Black Like Boris:

Boris Vians Fictions of Identity in Post-World War II Paris

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Submitted to the Faculty of

Haverford Colleges Department of History
History 400: Senior Thesis Seminar

By
Celeste Day Moore
Haverford, PA
April 14, 2003

CONTENTS

PREFACE.i
SECTIONS
1. Introduction..1
2. A Vianesque Style8
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 the
collection of Michle Lglise-Vian, copied from Jean Clouzets 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 Vians 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 knew
how much I could love jazz.

Introduction
For Boris Vian is just setting out on the road to becoming Boris Vian Raymond
Queneau1
In the post-war world of Saint-Germain-des-Prs, 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 black
culture.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 Paris3 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-

Raymond Queneau, forward to LArrache-Cur (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-dAvray, raised by Paul and
Yvonne Vian. After receiving an engineering degree from lcole Centrale in Paris in 1942, he worked in a
bureaucratic position with lAssociation franaise de normalisation (A.F.N.O.R.), alleged to be preparing
norms for the glassmaking industry. In 1941, he married Michelle L glise, with whom he would have two
children 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 main
source of their income. Christopher M. Jones, Boris Vian Transatlantic: Sources, Myths, and Dreams (New
York: Peter Lang, 1998) 7, 32. See also Marc Lapprand, Boris Vian: la vie contre (Ottowa: Presses de
lUniversit dOttowa, 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
Stovalls 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 AfricanAmerican expatriate history is gleaned from his early chapters. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 133.

Germain-des-Prs,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 Vians 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 neighborhoods 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, Inez
Cavanaugh, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, and Marcel Duhamel to
name a few. Vian ends with the Catchisme [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 lexistentialiste, signs of existentialist behavior of the
Germano-pratins, juxtaposed with the tongue-in-cheek Emploi du temps de
lexistentialiste [Existentialists Schedule], which instructs one to attend the Flore caf
from three to six in the afternoon and go to the Tabou for the Bal Ngre on Saturday
nights.8 The original cover of the Manuel stated that it was a Texte souvenir sur la
naissance dune cave existentialiste, [Souvenir text on the birth of an existentialist
club] certainly an apt expression in light of the language Vian had employed.

Boris Vian, Manuel de saint germain des prs, presented and drawn up by Nol Arnaud (1950;
Paris: Chne, 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 Vians death.
Arnaud, Les vies parallles de Boris Vian (Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions, 1970), 596.
6
Vian, Manuel, 38.
7
Vian, Manuel, 286.
8
Vian, Manuel, 67.

Vians whimsical tone reveals not only the emergence of an institutionalized

avant-garde in St-Germain but also his discontent with his role within the communitys
structures. This piece is ripe with Vians 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 Vians
significance, painting him as merely the court-jester9 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 heard
them. 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 StGermain.

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 intellectual
type of 1940s St-Germain-des-Pres, such as Camus. Campbells other pieces on Vian offer a more
nuanced view of his intellect and significance, but this particular piece, he expresses a simplified
interpretation of Vian, which many of those focused only on Sartre and Camus might adhere to. James
Campbell, Sullivan, the invisible man, review of Philippe Boggios Boris Vian, Times Literary
Supplement, 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 communitys 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 artistic
movements of the 1920s ngrophilia 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 words 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 Picassos interest in African masks and lart ngre.
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 Zellis and the African-American
owned Bricktops. Josephine Baker took Paris by storm in her Revue Ngre, 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 (New
York: 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
Los 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 SaintGermain: It was as if theyd 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 cafs, 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 in
the 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 to
Paris 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 engage that many of his peers

16
17

Stovall, Music and Modernity, 45.

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 Jirai 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, French
intellectual hegemony, but most significantly, by complicating his audiences interest in
black music and writing. As Jacques Prvert wrote in the Manuels introduction, Boris
Vian nest pas un Diplomate, cest 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 Coopers 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 Vians obituary in the
New York Times, see Appendix C, Figure 1.
19
Boris Vian is not a Diplomat, he is an Acrobat. Prvert 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 Vians contemporary critics, the traduit de lamricain
has become a magical phrase in Paris and a quick-selling device for book publishers20
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 with
feverish impatience far beyond the crossroads of St. Germain-desPrsMonsieur Jean Paul Sartre, while smoking his pipe, has given them
his benediction, and all the adolescents who formerly looked to Gide,
Montherlant or Malraux now turn their eyes toward Texas and
Oklahoma.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 Srie Noire.22 This series, and American literary
developments in general, captured the attention of many French audiences with regular
releases: Between Duhamels Srie 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 DHalluin, the publisher of
20

Henri Peyre, The Contemporary French Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 263.
Additionally, French critic Robert Kanters also wrote, in todays style, just about anything is translated, as
if 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, Gods Little Acre (1933),
and Tobacco Road (1932). The other authors mentioned are, respectively, Andr Gide, Henry de
Montherlant, and Andr Malraux. Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner, Transatlantic Migration: The
Contemporary 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.

ditions du Scorpions, was inspired to publish romans noirs as well. In August of 1946,
DHalluin challenged Vian to write such a crime novel in a fortnight.24 Rising to the
challenge, Vian completed Jirai 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,
LEcume des jours [Froth on the Daydream],26 through it achieving runner-up position
in the popular literary contest, the Prix de la Pliade, in June of 1946. His success clearly
marked him for dHalluins eyes, as did Vians own arrogance; before writing, he is
reported to have said to Georges dHalluin: A best seller? Give me ten days and I shall
manufacture one for you.27
Jirai 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 brothers 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 [Sullivans] 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 DHalluin through his brother, Georges dHalluin, who played with Vian in
Charles Abadies orchestra. According to Cismaru, Jean dHalluins Editions was in deep financial
trouble. Cismaru, 28.
25
Vernon Sullivan [Boris Vian], Jirai cracher sur vos tombes (Paris: Editions du Scorpion,
1946); Vian, I Spit on your Graves, trans. Vian and Milton Rosenthal (Paris: Vendome Prss, 1948. The
following English passages from the novel are from Vians 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 Parallles, 163.
28
Vian, Preface to Jirai 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.
Jirai cracher was banned in 1950 after pages of it were found at the crime scene of a
murder in Montparnesse; more controversy ensued after Vians own trial for falsifying
the authorship.31 This trial did not damper sales nor Vians spirit; instead, he displayed
blatant insolence in the minds of the Cartel dAction Sociale et Morale that tried him:
In an article for the daily Combat, Vian recounted that all the witnesses
were asked whether they would put his books into the hands of their
children. It seems, Vian commented, that the witnesses had nothing
more important to do in life but to rush up to their children with their arms
loaded with realistic novels. As for himself, Vian confessed, despite his
perverse desire to force his son, Patrick, to read Henry Miller and the
Marquis de Sade, the 8-year-old boy stuck stubbornly to his comic books
and 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 Vians career.
The other novels Les Morts ont tous la mme 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.

