L’Écume des jours
Review copy.
Signed presentation inscription: “à [dedicatee cut away], hommage de l'auteur, Boris Vian.”
“There are only two things: love, in every possible way, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington, which is the same thing. Everything else should disappear, because everything else is ugly.”
When this novel appeared, Boris Vian was the jazzman of the Abadie orchestra, which he had formed in complete secrecy during the Occupation. Thanks to his friend Claude Léon, the group’s drummer, he obtained a position at the Office du papier: a dream job requiring nothing more than his physical presence. L’Écume des jours was written in the large room he shared with Léon, which served as their “office,” in nine weeks, and completed on 13 June 1946 — just in time to enter for the Prix de la Pléiade, on Paulhan’s advice.
The novel nonetheless earned the young author a place contributing to the review Les Temps modernes, fittingly enough since one of the book’s heroes is an avid reader (and collector) of the works of Jean-Sol Partre. True fame came to Vian only fifteen years later, thanks to Jean-Jacques Pauvert, publisher of his complete works, when Pauvert bought back the rights in 1960: “Gallimard even asked me, as a favor, to take the unsold stock off their hands. They sold it to me at the price of the paper! Which gives some idea how little had sold between 1947 and 1963…”