Vernon Sullivan: The Bestselling Writer Who Didn’t Exist
In 1946, a novel called I Spit On Your Graves (J’irai cracher sur vos tombes) appeared in France. The book was a hardboiled thriller written by a newcomer, a black American writer named Vernon Sullivan. The translator was a French author well-connected in Parisian literary circles but little-known to the reading public, Boris Vian. In his preface to the novel, Vian explained how publisher Jean d’Halluin had met Sullivan, and Sullivan “showed him his manuscript.” Vian then went on to talk about Sullivan’s literary motivations, saying that Sullivan “considered himself ‘more as a Negro than a white man,’ in spite of having passed the ‘line’… He had the idea that one can imagine and also meet Negroes just as ‘tough’ as white men. This is what he had personally tried to demonstrate in this short novel… all the more so as his American publishers had just shown him the timidity of any attempt at publication in his country.”
I Spit On Your Graves is indeed harsh. It’s narrated by Lee Anderson, an African-American light-skinned enough to pass for white. He starts the novel by settling into the fictional southern middle-class town of Buckton where he takes a job as the Buckton Bookstore manager. Amiable and handsome, he simmers with hidden anger, and he discloses to the reader that back in their hometown his younger brother was lynched for being seen with a white woman. Lee has come to Buckton driven by one goal: to seduce and kill two white women to avenge his brother’s death.
Through the book, he does a lot of drinking and partying with the town’s young carefree women, and he proves to be quite a sexual athlete. Nobody seems to suspect that he’s black, but he always worries that his deep bass voice, an undisguisable “black” voice, will give him away. One or two people do finally express doubts about his alleged whiteness, but he carries on with his deception, honing his obsessive sights on a pair of wealthy sisters. These are the two women he murders, in brutal fashion. At the end, his racial status clear to all, the police trap him in a barn and shoot him. He dies. But as Sullivan’s authorial voice says, in a brief postscript, “The townspeople hanged him anyway, because he was a nigger.”
The book is written in a terse style, indicating Sullivan had read his Cain, Chandler, and Horace McCoy. His main character’s narration carries a clear sense of outrage. Sensitive to the racial hypocrisy around him, he critiques whites and blacks in equal measure. His brother was too kind, honest, and forgiving, he says, and “that’s what ruined him.” Anderson has no time for the humility and deference, as he sees it, that blacks present to whites, and he’s certain that “if we only had [white people’s] skin we’d be ahead of him, for he talks too much and betrays his weakness when he’s in the company of what he thinks are other white men.” Of blacks who “go over to the side of the whites for all purposes, not even having the decency to refrain from knocking the colored race when the occasion demands it,” he could “kill men like that with a lot of pleasure.”
I Spit On Your Graves marked the emergence of a beautifully corrosive African-American author, given full expression, as Chester Himes later would be, in France, except that, as it turned out, there was no Vernon Sullivan. He didn’t exist. For all its bitterness about race and racism, the novel was the work of a white man, its supposed translator, Boris Vian. And Vian had never even been to the United States. In contrast to his fictional creation, a black man who passes as white, Vian adopted a black persona, and his literary hoax, at least at first, succeeded. French readers thought Vernon Sullivan was real. They didn’t suspect Vian had done more than “translate” and supply the book’s informative preface. But who was Boris Vian exactly, and why had he perpetrated the hoax? What lay behind what now would be rightly called an egregious act of cultural appropriation?
Born in 1920 in an affluent suburb of Paris, Boris Vian had a comfortable upbringing with bohemian-minded parents. He was sickly as a young child, and when he was twelve, he contracted rheumatic fever and typhoid. The illnesses left him with a weak heart and he lived much of his life in precarious health. He predicted he’d die at the age of 40. In actuality, he made it to 39. Perhaps it was this certitude that his life would be short that spurred his artistic production, because the volume of his creative output is remarkable.
