Something akin to those science experiments that employ vast
amounts of energy to achieve a momentary glimpse of a transitory but paradigm-shifting state, Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’écume des jours [i]
- a delirious, nutty, affecting and tragic love story (ranked #10 on Le Monde’s 1999 list of the best 100
books of the 20th century) - radiates life and captures, for a brilliantly
glowing instant, the effervescent transports of youth, love and friendship.
It’s disappointing that Vian seems to be best known, at least
in the United States, for I Spit on Your Graves (J’irai cracher sur
vos tombes), his raging novel of racial and sexual violence in the American
South, as L’écume des jours, while hardly free of the darkness that shadows
that later attempt at noir, reveals Vian working a far richer, more resplendent
and dazzling vein. As though anticipating the Beat Generation (and taking most
of its better aspects, leaving the larder spare), Vian’s novel mixes his
beloved jazz music with poetic conceits and inventive language into a work in
which music and movement seem generated by every gesture, to punctuate each
event, creating an animated, spirited atmosphere of transient vivacity and bright
promise. In a prefatory note to the book, Vian captures the vital concentration
of this elixir, writing, “There are only two things: love, in all its aspects,
with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or of Duke Ellington. The rest
should disappear, because the rest is ugly, and these few pages of demonstration
that follow take all of their force from the fact that the story is true, just
as I have imagined it from one end to the other.”
The reader knows right away that he or she is in for an
imaginative “true story.” L’écume des jours verges on fable, creating a
world in which the emotions of its characters find correspondence in exterior
manifestations, often of an absurdist, even hilarious nature. The novel opens
with the well-off, 21-year-old Colin emerging exhilarated from his bath and
walking down the hallway to the kitchen, where mustachioed mice - one serves as
a mute but expressive witness throughout the novel - dance delightedly in the
rays of sun reflecting off the shiny faucets of the sink. Colin’s private chef,
Nicholas, has ingeniously trapped an eel that has been sticking its head out of
the lavatory basin, and is preparing an extragant recipe supplied to us in full
(more recipes follow, all at least as over-the-top as any in James Hamilton
Patterson’s comical Cooking with Fernet Branca, but plausible, since…well,
try looking into an antiquarian French cookbook sometime). When Colin’s closest
friend Chick arrives, the jazz-obsessed Colin demonstrates for him his
pianocktail, a piano that mixes cocktails in accordance with particular melodies
played on the keyboard, just one of many conceits and inventions in L’écume
des jours wild enough to rival those of Raymond Roussel.[ii]
Colin, aching to fall in love with someone, like Chick has
with Nicolas’ niece Alise, encounters at the ice skating rink one day the
18-year-old Chloe, from whom he flees after committing a faux pas. Vian captures beautifully the abject fear mingled with
all-encompassing hope that marks the earliest moments of love between young
people. What follows is a madcap, whirling, deeply poignant love story in which
the brightest and most ethereal moments of young love run up against the trials
and cruelties of a world seemingly determined to snuff them out.
Though fantastical for a “true” story, L’écume des jours cleaves
closely to realities thinly veiled and often tremendously funny, as in a contrepèterie transformation of
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (friends and champions of Vian) into Jean-Sol
Partre, the great philosopher of the moment, and his colleague the Duchesse de
Bovouard. Chick, obsessed with purchasing all of Partre’s books in the finest
editions (including one bound in nothingness), becomes nearly giddy when a
bookseller offers him a pair of the philosopher’s worn pants. His girlfriend Alise
shares his fanaticism, at least for a time. Partre himself, nearing completion
of his magnum opus, a 20-volume encyclopedia
of nausea, arrives at a conference riding upon the back of an elephant, accompanied
by sharpshooters; following the philosopher’s talk to fans no less enthusiastic
than those of the Beatles at Shea Stadium, sample vials of varieties preserved
vomit are offered for sale.
