V is for Vian

Encyclopedie

Dear Friends,

I’ve recently finished a novel that I’m pretty excited about. As seems to be my habit, I’m sharing short essays on some of the themes that came up while I was working on the book.

Best,

Sam

V IS FOR VIAN

If there’s one writer you may well not have heard of but should definitely read, that writer is Boris Vian.

Vian rose to prominence actually as a jazz trumpeter. He was a friend of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, the critical musical inspiration for Serge Gainsbourg, and in his short novels — L’Écume des Jours (Froth on the Daydream) and J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Will Piss On Your Graves) are the most famous — Vian found, I believe, an entirely new way to write novels. And he died the superlative, the only truly honorable death of a writer — he had a heart attack while denouncing the film adaptation of his own book.

So what was Vian’s achievement? He seemed to realize that the field of gravity in a novel is very different from the field of gravity in ‘reality’ — and that striking aesthetic effects can be achieved through a process of tweaking the laws of nature of the world that the characters inhabit, as opposed to doing what most writers do and following a character’s journey through a basically stable reality. Vian put this insight into pithy form in L’Écume des Jours, writing, “People don’t change. Only things.”

This is the novel’s heartbreaking culmination — and it is, by the way, probably the saddest book I have ever read, which is all the more striking in that its sadness is achieved without any of the usual armature of tragedy or character development.

Everybody in L’Écume is a bit silly, operating according to the laws of a particularly foppish world running parallel to our own. Colin and Chick are young anglophones and jazz heads in post-war Paris. Colin’s interests are his clavicocktail — a wonderful contraption that mixes the ideal cocktail to accompany the jazz song you are playing — and his new cook, Nicholas, with his unutterably wonderful delicacies. Chick’s interest — much to his detriment — is a certain philosopher, Jean Pulse Heartre, of whom Chick is determined to procure every possible memento. At some point, it occurs to both Colin and Chick that they should fall in love — and they find partners who perfectly match themselves, Chloe for Colin and Alyssum for Chick.

The plot of L’Écume, basically, is that Colin and Chick eventually run out of money and have to get jobs. Chick’s penury is the more spectacular — he squanders everything he has and then runs up immense debts buying Heartre items. An unscrupulous bookseller sells him a pair of Heartre’s pants with pipe burns and drives him to complete ruination with a pipe with Heartre’s actual teeth indentations. Colin falls apart more prosaically — he just squanders all of his money. Little by little, he has to sell off his possessions, sell his clavicocktail, fire Nicholas (rarely in literature has the firing of one’s cook been such a tragic event). He takes a series of jobs, which, in a word, do not go well. One interview ends with the manager firing a pistol at Colin as he flees out the office door. One job, passing out eviction notices, ends on a low note when Colin “looked at the list and the next name on it was his own.”

Colin’s financial problems unfortunately coincide with a health crisis. On Colin and Chloe’s honeymoon, the glass of their bedroom window breaks. The glass doesn’t stitch itself back together in time — as glass usually does — and Chloe catches cold, which results in her developing a water-lily in her lung. The rest of the society turns out to be singularly unhelpful. The quack doctor Colin takes her to says, “At any rate if she follows my treatment she’ll probably get better.” “Probably,” Colin responds. “In any case I’ll send you my bill,” the doctor cheerily tells him.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever been as sad about the death of a fictional character as I am about Chloe, which is surprising because Chloe is, in normal literary terms, almost completely underdeveloped. She has virtually no identifying characteristics, is sort of simpering and sort of vapid. Her clear purpose is to live forever in the rose-tinted world of gadgets and romances that we are introduced to at the novel’s beginning, and, even more than the other characters, she is startled and terrified at the change in atmosphere that occurs around the novel’s midway point. “It’s not as light here as it used to be. What’s happening to everything?” one of her friends despondently remarks.