Under his own name, he wrote novels, poetry, stories, plays, screenplays, articles, and satirical pamphlets. He did genuine translations into French of books by Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. But alongside his literary endeavors, Vian had another love, music, in particular jazz, and he pursued it with zeal from his teenage years. He became such a jazz expert that at 16 years old, he gained acceptance to the preeminent French jazz club, Le Hot Club de France. The next year, he took up the trumpet. Vian would go on to become a prime fixture in the French jazz world, and through the 1940s, even during the war, he wrote regular columns about jazz and played his trumpet in a Paris-based band.
Perhaps it’s through jazz that his preoccupation with American culture, and especially black American culture, began. Vian often served as host to visiting American musicians, and in 1939, he helped mount a big Duke Ellington concert that affected him greatly. Ellington would become the godfather to his daughter, and after the war, Vian opened the Club Saint Germain on the Left Bank, a jazz cave where he would organize shows for the best jazz artists around, including Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. For Vian, jazz was a way of life, something to which he gave unstinting commitment. In a way that sounds quintessentially French (and male) but uniquely Boris Vian, he’s quoted as saying, “There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.”
Beauty and ugliness define the two poles of Vian’s outlook. As a literary writer, the man who moved in the same social orbit as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (who had an affair with Vian’s wife, helping to wreck the marriage), Vian wrote absurdist fantasias filled with eccentrics and romantic dreamers. His novels can get dark, but they are full of puns, slapstick, and comedy. A man falls in love with a woman who develops a fatal water lily in her lung in Foam of the Daze. To keep her alive, he must surround her with flowers. Love and weird beauty figure also in Autumn in Peking, where a number of people, obsessive types, build a train station and railway tracks in a desert no one visits. Though now considered an important postwar French author—Foam on the Daze has sold millions of copies in France—Vian writing as Vian did not receive recognition outside his coterie of literary friends. It was only when he turned to the dank and sordid, writing as a black American, that his fiction made him money.
The truth was I Spit On Your Graves had begun when Jean d’Halluin of Editions du Scorpion asked Vian to choose and translate a hardboiled American crime novel for d’Halluin’s new imprint. Vian decided he’d write the book himself, indulging his love for things American. One can imagine him, with his prankster instincts and the bond he felt with his black musician friends, telling himself he could pull the race charade off. Here was a chance to write a bestseller and to express what must have been sincere feelings about the United States’ racial situation.
Unnoticed at first, the book gained attention in early 1947 when a Daniel Parker, head of a French right wing watchdog group called the Cartel d’action sociale et morale, condemned it for its violence and explicit sexual content. Parker sued author Sullivan, translator Vian, and publisher d’Halluin, and tried to have the book banned. The case wound up in court, where Vian, never admitting he was Sullivan, escaped being fined. A few months afterward, more notoriety ensued. A man in Paris strangled his lover in a hotel room, and the police found a copy of I Spit On Your Graves by the bed. The murderer had circled passages in it, among them the section where Lee Anderson strangles one of the two sisters. Between the lawsuit and the book’s connection to the killing, sales for I Spit On Your Graves took off, and it became the top seller in France in 1947. Finally Vian had a success, but he’d had to impersonate a black American to achieve it. What’s striking is that Vian himself was fully aware of how white culture uses and co-opts black culture, and he has a passage in the novel that pointedly discusses this. It occurs when Anderson, a jazz lover like his creator, is discussing music and the contributions of black people with somebody else, and the passing-for-white Anderson definitively takes the side of blacks:
“Well, that’s really a compliment,” I said. “They’re just about the best musicians you can find.”
“I don’t think so. All the big dance orchestras are white.”
“Of course—the whites are in a better position to exploit the Negro’s inventions.”
“I just don’t think you’re right.”
“All the great popular composers are colored. Like Duke Ellington, for example.”
“What about Gershwin, Kern and all of those?”
“They’re all immigrants from Europe,” I said. “They’re the best ones able to envelop it. But I don’t think you’d find a single original passage anywhere in Gershwin’s work—one that hasn’t been copied or plagiarized…
The levels of posing this novel contains, both in the text and outside it, are dizzying. And after all, we’re talking about a work written as a pulp novel, in two weeks. It would seem easy to dismiss I Spit On Your Graves as a hoax perpetuated by a “white Negro” trying to make a quick buck, but Vian’s sincerity does come through. And more than sincerity: understanding. As James Baldwin says in his book length essay “The Devil Finds Work,” “What informs Vian’s book… is not sexual fantasy, but rage and pain: that rage and pain which Vian (almost alone) was able to hear in the black American musicians, in the bars, dives, and cellars, of the Paris of those years.”
