The Life of Marguerite Duras
[In the following essay, which is based on an interview with Duras, Garis discusses how the author's views and life experiences have impacted her writing.]
Novelist, playwright, film maker, Communist, outrageous social commentator, Marguerite Duras has awed and maddened the French public for more than 40 years. Considering her impoverished childhood in Vietnam, her participation in the French Resistance, her Communism and ultimate disaffection with the Party, her two marriages and many liaisons, the near-fatal cure she underwent for alcoholism in 1982, and, especially, her miraculous recovery from a five-month coma induced by complications from emphysema in 1988, it is reasonable to suggest that Marguerite Duras is a force of nature.
Her 48th work, The Lover, published in 1984 when she was 70, was a best seller not only in France and throughout Europe, but in the United States as well. According to the French publisher Jerome Lindon, whose Les Editions de Minuit brought out The Lover, it is one of the few contemporary French books to have an international impact. He knows of at least 29 foreign editions, including 3 in separate Chinese dialects. It won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
Set in prewar Indochina, where Duras spent her childhood, The Lover is a despairing, sensuous novel about an affair between a 15-year-old French girl and a 27-year-old Chinese man. The consuming infatuation and brutal shifts of power between the lovers echo many issues of modern colonialism. Although Duras's work is avidly followed by a coterie of intellectuals, and her 1960 film script of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour has become a cult classic, it wasn't until The Lover that she reached a mass audience. Duras stated publicly that it was completely autobiographical—an assertion that made her a media star.
Now, at 77, she has again captured center stage by publishing L'Amant de la Chine du Nord (The North Chinese Lover), a book the newspaper Le Point calls "stunning and diabolical." With the audacity for which she is famous, this book is an end run around the film director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who has shot his version of The Lover, scheduled for European release in January. Until she and Annaud argued, Duras was the screenwriter, eventually Gérard Brach, whose credits include the screenplays for "The Name of the Rose" and "The Bear," adapted the novel with Annaud. (Annaud will not speak to the press about the film.) Meanwhile, Duras recast her best seller into a new version, which is a fuller telling of the original, including many new shocking details, and—always mischievous—camera angles and directions for the soundtrack. Duras says her new book is more true than The Lover.
Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity. After The Lover, Duras said, in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the story of her life did not exist. Only the novel of a life was real, not historical facts. "It's in the imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life."
Between The Lover and The North Chinese Lover, Duras has written and directed her 18th film and published a collection of essays, three novels and "The War," a vivid account of waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from Dachau during the Liberation, then nursing him back to health from near starvation.
Keeping in mind her special relationship to truth, I visited her in her apartment in Paris to talk about her work and her long life. At that time she had almost completed The North Chinese Lover. Monique Gonthier, a bilingual French journalist, accompanied me for linguistic emergencies.
In the dark, cramped hallway of their apartment stand a tiny woman bent with age and a handsome, middle-aged man—Marguerite Duras and her companion of 11 years, Yann Andréa. She wears a plaid skirt and green stockings, he wears leather pants and has a mustache; together they evince images of whimsy, intellect and danger.
We walk into a small, dusty room filled with strange objects: a broken candleholder that is a model of the Eiffel Tower, a box of old postcards, little tins of tea next to a piece of curled red ribbon. There are piles and piles of paperback books and a round table in the middle of the room where Duras seats herself in front of some blank pages and three pens.
Her head is so large that her cheeks spread out toward her narrow shoulders. She must be less than five feet tall. She wears many rings and bracelets.
"Let me tell you something," she says. Her voice is gruff, energetic and frank. "I am finishing a book. I am going to pick up the story of The Lover without any literature in it. The fault I have found with The Lover was its literariness, which comes very easily to me because it's my style. But you won't understand that."
"Even I am struggling to understand," says Yann, smiling. "Another version of The Lover without the style of The Lover? It's the same story."
"Not exactly. Another novel. It is between the little girl and the Chinese."
"Why go over the material again?" I ask.
