Boris Vian

Boris Vian (Ville-d'Avray, 1920 – Paris, 1959) was a French polymath: a novelist, playwright, poet, jazz musician, engineer, translator and journalist. He wrote in French, and his fiction, marked by an inventive style and playful wordplay, remains one of the most distinctive voices of postwar Paris. He was also an important figure in the French jazz scene and in the intellectual life of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Born into a comfortable family, he suffered rheumatic fever as a boy, which left a lasting heart condition that shaped his health for the rest of his life. He trained as an engineer and worked for the French standards association, but his real passion was jazz, which he played on the trumpet first in amateur bands and later professionally. During the war he began writing novels drawn from the parties he organized with his brothers and from his life as an office worker.

In 1946 he published Froth on the Daydream, with invented words such as "pianocktail", a piano that produces cocktails matching the tune it plays, and with objects that respond to the characters' feelings. The book was a commercial failure at the time. That same year, wanting to prove he could write a bestseller, he published under the name of Vernon Sullivan, a fictional American author of hard-boiled crime, the novel I Spit on Your Graves. It sold well, but its violence and sexual content caused a scandal that dragged on through years of lawsuits. Vian eventually admitted authorship and was convicted of offending public morals. Critics felt deceived, and his more serious work also came under attack.

He moved in the circle of Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, wrote for Les Temps Modernes and Combat, and met musicians such as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. In 1950 he published The Red Grass, a highly autobiographical book, and in 1953 The Heartsnatcher, which sold poorly. He then largely left fiction behind and turned to songwriting, opera and records. His song "The Deserter", which urged refusal of military service during the Algerian conflict, was banned from radio and television for years.

His health worsened in the late 1950s. He appeared in films and kept writing songs to the end. He died in Paris in 1959, aged thirty-nine, of a heart attack suffered while he attended, incognito, a preview screening of the film adapted from his novel.

His reputation grew after his death. Books that had been little understood during his lifetime found readers, and he is now regarded as one of the most original French writers of the twentieth century. His widow founded associations to preserve his memory, and his songs, above all "The Deserter", are still linked with protest against war.