Hegel's laughing

[James Kyllo]

Thomas Eckhardt asked:

> Perhaps the question is whether English translations of Vian's novels
> were available in the US during the 50s/60s. Paul? Neil?

Paul Mackin replied:

>I would say No. In the 50s Sartre was widely read in the U.S. in
>translation.  Also Camus's The Plague, The Stranger, The Fall.
>deBeauvoir also. I know I didn't know about Vian.

However - it seems they were available, but in disguise.  I went to Amazon,
to see whether I could buy any Vian ... and this is what I found:

"As unlikely as it may seem, America was somewhat 'in' for the French after
World War II; the prewar renown of Hemingway and Faulkner was giving way to
the novels of Cheyney and Cain, and film noir heroes such as Humphrey Bogart
had unknowingly joined forces with the rising stars of French
existentialism. The sex-and-violence pulp novel to have the biggest impact,
however, was 'I Spit on Your Graves' by a certain Vernon Sullivan, whose
existentialism came short of actually allowing him to exist. He was the pen
name of Boris Vian, jazz musician, song-writer and author, whose best-known
novel (translated as Froth on the Daydream in Britain, and Mood Indigo in
the U.S.) would later be described by Raymond Queneau as 'the most beautiful
love story ever written.' If that was to be the most beautiful, however,
then this, his literary debut, was without question one of the ugliest - a
brutal sex-and-murder revenge story to outdo even Charles Willeford at his
worst.

A lawsuit against indecency and a copy of the novel (with aptly-circled
passages) found in a hotel room by the strangled body of a business-man1s
mistress did wonders for the book's sales, but Vian's subsequent translation
of the book into its 'original' English failed to maintain his anonymity. It
did, however, make this text available to the English reader, even if it
took 50 years for it to now see print in the States."

best

James