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 Roug kills
his concubine. Next to the corpse, the police find a coy of Jirai cracher sur vos tombes opened to the
passage when the hero also kills his mistress. Vernon Sullivan is immediately described by the press as an
indirect assassin, and the President of the Cartel dAction Sociale et Morale introduces a lawsuit against the
author. 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 1950
the government officially forbids further sales of the book, and in the following year Vian is sentenced for
affront 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.
30

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, Vians 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 dAction Sociale et Morale (the Parisian
Watch and Ward Society) is an American ngre blanc whose nom de
plume is Vernon Sullivan and whose first, semi-autobiographical novel is
Jirai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes literally, I Shall Spit on Your
GravesSullivan, as a result, now shares top French popularity with
such Americans as Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, and
Horace McCoy, author of the hard-boiled They Shoot Horses, Dont
They? A 26-year-old mulatto from Chicago, Sullivan met Jean dHalluin,
founder of Le Scorpion press, while he was still a GI last spring.
DHalluin read his tale of a Negro who turns criminal after his father is
lynched, and signed a contract for exclusive first rights to all Sullivans
writing. Sullivan, under his own name (which his publisher has agreed not
to disclose), now is in New York earning a living as a translator in order to
go on writing like James M. Cain, his obvious inspiration.33
The article identifies Vians 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 fathers lynching, rather than his brothers death. These
mistakes indicate the extent to which such a literary figure would be possible in the
imagination of Newsweeks 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 hardboiled crime fiction genre. Vian does acknowledge the influence of Cain in his editorial preface to the
novel, in which he says: We meet, besides, in these pages, the extremely clear influence of Cain. Vian,
Preface, Jirai 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 Faulkners Light in August, translated to French in 1935, depicted a character
named Joe Christmas as a mulatto passing for white. Faulkners work had influenced
many French writers and his name certainly a recognizable one for Vian.34 Vian knew of
Richard Wrights novels and short stories, some of which he had translated, which
alongside Faulkners 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 Henri
Magnans article in Le Monde.35 Additionally, African American expatriate Claude
McKays novel Banjo: A Story Without A Plot, published in 1929, included a description
of lynching that may well have influenced Vians own treatment of the subject.36
Vians 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 Asburys article in
Colliers 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, Sartres article in an Atlantic article in 1947 described the influence of
Faulkner on the writing style of Mme. De Beauvoir. Jean-Paul Sartre, American Novelists in French
Eyes, 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 would
criticize Vians own criticism of the Algerian war, writing that Vian was spitting on tombs that were still
fresh. Cismaru, 20.
36
McKay writes: I seen [a lynching] down in Dixie. And it was own lil brother. Jest when he
was a-growing out of a boy into a man and the juice of life was ripening a pink temptation kept right on
after him and wouldnt let be until he was got and pulled the way of the rope. Claude McKay, Banjo: A
Story 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 of
race relations in America, and likely was read by Vian. Cismaru, 29.

everwidening stream of black blood to the white native stock.38 This figure painted a
significant picture for Vian, for the phenomenon of passing seemed not only culturally
fascinating, but also imminently relevant. Asbury and others concerns about passing
were rooted in their own understanding of race, which depended upon the one-drop
rule, stating that one-drop of Negro blood makes a person a Negro.39 The
overarching American concern for this issue of color lines, and the possibility of
traversing them, was also articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois; in his The Souls of Black Folk,
he writes that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.40
Vian writes in his preface that Sullivan told him that he considered himself more as a
nigger than a white man, in spite of having passed the line; we know that every year,
several thousand Negroes (thus designated by law), disappear from the census lists and
pass to the opposite camp.41 This evocation of Asburys article demonstrates Vians
familiarity with American news commentary and concerns.
Jazz musicians also brought tales of racism and violence to Paris, giving Vian a
greater sense of indignation. Finally, the genealogical growth of the name of Vernon
Sullivan indicates the influences on Vians sense of African American culture.
According to biographer and critic Nol Arnaud, several black figures in Vians life
constituted the namesake: Vernon, because of Paul Vernon, who is today a dental
38

Herbert Asbury, Who is a Negro?, Colliers, 3 August 1946 According to Jones, Michel
Rybalka notes that this influence was specifically noted in the original publication of Jirai cracher sur vos
tombes. Jones, 107. According to Cismaru, Vian subscribed to the popular American magazine. Cismaru,
29.
39
Bennett notes that role gained acceptance in most states during the 19th century and was
uniformly accepted by the 1920s. Juda Bennett, The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern
American Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 5. Another African-American novelist, George
Schuyler wrote a satire of passing in his 1930 novel Black No More, in which he depicts two black
scientists who discover the formula for whiteness. Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic
Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 283 n. 26.
40
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk in Three Negro Classics (New York: Avon Books,
1965; Bard, 1999), 209.
41
Vian, Preface, Jirai cracher, xi.

surgeon, but at that time studying pharmacology, and brown musician of Claude
Abadies 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 Vians interest in
the tragic mulatto who could passe-blanc in white America.
Jirai 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 you
with that voice of yours and a girl notes, Hes got a voice just like Cab Calloways.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 Lees
white female conquests, says to him:
Ive never heard singers or guitarists with a voice like yours. I have heard
a voice that yours reminds me of, yes, it was back in Haiti. Some black men.
Well, thats really a compliment. I said. Theyre just about the best
musicians you can find.
Oh dont talk nonsense.
Its not nonsense. Theyre the source of all American music, I said.
I dont think so. All the big dance orchestras are whites.
Of course the whites are in a better position to exploit the Negros
inventions.44
Lou connects something in Lees 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, cause de Paul Vern aujourdhui chirurgien-dentiste, alors tudient en pharmacie, et

musicien marron de lorchestre Claude Abadie: Sullivan, cause de Joe Sullivan, pianiste de jazz, un des
meilleurs du style Chicago. Arnaud, Vies Parallles, 153.
43
Vian, Jirai 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, for
example.
What about Gershwin, Kern, and all of those.
Theyre all immigrants from Europe, I said: Theyre the ones best able
to envelop it. But I dont think youd find a single original passage anywhere in
Gershwins work one that hasnt been copied or plagiarized. Just try and find
one in the Rhapsody in Blue, for example.
Youre 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 dont 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 ngresse who runs a brothel, and most intriguing, workers
45

Ibid., 95.
J.K.L. Scott, From Dreams to Despair: An Integrated Reading of the Novels of Boris Vian
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 152.
47
Vian, Jirai cracher, 5.
46

in plantations owned by Lou and Jeans parents. Lou and Jeans 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 than
theirs. They owned a flock of sugar-cane plantations in the West Indies
and, 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 Lees death, and though he dies by gunfire and in many ways by his
own 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 townspeoples notion of black identity he is in his final
incarnation marked only by his sexual identity. The complexities of Lees racially mixed
identity are erased as his sexuality persists beyond his life.
In Jirai 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 Sullivans 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 readers 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.
Ibid., 36.
50
Ibid., 177.
49

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 in
which siblings are also mysteriously prominent, set in a world of jazz,
whisky, drugs, and film-noir existentialism. Passing is connected not to
assimilation but to blood vengeance. The absurdity of racial lines and their
violent consequences for the characters are placed into the foreground of
the fictionalization of passing Literary hoaxes such as the anonymous
publication of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and the
invention of the author Vernon Sullivan suggest the possibilities of
connecting the theme of passing to formal plays with truth-telling and
authenticity, as James Weldon Johnson and Boris Vian play hide and seek
with their readers expectation of an authentic identity of the author even
in 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 AfricanAmerican 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 Vians 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 the
young Chester Himes. The theme of tragic miscegenation runs through his
early works. Both If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade
revolve around a black male protagonist who is manipulated, seduced, and
then destroyed by a cunning white woman. Such tortured relationships
could end only in violence. The Primitive (1955) depicts the murder of a
white 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.

