of himself – thus freed, Vian can perform his identity, with the

tools of jazz in his hands.

Though he heard black performances, Vian experienced the evolution to bebopless directly: “Vian’s primary influences were not performances, or at least not live

performances. He was formed by the representational world, in this case recordings of

jazz and writings about it.”110 As he said himself on a radio program, “First of all, jazz is

American music, and so the critic is always dependent upon foreign recordings. It is true

that there are more concerts here lately but Paris is not yet a city in which it is possible to

hear a large assortment of good jazz.”111 Vian’s description of Parisian jazz is consistent

with the assertion that much of his knowledge came from jazz records. Though artists

such as Miles Davis visited Paris, and Kenny Clarke played regularly, Vian felt that the

best performances were in the United States. Though Vian’s work in the Jazz Hot and

Combat consisted primarily of jazz criticism, he had a broad sense of the social

implications of jazz. Vian’s jazz criticism reflected the ways in which he mediated his

social criticism through jazz, as well his sense of the larger predicament of black culture

beyond music. As Caribbean expatriate, musician and writer Henri Salvador wrote once

110 Jones, 100-101.111 Vian, “Must a Jazz Critic be a Musician?” (radio, 4 December 1949) in Vian, Round About ,

117.



of Vian, “Il était amoureux du jazz, ne vivait que pour le jazz, n’entendait, ne s’exprimait

qu’en jazz” ["He was in love with jazz, lived only for jazz, heard only, expressed himself

only through jazz"].112

Jazz experienced a shifting relationship with Parisian intellectuals and jazz

enthusiasts, and brings to the forefront many different locations of interrogation. Jazz was

objectified in many instances within the currents of surrealism and primitivism in the

interwar period. After World War II, jazz developed a greater subjective force in the

discourse of existentialism, operating less as an object for the avant-garde gaze but rather

as a modernist tool of subjectivity. In his collection of essays, Shadow and Act , RalphEllison responds to the medium of jazz as both an empowering and disempowering

enactment:

There is in this a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Eachtrue jazz moment…springs from a contest in which the artist challenges allthe rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the canvassesof a painter) a definition of his [ sic] identity: as individual, as member ofthe collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus because jazzfinds its very life in improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazz manmust lose his identity even as he finds it.113

Ellison’s words reflect much of Bechet’s experience as well, for he finds in improvisation

the loss of individual identity and emergence of a collective one. He refers to the

traditions inherent in jazz, but refuses to hinge directly a black performer’s identity on

these traditions; rather, he sees the act of improvisation as a connection to a

“collectivity.” The “jazz man” is linked to the experiences of the black community but

not wedded to them singularly.

112 Arnaud, Vies parallèles, 109.113 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 234 quoted in Paul Gilroy,

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),79.



Jean-Pol Partre

In 1946, Vian became acquainted with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,

and soon joined Sartre as a contributor for his journal, Les temps modernes [“The Modern

Times”].114 Sartre and Vian had a well-documented friendship and working relationship,

evidenced not only by Vian’s work with Sartre’s journal, but also by their social

interactions with each other and each other’s lovers and wives. At that time, Vian was

married to Michelle Vian, who was also involved in the literary world; together, they

wrote extensively and translated many American texts through much of World War IIand the post-war period. 115 De Beauvoir worked as an editor and writer for Les temps

modernes, serving on the editorial board for much of Sartre’s tenure . The Vians, Sartre,

and de Beauvoir were a recognizable foursome in Saint-Germain - their friendship and

intellectual camaraderie was well documented. 116 In one of her intellectual memoirs, La

Force des choses, de Beauvoir describes an evening at the home of the Vians:

When I arrived, everyone had already drunk too much; his wife, Michelle,her long white silk hair falling on her shoulders, was smiling to theangels…I also drank valiantly while listening to records imported fromAmerica. Around two in the morning Boris offered me a cup of coffee; wesat in the kitchen and until dawn we talked: about his novel, on jazz, onliterature, about his profession as engineer. I found no affectation in hislong, white and smooth face, only an extreme gentleness and a kind ofstubborn candor; Vian detested just as passionately les affreux [themasses] as he adored those whom he loved…We spoke, and dawn arrived

114 The journal’s first issue was on October 1, 1945 and included essays by Sartre, Richard Wright,Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francis Ponge and Raymond Aron, and Jacques-Laurent Bost. See Appendix B,Figures 1 and 2 for a facsimile of this first issue’s contents and editorial board. Les Temps Modernes (Paris).

115 Vian separated from Michelle in 1949 and moved in with Ursula Kübler, a dancer from Zurich,whom he later married in 1954. Older, intro. to Blues for a black cat & other stories, ix-xv.

116 See Appendix A, Figure 7 for a photograph of Vian, Léglise-Vian, Sartre, and de Beauvoir.



only too quickly. I had the highest appreciation, when I had the chance ofenjoying them, for these fleeting moments of eternal friendship.117

This passage reveals not only the nature of de Beauvoir and Vian’s friendship, but also

the sort of artistic, musical, and intellectual environment from which it grew. Thesefriendships gave way to literary efforts, with both Sartre and de Beauvoir so deeply

involved in Les temps modernes.

The journal was a significant post-war forum for discussion and revolutionary

inquiry, fashioning itself as a new form of literature, “la literature engagée” [“committed

writing”].118 Sartre and his colleagues founded the journal soon after the liberation of

France in August 1944 and it remained a major force in the French political scene until

1952, when Sartre left its board. According to Steven Ungar, Les temps modernes

emerged as a holdover from “Socialisme et Liberté” [“Socialism and Freedom”], a

resistance group of brief renown at the beginning of World War II.119 Its founding editors

and members of the original editorial committee included Sartre, de Beauvoir, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, Michel Leiris, Raymond Aron, Jean Paulhan, and Albert Ollivier.120 The

journal was viewed in close proximity to the French Communist because its literary and

cultural messages were often revolutionary, consistently voicing “an imperative to

action.”121

117 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 73-74 quoted in Cismaru,56-57. Though de Beauvoir remembered Vian fondly, the relationship between Sartre and Vian was lessstable; years later, after Vian had divorced from Michelle, Sartre began a romantic relationship with her. As

Arnaud notes, “Boris saw Sartre twice during those years [in the early 1950’s]. Embarassment or sarcasm,in the course of these meetings which are clothed in the appearance of the greatest cordiality…Sartre willconclude that Boris does not particularly seek his company.” Noël Arnaud, in Bizarre 39-40, p. 150 quotedin Cismaru, 57.

118 Steven Ungar, “Rebellion or Revolution?” in A New History of French Literature, ed. DenisHollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 972.

119 Ungar, 972.120 Anna Boschetti, The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, trans. Richard

C. McCLeary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 173.121 Ungar, 976.



Vian contributed essays, columns, and translations to the journal, including his

“Chronique du menteur” [“Chronicles of the liar”],122 a translated essay on negro

spirituals,123 an essay entitled “Les Fourmis,”124 and a translation of Richard Wright’s

work. His contributions differed in large part from the rest of the journal, offering often

comical or avant-garde social commentary. The journal’s purpose was, according to

Sartre, to give “an account of the present, as complete and faithful as possible.” Sartre

himself contributed articles such as “Qu’est-ce que c’est la littérature?” [“What is

Literature?”]. The journal also presented the entire text of Wright’s Black Boy, serialized

over the course of six issues in 1947.