"Because there is a film maker who is one of the greatest in the world, whose name is Jean-Jacques Annaud, who took on The Lover. He told a story that I didn't recognize, so I said: 'Now you're going home, it's finished. I don't want to work with you anymore.' I was a little nasty."
The film is being made in English with two unknowns playing the leads: an English girl and a man from Hong Kong. Duras waves her hand in dismissal when I ask her if she will watch the shooting. "It doesn't interest me," she says, But, of course, she has her new book, which more or less throws down the gauntlet to Annaud.
As Yann plays with a piece of ribbon like the one on the table, twisting it through his fingers, she looks at me expectantly, and I begin by asking about early literary influences. She denies having any. "My mother was a farmer," she says bluntly. "She had no idea what literature was all about."
"Did you know you were a writer when you were young?"
"I never doubted. I wrote when I was 10. Very bad poems. Many children start out writing like that, with the most difficult form."
The form of a typical Duras novel is minimal, with no character description, and much dialogue, often unattributed and without quotation marks. The novel is not driven by narrative, but by a detached psychological probing, which, with its complexity and contradictory emotions, has its own urgency.
I ask her why she has said in interviews she feels suffocated by the classical novel, especially Balzac.
Balzac describes everything, everything. It's exhaustive. It's an inventory. His books are indigestible. There's no place for the reader."
Yann says gently: "There is pleasure too, in reading Balzac. You're very reassured."
"If you read it at 14," Duras barks back. "Balzac was my earliest nourishment. But I am a part of my own time, you have to be a part of your own time. One can no longer write as Balzac does. And Balzac could never have written 'Lol Stein.'"
The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964) is one of Duras's seminal works. Nineteen-year-old Lol Stein is engaged to Michael Richardson. They go to a ball in S. Tahla, an imagined town on the north French coast, similar to Trouville, where Duras owns a house. Anne-Marie Stretter, a glamorous older woman, arrives and steals away Michael Richardson. Lol Stein goes mad. Ten years later she is back in S. Tahla as a married woman. She walks incessantly, seldom talking. One day she follows a man who has a clandestine meeting with a woman from Lol Stein's youth. Later, the three of them meet socially, and eventually Lol Stein lies in a field outside a hotel in which the man and woman are making love. She occasionally sees her woman friend, naked, cross in front of the window, oblivious of being watched. The man, however, knows, which heightens Lol Stein's pleasure. An odd, obsessive longing she had felt to follow Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter when they left the dance is now fulfilled by this act of voyeurism.
I ask her what sort of state she was in when she wrote Lol Stein, and she tells me a curious story.
"With Lol Stein, I screamed. I was by the sea, in a house in Trouville. I was in the living room, and at a little distance was my lover. I heard a cry. I leaped up. I went to see the young man. I said, 'What's the matter?' He said: 'What are you talking about? I'm the one who should ask why you screamed.' I'd cried out, without even … it's funny."
"Have you ever known someone like Lol Stein?"
She picks up the papers before her, stands them upright and taps the edges to align them. She is so small that her face disappears behind the pages. I hear a deep sigh.
"One day I took care of a madwoman. I went to a psychiatric hospital and asked for a young woman who had attracted me. She was very beautiful, very elegant. I took her out in the car. She didn't say anything. We simply went to a cafe. She ate and ate and ate—like a clochard, crudely, with her hands. At her core she was very sick. I wanted to see it physically. I saw it in her. The gaze. That's Lol Stein.
"I've been thinking about this character for 10 years. I have an image. Not another book. Maybe a film. She is on the beach at Trouville. She is in a rickshaw. There's no roof, she's exposed. She is very made up, like a whore. She's wearing dirty dresses, and it's as if she grew old in an asylum. And you know where she's going? She's going to the dance."
"Terrific!" says Yann. "You have to do it! Write it!" She turns to him with a distant look in her eyes and a faint smile. Silence prevails.
Marguerite Duras was born in Giadinh, near Saigon, in 1914. Her father, Henri Donnadieu, was a professor of mathematics at a school in what was then French Indochina. He died in 1918, leaving Marguerite, two brothers and her mother practically destitute.