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.
53

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 that
a 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 Jirai cracher sur vos tombes, Vian was
fully engaged in the black Parisian musical community. According to black expatriate
James Baldwin, Vians involvement in jazz was the foundation of Vians cultural
resonance in his novels: What informs Vians 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 streets56 These
streets, people, and bars, like the Tabou and the Club Saint-Germain,57 were indeed the
physical elements of Vians 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, AfricanAmerican, 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 by
Mike Zwerin. Vian, Half a Century of Jazz (1), La Parisienne (February 1953) in Vian, Round About
Close 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 StGermain.

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-gardes 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 flneur 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 flneur, the consumption of jazz functions as a brute
stimulant of, rather than as an aesthetic exemplar for, the modernist
production that follows upon it. The shower from this noise has woken us
so that we can now produce a different noiseIn 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, violenceParadoxically, 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 AvantGarde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 103.
59
Cocteau, Jean, 1946-51, La Jeunesse et le scandale, in Oeuvres Compltes, v. IX (Lausanne:
Marguerat), 141 quoted in Gendron, 97.
60
Vian, Whats 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 the
instrument due to his weak heart. He described this experience of Ellingtons 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 Abadies 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
Gillespies 1948 performance and the 1949 International Jazz Festival, in which Charlie
Parker and Sidney Bechet played. The latter concerts 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 of
his life. Cismaru, 15. The other great moments were also concerts one with Dizzy Gillespie in 1948 and
the other with Ella Fitzgerald in 1952. Vian, Jazz Hot (June 1952), 17, quoted in Cismaru, 16-17. For a
photograph of Vian with Abadies 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 caf 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 Calloways 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 Lattaque
de train.65 This generation of youth was generally middle-class, prompting heavy
criticism 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 done
over a decade before, to celebrate Sikis 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: Cooper
Square Press, 2000), 147.
67
Emmanuelle Rioux, Les zazous: un phnomne socio-culturel pendant loccupation (masters
thesis, Universit de Paris X, Nanterre, 1987), 164, quoting from an interview with George Guetary, 20
December 1986, quoted in Shack, 123.

actors in extravagant dress rehearsal for a grand finale, like clusters of

Bojangles 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 Vians 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 Georges
Carpentier. Shack, 123.
69
In this text, Scott examines the causes everyday peasant resistance, rather than open revolt this
work was based on his anthropological fieldwork in Malaysia in the late 1970s. Resistance is rooted in
every 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 Panassi 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. Delaunay
founded 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, nor
American!...Jazz is much more than an American music it is the first
universal music. It may be termed international because, instead of
addressing itself solely to the mind (which is dependent on national
tradition and culture), it speaks directly to the hearts of men (who, when
the fictions of education, tradition, and nation are ignored, are very
similar, 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 complte indiffrence aux graves problmes de lheure qui ntaient graves au fond
que pour ceux qui en sont morts. Arnaud, Vies parallles, 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. Robert
Walser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131.

bearing on listeners. Panassi, 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 Panassis jazz criticism, which Goddard terms as one
exhibiting disastrous conservatism.74 Panassi 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, Panassi 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 has
greater talent than civilized man. An excess of culture atrophies
inspiration, and men crammed with culture tend too much to play tricks, to
replace inspiration by lush technique, under which we find music stripped
of real vitality.76
The vitality Panassi 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 Panassi 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.
Panassi quoted in Goddard, 153.
76
Panassi quoted in Goddard, 154.
77
Stovall, Paris Noir, 174.
75

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 the
revolutionary changes in jazz musical form in the 1940s, nor to
rehabilitate the Dixieland revival, but rather to highlight the crucial role of
what 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 of
the jazz discursive terrain a new construction of the aesthetic discourses
of 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 Panassis 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.
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
79

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. Vians 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 numerous
occasions to the querelle between Panassi and Delaunay, saving his harshest criticism
for Panassi, or as Vian referred to him, the clown of Montauban, Pain-ass-i or a
walking insult.85 Unlike Panassi, 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 the
situation well enough to see that jazz is only undergoing a normal, logical,
inevitable evolution. Because one thing is certain: the definition of the
word is not divided by any date, everything before begin real jazz and all
that 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 Panassi, Vian did not
hear a missing vitality in newer forms. Vian often satirized Panassis jazz criticism,
Metronome editors vaguely for their snide and reactionary attitude, Music Dial quite pointedly identified
a fascist strain in their tendency to treat music as a fetish or an opiate. This criticism would be echoed
years later in problematizing the French interest in jazz and black culture. Mick Eckles, Too Much
Music, Metronome, 1944 (March): 9 quoted in Gendron, 138.
84
Gendron, 125.
85
Montauban was the village that Panassi lived in during the Nazi Occupation. Zwerin translates
Vians Pain-acier to Pain-ass-i. 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-i, a not quite jazz
critic, 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 Panassis 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. Panassi.87 This tongue-in-cheek
approach was given substantial basis in Panassis own commentary. Vian sees the
humor in Panassis 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. Everybodys Master Pain-ass-i really said, as he came
out of that Dizzy Gillespie concert: I love jazz, but thats not jazz The
second half of the phrase was omitted. I want to set the record straight. Its
a 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
ngres de trente-septime 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 forcment raison quand il sagit de jazz.
[Blacks are necessarily right when it is a question of jazz.].90 Years later, however, he
reacts negatively to critic Berta Woods 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

131.

88

Vian, Papal Decrees, in Jazz Hot, special edition (1950), quoted in Vian, Round About, 124-

Vian, After Theyve Gone, in Combat 4/5 (July, 1948) quoted in Vian, Round About, 66.
Vian, Vercoquin et le Plancton, 1947 (Paris: Christian Bourois, 1981), quoted in Jones, 70.
90
Vian, Jazz Hot, 1948, quoted in Frank Tnot, Boris Vian: Le Jazz et Saint-germain (Paris, Du
May: 1993), 39.
89

Maybe, the material conditions of Blacks having improved, they need less
to 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; humthe roots that one beats joyously, if I dare to express
myself ...perhaps Blacks are not so sorry to have lost these roots91
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 Vians 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 Woods 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 lgendes du temps
jadis, elle a rv de bons Noirs qui faisant les clowns, riaient bien et dansaient avec la grce danimaux de
la jungle.(elle a srement pens a comme a). Or, elle saperoit que ces gens ont des frigidaires, des
cravates et des Ford, et regardent Bob Hope la TV. Typique est cette phrase o elle sexclame A Negro
child does not dare act like a Negro (un enfant Noir nose plus agir comme un Noir). Cela veut dire
trs exactement: un enfant Noir ne veut plus agir selon la conception que les Blancs avaient des Noirs au
temps o Berta Wood a commenc former ses concepts dans sa tte Music as an expression has lost
its meaning to Negroes...assure Berta. Peut-tre que, la condition matrielle des Noirs stant amliore,
ils ont moins besoin de sexprimer par la musique: peut-tre vont-ils le faire plus librement, plus
calmement, par dautres moyens non dnus dintrt qui se nomment la littrature, la peinture, le cinma:
et alors? Les riches racines du blues ont t arraches, sanglote Berta; humdes racines sur lesquelles on
tapait joyeusement coups de trique, si jose ainsi mexprimerpeut-tre que les Noirs ne sont pas si
fchs davoir perdu ces racines
Berta Wood has read the legends of times past, she has dreamt of good Blacks who act like clowns, laugh
well and dance with the grace of jungle animals(she has surely thought something like that). Now, she
notices that people have refrigerators, ties and a Ford, and watch Bob Hope on T.V. Typical is this passage
where she exclaims: A Negro Child does not dare act like a NegroIt means very exactly: a Negro
child wants no longer to act according to the conception that whites have of blacks at a time when Berta
Wood has begun to form her concepts in her headMusic as an expression has lost its meaning to
Negroes assures Berta. Maybe, the material conditions of Blacks having improved, they need less to
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; humthe roots that one beats joyously, if I dare to express myself ...perhaps Blacks are not so
sorry to have lost these roots Vian, Jazz Hot (June 1957) quoted in lAmerican Way of Life, a
chapter in a compilation edited by Lucien Malson, Chroniques de Jazz (Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1967;
Societ Nouvelle des ditions Pauvert, 1996), 52-53.
92
Vian, Chroniques de Jazz, 52.