125

Sartre’s journal illustrated the avant-garde’sinterests of the period, demonstrating an interest in the modern condition but also in the

works of African-American and African writers.

According to Anna Boschetti’s historical consideration of Les temps modernes,

Vian’s relationship to the journal mirrored his own with Sartre: “…among those writers

and artists whose contributions are generally few, the distinguishing criterion is

friendship with Sartre, which is generally evidenced by his having prefaced one of their

works. In terms of this criterion we can establish a group of authors who were associated

with the review during this period, such as Vian, Nathalie Sarraute, Genet, Queneau, and

122 This column was eventually compiled in Chronique de menteur, a collection of essays by Vian.

Boris Vian, “Impressions d’Amérique” in Chronique du Menteur (Chronicle of the Liar), ed. Noel Arnaud(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974).

123 According to the journal’s footnotes, the article was written by Norman Cowin and originally published in The Book of American Negro Spirituals, ed. and intro. by James Weldon Johnson (New York:Viking Press, 1929). Vian, “Les Negro Spirituals,” Les temps modernes 1, no. 11-12 (August-September1946): 369-392.

124 The short story was dedicated to Sidney Bechet, “à cause de ‘Didn’t he ramble.’” Vian, “Lesfourmis” [“The Ants”], Les temps modernes 1, no. 9 (June 1946): 1564-1575.

125 Les temps modernes 2, no. 16-21 (Jan-June 1947). See Appendix B, Figure 3 for a facsimile ofthis issue’s table of contents.



Wright.”126 She categorizes other writers as either being on the editorial committee, a part

of the “inner circle,” art and literary critics, academics or political journalists. 127 She

notes that most of these writers and editors were in some way, however, “recruited by

Sartre and gravitated around him.”128 Sartre acted as arbiter of culture in the Latin

Quarter and his interests directed the role of Les temps modernes in Parisian intellectual

discussion:

Thus it is understandable that Les Temps Modernes ends up reproducingthe characteristics of Sartre’s position. In the highly centralized, tightlyknit world of Parisian intellectual life, the central, multifaceted characterof Sartre’s position makes it the operant determinant of the probable,

almost necessary meetings which lead to most of the externalcollaborations with the review…And in the case of authors still unknownoutside the Latin Quarter – such as Vian and Genet – it is a matter ofSartre’s position having a dual, and convergent, effect. Sartre is thecontact, the filter, and the interpreter of the emerging moods of his milieu,and what is more, he has the power to make his preferences legitimate.

Clearly, Sartre was a cultural “power” to be reckoned with. This is particularly

significant for Vian because his work was consistently viewed as marginal to the

more ‘serious’ contributions to the journal and concerns of the Saint-Germain

community.

Though Vian’s involvement with Les temps modernes began with his friendship

with Sartre, Vian’s public activity and writing took a more significant turn with his own

intellectual and personal departure from Sartre. It was in this journal that Vian established

himself as a satirical voice of the era and began to write freely, both ironically and in

earnest, on racial matters. In Vian’s “Chronique du menteur,” a column in Les Temps

126 Boschetti, 173.127 Ibid. Another well-known existentialist presence – Albert Camus – did not join the journal,

though he was invited. Camus had been active in the review Combat , as had Vian, during the war but didnot wish to continue with Sartre’s journal. The two men’s relationship was often rocky. Ungar, 972-973.

128 Boschetti, 177.



Modernes, he wrote essays and fanciful stories that ridiculed French culture, literature

and philosophy. Vian also included some critiques of the editorial board in his column,

which got less than favorable attention from Sartre. In his popular novel, L’Ecume des

Jours, he even referred to Sartre as “Jean-Sol Partre” and de Beauvoir as the “Duchess of

Bovouart.”129 Vian’s column also pointedly commented on the journal’s enterprise as a

whole:

In the column he wrote in the 1940s for Les Temps Modernes,'Chroniques du menteur,' Vian joked about the magazine's dullness, its badrates of pay, its awkward design. He made fun of the somber pronouncements of Meloir de Beauvartre and Pontartre de Merlebeauvy.

Merleau-Ponty, the general editor of Les Temps Modernes, was less thanamused: a piece in which Vian teased the hard-left philosopher for takingup too many pages in the magazine ('He is a capitalist') was rejected, andthe 'Chronique' did not appear again.130

Other members of the editorial board, and the structure of the journal itself, were clearly

not immune to Vian’s pen. His rhetorical plays on the names of Merleau-Ponty, de

Beauvoir, and Sartre literally conflate their names, turning editors whose individual

personalities normally distinguished them from each other into representatives of a single

and unquestioning entity. Additionally, Vian’s take on the editorial board did not

preclude a self-reflection, a posture which enabled him to examine all elements of

identity, including his own.

One particular piece, “Impressions d’Amérique,” was the most damaging for

Vian’s relationship with the board, but was also the one that resonated most clearly with

J’irai cracher sur vos tombes and his jazz criticism. Vian wrote his “Impressions” on or

around June 10, 1946 but the submission was turned down by the editorial board shortly

129 Boris Vian, L’Écume des Jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), trans. by John Sturrock (New York:Grove Press, 1968). According to Cismaru, the novel was “both an homage and a dig to the two celebratedapostles of Existentialism.” Cismaru, 56.

130 Campbell, Paris Interzone, 269-270.



thereafter. His work subsequently remained unpublished until 1974. Originally, the

column was to have been printed for the August/September, 1946 issue of Les Temps

Modernes.131 This issue was dedicated to writings about and from the “U.S.A.,” and

included essays on sexuality, folk music, race, music, and democracy in the United

States. The issue also included a translation of Richard Wright’s work, “Débuts à

Chicago.”132 Vian himself translated an American piece on negro spirituals, which was

included, though his own thoughts on America were not. According to critic Christopher

Jones, this particular moment was significant not only in Vian’s relationship to the

editorial board but also his public identity:Vian’s public engagement with American life and literature can be said tohave begun in 1946. In that year the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes refused to publish Vian’s “Impressions d’Amérique.” TheFrench reading public as a whole registered a somewhat different reaction:125,000 of them bought those impressions in the form of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes.133

As in J’irai cracher , Vian was grappling with complex racial relationships, though the

“Impressions” went even further in his critique of French intelligentsia. In the

“Impressions d’Amérique,” Vian describes a dream encounter with well-known surrealist

André Breton at a Harlem nightclub. Breton was a well-known and influential poet,

writer and critic, who led the surrealist movement in France in the interwar period.

Indeed, Breton had moved to New York during the Vichy period, exiling himself

amongst the New York intelligentsia, all the while disclaiming American culture and

language:

Breton’s almost compulsive rejection of everything American as anexpression, perhaps, of his misery. English was an anathema to him: he

131 Scott, From Dreams to Despair , 135.132 See Appendix B, Figure 4 for a facsimile of this issue’s table of contents.133 Jones, 105.