Until she went to the Sorbonne in France in 1932, Duras lived like an Asian child an spoke fluent Vietnamese.
In 1924 her family moved to Sadec, then to Vinhlong, villages on the Mekong River. In Vinhlong a new French governor arrived from Laos with his wife, a pale beauty named Elizabeth Striedter. It was rumored that the wife had a young lover in Laos who killed himself when she went away. The news of this suicide had a searing effect on the imagination of Duras, for whom the woman came to represent a dark, mythic feminine power. She was the model for Anne-Marie Stretter (who reappears in The North Chinese Lover). "Many times I have said to myself," Duras told the critic Michelle Porte, "that I am a writer because of her."
There was another event in Vinhlong that changed Duras forever. Her mother, the daughter of poor French farmers, had saved for 20 years to buy arable land in Indochina. At last she purchased a farm from the French colonial government, not realizing that without a bribe she would be cheated. With the help of her children, she built a bungalow and planted rice. But as soon as the rainy season started, the sea rose to the house, flooding the fields, ruining the crops. Every penny of her savings was lost. She fought against the sea for years, building dikes that washed away, until finally her health was broken. Marguerite, herself, at age 12, had an emotional crisis serious enough to be called madness. After that, for the rest of her life, she was preoccupied by insanity and convinced that the world was fundamentally unjust.
Her childhood was also full of a wild freedom. With no supervision she played in the rain forest and hunted for birds and small game that, in her extreme poverty, she brought home to eat.
In a 1974 booklength interview with Xaviere Gauthier, Duras said: "I have a bedazzled memory … of the night in the forest when we'd walk barefoot, barefoot while everywhere it was teeming with snakes!… I wasn't afraid at 12, and then, as an adult, I've said to myself, 'But how did we get out alive?' We would go to see the monkeys, and there were black panthers too. I saw a black panther fly by a hundred meters away. Nothing in the world is more ferocious than that."
Thinking about that panther, I ask her: "There seems to be a chronic underlying panic in your books. Did that come from your childhood?"
"Who can say? It's true that it exists. Endemic, as they say."
During another long silence I gaze at a strange tableau on a table. A mirror with dried flowers drooping from the top is propped against the wall. In its reflection is a poster of "Destroy She Said," her first independent movie. Leaning against the mirror is another, smaller mirror.
"There was a sexual fear, fear of men, because I didn't have a father. I wasn't raped, but I sensed rape, like all little girls. And then afterwards I had a Chinese lover. That was love."
Yann serves us grenadine. I remember French friends telling me, with eyebrows raised, that between them is un vrai amour, even though he is a homosexual.
"Do you think most people live with continual fear?"
"Only the stupid are not afraid."
Fear, despair, alienation are themes that seized her in her childhood; later Duras became fascinated with crimes of passion. In the 1958 novel Moderato Cantabile—Duras's first major success—a crime is committed: lying on the woman he has just killed, a man sobs: "Darling, My darling." Two witnesses, a man and a woman, later drink together and reconstruct in repetitious and incantatory dialogue a passion so intense that its climax was murder. This mix of eroticism and death runs through her work like a river that feeds everything it passes. Certainly one of its sources was the French governor's wife, but an even stronger one was a savage conflict within her family circle.
Duras passionately loved Paulo, the younger of her two older brothers (both of whom are now dead). Paulo was slightly retarded and was deathly afraid of Pierre, the older brother, who tormented and physically battered Paulo. One of the most jarring revelations in "The North Chinese Lover" is that Duras had sex with Paulo. In the book he begins to crawl into her bed when they were both very young, precipitating terrifying rages from Pierre. That intimacy eventually leads to consummation, just before the family leaves Vietnam. This new slant on her childhood might explain why she hated Pierre so much that she wanted to kill him.
"I should have," she cries today. "There was only one solution. That was murder. And one didn't adopt that solution. And it went on throughout my whole childhood. Hate grows. It's like a fire that doesn't go out. When he was 17 and I was 13, during a nap one day I got a knife to kill him."
"Why?"