When Chloe dies, it is, the narrator observes, the first time Colin had been to a cemetery. “Chloe is dead and I am a pauper,” Colin says soon afterwards, which is, for me, one of the simplest, starkest expressions of grief in literature — like King Lear’s “O O O O,” like Priam descending to collect Hector’s body. There is no way forward from here for any of Vian’s characters; at some point, life just locks the doors shut.

What is happening is — from a plot and aesthetic point of view — not a character reaching a logical culmination of their journey, it is the world changing inexplicably around them. And since this is, also, what life primarily consists of — this is how youth ends — the emotional impact is overwhelming. Incidentally, what Vian does from a technical point of view matches up perfectly to two pieces of writing advice of Kurt Vonnegut’s. One is that a plot is a practical joke played on the characters; the other is that it should be done with the utmost cruelty — as is carried out maximally in the nasty tricks the narrative plays on Colin and his crew.

In a very wrongheaded New Yorker article on Vian, the writer expressed astonishment that L’Écume des Jours and J’rai cracher were written by the same person. To the New Yorker, it’s like discovering that “Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had updated 120 Days of Sodom…while working on The Little Prince.” But this misses a great deal of what’s happening in L’Écume. It is not some sunny Wes Anderson-ish fantasia. Yes, record players can also mix cocktails and the cook has a mouse friend that talks, but human life, even before the novel takes its dark turn, is at a noticeable discount. Here, in one of the better set pieces in the history of writing about philosophy, is the description of security measures for a lecture delivered by Heartre:

In the far distance the silhouette of Jean Pulse emerged from an armored howdah, under which the rough and wrinkled hide of the elephant took on a bizarre appearance in the glow of a red headlamp. At each corner of the howdah a hand-picked marksman, armed with an axe, stood at the ready. The elephant was striding its way through the crowd, and the fearsome plod of the four columns moving through the crushed bodies unrelentingly drew on. At the main gate the elephant knelt down and the specially selected marksmen got off. With a graceful leap, Heartre landed in their midst and, hacking out a path with tilted axes, the group made its way to the platform.

And Colin, by the way, is no kinder than the world around him. Here is how he deals with a somewhat slow-moving attendant at an ice skating rink:

The attendant dawdled along. Colin looked round, saw him ten yards behind and waited till he had caught him up. Taking brutal aim with his skate, he gave him a savage karate chop under the chin and the attendant’s head flew off and landed on the top of one of the ventilation shafts while Colin took the key which the body was still absentmindedly clutching in its hand.

Readers, by the way, have been perplexed that, for a novel written in 1946, the war is nowhere mentioned — the characters seem to exist in a limitless horizon of pleasures tempered only by money troubles — but, actually, the war is everywhere, it is the constant background, so pervasive that it is almost not worth noticing. Human life has simply dropped in value — whether at the ice skating rink or the Heartre lecture. When that happens, emphasis instead shifts somewhere else — to the intense, almost desperate hedonism that was such a noticeable part of wartime Paris, with everybody trying to live at the greatest possible height even with a full awareness of how quickly all pleasure can be snuffed out.

What accounts for the shared authorship of J’irai and L’Écume isn’t some split personality of Vian’s — it’s that both are animated by the same inner freedom, and by Vian’s ability to change the laws of gravity in his fictional worlds. This is something like ‘world-building,’ the Legolandish technique that came into literature mostly through sci-if and fantasy but needn’t be so techie-driven. If it’s possible, in literary fiction, to create characters and scenarios, it should be possible to create worlds as well — and worlds with entirely different laws of morality to our own. The real point is that the creative principle is primary — and limitless. In J’irai, Vian can — without having ever been in America — perfectly easily inhabit the consciousness of an American black man hellbent on revenge for American racism (although in a fictitious landscape that bears precious little resemblance to the actual American South). In L’Écume, he can create a completely different Paris, with no discernible war, with clavicocktails, and with philosophers arriving at lectures on elephants, with no police to worry about if one happens to decapitate a skating rink attendant — a world of constantly shifting ephemera where the absoluteness of death is the only steady constant.