‘was careful not to learn even three words of [it] for fear of dulling theedge of his own exquisite writing instrument…Wonderful it was to thinkof him tiptoeing around his precious language bed, administeringantibiotics to keep the Americanisms at bay.’134

Breton’s fear of American English as well as distaste for America – “He sulked, hatingAmerica, wishing himself back in Paris”135 – was certainly not lost on Vian, who depicts

Breton in a very different manner altogether. Vian describes his confusion because

instead of seeing a white Breton at the Harlem nightclub, Breton instead “was passing as

black, one could say absolutely a true Negro, he had even a Negro’s black lips and frizzy

hair, and he spoke like a Negro…It is a loss for surrealism.”136 Vian has completely

toppled audience’s expectations of Breton by presenting him as a “true Negro,” even

pointing out the minute details of a stereotypical black physical appearance. This

technique is reminiscent of Vian’s typical style, in which he asks controversial questions

of audiences – “Should All White Musicians Be Executed?”137 – and subverts and twists

traditional language. He further overturns expectations for Breton’s primary mode of

influence – his language. Vian creates black slang for Breton, who tells him in this black

vernacular: “Ah’ll stay wid’ ma black gal and ma black kids. I’am’t no use, man, goin’

all’ round de world an’ catchin’ sea sick, crabs an’claps an’lookin’ always for fuck. Lawd

134 Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (Santa Monica, 1986), 20 quoted in Ruth Brandon, Surreal Lives:The Surrealists, 1917-1945 (New York: Grove Press, 1999), 431.

135 Brandon, 429.136 “J’ai fini par rencontrer André Breton en plein Harlem, dans une petite boîte assez crasseuse, ça

s’appelait Tom’s; pas de doute, c’était lui. Mais quel camouflage!...Il s’est passé au noir; on diraitabsolument un vrai Nègre, il a même des grosses lèvres de Nègre et des cheveux crépus, et il parle commeun Nègre. Il se fait appeler Andy, les autres n’ont pas l’air d’avoir beaucoup de respect pour lui. Je lui aidemandé s’il comptait venir en France et il m’a répondu: ‘…man. Ah’ll stay wid’ ma black gal and ma

black kids. I’am’t no use, man, goin’ all’ round de world an’ catchin’ sea sick, crabs an’claps an’lookin’always for fuck. Lawd don’t likes that man, sure Lawd don’t likes that.’ C’est une perte pour lesurréalisme…, a murmuré Astruc. Je n’aurais pas cru qu’il connaisse des mots comme ça, mais il l’a dit, etcomme il n’y avait rien à faire d’autre, nous sommes repartis.” This previous passage is my translation.Vian, “Impressions d’Amérique,” Chronique du menteur , 85-86.

137 See n. 88.



don’t likes that man, sure Lawd don’t likes that.”138 Breton is rendered as a sexual being,

who has given up his own promiscuity and history of contracting sexually transmitted

diseases. He has lost the source of his power – his control and manipulation of French

language and culture – and instead been given Vian’s created black vernacular, riddled

with the diseased “Americanisms” he had struggled to avoid. By creating a ‘black

Breton,’ Vian has de-essentialized what it means to be white or black, creating instead a

performance of blackness.

Vian’s descriptions of the rest of his trip to America are less blatantly directed at

individuals but equally controversial; he writes, “We waited all the morning in front ofthe door of hotel, while hoping to see the lynching of a negro, but New-Yorkers are

definitely amorphous. It appears that in Nevada, one still finds the hard ones. We are

trying to go past one.”139 His description of the French visitors’ desire to view a lynching

clearly reflects much of Vian’s influences for writing J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. He

refers not only to his understanding of lynchings in the U.S., based on essays he had read,

but also includes his criticism of the Parisian community, of whom he anticipates interest.

Just as the racial and sexual violence of J’irai cracher had helped in garnering sales, he

could assume that the same audience would secretly seek out this kind of voyeuristic

experience.

As Vian’s “Impressions” were scheduled to appear in print very near the

publishing of J’irai cracher sur vos tombes - August 1946 – Vian’s works clearly exhibit

some theoretical and physical intertextuality. Both the novel and the essay feature the

138 Vian, Chronique du menteur , 85-86.139 “Nous avons attendu toute la matinée devant la porte de l’hôtel, en espérant voir lyncher un

nègre, mais les New-yorkais sont décidément amorphes. Il paraît que dans le Nevada, on trouve encore desdurs. Nous tâcherons d’y passer.” This previous passage is my translation. Vian, “Impressionsd’Amérique,” Chronique du menteur , 93.



themes of lynching, passing, all in the imagined landscape of America. Additionally, both

works undermine an essential black identity fixated on race. Read in light of the

“Impressions,” Vian’s J’irai cracher takes on new significance – not only has Vian de-

essentialized the black identity of a man who appears white, he has also de-essentialized

white identity by describing Breton passing for black. At the end of the “Impressions,”

Vian visits some “members of the French expatriate community in Hollywood, who seem

somewhat lost”140 This passage also refers to the editorial board’s experience during the

war, since many of the surrealists, including artist Man Ray, had fled to Hollywood and

Los Angeles. These direct references, coupled with Vian’s satirical voice on racism, didnot bode well for his future with Les temps modernes: “Vian here, as in certain Sullivan

sequences, is treading on the thin ice between satirizing racist attitudes and inadvertently

fostering them; the editors at Les Temps Modernes may have opted for the latter

interpretation.”141 Vian’s last column appeared in the journal in June, 1947, one year after

this particular intellectual battle.

In this column, Vian has implicitly and explicitly brought Breton and Sartre into

the consideration of racial identity. Both Breton and Sartre were engaged in editorial

relationships with African writers and had an ideological interest in black identity. Their

perspectives offer valuable counterpoints to Vian’s relationship to black identity, jazz,

and America. Breton edited and prefaced a book of poetry by Martinique poet Aimé

Césaire; Sartre wrote the preface for Léopold Senghor’s anthology of black Francophone

poetry. In these pieces, they legitimized the work of Francophone writers by contributing

their own editorial voices. However, these prefaces and the act of prefacing bring to the

140 Jones, 151.141 Ibid., 150.



foreground the role of French critics in the works of African writers. Breton and Sartre’s

relationship to these African authors, and their vision of black identity, stands in contrast

to Vian’s own relationship to the construction of blackness.

Breton was the recognized “Father of Surrealism,” a movement that had lost

much of its momentum by this point, but also clearly had a place in French cultural

values. Breton’s surrealism was a philosophy seeking ‘human emancipation’ from

Western rationalism, drawing upon for inspiration the experiences and art of other racial

and cultural groups. As Rosemont indicates, Breton found in surrealism a method for

achieving liberation: “‘Human emancipation,’ wrote André Breton in Nadja, ‘remains theonly cause worth serving.’ For the surrealists, surrealism remains precisely the best

means of serving that cause.”142 Breton developed an interest in the work of West Indian

poet Aimé Césaire, and eventually wrote a preface for Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au

pays natal [“Notebook of a Return to a Native Land”].

Breton found in Césaire’s poetry echoes of his own concerns for social liberation

and revolution. Césaire, who had come to Paris in 1930, returned to his home country of

Martinique in 1939 and published the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal . In 1941, on his

way to New York, Breton stopped in Martinique and was impressed by Césaire and his

reputation. As noted before, Breton had left Paris with many other European intellectuals

to go to the United States, but his trip had included stops in the Caribbean:

The Second World War was perhaps the only time that Westernintellectuals were forced to take refuge outside Europe for politicalreasons and were therefore confronted with the experience of exile at firsthand. This is something that was especially acute in the case of Bretonhimself, forced to live in New York, a city for which he had no affinityand which seemed to him to embody all the worst aspects of European

142 André Breton quoted in Franklin Rosemont, introduction to What is Surrealism? SelectedWritings, trans. and ed. Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 5.



culture, with few of its redeeming ones. On the other hand, he wasenchanted by his various stays on the Canadian coast and in Martinique,Arizona, and Haiti.143

Breton found Césaire’s home country to be “an affirmation of his own values,” 144 – he

left deeply impressed and went on to encourage the publication of Césaire’s Cahier in

France, eventually realized in a 1947 publication, edited and prefaced by Breton.145 Prior

to this release, Breton had written of the collection in the journal Fontaine, referring to

Césaire as a “un grande poète noir”:

Césaire’s poetry, like all great poetry and all great art, reaches the heights by the power of transmutation it sets in motion, which consists – from a

base of the most disreputable subject matter, including even ugliness andservitude – of producing what we know is no longer gold or the philosopher’s stone, but liberty.146

The “liberty” Breton sees in Césaire’s poetry is echoed in some of Césaire’s own work.

