Have you seen Le Roi Danse? It's not a perfect movie (the script is so-so) but from a historical perspective it's very interesting as an illustration of the use of arts and symbolism to build the Sun King image (the whole movie appears to be on you tube, incidentally). It shows Louis XIV in a light many aren't used to - and visually it's very accurate, all based off engravings, programmes' and Versailles' gazette descriptions of the costumes and sets. It's based on Beaussant's lavish biography of Lully (Lully ou le musicien du soleil, you might have some of the CDs linked to that book, they started an edition of recording's of Lully's complete works under that title). It's a very beautiful book (fits your standards too - bookstores keep it under lock and key) if those aspects of Louis XIV's reign interest you in particular. There's a lot on Molière as well, since so much of their careers were linked (Molière's plays is what is remembered, but a very great deal of his life's work was putting together the shows or propanganda events for Versailles (and pre-Versailles) with Lully). OTOH, as you may have noticed, Petitfils relied heavily on that book for his chapters on the role of arts in the reign, so in a way you already got the synthesis, of the political aspects of this in any case.

I love Lully too, and the French baroque in general.



Productions of Racine I've seen were all fairly intense, though that one was the most "dramatic" (the ones I've seen as a teenager had the actors pose and recite a lot more). And you haven't seen the most intense moments in that clip. It gets very raw and violent toward the end. Dorval impressed a lot for her virtuosity at screaming alexandrins at great speed without missing a beat.

Productions of greek tragedies tend to get very intense here too. Dramatic intensity is kind of a trademark of Montréal's theatre, that and inventiveness in the "mise en scène". It impresses the French much when our companies tour there (also the Russians, for some reason - some companies had massive success in Moscow in the last decade or two), their theatre productions tend to be more academic and conservative.




They're very funny and incisive. They all deal with anti-militarism as their main theme, though. My favourite would be L'équarissage pour tous, with its family where the children serve in different national armies. In Pléiade we're also missing the opera libretti (far more forgettable, they're nothing special and not written in his personal style) and probably most of Vian's writings on Jazz (he was the foremost French expert of his time on American Jazz, and in fact one of the most knowledgeable commentators of jazz in that time period). I also don't remember if his writings for Sartre's Les Temps Modernes and other magazines are included.



He was foremostly against all ideologies/systems of thought, though his favourite targets were communism and catholicism (ot its clericalism, he wasn't anti-Christian. You'll see his mockery of catholicism become more incisive as time goes), and militarism. Another of his pet peeves were bureaucrats. He came from a background of free thinking originals, real oddballs. Freedom to think for himself without bowing to any fashionable dogma is something Vian defended and cherished all his life. In 1950s France, that made him somewhat bizarre, and his relative apolitism (eclectism would be more accurate) and critics of all political, philosophical or literary dogmas made him very suspicious with their defenders, and contributed a lot to his reputation for not being a "serious" writer, or for lacking intellectual depth (despite having a very wide culture, which unlike most of his friends included a scientific culture) though that didn't fool a few intellectuals like Queneau and De Beauvoir, who loved Vian's works. Sartre found him pleasant, but never took him very seriously. For a while - around the time of the publication of L'Écume des Jours, incidentally - you might say Vian somewhat acquired the status in literary circles as Sartre's court jester. He was a great americanophile, yet his friendship with jazzmen made him very critical of racial/social tensions in the US of the time (you'll see some of that in the first two Sullivan novels). He was also a great admirer of golden Age SF (and translator of Van Vogt). You'll see the influence of that on L'Herbe Rouge. You could find Vian in many circles (especially where the fun was, he was an hedonist) but he didn't really belong to any. Close to the existentialists, but not one himself, he had communist and Gaullist friends, but avoided discussing politics with them (as he could get fairly heated up)

Another thing Vian hated with passion was propaganda. You'll see him depict ideologues of all ilk as idiotically repeating empty slogans. It's especially virulent with catholicism, though there remains something good-natured about it all - most often Vian chose to mock or push to the absurd to denounce (though he could be vitriolic in his dislikes... and persistent too. The ultra catholic poet Paul Claudel (brother of Rodin's mistress) is one of his favourite targets. In one of the novels, Vian refers to his catholic literary magazine and his poetry by having a character killing time with a knitting pattern by Paul Claudel that he found in the magazine La Pensée Catholique et le Pélerin agglomérés.

It's sad Vian's dead. I would have loved to have a Vian-coined term for the literalists/creationists, for instance.

Vian's fiction resurfaced as a darling of the Mai 1968 movement and L'Écume des Jours in particular was offered as an illustration of "L'imagination au pouvoir" slogan. Vian would have been happy, that crisis was De Gaulle's downfall. Since then, L'Écume des Jours remains the top "classic" of French lycéens.

I still see many Vian inspired slogans in the current social crisis (among a sea of appalling lack of culture, to be honest).




You will love Vian's term for the communists. In his fictional universe, he calls them "the conformists", which in Vian's free thinker vision is pretty much the worst insult. He also never understood some of his contemporaries's blindspot when it came to stalinism. His views on religion, however, is not far from Marx's Opium of the masses. His POV on communism might appear ambiguous in places (but for having read several biographies, it's not - Vian was somewhat socialist on social matters, and definitely on the left on morality and culture - and his anti-militarism, and his dislike of Financiers/Banks, but pretty much center right/conservative in many other things), because he also attacked rabid anti-communism and paranoid fears of the Reds. He would likely have denounced McCarthyism virulently. Most of all, he feared the cold war would become a race to arms. He died before seeing how right he was.

As for Sartre, honestly I would have to go back to one of the biographies of Vian I have to quote you what he said on existentialism. What I remember by rote is that De Beauvoir understood right away upon reading L'Écume des Jours (and explained it to Sartre) that Vian's target was neither Sartre or his philosophy (which in some ways influenced him - see L'Herbe Rouge) but Sartre's "fandom". That a philosopher could be turned into a pop star with silly groupies who didn't understand his works but worshipped him, that a personality cult could grow around him, that for many of those fans his writings or ideas were barely understood, or considered important, was totally appalling to Vian. That's what he caricatured in L'Écume des Jours, and De Beauvoir quite approved and got the novel Sartre's imprimatur in turn, which lead to the publication (of excerpts, IRRC) in Les Temps Modernes.



The one you were planning already: L'Écume des Jours, L'Automne à Pékin. Then L'Arrache-coeur, L'Herbe Rouge.

Then it doesn't matter so much. Novellas first, I would say - after the novels they're Vian most interesting work. Skim through the youth works if you want to see a far less achieved, far more absurd Vian. Of the Sullivans, "Et on tuera..." is perhaps the most Vian-like, as a kind of spoof of Flemming that's often really funny. "Elles se rendent pas compte" is another like this, but far less successful. "Les Morts..." just isn't that great. "J'irai cracher sur vos tombes", the first Vernon Sullivan and the one written before the trial for obscenity and that was published as Vian was still believed to be only its translator, is mostly of interest historically, for the scandal surrounding it (which owes a lot to the rabid enemity of the catholic moral right Vian's attacked and who took this way their revenge. It might have a special interest for an American reader for two things: Vian wrote it to fool people it was a translation from English, and it remains of interest to see how a Frenchman of the 50s, who never set foot in America and knew it strictly from its literature and from his friendship with mostly black jazzmen, imagined north-American life and social issues.