African-American jazz. Vians concerns were not his alone; as historian William Shack
notes, for some black writers, [Jazz] was not considered the kind of cultural
achievement of the race that ought to be mentioned or recommended.93 However, unlike
some of the leading black figures of the Harlem Renaissance, like W.E.B. Du Bois, who
argued for higher forms of expression, Vian clearly valued jazz as a supreme artistic
form and one that deserved not only recognition, but also great praise.94
In jazz musician and Parisian resident Sidney Bechets autobiography, Treat it
Gentle, he describes coming to Paris several years after the Second World War ended.95
He also spoke to many of the concerns that Vian raised about the black communitys
relationship to music: You know, the Negro doesnt want to cling to music. But he
needs it; it means something; and he can mean something. Hes always go to be honest,
and people are always putting him to music. Thats your place, they say. How can you
be honest to something when people are trying to make it unnatural for you?96 Bechet
reveals his own discontent with the possibility of an honest portrayal of black identity
when black people are forced into portraying, or performing, a particular brand of
blackness. He writes of the ways, under the circumstances of racism, black performers
could assert a self-identity through the medium of jazz, but nevertheless are not
93

He also notes that writers George Schuyler and Robert Abbott held their view that jazz and the
culture that developed round this musical form were but a short distance away from minstrels and
crooning. Shack, 134.
94
As David Levering Lewis describes in his work on the Harlem Renaissance, the Talented Tenth
did not always approve of jazz: Afro-American music had always been a source of embarrassment for the
Afro-American eliteupper-crust Afro-Americans still mostly recoiled in disgust from music as vulgarly
explosive as the outlaw speakeasies and cathouses that spawned it. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem
Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; Penguin, 1997), 173.
95
His descriptions echo much of Vians sense of St-Germain at the time: I came back to Paris
in the fall of 1949. I had a look around those Jazz clubs in St-Germain-des-Prs, and in the end I settled
with Claude Luters band; and I settled in Paris, too, and thats been my home since that time there was
a lot of American musicianers in Paris at that time and I got them together and we had ourselves a time
recording a few numbers. Sidney Bechet, Treat it Gentle: An Autobiography (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1960), 194-195.
96
Bechet, 3-4.

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

writes of his own familys 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 thatI got it from something inherited, just like
the stories my father gave down to me. And those stories are all I know
about some of the things bringing me to where I am. And all my life Ive
been trying to explain about something, something I understand the part
of me that was there before I was. It was there waiting to be me. It was
there waiting to be the music. Its that part Ive been trying to explain to
myself 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 hes playing, its the long song that started back there in the South. Its the
remembering song. Theres 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.
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: University
of Wisconsion Press, 1998), 65-66.
99
Bechet, 202.
98

memory of many generations, is where one locates authenticity, not in the performers
essential knowledge.
Vians 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 Panassis 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 and
musicians. 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 Ive been obliged to rethink my position.
Sure, its 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 Vians 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 Vians 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]? Hes perfect. At least hes
wearing his own skin, not blackface, and we hear his own voice. And at least jazz is
something basic and honest for himWhereas that imbecile Astaire, with his Negro
costume and his silent trumpetA monkey, I tell you, thats the monkey.102 This
striking example reveals Vians 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 gained
admiration 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 audiences perception of
which person should be emulated and admired Vian points to the black musician as the
object of envy. Angered at the Broadway musicals 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 bigband swing era was at hand, and its replacement, small-group bebop, was percolating underground (in
Harlem, 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 whether
Vian was indicating that Astaire appeared in the film.
102
Vian is referring here to Fred Astaires performance in the film Swing Time, in which Astaire
appears in blackface and dances to Bojangles of Harlem. This appears to be the only occasion on which
Astaire performed in any sort of minstrel show. Vian, Hugo Hackenbush and the Monkeys (Jazz Hot,
November 1947) in Vian, Round About, 25.

tait le fils naturel de Staline.103 [We knew it, that Gershwin was the natural son of
Stalin.]. Bechet also criticized Gershwin, though less directly: Gershwin, Ive got a lot
of respect for him. Hes a hell of a fine writer. All his music you can listen to, theres a
whole lot of beauty to it and a whole lot of feeling. It really tells a story inside itself. But
it still isnt Negro music. It still isnt saying what the black man, hed say.104 Both men
indicate the racism in the American response to and appropriation of jazz. Vian
recognizes the tyrannical impulses in Gershwins use of black music and by comparing
them to Stalin, forces the discussion of white appropriation of jazz into the ethical realm.
He knows that this act is consistent throughout American history and thus consistently
associated with American racism. Bechet responds to his own sense that Gershwins
music is not Negro music, nor could it ever speak to the black American experience.
Vian also wove descriptions of the social climate into his criticism of American
musical products, even in one instance detailing lynching laws in the United States for his
French readers.105 In one essay, he likened the United States social climate to that of the
Nazis when describing the relationship of the musical form to the black experience: You
need subtle and expandable ears to follow it, because the hustle and bustle of jazz is the
image of the hustling and bustling of fifteen million blacks who, persecuted and
terrorized, are trying to make their place in the Etazunis through their tears and hard
work.106 In an article printed in the Jazz Hot, Vian described a fanciful experience
entitled En Rond Autour de Minuit, [Round About Close to Midnight], in which he
103

Vian, Chroniques de jazz, 38.

Bechet, 206.
105
Vian wrote in his jazz column in Combat about the introduction of anti-lynching laws in
Southern states which previously did not have them, and about the censoring in Memphis of the film New
Orleans, because of the appearance in it of Louis Armstrong. Campbell, Paris Interzone, 16.
106
Zwerin notes in his translation that Vian is created a word play between the French word for
the United States, les Etats-Unis, and Nazis. Vian, Half a Century of Jazz (2) (La Parisienne, February
1953) in Vian, Round About, 174.
104

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
Vians changing identity. Jones also points to jazzs place in Vians feelings of
estrangement:
Jazz for Boris Vian was not simply a form of musical expression, it was an
entire universe from which he drew much of his subjective self-definition,
a universe with actors and conventions he was well-suited to engage, yet
which contributed in certain ways to a tendency toward selfmarginalization.109
With so much of Vians writing on jazz reflecting a complex and broad understanding of
the African-American experience, Joness analysis is helpful in developing insights into
Vians personality, motivations and responses. Vians 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 crits sur le Jazz, Tome I, ed. Claude Rameil
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1981), 68-72. Vian incorporates the language of bebop in the creation of new
words, 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 to
include the zoot swing of jazz. Translation of the this particular essays title and content was found in
Zwerins introduction to and translation of Round About Close to Midnight.
108
In French, bird is translated to loiseau. 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 bebop
less directly: Vians 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 Vians 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 Vians work in the Jazz Hot and
Combat consisted primarily of jazz criticism, he had a broad sense of the social
implications of jazz. Vians 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
111

117.