When in Paris, Césaire befriended other African students and writers such as Léopold

Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. Together, they co-founded and edited Légitime Défense,

a booklet published in 1932 declaring its contributors, mostly from the West Indies, to be

“suffocated by this capitalistic, Christian, bourgeois world.”147 This literary statement

borrowed from Western theories of communism and surrealism. Specifically, its own

name references Breton’s 1926 pamphlet on these two dogmas, echoing his writing’s

143 Michael Richardson, , ed. and trans. Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and theCaribbean (London: Verso, 1996), 22.

144 Scharfman, 946.145 “The Cahier was published almost in toto in 1939 in the journal Valontés, but went unnoticed

by the Parisian public. A first bilingual (French-Spanish) edition of the work appeared in 1944 in Cuba, andwas not published in full in France until 1947 in the Bordas edition, prefaced by an article on Césaire thatAndré Breton had written in 1944 for the magazine Fontaine [ Fontaine, no. 35 (1944)]. The Cahier wasrepublished in 1956 in Présence Africaine. This particular edition will be referenced in the rest of thisessay, Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (orig, 1947; Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956).Publishing information was found in Kesteloot, 191-192.

146 Breton, “Un grand poète noir,” Fontaine, no. 35 (1944) quoted in Kesteloot, 256.147 Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French ( Les écrivains noirs de langue française), trans. by

Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Brussels: Editions de l’Institut de Sociologie, 1963; Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press, 1974), 15.



“springboard for political engagement.”148 According to Lilyan Kesteloot, “Breton, too,

recalls the young West Indian group as a parallel movement to his own.”149

Césaire’s Cahier first voiced the new ideology of négritude; according to Abiola

Irele, “negritude refers to the literary and ideological movement of French-speaking black

intellectuals, which took form as a distinctive and significant aspect of the comprehensive

reaction of the black man to the colonial situation.”150 Césaire himself described the

movement’s beginnings in a 1967 lecture: “Thirty years ago when Senghor, Damas and I

were students in the Latin Quarter the term ‘négritude’ was coined during our discussions

and debates…But it happens that in fact I have the dubious honor of having used theword in a literary sense for the first time.”151 This movement was in part inspired by Leo

Frobenius, whose anthropological work echoed the same concern with African style and

consciousness.152 Additional works included the journal, l’Étudient Noir – these works

formulated a sort of proto-négritude movement, anticipating the other work and activism

of the 1950s.

Breton found the future of surrealism in this new movement, believing that

European artistic movements would stagnate without the contribution of black poetry and

art: “In the twentieth century, the European artist, swept along by the reasonable and the

148 Ronnie Scharfman, “Surrealism and Négritude in Martinique,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Dennis Hollier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 945.

149 Kesleloot references a January, 1960 interview with Breton. Kesteloot, 38-39. Additionally, thework consciously drew upon the Harlem Renaissance and its canonical text, Alain Locke’s 1925 anthologyof black writing, The New Ne gro. Kennedy, introduction to Kesteloot, xiv.

150

Abiola Irele, “What is Negritude?” in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 67.

151 Césaire quoted in Jules-Rosette, 34.152 Scharfman, 945. According to Jules-Rosette, “Black students at the Sorbonne began to read

anthropology and were particularly impressed by the German archaeologist-anthropologist Leo Frobenius’s History of African Civilizations, which was translated into French in 1936.” Jules-Rosette, 33. According toLéopold Senghor, “Frobenius was truly the moving spiritual force in the emancipation of black Africa: hisidealistic vision of a still-pure Africa, not yet contaminated by outside influences, nourished our fervor.”Senghor quoted in Christopher L. Miller, introduction to Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 17.



According to Brent Hayes Edwards, “Breton’s suffocating influence” was a necessary

aspect for Césaire’s work with him. 156 His social persona and strong identification with

surrealism reinforces the significance of his actions, most particularly his relationship

with Césaire. As Brandon notes, “Breton, so passionate about freedom, both personal

and artistic, was totalitarian in his impulses, a dictator in the age of dictators.”157 This

observation sheds light on the extent of Breton’s control in projects associated with

surrealism. Surrealism’s power as a dogmatic force was fading as the négritude

movement was gaining momentum, prompting Breton to respond directly to the

movement and to Césaire.In Vian’s vision of Breton in Harlem, one can see the complexities at work when

Breton, the father of surrealism, is viewed passing as African-American. Breton has

completely morphed into the essentialist understanding of “negro,” or to translate

négritude correctly, “nigger.” Breton’s black life is not poetic, however, and he offers

nothing to the Europeans who meet him, but rather, wishes to stay in Harlem, with his

wife and children. The surrealist project was so closely tied to Breton that it would be

very difficult to differentiate the man from the movement. In Vian’s narrative, therefore,

it is not only Breton who is black, it is surrealism. It is important to distinguish between

Vian’s radical subversion of surrealism’s blackness, as he renders the surrealist project

black, and Breton’s appropriation, and indeed, his expropriation, of négritude. Breton has

essentialized négritude, and black identity, within the constructs of surrealism; this move

fixes black identity within a binary system, thus reinforcing the notion of identity that is,

rather than is performed. Vian displaces blackness from a fixed point from which to

156 Edwards, “The Ethnics of Surrealism,” 87.157 Brandon, 4.



explain or further an ideology and instead, shakes the foundation of that ideology. Vian’s

vision of Breton’s blackness is certainly less comfortable for the surrealist himself, for it

erases the editorial distance that Breton could maintain between himself and Césaire.

Indeed, Breton has entirely lost his former identity in becoming black, both physically

and linguistically. This moment could indeed reflect one of Breton’s greatest fears – that

he, surrealism, or France would lose its own identity in its patronage of black art.

Thus, in depicting Breton as stereotypically African-American, Vian has

responded directly and indirectly to the tradition of French colonial and post-colonial

literature, intellectualism, and surrealism. His narrative of Breton’s blackness obviously parallels J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in its inclusion of lynching but more significantly,

in both pieces includes a controversial treatment of passing, both as black and as white.

Breton is passing for black in the nightclub, Vian is passing for black in the French and

American literary worlds, and Vian’s mulatto protagonist, Lee Anderson, is passing for

white. These pieces resonate with one another because Vian has stylized a new

performed identity for all three – himself, Breton, and Lee Anderson – giving no one

respite in a fixed identity.

Sartre, Vian’s friend and editor, was engaged in a different sort of relationship

with black writing and identity. In particular, Sartre wrote an introduction - “Orphée

Noir” [“Black Orpheus”] - to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of black African

Francophone poetry in 1948.158 In it, Sartre explains his own self in relation to Africa; he

writes at the beginning of the piece:

I address myself here to white men, to whom I wish to explain that which black men know already: why it is necessary through a poetic experience

158 Senghor’s work was entitled Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, 1948. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Black Orpheus," trans. S.W. Allen (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1976).