Vian’s rich language provides one of the greatest pleasures
of L’écume des jours. For example, in the original French, the above
vials are described as “enchantillons de vomi empaillé,” the last word nearly
untranslatable in context, given its connotations of taxidermy. Vian frequently
employs neologisms, surprising juxtapositions of adjectives, and unusual turns
of phrase, many of which slip as effortlessly as a grace note into the
linguistic current, as in his invention (replete with description) of a dance
he terms the “biglemoi.”
Much of the fanciful content of L’écume des jours derives
from its many cartoonish exaggerations, like those one imagines might have
blossomed had Salvador Dalí continued his brief collaboration with Walt Disney.
In one scene, Colin draws grooves on the top of a cake, then spins the cake on
his index finger while, with the sharp point of a holly leaf serving as a
stylus, elicits Duke Ellington’s “Chloe.” In another scene, as a piece by Ellington
is played on the phonograph, a rectangular room stretches to become round, resuming
its original shape when the music stops. When Chloe undergoes an operation to
remove a water lily growing in her lung, the surgical scar forms a comically
perfect circle. Nicolas’ culinary concoctions reach an alarming state of
absurdity when he prepares a hangover cure consisting of “white wine, a
spoonful of vinegar, five egg yolks, two oysters, and a hundred grams of ground
beef with crème fraîche and a pinch of hyposulfite of soda.”[iii]
Often, though, such elaborations represent material correspondences
of the sharp emotions of youth. Some of these take on a violent quality of the
sort present in I Spit on Your Graves, a just-under-the-surface fury at
life’s injustices, a fierce protest against all that stands in the way of love,
vitality and hope. When a skating rink attendant moves with lethargic
indifference after Colin learns that Chloe is in the hospital, Colin, with
cartoon violence, dispatches him by throwing an ice skate and decapitating him.
Alise’s eventual dismay at Chick’s having become a slave to collecting all
things Partre results in a furiously disproportionate explosion of violence
that contains echoes of the Nazis’ destructive purges.
If not an explicit response to the horrors of the
just-concluded war, L’écume des jours, written as Vian traveled about
the United States in 1946, nonetheless carries within it a scream of
indignation against a world that could allow the wanton destruction of so many
young people, so much beauty. Coming from the pen of a writer who would go on
to compose one of the most forceful and defiant refusals to participate in the
killing of his fellow human beings – the acidly caustic song “Le Deserteur” -
it’s small wonder that this marvel-filled and moving work of imagination and exuberance
could simultaneously contain such a grimly melancholic vision bordering on
fatalism, an acknowledgement that the world’s ugliness may prove too much even
for the best of youth. Having witnessed the terrible things of which the world
was capable, even Mickey Mouse might willingly have placed his head in the open
maw of an ever-obliging cat.
[i] The difficulties of translation are evident in the
history of attempts to translate the title of Vian’s novel. “L’écume”
translates literally as “froth,” “foam,” or “sea spray” (Wikipedia’s entry on
Vian goes for the more vulgar “scum”). At least three English translations of L’écume
des jours have been published and three film versions have come out, all of
which demonstrate this translation problem. The film titles include Spray of
the Days and two titles that leapfrog the issue, Chloe and, sharing
the same title as the second English edition to be published, the recent Mood
Indigo. The first English edition appeared in 1967, entitled Froth on
the Daydream. The latest, 2003’s Foam of the Daze, leans in the
direction of fetishizing the kookier elements of the book at the expense of its
genuine innocence and tenderness, and to me misses the poignancy of the
original French. This may largely be a matter of taste; I am not a translator,
but an option that appeals to me is The Evanescence of Days.
[ii] Literature’s marvelous ability to imagine what others
may go on to realize is born out , as an Internet search on the word reveals, by
the existence of several working pianocktails created by Vian’s fans.
[iii] Perhaps best known today as the principal ingredient
in those chemical “instant heat” hand warmers and thermal pads.