Jones, 100-101.
Vian, Must a Jazz Critic be a Musician? (radio, 4 December 1949) in Vian, Round About,

of Vian, Il tait amoureux du jazz, ne vivait que pour le jazz, nentendait, ne sexprimait
quen 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, Ralph
Ellison 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. Each
true jazz momentsprings from a contest in which the artist challenges all
the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the canvasses
of a painter) a definition of his [sic] identity: as individual, as member of
the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus because jazz
finds its very life in improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazz man
must lose his identity even as he finds it.113
Ellisons words reflect much of Bechets 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 performers 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 parallles, 109.

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.
113

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 Vians work with Sartres journal, but also by their social
interactions with each other and each others 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 II
and 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 Sartres 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 the
angelsI also drank valiantly while listening to records imported from
America. Around two in the morning Boris offered me a cup of coffee; we
sat in the kitchen and until dawn we talked: about his novel, on jazz, on
literature, about his profession as engineer. I found no affectation in his
long, white and smooth face, only an extreme gentleness and a kind of
stubborn candor; Vian detested just as passionately les affreux [the
masses] as he adored those whom he lovedWe spoke, and dawn arrived

114

The journals 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 issues contents and editorial board. Les Temps Modernes
(Paris).
115
Vian separated from Michelle in 1949 and moved in with Ursula Kbler, 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, Lglise-Vian, Sartre, and de Beauvoir.

only too quickly. I had the highest appreciation, when I had the chance of
enjoying them, for these fleeting moments of eternal friendship.117
This passage reveals not only the nature of de Beauvoir and Vians friendship, but also
the sort of artistic, musical, and intellectual environment from which it grew. These
friendships 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 engage [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 Libert [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 less
stable; 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 1950s]. Embarassment or sarcasm,
in the course of these meetings which are clothed in the appearance of the greatest cordialitySartre will
conclude that Boris does not particularly seek his company. Nol Arnaud, in Bizarre 39-40, p. 150 quoted
in Cismaru, 57.
118
Steven Ungar, Rebellion or Revolution? in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis
Hollier (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 Wrights
work. His contributions differed in large part from the rest of the journal, offering often
comical or avant-garde social commentary. The journals purpose was, according to
Sartre, to give an account of the present, as complete and faithful as possible. Sartre
himself contributed articles such as Quest-ce que cest la littrature? [What is
Literature?]. The journal also presented the entire text of Wrights Black Boy, serialized
over the course of six issues in 1947.125 Sartres journal illustrated the avant-gardes
interests of the period, demonstrating an interest in the modern condition but also in the
works of African-American and African writers.
According to Anna Boschettis historical consideration of Les temps modernes,
Vians 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 dAmrique in Chronique du Menteur (Chronicle of the Liar), ed. Noel Arnaud
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974).
123
According to the journals 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-September
1946): 369-392.
124
The short story was dedicated to Sidney Bechet, cause de Didnt he ramble. Vian, Les
fourmis [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 of
this issues 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 reproducing
the characteristics of Sartres position. In the highly centralized, tightly
knit world of Parisian intellectual life, the central, multifaceted character
of Sartres position makes it the operant determinant of the probable,
almost necessary meetings which lead to most of the external
collaborations with the reviewAnd in the case of authors still unknown
outside the Latin Quarter such as Vian and Genet it is a matter of
Sartres position having a dual, and convergent, effect. Sartre is the
contact, 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 Vians involvement with Les temps modernes began with his friendship
with Sartre, Vians 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 Vians Chronique du menteur, a column in Les Temps

126

Boschetti, 173.
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 did
not wish to continue with Sartres journal. The two mens relationship was often rocky. Ungar, 972-973.
128
Boschetti, 177.
127

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, LEcume des
Jours, he even referred to Sartre as Jean-Sol Partre and de Beauvoir as the Duchess of
Bovouart.129 Vians column also pointedly commented on the journals 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 bad
rates 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 than
amused: a piece in which Vian teased the hard-left philosopher for taking
up too many pages in the magazine ('He is a capitalist') was rejected, and
the 'Chronique' did not appear again.130
Other members of the editorial board, and the structure of the journal itself, were clearly
not immune to Vians 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, Vians 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 dAmrique, was the most damaging for
Vians relationship with the board, but was also the one that resonated most clearly with
Jirai 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, Lcume 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 celebrated
apostles 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 Wrights work, Dbuts
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 Vians relationship to the
editorial board but also his public identity:
Vians public engagement with American life and literature can be said to
have begun in 1946. In that year the editorial board of Les Temps
Modernes refused to publish Vians Impressions dAmrique. The
French reading public as a whole registered a somewhat different reaction:
125,000 of them bought those impressions in the form of Jirai cracher
sur vos tombes.133
As in Jirai cracher, Vian was grappling with complex racial relationships, though the
Impressions went even further in his critique of French intelligentsia. In the
Impressions dAmrique, Vian describes a dream encounter with well-known surrealist
Andr 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:
Bretons almost compulsive rejection of everything American as an
expression, perhaps, of his misery. English was an anathema to him: he
131

Scott, From Dreams to Despair, 135.

See Appendix B, Figure 4 for a facsimile of this issues table of contents.
133
Jones, 105.
132

was careful not to learn even three words of [it] for fear of dulling the
edge of his own exquisite writing instrumentWonderful it was to think
of him tiptoeing around his precious language bed, administering
antibiotics to keep the Americanisms at bay.134
Bretons fear of American English as well as distaste for America He sulked, hating
America, wishing himself back in Paris135 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 Negros black lips and frizzy
hair, and he spoke like a NegroIt is a loss for surrealism.136 Vian has completely
toppled audiences 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 Vians 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 Bretons primary mode of
influence his language. Vian creates black slang for Breton, who tells him in this black
vernacular: Ahll stay wid ma black gal and ma black kids. Iamt no use, man, goin
all round de world an catchin sea sick, crabs anclaps anlookin 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
Jai fini par rencontrer Andr Breton en plein Harlem, dans une petite bote assez crasseuse, a
sappelait Toms; pas de doute, ctait lui. Mais quel camouflage!...Il sest pass au noir; on dirait
absolument un vrai Ngre, il a mme des grosses lvres de Ngre et des cheveux crpus, et il parle comme
un Ngre. Il se fait appeler Andy, les autres nont pas lair davoir beaucoup de respect pour lui. Je lui ai
demand sil comptait venir en France et il ma rpondu: man. Ahll stay wid ma black gal and ma
black kids. Iamt no use, man, goin all round de world an catchin sea sick, crabs anclaps anlookin
always for fuck. Lawd dont likes that man, sure Lawd dont likes that. Cest une perte pour le
surralisme, a murmur Astruc. Je naurais pas cru quil connaisse des mots comme a, mais il la dit, et
comme il ny avait rien faire dautre, nous sommes repartis. This previous passage is my translation.
Vian, Impressions dAmrique, Chronique du menteur, 85-86.
137
See n. 88.

dont likes that man, sure Lawd dont 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 Vians 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.
Vians 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 of
the 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 Vians influences for writing Jirai 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 Jirai cracher had helped in garnering sales, he
could assume that the same audience would secretly seek out this kind of voyeuristic
experience.
As Vians Impressions were scheduled to appear in print very near the
publishing of Jirai cracher sur vos tombes - August 1946 Vians works clearly exhibit
some theoretical and physical intertextuality. Both the novel and the essay feature the
138

Vian, Chronique du menteur, 85-86.