Negritude as antithetical value is the moment of the negativity.”163 According to Ross

Posnock, such a relocation “reduces Negritude to a transitional term in a dialectic whose

synthetic moment is a society without races or memory of racism.”164 This

reconsideration of négritude disallows the race struggle that has immediate and real

consequences for Césaire and other black writers. Sartre’s goal of a synthetic, raceless

society is imagined without consideration for the social constructs that remain in place,

unaffected by his vision. Sartre sought to both deny the essentialized négritude of Africa

and posits this movement instead in a political context; however, his treatment also

denies the specificities of racism and colonization in the lives of those who creatednégritude. According to Jules-Rosette, “Sartre reconciled the poetic and political images

of Africa by demonstrating that négritude is a source of cultural inspiration in its exotic

image and a stepping stone toward universal political liberation in its combative

image.”165

Sartre conceives of the négritude movement only in terms of the larger context of

the universal class struggle. According to Jules-Rosette, “Sartre’s perspective was

unappealing to the proponents of négritude in its rejection of the primacy and universal

significance of African cultures.”166 Manthia Diawara echoes her point, writing that the

ways in which Sartre’s vision is incongruous with Senghorian négritude: “Ironically, this

awareness of common struggle, of worldwide demand that human rights be granted by

white supremacists and capitalists, seemed to undercut Negritude’s first claim to

163 Sartre, 59-60.164 Ross Posnock, “How it Feels to be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the "Impossible Life" of

the Black Intellectual,” in Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997), n.18.165 Jules-Rosette, 55166 Jules-Rosette, 56.



authenticity and singularity.”167 Sartre instead argues for the recognition of a common

struggle, rather than examining the particular circumstances that led to the development

of négritude.

Sartre textually exploits négritude by positing it once again in a categorization of

race that denies the unequal social conditions wrought by the exploitation of racial

difference.

Négritude’s essentialization of race is denied in Sartre’s’ “position on antiracist

racism,”168 stripping négritude of its power and agency. Indeed, Senghor’s work and

other writings are not immune to many of the value-laden and essentialist polarities ofnégritude, as he sought to find language that emphasizes the qualities of blackness that

black people share universally. While Senghor’s vision remains problematic in its

fundamentally essentialist sense of race difference, Sartre’s words ignore Senghor’s

message but also provide an oppositional reaction that is equally difficult. Sartre instead

envisions race as secondary to his vision of class emancipation without acknowledging

that much of the consciousness of black identity emerged from the social manipulation of

racial difference. Richardson discusses Sartre’s failure to envision négritude through its

self-definition; he refers to Martinique writer and philosopher René Ménil’s criticism:

“The negro in question is a negro who resembles Sartre, a Sartre darkened and sometimes

turned upside down, but a very anguished, very existentialist and picturesque negro!”169

Ménil’s description of Sartre resonates precisely with what Vian was satirizing in his

essay on Breton; Sartre has transformed himself into a black man, imagining the essential

167 Manthia Diawara, "Situation I: Sartre and African Modernism,” In Search of Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7.

168 Ibid., 2.169 René Ménil, “De la négritude,” in Tracées (Paris: Robert Laffront, 1981), 61-96, quoted in

Richardson, introduction, 9.



qualities of blackness as his own, and part of his philosophical project. Vian rejects both

men’s projects: Sartre’s because he has ignored the ethical dimensions of performing

blackness and Breton because he has bought into an essentialist vision in order to further

Surrealism.

For both Sartre and Breton, there was an ideological investment in racial

difference and essentialism, in which the work of négritude could serve as part of a

surrealist or Marxist agenda. Breton found in Césaire’s work the furthering of the

surrealist project, literally editing and revisioning Césaire in the future trajectory of

surrealism. Racial difference provided a dialectic through which Sartre could negotiatethe necessity of black writing to the emancipation of the human condition. These two

writers were not the only forces at work in this context, however. As has been noted,

Senghor and Césaire differed in their interpretation of négritude: “Both Césaire and

Senghor develop négritude as an identity discourse that renews the pride of a

marginalized group. Yet, Césaire’s definition of négritude remains fluid, while Senghor

insists on viewing négritude as the totality of black Africa’s cultural values.”170 Clifford

indicates that Léopold Sedar Senghor supports a depiction of an essentialized African

mentality in contrast to Césaire’s rejection of these essentializations.171 He describes

Senghorian négritude as a “backward-looking idealism” that reinscribed the romantic

racialism of the past.172

Césaire, unlike some of his colleagues, believed that black people shared not

some sort of “essential” quality, but rather shared the “distinction” of being designated

170 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1998), 242-43.

171 Clifford, “A Politics of Neologism,” 178.172 Ibid., 178.



black. Clearly, Césaire saw the complexities of négritude and was not willing to

compromise these intricacies for an essentialist view of blackness. Edwards writes of this

vision: “Césairian Negritude might be less an essentialism than a refusal of that game of

perpetual transposition – [it] will not serve as ‘bows drawn for the arrows’ of European

dreams….The Cahier envisions a communal identity, but not a chromatic posse, united in

skin color (Breton’s ‘great black poetry’). Instead, Césaire goes fishing for a corrosive

tongue.”173 Négritude need not be the trope for surrealist or Sartrian ideology – it could

stand alone as a complex and shifting ideology.

Fortunately, the “communal identity” that Césaire imagined in his Cahier was beginning to take form in Paris - a Pan-African dialogue and new African voice began to

develop. Most significantly, a mixture of the diasporic and French intelligentsia,

including Diop, Sartre, Gide, and Wright, participated in the 1947 literary creation of the

journal Présence Africaine. According to Jules-Rosette, this moment constituted a

“transformation of the literary landscape”; she also notes that the journal “encouraged a

conception of the world based on the dialectics of oppression and affirmation.”174 This

redefinition of the colonial literary subject and literary colonizer invokes the terminology

of colonization and quite literally re-yokes the language. By the mid-1950s, France’s

colonial empire was disintegrating. France first lost Indochina embarrassingly in 1954 at

the battle of Dien Bien Phu and then immediately engaged in a failed attempt to keep

Algeria. The end of French colonialism brought together the scattered subjects of

colonialism as well as African-American writers in residence in Paris. This included

African-American Richard Wright, another prominent figure in Parisian and American

173 Edwards, 33-35.174 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, introduction to Black Paris, 2, 7.



literary circles.175 In 1956, the Congress of Negro Artists and Writers in Paris brought

together black Americans and black French intellectuals – including Wright – leading to

controversial debate on the relationship of African-American identity to post-colonial

African identity. As Léopold Senghor wrote of Paris in the late 1940s:

Naturally Paris is small…at least for black intellectuals, who always endup meeting each other either in the Latin Quarter or at Saint-Germain-des-Près. This is how I made contact with a number of second-generation black intellectuals during the German occupation. This is how after theSecond World War, Présence Africaine was born.176

The physical proximity of these different players necessitates a dialogue between

the translators and translated, critic and musician, and colonizer and colonized. It was inthis social and linguistic context that Vian began his own interrogation of identity

politics. He challenged previous dialogues amongst the intermediaries, translators and

black writers of African and African-American works. This African Francophone

community’s experiences with the white Parisian intelligentsia would have been easily

observed and experienced by Vian. He was a part of a unprecedented conversation and all

the while, was inundated by American news articles, listening to new records of a

constantly improvising jazz form, and talking to African-American writers, performing

with African-American jazz musicians. It is this context that Boris Vian unseats his own

identity and begins to improvise.