The ruse not exposed, a second Vian-as-Sullivan novel appeared in 1947—The Dead All Have the Same Skin. Here, appropriation and racial confusion themselves become motifs; the book reads like the nightmare of a person having an extreme identity crisis. The narrator, Daniel Parker, is an apparently white man who works as a bouncer in a low-grade New York City nightclub. He has a white wife and a white child. One day out of the blue, a dark-skinned black man appears, claiming to be his brother. They have the same mother and father, he says, and he threatens to reveal Parker’s racial secret to his boss and family. Parker gives in to the blackmail, helpless against the surfacing memories of his past as a black child, and the comprehension of his true racial make-up sends him into a psychological tailspin. Are his memories real or imagined? The reader can’t tell. His sexual insecurity worsens his unease; he finds himself impotent with white women, his wife included, and flings himself into joyless trysts with a variety of black women. His internal tensions boil over into violence, and he devolves into a multiple murderer whose sexual hang-ups, chattiness, and general disorientation remind the reader of a Jim Thompson character. And like Thompson’s people, Parker, despite his delusions, broaches certain uncomfortable truths. As he says, “It’s not all that rare, really—whites who want to change the shade of their skin.”
Unlike Lee Anderson, who had a plan and executed it, consequences be damned, Daniel Parker is at the mercy of his fears and compulsions. A true roman noir protagonist, he inflicts his damage on himself. He realizes this by the end, acknowledging that he killed “them all for absolutely no reason.” Even the police discover that the man claiming to be his brother was a “master blackmailer” and that the killer they are hunting isn’t black. The people Parker killed remain dead, but that Parker is white changes how the police look at the case. It’s not a situation of a black man running murderously wild—society’s worse case scenario—but something more twisted yet mundane.
“And just what did you tell me a little earlier?” he blurted. “That this guy isn’t any more black than you or me?”
Cooper shook his head. He felt uncomfortable.
“It’s just a fact and we can’t do anything about it. We made a mistake.”
“Well, I don’t give a damn. Why did we screw up… What’ll it look like? The papers have been all over this for four days, over every last detail… And this is the news you bring me? That this guy is white! I mean really, for Christ’s sake, just what makes this guy white, after all?”
“It’s not my fault,” said Cooper.
What Vian doesn’t answer is why the blackmailer selected Parker in the first place. If Parker is white, how did the blackmailer suss him out as a mark, somebody gripped by racial dysphoria? Nothing in the book indicates that the blackmailer could have, logically speaking, and it’s part of what gives The Dead All Have the Same Skin a dreamlike quality. It’s a classic doppleganger story with a racial inflection, where the protagonist seems to mentally summon his alter ego.
Boris Vian went on to write two more Vernon Sullivan novels. To Hell with the Ugly came out in 1948 and They Do Not Realize in 1950. By then, the public knew Sullivan was Vian, and Vian jettisoned the racial explorations, preferring to go for genre parody. To Hell with the Ugly, for instance, is a noir, sci-fi, and Hardy Boys mashup set in a fantasy Los Angeles with a muscle bound lead named Rock Bailey. It’s a laugh out loud hoot, but Vian is doing something quite different than what he does in his first two Sullivan books.
Vian died in 1959, in circumstances absurd enough to match his novels. He was at a movie theater showing a French film version of I Spit On Your Graves. Unhappy with the adaptation, he had attacked the new film in the press and asked the producers to take his name off the credits. The film had just begun when he slumped over in his seat. Vian had suffered a heart attack, and the story goes that his final words, as he took in the film’s opening scenes, were filled with outrage: “These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!”
Perfect last words for a white Frenchman who pretended to be a black American writing about a country he’d never visited, upset that the actors portraying his characters didn’t seem real enough.
Originally published in Literary Hub.