Nous avons attendu toute la matine devant la porte de lhtel, en esprant voir lyncher un
ngre, mais les New-yorkais sont dcidment amorphes. Il parat que dans le Nevada, on trouve encore des
durs. Nous tcherons dy passer. This previous passage is my translation. Vian, Impressions
dAmrique, Chronique du menteur, 93.
139

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, Vians Jirai cracher takes on new significance not only has Vian deessentialized 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 lost140 This passage also refers to the editorial boards 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 Vians satirical voice on racism, did
not 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 Vians 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 Vians relationship to black identity, jazz,
and America. Breton edited and prefaced a book of poetry by Martinique poet Aim
Csaire; Sartre wrote the preface for Lopold Senghors 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
141

Jones, 151.
Ibid., 150.

foreground the role of French critics in the works of African writers. Breton and Sartres
relationship to these African authors, and their vision of black identity, stands in contrast
to Vians 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. Bretons 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 Andr Breton in Nadja, remains the
only 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 Aim Csaire, and eventually wrote a preface for Csaires Cahier dun retour au
pays natal [Notebook of a Return to a Native Land].
Breton found in Csaires poetry echoes of his own concerns for social liberation
and revolution. Csaire, who had come to Paris in 1930, returned to his home country of
Martinique in 1939 and published the Cahier dun retour au pays natal. In 1941, on his
way to New York, Breton stopped in Martinique and was impressed by Csaire 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 Western
intellectuals were forced to take refuge outside Europe for political
reasons and were therefore confronted with the experience of exile at first
hand. This is something that was especially acute in the case of Breton
himself, forced to live in New York, a city for which he had no affinity
and which seemed to him to embody all the worst aspects of European
142

Andr Breton quoted in Franklin Rosemont, introduction to What is Surrealism? Selected

Writings, trans. and ed. Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 5.

culture, with few of its redeeming ones. On the other hand, he was
enchanted by his various stays on the Canadian coast and in Martinique,
Arizona, and Haiti.143
Breton found Csaires home country to be an affirmation of his own values,144 he
left deeply impressed and went on to encourage the publication of Csaires 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
Csaire as a un grande pote noir:
Csaires 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 and
servitude of producing what we know is no longer gold or the
philosophers stone, but liberty.146
The liberty Breton sees in Csaires poetry is echoed in some of Csaires own work.
When in Paris, Csaire befriended other African students and writers such as Lopold
Sdar Senghor and Lon Damas. Together, they co-founded and edited Lgitime Dfense,
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 Bretons 1926 pamphlet on these two dogmas, echoing his writings

143

Michael Richardson, , ed. and trans. Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the
Caribbean (London: Verso, 1996), 22.
144
Scharfman, 946.
145
The Cahier was published almost in toto in 1939 in the journal Valonts, but went unnoticed
by the Parisian public. A first bilingual (French-Spanish) edition of the work appeared in 1944 in Cuba, and
was not published in full in France until 1947 in the Bordas edition, prefaced by an article on Csaire that
Andr Breton had written in 1944 for the magazine Fontaine [Fontaine, no. 35 (1944)]. The Cahier was
republished in 1956 in Prsence Africaine. This particular edition will be referenced in the rest of this
essay, Aim Csaire, Cahier dun retour au pays natal (orig, 1947; Paris: Presence Africaine, 1956).
Publishing information was found in Kesteloot, 191-192.
146
Breton, Un grand pote noir, Fontaine, no. 35 (1944) quoted in Kesteloot, 256.
147
Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French (Les crivains noirs de langue franaise), trans. by
Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Brussels: Editions de lInstitut de Sociologie, 1963; Philadelphia: Temple
University 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
Csaires Cahier first voiced the new ideology of ngritude; 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 Csaire himself described the
movements beginnings in a 1967 lecture: Thirty years ago when Senghor, Damas and I
were students in the Latin Quarter the term ngritude was coined during our discussions
and debatesBut it happens that in fact I have the dubious honor of having used the
word 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, ltudient Noir these works
formulated a sort of proto-ngritude 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 Ngritude 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, the
work consciously drew upon the Harlem Renaissance and its canonical text, Alain Lockes 1925 anthology
of black writing, The New Negro. 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
Csaire 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 Frobeniuss
History of African Civilizations, which was translated into French in 1936. Jules-Rosette, 33. According to
Lopold Senghor, Frobenius was truly the moving spiritual force in the emancipation of black Africa: his
idealistic 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.

useful, can guard against the drying up of his sources of inspiration only by returning to a
so-called primitive vision, the synthesis of sensorial perception and mental image.153
According to Breton, ngritude has a place in his sense of European intellectual
advancement but not as an independent movement. Csaires ngritude serves as a
necessary step in the wake of surrealism, a place to which the European artist can turn.
Breton wrote that Csaires poems should be a breakdown of the intellectAfter the
breakdown, everything begins anew sand, oxyhydrogen blowpipes.154 In Bretons
vision, the poetry of ngritude has a singular utility blackness breaks down and
destroys Western intellect and rationality. He refers to the building blocks of the natural
world sand, earth, water, oxygen - whose very identity is shaken and reconfigured in
the face of this new vision.
Bretons intellectual appropriation of Csaire restricted the power of ngritudes
message for he incorporated it into the framework of French intellectualism:
Surrealism is allied with peoples of color, first because it has always taken
their side against all forms of imperialism and white banditryand
secondly because of the profound affinities that exist between surrealism
and so-called primitive thought, both of which seek the abolition of the
conscious and the everyday, leading to the conquest of revelatory
emotion.155
Breton finds profound affinities between surrealism and ngritude; he sees a
correlation between surrealisms work in the revolutionary abolition of the conscious
and everyday and the work of Csaire, ignoring the ways in which black people were
forced into such a position.
153

Jean Duche, Andr Breton nous parle, in Figaros literary supplement (5 October 1946)
quoted in Kesteloot, 39.
154
Un pome doit tre un dbcle [sic] de lintellectAprs la dbacle [sic] tout recommence
sable, chalumeaux oxydriques. This piece by Breton was included in Csaires contribution to a journal.
Csaire, Maintenir la posie, Tropiques 8 (October 1943) quoted in Kesteloot, 258.
155
Brent Hayes Edwards, The Ethnics of Surrealism, Transition 8:2, issue 78 (1999): 129.

According to Brent Hayes Edwards, Bretons suffocating influence was a necessary

aspect for Csaires work with him. 156 His social persona and strong identification with
surrealism reinforces the significance of his actions, most particularly his relationship
with Csaire. 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 Bretons control in projects associated with
surrealism. Surrealisms power as a dogmatic force was fading as the ngritude
movement was gaining momentum, prompting Breton to respond directly to the
movement and to Csaire.
In Vians 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
ngritude correctly, nigger. Bretons 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 Vians narrative, therefore,
it is not only Breton who is black, it is surrealism. It is important to distinguish between
Vians radical subversion of surrealisms blackness, as he renders the surrealist project
black, and Bretons appropriation, and indeed, his expropriation, of ngritude. Breton has
essentialized ngritude, 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
157

Edwards, The Ethnics of Surrealism, 87.

