Original autograph manuscript of a short story by Boris Vian, written in 1945 and published posthumously in the collection Le Loup-Garou in 1970.
Highly dense manuscript of 17 pages on 9 sheets, written in black ink with deletions and corrections, on perforated graph paper, dated “25.10.45” at the end of the text. One of the very rare manuscripts dated by the author.
Exceptional manuscript of Boris Vian’s first short story, written at the age of 25, just a few months after the Liberation.
According to Michelle Vian, Bison Ravi’s first literary attempts date from the winter of 1941–42, when she asked him to write her a fairy tale. The exercise sparked in the young engineer a desire to pursue a more whimsical and nonsensical tale, intended only for his friends: Troubles dans les Andains. Two years later, he began work on what would become his first published novel in 1947, thanks to Raymond Queneau: Vercoquin et le plancton.
But before meeting the mentor and spiritual father who would open the doors of Gallimard’s “White House”, writing was, for Vian, no more than a game—light-hearted, unambitious, a way to combat the gloom of the Occupation years. His true passion, as a mediocre engineer, was jazz, and he had begun a semi-professional career performing with Claude Abadie’s ensemble.
When he signed his contract on 18 July 1945 for the collection “La plume au vent”, created and directed by Queneau, Boris Vian no doubt believed he had yet to write anything of substance. His “little effort” Vercoquin ecaetera, shyly submitted to Queneau the previous month, would be accompanied by a disillusioned preface and a half-apologetic dedication.
Martin, completed in October 1945, is therefore his first true work as a writer and his very first short story—a genre in which he would soon excel. As noted by M. Lapprand, C. Gonzalo, and F. Roulmann in the Pléiade edition: “Boris Vian’s incisive writing is a perfect match for the short form. [...] It first found expression in the short story, in the Anglo-American sense of the short story, which Vian greatly admired as a reader. Between 1945 and 1958, his spirited pen produced 45 such texts [...]. He enjoyed the exercise so much that he wrote more than thirty between 1945 and 1948 alone, of which only five remained unpublished during his lifetime.” Martin would appear only eleven years after his death in the collection Le Loup-Garou, with no indication of its pivotal place in his literary and artistic development.
Yet this debut short story bears unique traits that make it a cornerstone of Vian’s oeuvre. Entirely focused on his two great passions—jazz and American cars—this wandering narrative stands out above all for its style. At the dawn of what he dreamt would be a literary career—more turbulent than he anticipated—Vian doesn’t adopt his own voice, but that of Sullivan. Martin is written in the pure tradition of American hardboiled fiction, though without any real plot or structured narrative.
Martin recounts nothing more than the somewhat disappointing evening of a “brown amateur” trumpeter—that is, a semi-professional—invited to play in an impromptu band at a party for G.I.s. With no introduction, climax, or resolution, the tale reads like a pure exercise in style, yet in a style still entirely new for the budding writer, one that would later define J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, Elles se rendent pas compte, Les morts ont tous la même peau, Et on tuera tous les affreux, the only literary successes published in his lifetime under the guise of “translation.”
The characters in Martin would seem to appear out of nowhere, were it not for modern readers recognizing Miqueut, the narrator’s boss, lifted directly from Vercoquin; Doddy, the missing drummer, clearly modeled on Claude Léon, one of Vian’s closest friends who would reappear in several later works; Temsey, a pseudonym for Taymour Nawab; and of course the Major—alias Jacques Loustallot—who appears here as an actual U.S. officer, alongside a subtle reference to Boris’s brother, himself a musician.
But it is above all the narrator who offers the interpretative key to the story: behind the name Roby lies one of Vian’s many anagrammatic pseudonyms—Robi Savin—his “aggressive self” (as described in the Dictionnaire des personnages de Vian)—a penniless engineer and amateur trumpeter, enamored of jazz and automobiles.
Roby’s evening is a “pulp” version of one of the many performances Vian and his band gave at American charity events during the Liberation. The setting features places frequented by Boris and Michelle: the Hôtel Normandie, Claude Léon’s rue Lamarck, and the rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, rebaptized “rue Notoire-du-Vidame”, home to AFNOR...
Martin is thus a fascinating plunge into post-war Paris, viewed through the bitterness and disenchantment of a youth left behind—a mood captured by Philippe Boggio in his biography of Vian: “The boys hardly understood jazz [...] and had no idea of the violent myth their country had inspired during the Occupation.” More autobiographical than his later short stories, which leaned toward whimsy and the fantastic, Martin is a rich source of insight into Vian’s youth and the fierce melancholy of a restless mind in a liberated but still constrained city.