"For everything, for the sake of killing him. So he wouldn't beat the little one anymore. I can't talk about the little one because I'm going to cry."
"Why didn't you kill the older one?"
"He woke up. He laughed." She imitates horrible laughter. It's a bizarre moment. "He got hold of the knife. He flung it away. I picked it up. He called my mother. He told her. They laughed uproariously. And I cried, I cried."
"What did your mother do?"
"She was very hard on me. She didn't love us, the little one and me. I've never seen anything like it in my life, my mother's preference for my older brother. She was proud of me because I did well in school. My little brother wasn't altogether normal, and that's why my older brother persecuted him. And as for me, I was going mad with pain because above all I loved my little brother. I wanted to kill myself when he died."
Self-destruction for love is a particularly Durasian obsession. "You destroy me. You're so good for me," repeats the woman in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" to her lover. I ask her today why sex and death are always entwined for her.
"It's difficult to articulate. It's erotic." She takes a deep breath. "I had a lover with whom I drank a lot of alcohol." She pauses, staring straight at me. Her face is expressionless, her dark eyes are absolutely still. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists."
In Practicalities, a 1987 book of essays, Duras writes about a violent affair. "We took a room by the river. We made love again. We couldn't speak to one another any more. We drank. He struck me … in cold blood. We couldn't be near one another now without fear and trembling…. We were both faced with the same strange desire." It was after that experience that she wrote Moderato Cantabile.
Is Duras's attitude toward eroticism an anomaly, or is it particularly French? Jennifer Wicke, an associate professor of comparative literature at New York University, told me that while the English may write about a languid conversation in front of a fire, the French are entirely different.
"Duras's writing is always at an extremity, and that is quite French," she said. "I see her as carrying on the tradition of l'amour fou, the crazed love. It's a bleak world view, the opposite of a lyrical text. It proposes a tragic end, because desire can't be sustained. It will either turn into obsession and, thus, ultimately destroy its object, or it will see itself be deflated by the very cruel contingencies of history, or death."
Duras is associated with the Nouveau Roman (literally "new novel"), a movement born in the 50's, whose members include Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. The Nouveau Roman rejects the classical novel as an inappropriate medium to express the chaotic, morally ambiguous postwar world. Although Duras shares many of the movement's stylistic hallmarks—the free flow of time and the use of silence—she is the least obsessed with literary principles, and the most inspired by her own inimitable sensibility.
Peter Brooks, the Tripp Professor of Humanities at Yale University, commented to me that the other Nouveau Roman writers got more attention than Duras when the movement began because there was "something more technicolor about their technique. Their theorizing and their break with the traditional novel were overt and total. But Duras is the one from that whole generation who really is going to last."
Duras looks at Yann, and he takes her hand. During our conversation he has been shuffling around, walking in and out of the room, one hand on his hip, flipping his hair back with a toss of his head—a movement that must be, in other circumstances, flirtatious. I ask how they like to spend their time.
"The thing we like most in life is to be in a car together," she says, "to go in bistros, cafes, and make stories from what we see."
"Do you ask a lot of questions?"
"All the time. People talk to us. I go out every day in the car." Then she adds: "I had chronic bronchitis. You can hear my voice very well, even so. I still have vocal cords. I was in a coma for five months."
In October 1988, Duras fell into a coma from which she miraculously awoke intact. She now has a tracheostomy and wears a necklace of wire with a silver button in the middle. At times she adjusts it, which seems to alter the force of her voice.
The most difficult storm Duras weathered was her cure from alcohol in 1982. Yann wrote a harrowing account, which has not yet been translated into English, called simply "M.D." She tells me Yann's book is "magnificent."
"I drank because I was an alcoholic. I was a real one—like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."
Her small, bejeweled hands lie on the table before her, one resting on the blank paper.
The next day we talk about criminals. Duras has never shunned conflict—as a Resistance fighter, as a Communist or as a woman who speaks out in defense of murderers if she imagines the killer is an anti-establishment figure.