175 The extent to which he and Vian were acquainted remains unknown. As historian JamesCampbell recounts, there is evidence for some relationship, though most likely in literary and translationalterms: “Did Vian read Native Son?...Native Son would not be published in its French translation until

several months after the appearance of the pseudo-American novel [ I Spit on Your Graves], but Vian readEnglish and was up to date in things American – especially Afro-American – and it seems unlikely that hewould have ignored the major work of the black American everyone was talking about. In fact, hetranslated a fifty-page story by Wright for the French-African journal Présence Africaine, ‘Bright andMorning Star’, which came out in the same month as J’irai cracher .” Sartre figured prominently in bothVian and Wright’s lives in Paris, so a documented friendship between the two seems likely; however,“neither man recorded any comment on the other. Vian, tall and handsome and up to the minute ineverything, might even have regarded Wright as a bit of a vieux jeu, a ‘square’.” Campbell, Paris Interzone,19-20.

176 Leopold Senghor quoted from a 1960 letter in Kesteloot, 235.



Black Like Boris

“We didn’t say a thing. We just stood there on the corner in Harlem dumbfounded – notknowing now which way we’d been fooled. Were they really white – passing for colored?Or colored – passing for white?”177 – Langston Hughes

Consideration of a transcontinental dialogue, nearly a decade later, between black

and white Americans reveals the significance of Vian’s relationship to black identity. In

1957, New York hipster and writer Norman Mailer published “The White Negro” in the

journal Dissent . He took a controversial stance on the identity politics at play between the

white bohemian ‘hipster’ and the “Negro”:In such places as Greenwich Village, a ménage-a-trois was completed –the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was thewedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gaveexpression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least allwho were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the Negro who brought the cultural dowry.178

Mailer’s choice of language has particular bearing in this discussion, as it contrasts so

fundamentally with Vian’s linguistic choices. Mailer speaks immediately to a sexualized

element in identity construction, choosing the “ménage-a-trois” as the emblematic

structure of race relations. Additionally, he refers to the “cultural dowry” brought by

black people, limiting the contributions of black culture to artistic accomplishments.

However, given the relationship between “hipsters” and the “Negro,” in which white

youth metaphorically and literally tried on the clothing, language styles and music of the

black community, this metaphor is appropriate. The “cultural dowry” of the black

177 Langston Hughes, “Who’s Passing for Who?”, in Laughing to Keep From Crying (New York:Henry Holt, 1952), 7.

178 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” originally “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections onthe Hipster,” Dissent 4:3 (Summer, 1957): 276-93. Quoted here in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History,ed. Robert Walser, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 244.



community was the muse that gave the Beat writer his inspiration. Additionally, Mailer’s

analysis excludes the fundamental differences between the social marginalization that

black and white people experienced. As Campbell writes,

Mailer was right to insist in his essay that the hipster took his key, his beat, from the Negro, and that the two shared a place on the margin of asociety which, though free, constantly threatened them. He omitted tostress a crucial distinction, however: the hipster refused to acceptconventional society; the Negro was refused by it. Mailer’s essay is bursting with insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He didnot pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all this white Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris, Baldwin, whom he began tosee regularly back in New York, was about to inform him.179

This distinction is one that Vian understood and one that American expatriate JamesBaldwin would explicate further in his essay, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.”

Baldwin writes of the problematic racial structures that facilitated the Beat Generation’s

interest in blackness Mailer’s essay, all the while pointing to the friendship Baldwin

maintained with Mailer. However, he is openly critical of other Beat writers, such as Jack

Kerouac.180 Baldwin writes directly of the Beat writers’ appropriation of black language,

used in order to explicate their hip identity:

But why should it be necessary to borrow the Depression language ofdeprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, inorder to justify such a grim system of delusions? Why malign the sorelymenaced sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white man’s ownsexual panic?181

179

Campbell, Paris Interzone, 258.180 “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in theDenver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was notenough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night… I wished I were aDenver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man"disillusioned….There was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life thatknows nothing of disappointment and ‘white sorrows’ and all that.” Jack Kerouac, On the Road (NewYork: Viking Press, 1957), 180.

181 James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Literary Classics, 1998), 278.



Baldwin responds to the sexualization of racial identity at work in Mailer’s essay,

referring to the white “sexual panic” in the face of intellectual emasculation. He criticizes

Mailer’s appropriation of “Depression language” – Mailer the hipster ‘speaks black’ to

explain his ‘oppressed’ existence – a move which Baldwin sees as delusional.

Like Sartre, Mailer sees in the black male a force that is absent in his own life and

seeks this “sperm” to reinvigorate his own social construct, with its limitations and

liberties. Baldwin continues by describing a reaction of a black musician to Mailer:

‘Man,’ said a Negro musician to me once, talking about Norman, ‘the onlytrouble with that cat is that he’s white’…What my friend meant was that

to become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneselfup as one went along. This had to be done in the not-at-all metaphoricalteeth of the world’s determination to destroy you. The world had preparedno place for you, and if the world had its way, no place would ever exist. Now, this is true for everyone, but, in the case of a Negro, this truth isabsolutely naked: if he deludes himself about it, he will die.182

Baldwin writes that to be black, “one had to make oneself up as one went along,” a

strategy that evokes the terminology and structure of jazz, in particular improvisation. He

is situating the formation of black identity within the medium of jazz while never

ignoring the vividly described “teeth of the world’s determination to destroy you.”

Significantly, Baldwin’s strategy of black identity construction is articulated as a

performance, suggesting that identity must be performed. This suggestion is reminiscent

of Bechet’s own characterization of identity as an improvisational narrative, reiterating

the need to re-imagine black identity outside of an essentialized vision. It appears that

new “theses” of identity politics are necessarily improvised; this notion is akin to jazz

performance, a method that Vian, with his knowledge of jazz, could have realized.

182 Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” 279.



Baldwin’s essay is further contextualized by considering later explorations of

white people passing for black. Gayle Ward discusses the shifting identities of black and

white in her essay on John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. She notes many themes that

are also at work in Mailer’s essay:

The ‘depth’ of white male identity, which retains its social value despiteconscious efforts to depreciate it, contrasts in this narrative with the‘surface’ of black identity, which can be put on or taken off at will.Griffin’s experiment evokes anxiety because it takes for granted theseconditions of freedom; his passing ensues from a sovereignty over identityrather than from the exigencies of economic necessity or personalsafety.183

Mailer, Sartre, and Breton are all able to retain their social prominence and power despite performing and fictionalizing black identity. Echoing Baldwin’s concerns for the

significance of the danger inherent in being black, Ward notes the “exigencies” of

personal well-being which must be negotiated for black people, but which can be ignored

by white people who pass for black. Laura Browder similarly addresses the problematic

elements of Mailer’s essay, as well as the racial politics in the United States, which

render Mailer’s argument all the more difficult: “In ‘The White Negro,’ Mailer

depoliticized racial politics. During the height of the civil rights movement, he framed

blackness as an existential, rather than a political, condition.”184 Mailer’s essay echoes

Sartre’s work as it ignores the practical problems of constructing black identity and

forces it into the philosophical realm. This necessitates a consideration of the ethics of

metaphoric and physical passing, and of performing race, especially in the context of

historical performance of “blackness” in blackface and minstrelsy. As Caughie points

183 Gayle Ward, “White Identity in Black Like Me,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed.Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 162. She is referencing Richard Dyer’s essayon the social construction of whiteness and Griffin’s novel, Black Like Me. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29:3 (1998), 44-64 and John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (1961; Boston: Houghton, 1977).

