Boris Vian

French · 1920 to 1959

Born on March 10, 1920, in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Ville d'Avray to Paul Vian, a young rentier, and Yvonne Ravenez, an amateur pianist who named her son after the Mussorgsky opera she had just seen, Boris Vian inherited from his father a distrust of the church and the army and a taste for the bohemian life. Rheumatic fever at twelve left his parents overprotective and his heart permanently damaged. At Lycée Hoche in Versailles he and his brothers threw what they called surprise-parties, dosed sometimes with peyote, that would become the material of his early novels. He took degrees in mathematics and engineering, joined the standards bureau AFNOR by day, and at night played jazz trumpet at the Club Saint-Germain alongside Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, whom he met as their Paris liaison. Under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan he published a hoax pulp novel, I Will Spit on Your Graves (1946), passed off as a translation from a Black American writer; it was prosecuted for obscenity and made him notorious. Froth on the Daydream (1947), the surreal love story of Colin and Chloé in a world where a water lily blooms in her lung, was the book he cared about. He wrote the anti-war song Le Déserteur in 1954, banned from French radio during the Algerian war. On the morning of June 23, 1959, at the Marbeuf cinema, Vian was watching the unauthorised film version of I Will Spit on Your Graves. He had publicly denounced the production. A few minutes in, he muttered an insult at the actors and slumped forward, dead of cardiac arrest at thirty-nine.