"Martin m'a téléphoné"

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.

Bison Ravi’s initial literary experiments date to the winter of 1941-42. At Michelle Vian’s request, he produced a fairy tale, an exercise that prompted the young engineer to undertake another fantastical and deliberately incoherent piece for his friends’ amusement: Troubles dans les Andains. Two years later, he began work on what, in 1947, would become his first published novel -Vercoquin et le plancton - thanks to the encouragement and support of Raymond Queneau.

Before the decisive encounter with the mentor and spiritual father who would open to him the doors of Gallimard’s prestigious “Blanche” series, writing for Vian was merely a pastime - a light-hearted diversion with no consequence or ambition, meant to stave off the gloom of the Occupation years. The true passion of the mediocre young engineer was jazz, and his gradual professionalisation within Claude Abadie’s ensemble.

When, on 18 July 1945, he signed his contract for the collection La plume au vent, created and directed by Queneau, Boris Vian most likely felt he had written nothing of real substance. His little “oeuvrette”, Vercoquin ecaetera, timidly sent to Queneau the previous month, would appear with a world-weary preface and a dedication shaped almost as an apology.

Completed in October 1945, Martin stands as his first attempt at authorship and his very first short story - a form in which he would demonstrate remarkable mastery. As M. Lapprand, C. Gonzalo and F. Roulmann observe in the Pléiade edition:
“Vian’s sharp, cutting prose lends itself marvellously to short texts. […] It first manifested itself in his early practice of the ‘nouvelle’, understood in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the short story, a form he greatly admired. From 1945 to 1958, his lively pen produced forty-five short narratives […]. He delighted so much in the genre that between 1945 and 1948 he composed no fewer than some thirty […], only five of which remained unpublished during his lifetime.”
Martin would be published only eleven years after his death, in the volume Le Loup-Garou, with no acknowledgement of its crucial role in the formation of Vian’s oeuvre and artistic identity.

And yet, this first tale by Vian possesses a set of singular traits that make it something of a turning point. Entirely built around his two great passions, jazz and American automobiles, the piece distinguishes itself from his earlier efforts chiefly through its stylistic daring. At the threshold of what he imagined would be a writer’s career - one ultimately far more turbulent than he anticipated - Boris adopts not a “Vian style” but a “Sullivan style”. Martin is a short story cast squarely in the tradition of American noir, even though Vian provides neither a proper plot nor any real narrative structure.

Martin relates nothing more than the rather disappointing evening of a "rank amateur" trumpeter, that is, a semi-professional musician, enlisted to play in an impromptu band at a party organised for the G.I.s. Lacking introduction, climax or denouement, the piece reads as a pure exercise in style, yet in a style entirely new to the budding writer: the very idiom that would later shape I Shall Spit on Your Graves, Elles se rendent pas compte, The Dead All Have the Same Skin, and Et on tuera tous les affreux,, the only works to achieve success in print during the lifetime of their so-called "translator."

The characters of Martin might seem to spring from nowhere were it not for the modern reader’s ability to recognise Miqueut, the narrator’s office manager, directly borrowed from Vercoquin; Doddy, the absent drummer, who is in fact Claude Léon, one of Vian’s closest friends and later a recurring figure in several works including Autumn in Peking; Temsey, the pseudonym of Taymour Nawab; and, of course, the appearance of the Major, Jacques Loustallot, here cast as an actual American major, alongside a discreet nod to Boris’s brother, also a musician.

Yet the true interpretive key lies with the narrator. The unassuming name Roby masks one of Boris Vian’s many anagrammatic aliases, Robi Savin -what the Dictionnaire des personnages de Vian calls the author’s “aggressive self” -portrayed here as a cash-strapped engineer and part-time trumpeter with a fervour for fast cars and jazz.
Roby’s long night out reads like a pulp-fiction reframing of Vian’s own wartime engagements, echoing the evenings when he and his band played for American charity functions after the Liberation. The narrative wanders through the couple’s familiar settings: the Hôtel Normandie, Claude Léon’s home on rue Lamarck, and rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, remodelled as the whimsically named “rue Notoire-du-Vidame”, headquarters of AFNOR.

Martin reads as a vivid descent into the streets of Paris, viewed through the lens of the bitterness and disenchantment that marked the aftermath of the war, so poignantly described by Philippe Boggio: “The boys had virtually no ear for jazz and remained unaware of the fierce myth their country had stirred in people’s minds during the Occupation”.
More openly autobiographical than the later tales shaped by Vian’s fantastical imagination, Martin provides invaluable insight into his early years, capturing the fierce, simmering melancholy of a young man restless in a city newly freed yet still hemmed in.

Martin is a vivid descent into postwar Paris, suffused with the bitterness and disenchantment captured by Philippe Boggio in his biography of Vian: “The boys understand almost nothing about jazz [and are] oblivious to the violent myth their country had given rise to in people’s minds during the Occupation”. More autobiographical than the stories that would later lean toward fantasy, Martin stands as an essential document on Vian’s formative years and the raw, impatient melancholy of a brilliant spirit navigating a city freed yet still hindered.

Dr Vian lets Mr Sullivan off the leash -the part of him that dreams of putting those Dutch musicians in their place,

“all of them bastards, half-Germans, all the more sycophantic when they want something from you, grovelling before a customer for a few cigarettes.”

A raw, unprovoked violence simmering beneath the surface, without a clearly defined object:

“Yes, I’m an engineer - which is, in three letters, the stupidest trade of all (…) but if pressing a button were enough - bang… no Martin, no Heinz, farewell. And it has nothing to do with them being musicians; all professionals are bastards.”