Dr. Vian gives free rein to Mr. Sullivan, who dreams of settling scores with Dutch musicians,
“All bastards, half-Germans, even more obsequious when they want something from you [and they] grovel before the client for a pack of smokes.”
Gratuitous violence waiting to explode, though never truly targeted:
“Yeah, I’m an engineer, and that’s the dumbest three-letter job of them all (...) but if all it took was pushing a button—bam—no more Martin, no more Heinz, goodbye. Just because they’re musicians doesn’t mean a thing; professionals are all bastards.”
Though purely imaginary, the narrator’s hatred starkly contrasts with the mundane monotony of his hour-by-hour evening account. And perhaps for the only time in his work, Vian offers a bizarre reference to the dark times just ended:
“What an ass! All drivers are morons. A rotten breed. Screw them, I’m an engineer. [...] We’re the same breed; people who grovel. Fine, I’ll get my revenge later—with a Colt, I’ll take them all down—but I’m not risking anything, because my skin’s worth more than theirs [...]. I wonder why we don’t just do it for real. Go find someone like Maxence Van der Meersch, tell him: —You don’t like pimps and brothel owners, me neither. Let’s start a secret society, and one night we charge in with a black Citroën and kill everyone in Toulouse. —That won’t be enough. We’ll have to kill them all. So I say, I’ve got another idea—we throw a big union meeting, and then we wipe them out [...]. If we get caught [...] no matter, we’ll have had a good laugh. But the next day, others will take their place. —Then he says, we’ll just do it all over again with something else.”
Blending Nazi racial ideology with Van der Meersch’s humanism, invoking the black Citroën—at once a symbol of the Gestapo and the Resistance—juxtaposing schoolboy humor with mass killing, Vian fans the embers just months after Germany’s surrender.
Set against the backdrop of a festive evening with loose morals, he captures the bitterness and dashed hopes of a lost generation in Victory Paris:
“It was full of pretty girls. Pity to see them with the Americans [...] the prettier they are, the dumber.”
At once grateful:
“I stuff myself until I’m no longer hungry, then a little more, just to make sure I won’t regret it the next day.”
and dependent:
“He holds out his hand for a pack of Chesterfields—‘Thank you Sir, Thanks a lot!’—lousy lackey!”
The characters seem to spend most of their time waiting for orders and rewards from the American soldiers.
Still, the narrator’s account focuses primarily on movement—first that of the cars, icons of the “Uhessas” fantasized by Vian:
“There was the sky-blue Chrysler of the US Navy, I’ve seen it pass several times in Paris already”; “No, the other one—better—a Lincoln”; “finally, a proper car, a 1939 Packard”; “what a great sound the tires of a big car make on cobblestones—hollow and round—we climbed in, in gear.”
Then it’s the dancers who catch Roby’s attention—“they’re dancing, without much conviction” at first, then “the brunette’s acting silly and wiggling her hard little butt, planting cabbages with the American,” and finally, a harsher verdict: “what a bunch of jerks! Are they dancing for the music, for the girls, or just to dance?”
Boris-Roby casts himself as a mere observer of this new world that ignores him. A silent secondary character, he becomes a vengeful hero and ruthless judge in his imagination alone: “I let them deal with it—what a bore [...] screw it, they all piss me off.”
Though Vian drew extensively from his experience in the Abadie Orchestra, the darling of dance parties organized by the American Army’s Special Service show, the model here, though autobiographical, is likely not Boris Vian the musician—Bison Ravi, trumpeter of the budding Saint-Germain scene. The disenchanted Roby is more subtly inspired by Boris Vian the writer, the future Vernon Sullivan: obscure novice, yet already a peerless observer of the hidden side of reality.
The key to this interpretation is ironically given to the reader in the very first line, which would become the posthumous title: “Martin called me at five o’clock.”
Martin is above all a nod to the characters of Marcel Aymé, one of Vian’s favorite authors. But the name mostly shares its opening syllable with the famous “Marquise” from the Surrealists’ criticism of stale novel openings like “The Marquise went out at five.” That phrase—and the judgment it inspired—became a recurring figure of literary satire. In 1961, Raymond Queneau himself turned it into an alexandrine in Cent mille milliards de poèmes: “C’était à cinq o’clock que sortait la marquise.”
The first writer to mock that infamous cliché of “insane” novelistic conventions, in Breton’s terms, Boris Vian demonstrates with his inaugural Martin an irreverence that spares neither the real nor the surreal world!
“I’m home, finally in bed, and just before I fall asleep, I turn into a duck.”
25.10.45”
Provenance: Fondation Boris Vian.