Brandon, 4.

explain or further an ideology and instead, shakes the foundation of that ideology. Vians
vision of Bretons blackness is certainly less comfortable for the surrealist himself, for it
erases the editorial distance that Breton could maintain between himself and Csaire.
Indeed, Breton has entirely lost his former identity in becoming black, both physically
and linguistically. This moment could indeed reflect one of Bretons 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 Bretons blackness obviously
parallels Jirai 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 Vians 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, Vians friend and editor, was engaged in a different sort of relationship
with black writing and identity. In particular, Sartre wrote an introduction - Orphe
Noir [Black Orpheus] - to Lopold Sdar Senghors 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

Senghors work was entitled Anthologie de la nouvelle posie ngre et malgache de langue
franaise, 1948. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Black Orpheus," trans. S.W. Allen (Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1976).

that the black man in his present situation must first take conscience of
himself and, inversely, why Negro poetry in the French language is, in our
times, the sole great revolutionary poetry.159
He situates black poetry, and in particular, Senghors work, in the context of his own
quest for revolutionary speech in Western thought. He writes techniques have
contaminated the white worker, but the black remains the great male of the earth, the
sperm of the world.160 Thus, the black voice is reconceptualized once again in terms of
sexuality, rendered as the force of masculinity that is absent in the capitalist, Western
self. Black poetry is envisioned only as a counterpoint to the Western trajectory, and coopted as a revolutionary force that is needed by those in Europe who sought to disrupt the
stifling social structure.
Sartre writes specifically of Csaires work in these terms, viewing it as within the
surrealist tradition. He writes, In Csaire the great surrealist tradition is achieved,
takes its definite sense, and destroys itself. Surrealism, European poetic movement, is
stolen from the Europeans by a black who turns it against them and assigns it a rigorously
prescribed function.161 Indeed, even the act of stealing is situated in terms of the
surrealist tradition, which appears to have anticipated its transformation by black writing.
Finally, in his most reductionist analysis, Sartre situates ngritude in his formation of the
dialectic of emancipation, devising philosophical guidelines for ngritude 162; he writes
that: In fact, Negritude appears as the weak stage of a dialectical progression: the
theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of

159

Sartre, Black Orpheus, 11.

Sartre, Black Orpheus, 45.
161
Sartre, Black Orpheus, 38-39.
162
Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers Landscape (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1998), 55.
160

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 ngritude disallows the race struggle that has immediate and real
consequences for Csaire and other black writers. Sartres 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 ngritude 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 created
ngritude. According to Jules-Rosette, Sartre reconciled the poetic and political images
of Africa by demonstrating that ngritude 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 ngritude movement only in terms of the larger context of
the universal class struggle. According to Jules-Rosette, Sartres perspective was
unappealing to the proponents of ngritude in its rejection of the primacy and universal
significance of African cultures.166 Manthia Diawara echoes her point, writing that the
ways in which Sartres vision is incongruous with Senghorian ngritude: Ironically, this
awareness of common struggle, of worldwide demand that human rights be granted by
white supremacists and capitalists, seemed to undercut Negritudes first claim to

163

Sartre, 59-60.
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, 55
166
Jules-Rosette, 56.
164

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 ngritude.
Sartre textually exploits ngritude by positing it once again in a categorization of
race that denies the unequal social conditions wrought by the exploitation of racial
difference.
Ngritudes essentialization of race is denied in Sartres position on antiracist
racism,168 stripping ngritude of its power and agency. Indeed, Senghors work and
other writings are not immune to many of the value-laden and essentialist polarities of
ngritude, as he sought to find language that emphasizes the qualities of blackness that
black people share universally. While Senghors vision remains problematic in its
fundamentally essentialist sense of race difference, Sartres words ignore Senghors
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 Sartres failure to envision ngritude through its
self-definition; he refers to Martinique writer and philosopher Ren Mnils 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
Mnils 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
Ren Mnil, De la ngritude, in Traces (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
mens projects: Sartres 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 ngritude could serve as part of a
surrealist or Marxist agenda. Breton found in Csaires work the furthering of the
surrealist project, literally editing and revisioning Csaire in the future trajectory of
surrealism. Racial difference provided a dialectic through which Sartre could negotiate
the 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 Csaire differed in their interpretation of ngritude: Both Csaire and
Senghor develop ngritude as an identity discourse that renews the pride of a
marginalized group. Yet, Csaires definition of ngritude remains fluid, while Senghor
insists on viewing ngritude as the totality of black Africas cultural values.170 Clifford
indicates that Lopold Sedar Senghor supports a depiction of an essentialized African
mentality in contrast to Csaires rejection of these essentializations.171 He describes
Senghorian ngritude as a backward-looking idealism that reinscribed the romantic
racialism of the past.172
Csaire, 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 of
Illinois Press, 1998), 242-43.
171
Clifford, A Politics of Neologism, 178.
172
Ibid., 178.

black. Clearly, Csaire saw the complexities of ngritude and was not willing to
compromise these intricacies for an essentialist view of blackness. Edwards writes of this
vision: Csairian 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 (Bretons great black poetry). Instead, Csaire goes fishing for a corrosive
tongue.173 Ngritude 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 Csaire 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 Prsence 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, Frances
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
174

Edwards, 33-35.
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 Lopold Senghor wrote of Paris in the late 1940s:
Naturally Paris is smallat least for black intellectuals, who always end
up meeting each other either in the Latin Quarter or at Saint-Germain-desPrs. This is how I made contact with a number of second-generation
black intellectuals during the German occupation. This is how after the
Second World War, Prsence 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 in
this 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
communitys 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 James
Campbell recounts, there is evidence for some relationship, though most likely in literary and translational
terms: 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 read
English and was up to date in things American especially Afro-American and it seems unlikely that he
would have ignored the major work of the black American everyone was talking about. In fact, he
translated a fifty-page story by Wright for the French-African journal Prsence Africaine, Bright and
Morning Star, which came out in the same month as Jirai cracher. Sartre figured prominently in both
Vian and Wrights 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 in
everything, 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 didnt say a thing. We just stood there on the corner in Harlem dumbfounded not
knowing now which way wed 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 Vians 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 mnage-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 the
wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave
expression to abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all
who were Hip. And in this wedding of the white and the black it was the
Negro who brought the cultural dowry.178
Mailers choice of language has particular bearing in this discussion, as it contrasts so
fundamentally with Vians linguistic choices. Mailer speaks immediately to a sexualized
element in identity construction, choosing the mnage-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, Whos 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 on
the 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, Mailers
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 a
society which, though free, constantly threatened them. He omitted to
stress a crucial distinction, however: the hipster refused to accept
conventional society; the Negro was refused by it. Mailers essay is
bursting with insight, but his black man was still an invisible man. He did
not pause to consider what the negro Negro thought about all this white
Negro stuff. His new-found friend from Paris, Baldwin, whom he began to
see regularly back in New York, was about to inform him.179
This distinction is one that Vian understood and one that American expatriate James
Baldwin 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 Generations
interest in blackness Mailers 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 of
deprived Negroes, which eventually evolved into jive and bop talk, in
order to justify such a grim system of delusions? Why malign the sorely
menaced sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white mans own
sexual panic?181

179

Campbell, Paris Interzone, 258.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the
Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not
enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night I wished I were a
Denver 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 that
knows nothing of disappointment and white sorrows and all that. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New
York: 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.
180

Baldwin responds to the sexualization of racial identity at work in Mailers essay,

referring to the white sexual panic in the face of intellectual emasculation. He criticizes
Mailers 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 only
trouble with that cat is that hes whiteWhat my friend meant was that
to become a Negro man, let alone a Negro artist, one had to make oneself
up as one went along. This had to be done in the not-at-all metaphorical
teeth of the worlds determination to destroy you. The world had prepared
no 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 is
absolutely 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 worlds determination to destroy you.
Significantly, Baldwins strategy of black identity construction is articulated as a
performance, suggesting that identity must be performed. This suggestion is reminiscent
of Bechets 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.