184 Browder, 209.



out, “Even more than the term ‘performativity,’ passing signifies the risk of identity in

that the practice has social, economic, and even physical consequences. Passing can be

literally a matter of life and death. Thus, passing marks the site of an ethical choice.”185

The ethics of these decisions frame the experience of passing differently, for it is less a

matter of intellectual interest and more of personal necessity.

Additionally, though Mailer and Sartre admire black culture, their writings

reiterate an essentialized black identity. Ward also points to the ways that Griffin’s

autobiographical work evokes W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” in The Souls of

Black Folk , but absorbs it in significantly different ways:I have argued that in his experiment, Griffin internalizes something akin toDu Boisian double-consciousness. Yet whereas Du Bois describes acondition of ‘twoness,’ of internalized self-contradiction and self-striving,Griffin, in his contempt for the ‘Negroid’ face, relates a more literalizedsplitting of the self in two. As one of these selves panics, feeling perhapssomething of Du Boisian double-consciousness, the other, the ‘observer,’watches and records.186

Griffin’s experience of a black face enables him to react negatively to his blackness and

revert to the position most comfortable for him, that of the observing researcher. This

particular of “twoness” appears in Sartre and Breton’s own work, for there remains a

“false opposition between the white researcher’s theoretical apprehension and the black

subject’s non-thetic ‘experience’ or non-consciousness…unequipped to imagine black

people elaborating their own ontology of blackness.”187 Black identity, in Sartre and

Breton’s rendering, is only constructed by their white editorial position.

185 Pamela Caughie, Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (Urbana, Universityof Illinois Press, 1999), 5.

186 Ward, “White Identity in Black Like Me,” 166.187 Ward, “White Identity in Black Like Me,” 154.



In another piece on racial passing, Marion Rust utilizes feminist theorist Judith

Butler’s language of gender passing, substituting race for gender in a citation from

Butler: “As Judith Butler writes in regard to gender, passing ‘fully subverts the

distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the

expressive model of [race] and the notion of true [racial] identity.”188 Passing complicates

the dual consciousness of he or she who passes, and illustrates the absurdity in fixing race

and racial identity. According to Caughie, there is no ‘real’ behind the mask – indeed,

there is only the performance. Passing necessitates this conclusion, for “passing requires

that we read the performance rather than reading through it to expose the ‘real’ identity behind it.”189

One underlying question remains: is it possible to imagine that Vian, taking a

black voice, could in fact be talking back as the colonized voice or acting as the precursor

to the colonized’s own forthcoming “talking back”? Certainly, in these texts, Vian has

connected the limits of a white voice speaking black and the limitations of a colonized

black voice speaking back. Herein, the white voice that seeks to interpret blackness is

simultaneously limited and liberated, just as the black voice is constrained and freed. To

achieve such a parallel construction, Vian seems to have inherited the discourse of

European intellectualism as well as that of Himes, jazz, and the African-American

community he met in Paris. Vian, with his history of subverting fixed dialectical

structures and essential ‘truths,’ brings a fuller understanding of imminent danger present

in a black person’s struggle to live in the world to his own struggles for self-identity.

Baldwin suggests Vian’s work is significantly different from Mailer’s essay, writing that:

188 Marion Rust, “The Subaltern as Imperialist: Speaking of Oloudah Equiano,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), n. 2, 36.

189 Caughie, 6.



“In spite of the book’s [ J’irai cracher sur vos tombes’s] naïveté, Vian cared enough

about his subject to force one into a confrontation with a certain kind of anguish. The

book’s power comes from the fact that he forces you to see this anguish from the

undisguised viewpoint of his foreign, alienated one.”190 Vian recognized his foreignness

in relationship to African-American music and identity, but nevertheless, seeks to

elucidate the black experience and inform his reading public. Baldwin finds a “power” in

the performance of black identity through the lens of a white author, rendering Vian’s

alienation and “otherness” as an element of black identity. When Vian’s otherness is a

part of the definition of black identity, blackness is no longer fixed at a certain point, ormore particularly, at a necessary disadvantage.

Within the context of these theoretical, literary, and real relationships, one can

begin to question the ways in which Boris Vian may have been responding to his

contemporaries and perhaps, para-textually anticipating the varying dialogues that would

ensue. Vian responds with a non-essentialist understanding of blackness, emphasizing

this agenda with his own passing as black, as well as the ways that he enters into the

black struggle, imagining yet not appropriating it for himself. Vian manages to both

respect the ways in which he will never understand or be black but also undermine the

constricting notion that to be black is essentially something. He believes that blackness is

socially constructed but also recognizes his inability to be socially construed as black. As

theorist Paul Gilroy notes, “in leaving racial essentialism behind by viewing ‘race’ itself

as a social and cultural construction, it has been insufficiently alive to the lingering power

of specifically racialised forms of power and subordination.”191 Indeed, Vian’s writings

190 James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work , 39.191 Gilroy, 32.



writes, in the “antiphony” of jazz, “lines between self and other are blurred and special

forms of pleasure are created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are

established between one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished racial self and others.”194

Vian performs his own “fractured” racial self and through it, acknowledges the fractures

and silences in history, which aided in the creation of other racial selves.

Through jazz, he is able to experience this performance first-hand, in a ‘real’

performance space and medium. Jazz was and remains a complicated form of

representation in which efforts to break from an essentialist performance of identity are

both constructed and freed by the form itself. Within a performance, there are structuresand rules that one must innovate within, improvising and stylizing a performance that

adheres to these regulations, yet also asserts an individuality. This performative space

also legitimizes the ‘trying on’ of other roles, faces, races, for the audience expects such

behavior. Finally, there is an element of risk in performance, for the performer must

exhibit this new self in front of an audience that judges. Black voice carried the baggage

of racial essentialism, enslavement, colonization, and racism many times across the

Atlantic, never freed from it in its articulation. For Gilroy, music works to depose

language and textuality as the "preeminent expressions of human consciousness."195 He

writes of Du Bois, who “places black music as the central sign of black cultural value,

integrity, and autonomy…The Souls is the place where slave music is signaled in its

special position of privileged signifier of black authenticity.”196 Vian complicates the Du

Boisian notion of musical authenticity; for him, this form becomes not that which

signifies the authentic but that through which he questions black authenticity. Gilroy

194 Gilroy, 79.195 Gilroy, 74.196 Gilroy, 90-91.



speaks to the “signifying practices” within jazz - the antiphony, improvisation, imitation,

gesturing, mask, and costume. These signifying practices find and express freedom,

calling and responding to the possibilities within the form. Jazz as a medium for

understanding black “cultural value” is especially valuable in this discussion, for it is also

the medium through which Vian comes to an appreciation of black culture and mediates

his own identity. Through Vian, we see that there can be an authentic performance but

there need not be an essential identity that performs; rather, as Gilroy suggests, there is a

“need to make sense of musical performances in which identity is fleetingly

experienced.”

197

With jazz as the slippery ‘ground’ and formal strategy of identity, the performance of self can continue without constraint. Given the construct of jazz, one

understands Vian’s attraction to it – indeed, it legitimized his plays with language,

identity, and culture.

In his autobiography, Bechet questioned the kinds of queries he received from

others about what black music really was:

People come up to me and they say, ‘What’s Negro music? What is itreally being?’ I have to tell them there’s no straight answer to that. If Icould give them a straight answer, just in one sentence like, I wouldn’thave to say all this I’m saying. You can’t say that just out straight. There’sno answer to that question, not just direct. You could come up to me andsay ‘What’s an American? What’s a Frenchman?’ How do you answer athing like that?198

Indeed, you cannot. The borders between American and French, black and white, ‘real’

and ‘unreal’ are blurred. Vian passed through these borders, fictionalizing and

improvising as he went, never arriving at a fixed place, race, or identity.

197 Gilroy, 78.198 Bechet, 204.



APPENDIX A: Photographs


Figure 1: Boris Vian as a young man.

Internet on-line. Available from http://melior.univ-montp3.fr/ra_forum/eo/vian_boris/dizertonto.html [7/29/02].


Figure 2 : Vian with his trumpet.Photo from Freddy de Vree, Boris Vian: Essai (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1965).

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]Figure 3: Vian with Abadie’s orchestra.Photograph from Freddy de Vree, Boris Vian: Essai (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1965)


Figure 4: “LouLou Guionet, Gus, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, Michelle Léglise-Vian, François

Chevais et Alain Vian au Prix du Tabou.”Photo in Manuel de Saint Germain des Prés, 208.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]Figure 5: Cover of the first edition of J’irai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes.


Figure 6 : Vian near the time of the J’irai cracher sur vos tombes scandal.

“Et Vian! En Avant la zizique: Textes et chansons de Boris Vian.” Internet on-line. Available onhttp://www.nice-coteazur.org/francais/culture/theatre/tdn/99/etvian.html.


Figure 7: Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, Michele Léglise-Vian, and Simone de Beauvoir.

“Qui est Boris Vian,” Internet on-line. Available from http://www.kiss.qc.ca/Forteresse/BioVian.html.


Figure 8 from Jean Clouzet’s Boris Vian (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1957).



APPENDIX B: Samples of Les Temps Modernes


Figure 9: Editorial page for the first issue of Les Temps Modernes.


Figure 10: Table of Contents for the first issue of Les Temps Modernes.


Figure 11: The final issue of the Black Boy series in Les Temps Modernes.


Figure 12: The “U.S.A.” issue of Les Temps Modernes.



APPENDIX C: Newspaper Accounts


Figure 13: Vian’s obituary in the New York Times (June 23, 1959).



REFERENCES

Works Cited

Primary Sources by Boris Vian

Sullivan, Vernon [Boris Vian]. J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. Paris: Editions duScorpion, 1946. I Spit on Your Graves, translated by Vian and Milton Rosenthal.Paris: Vendome Préss, 1948. Copy used for reference was translated by Vian butis a more recent edition, introduced by Marc Lapprand. Los Angeles: TamTamBooks, 1998.

Vian, Boris. Autres Écrits sur le Jazz, Tome I (Other Writings on Jazz, Volume I). Edited by Claude Rameil. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981.

________. Blues for a black cat & other stories. Translated and edited by Julia Older.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

________. Chroniques de Jazz. Compiled and edited by Lucien Malson. Paris: La JeuneParque, 1967; Société Nouvelle des Éditions Pauvert, 1996.

________. Chroniques du Menteur (Chronicles of the Liar). Edited by Noel Arnaud.Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974.

________. Manuel de saint germain des prés. Presented and edited by Noël Arnaud.Paris : Chêne, 1974.

________. Round About Close to Midnight: The Jazz Writings of Boris Vian. Translatedand edited by Mike Zwerin. London: Quartet, 1988.

Other Primary Sources

Baldwin, James. The Devil Finds Work . New York: Dial, 1976.

Baldwin, James. “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” In James Baldwin: Collected Essays. New York: Literary Classics, 1998.

Barry, Joseph A. “A Literary Letter from Paris.” New York Times, 23 July 1950, BR8.

Bechet, Sidney. Treat it Gentle: An Autobiography. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Edited, translated, andintroduction by Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad Press, 1978.



Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land). Translated by Emil Snyders. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1968.

Clouzet, Jean. Boris Vian. Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1957.

Delaunay, Charles. “Delaunay in Trenches, Writes ‘Jazz Not American.’” Translated byWalter E. Schapp. Downbeat (May 1, 1940): 6-19 quoted in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. Edited by Robert Walser. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk . In Three Negro Classics. Introduction by JohnHope Franklin. New York: Avon Books, 1965; Bard, 1999.

Himes, Chester. The Autobiography of Chester Himes: Vol. 2, My Life of Absurdity. NewYork: Paragon House, 1971-72; 1976.

Hughes, Langston. “Who’s Passing for Who?” In Laughing to Keep From Crying . NewYork: Henry Holt, 1952.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road . New York: Viking Press, 1957.

Les Temps modernes (Paris). 1945 - 1949.

Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” In Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed.Robert Walser, 242-246. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

McKay, Claude. Banjo: A Story Without a Plot . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929; 1957.

Peyre, Henri. The Contemporary French Novel . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.Reprint, French Novelists of Today. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Queneau, Raymond. Forward to L’Arrache-Cœur (Heartsnatcher ). By Boris Vian and translated by Stanley Chapman. Paris: Pro-Francia Vrille, 1953; London: Rappand Whiting, 1968.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “American Novelists in French Eyes,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1946:114-115.

Sartre, Jean Paul. “Orphée Noir.” Originally a preface to Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie

nègre et malgache de langue française. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1948. “Black Orpheus.” Translated by S.W. Allen. Paris: Présence Africaine,1976.

Smith, Thelma M. and Ward L. Miner. Transatlantic Migration: The Contemporary American Novel in France. Durham: Duke University Press, 1955.

“Watch and Word in Paris,” Newsweek , 24 February 1947, 104.



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New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.Arnaud, Noël. Les vies parallèles de Boris Vian. Paris : Bourgois, 1981; Paris: Union

Générale d’Editions, 1970.

Beevor, Anthony and Artemis Cooper. Paris After the Liberation: 1944 – 1949. NewYork: Doubleday, 1944.

Bennett, Juda. The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature . New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Boschetti, Anna. The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes.Translated by Richard C. McCLeary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1988.

Brandon, Ruth. Surreal Lives: The Surrealists, 1917-1945. New York: Grove Press,1999.

Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Butler, Judith. “Introduction to Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ ” InWomen, Autobiography and Theory: A Reader , ed. Sidonie Smith and JuliaWatson, 367 – 379. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

Campbell, James. Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank, 1946-60. London: Secker and Warburg, 1994.

Campbell, James. “Sullivan, the invisible man.” Review of Philippe Boggio’s Boris Vian.Times Literary Supplement, 28 January 1994, 7.

Caughie, Pamela L. Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility. Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Cismaru, Alfred. Boris Vian. New York: Twayne, 1974.

De Vree, Freddy. Boris Vian: Essai. Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1965.

Diawara, Manthia. "Situation I: Sartre and African Modernism." In In Search of Africa,1-11. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.



Edwards, Brent Hayes. "The Ethnics of Surrealism." Transition 8, no. 2, issue 78 (1999):84-135.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American writers in France, 1840-1980 .Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

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Goddard, Chris. Jazz Away from Home. New York and London: Paddington Press, 1979.

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Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French ( Les écrivains noirs de langue française).Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Brussels: Editions de l’Institut deSociologie, 1963; Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974.

Knight, Arthur. “ Jammin’ the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944.” In Representing Jazz,ed. Krin Gabbard, 11-53. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

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