Baldwins 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 Griffins Black Like Me. She notes many themes that
are also at work in Mailers essay:
The depth of white male identity, which retains its social value despite
conscious efforts to depreciate it, contrasts in this narrative with the
surface of black identity, which can be put on or taken off at will.
Griffins experiment evokes anxiety because it takes for granted these
conditions of freedom; his passing ensues from a sovereignty over identity
rather than from the exigencies of economic necessity or personal
safety.183
Mailer, Sartre, and Breton are all able to retain their social prominence and power despite
performing and fictionalizing black identity. Echoing Baldwins 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 Mailers essay, as well as the racial politics in the United States, which
render Mailers 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 Mailers essay echoes
Sartres 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 Dyers essay
on the social construction of whiteness and Griffins 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 Griffins
autobiographical work evokes W.E.B. Du Boiss 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 to
Du Boisian double-consciousness. Yet whereas Du Bois describes a
condition of twoness, of internalized self-contradiction and self-striving,
Griffin, in his contempt for the Negroid face, relates a more literalized
splitting of the self in two. As one of these selves panics, feeling perhaps
something of Du Boisian double-consciousness, the other, the observer,
watches and records.186
Griffins 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 Bretons own work, for there remains a
false opposition between the white researchers theoretical apprehension and the black
subjects non-thetic experience or non-consciousnessunequipped to imagine black
people elaborating their own ontology of blackness.187 Black identity, in Sartre and
Bretons rendering, is only constructed by their white editorial position.

185

Pamela Caughie, Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (Urbana, University
of 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
Butlers 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 colonizeds 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 persons struggle to live in the world to his own struggles for self-identity.
Baldwin suggests Vians work is significantly different from Mailers 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 books [Jirai cracher sur vos tombess] navet, Vian cared enough
about his subject to force one into a confrontation with a certain kind of anguish. The
books 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 Vians
alienation and otherness as an element of black identity. When Vians otherness is a
part of the definition of black identity, blackness is no longer fixed at a certain point, or
more 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, Vians writings

190
191

James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 39.

Gilroy, 32.

indicate that though he perceives race as a complex and non-fixed signifier, he also
perceives the racialized power dynamics of jazz. In many ways, Vian passes for a French
intellectual, yet all the while critiquing and subverting the work of his colleagues. Vian
refutes the attempts of Sartre, Breton, Mailer and a host of other intellectuals before him
by not appropriating the language, music, or identities of black people, but rather joining
in the act of subversion and passing.
In one of Vians Vernon Sullivan novels, Les Morts ont tous la mme peau, his
protagonist whose race is unclear and shifting throughout the novel laments that he
was on the border between two races.192 This border that Vian identifies is an
appropriate space in which to begin thinking more broadly about race. The spaces of the
unknown created by passing, by new forms of expression, push open the possibility for
an identity that ceases to constrict exploration. Where culture is created at the margins of
identity, in the borders, Vian is able to borrow from a host of sources, performing all.
Judith Butler defines performativity as the power of discourse to produce effects
through reiteration her notion of performance relies on reiteration, or in this context, a
methodology that could be read also as improvisation.193 Given Gilroys discussion of
racialized forms of power, there are clear exigencies of black identity performance that
place it within the realm of performativity without denying the social constructions that
necessitate it. A racial identity can be a self-positioning from which the individual can
perform, still attuned to the social contingencies around him or her - this move need not
specify further the borders of race but instead, blurs the distinction further. As Gilroy
192

Vian, Les Morts ont tous la meme peau, quoted in Cismaru, 52.
Judith Butler, Introduction to Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, in
Women, Autobiography and Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 368.
193

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 structures
and 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 autonomyThe 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.
Gilroy, 74.
196
Gilroy, 90-91.
195

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 Vians 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, Whats Negro music? What is it
really being? I have to tell them theres no straight answer to that. If I
could give them a straight answer, just in one sentence like, I wouldnt
have to say all this Im saying. You cant say that just out straight. Theres
no answer to that question, not just direct. You could come up to me and
say Whats an American? Whats a Frenchman? How do you answer a
thing 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
198

Gilroy, 78.
Bechet, 204.

APPENDIX A: Photographs
[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]
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].

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

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 Abadies orchestra.
Photograph from Freddy de Vree, Boris Vian: Essai (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1965)

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 4: LouLou Guionet, Gus, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, Michelle Lglise-Vian, Franois
Chevais et Alain Vian au Prix du Tabou.
Photo in Manuel de Saint Germain des Prs, 208.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 5: Cover of the first edition of Jirai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 6: Vian near the time of the Jirai cracher sur vos tombes scandal.
Et Vian! En Avant la zizique: Textes et chansons de Boris Vian. Internet on-line. Available on
http://www.nice-coteazur.org/francais/culture/theatre/tdn/99/etvian.html.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 7: Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, Michele Lglise-Vian, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Qui est Boris Vian, Internet on-line. Available from http://www.kiss.qc.ca/Forteresse/BioVian.html.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 8 from Jean Clouzets Boris Vian (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1957).

APPENDIX B: Samples of Les Temps Modernes

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]
Figure 9: Editorial page for the first issue of Les Temps Modernes.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 10: Table of Contents for the first issue of Les Temps Modernes.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 11: The final issue of the Black Boy series in Les Temps Modernes.

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 12: The U.S.A. issue of Les Temps Modernes.

APPENDIX C: Newspaper Accounts

[photograph omitted to comply with copyright]

Figure 13: Vians obituary in the New York Times (June 23, 1959).

REFERENCES
Works Cited
Primary Sources by Boris Vian
Sullivan, Vernon [Boris Vian]. Jirai cracher sur vos tombes. Paris: Editions du
Scorpion, 1946. I Spit on Your Graves, translated by Vian and Milton Rosenthal.
Paris: Vendome Prss, 1948. Copy used for reference was translated by Vian but
is a more recent edition, introduced by Marc Lapprand. Los Angeles: TamTam
Books, 1998.
Vian, Boris. Autres crits 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 Jeune
Parque, 1967; Socit Nouvelle des ditions Pauvert, 1996.
________. Chroniques du Menteur (Chronicles of the Liar). Edited by Noel Arnaud.
Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1974.
________. Manuel de saint germain des prs. Presented and edited by Nol Arnaud.
Paris : Chne, 1974.
________. Round About Close to Midnight: The Jazz Writings of Boris Vian. Translated
and 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, Andr. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Edited, translated, and
introduction by Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad Press, 1978.

Csaire, Aim. Cahier dun retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land). Translated
by Emil Snyders. Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1968.
Clouzet, Jean. Boris Vian. Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1957.
Delaunay, Charles. Delaunay in Trenches, Writes Jazz Not American. Translated by
Walter E. Schapp. Downbeat (May 1, 1940): 6-19 quoted in Keeping Time:
Readings in Jazz History. Edited by Robert Walser. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. In Three Negro Classics. Introduction by John
Hope Franklin. New York: Avon Books, 1965; Bard, 1999.
Himes, Chester. The Autobiography of Chester Himes: Vol. 2, My Life of Absurdity. New
York: Paragon House, 1971-72; 1976.
Hughes, Langston. Whos Passing for Who? In Laughing to Keep From Crying. New
York: 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 LArrache-Cur (Heartsnatcher). By Boris Vian and
translated by Stanley Chapman. Paris: Pro-Francia Vrille, 1953; London: Rapp
and Whiting, 1968.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. American Novelists in French Eyes, Atlantic Monthly, August 1946:
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