"I became great friends with Georges Figon," she tells me. "He had stolen diamonds and he had killed people. And afterwards he had kidnapped people, with ransom. He was a dear friend. I got him a television interview. He was amazingly intelligent. I even went away for the weekend with him."
"A romantic weekend?" Monique immediately asks.
"No. We never slept with each other. Never. And he never tried to sleep with me."
What is the allure of a criminal for her?
"It exerts a fascination for me—all the people who abandon the golden rule of good conduct. Criminals are heroes for me."
In 1985 Duras wrote an article about Christine Villemin, who was accused of murdering her child. Although conceding Villemin's guilt under the law, she justified the murder as a natural result of social injustice. The article caused a furor.
Duras's pronouncements in the press have given her a notorious reputation. In 1988 she was interviewed on television for some four hours. Duras alternately spoke and stared speechlessly into the camera. Very little of it was comprehensible to the general public. It was just before her coma.
During my interview I was disconcerted by her habit of jumping disconnectedly from subject to subject, and it wasn't until I was back in America and spent many weeks studying the transcript of the interview (which Nancy K. Kline, of Barnard College, translated for this article) that I gradually understood the connections she was making. In New York I spoke to Tom Bishop, chairman of the French department at New York University, a Beckett scholar and a friend of Duras's for 25 years. It had occurred to me that she had sustained brain damage in the coma.
"She was always like this," he declared. "I don't think she was ever any different. I would doubt that it's the coma." He described the scattershot exchanges of ordinary friendship, which often went something like this:
Bishop: "Let's have lunch."
Duras: "I never have lunch."
Bishop: "O.K."
Long pause.
Duras: "Where would you want to have lunch if we had lunch?"
Bishop: "I was thinking of the Rue de Dragon."
Duras: "Well, O.K., fine, let's do that."
"I think she's a fabulous writer who should just write and not talk about what she's thinking," Bishop said. Like her talk, her work doesn't make "a lot of sense," but it does "something else. It allows me to have an insight into the human psyche that I have found unique. I have learned things about humanity through her that others don't teach me."
A good example of meaning in ambiguity is Duras's work in the cinema, where she is almost as important to 20th-century experimental film as she is to literature. Annette Michelson, a professor of cinema studies at New York University, told me that one of Duras's most important contributions is her realization that "the cinema is made of relations." "And when you change the relations between sound and image," she says, "you have something new."
In India Song (1975), the actress Delphine Seyrig and various men walk through a room furnished only with a grand piano. They dance, lie down, sleep, weep, while off-screen voices comment on the unbearable heat, a man shrieks and sobs, a woman chants in Cambodian and jazz melodies pulse. Sounds never emanate from the actors. And yet the audience feels despair, longing, sensuality, the presence of death, colonialism, the impossibility of human communication—awelter of specific impulses that elude verbal definition.
Of course, a writer who concerns herself with disjunction and alienation is difficult to pin down in conversation. She used to say that as a film maker she wanted to "murder the writer," and recently she said she wants to "kill the image." I wonder how it is possible to make a film without image.
She answers: "With words. To kill the writer that I was."
All right. Suddenly she picks up the pen that has been in front of her for two days and begins to write on the paper. "I'm thinking of something." She looks up. "Sensitivity depends on intelligence. It's completely connected. There's an innocence also. Luckily." She puts down the pen. I record it as it happened. I do not fully understand.
To ground us a little, I introduce the subject of politics. Her hatred of de Gaulle springs to the surface.
"When de Gaulle arrived in France, I became an anti-Gaullist instantly. I saw through his power game. I saw he was an arriviste, with a special gift for language. And at just that moment they opened the camps, and my husband had been deported. I never got over it, the Jews, Auschwitz. When I die, I'll think about that, and about who's forgotten it."
"De Gaulle never said a word on the Jews and the camps," Yann adds quietly. "If de Gaulle had not been as big as he was," Duras says angrily, "no one would have noticed him. Because he was taller than everyone, he was boss. But why this arrogance? As far as I'm concerned, he's a deserter. He's horrible, horrible."
In The War, Duras describes her days in the Resistance, working with François Mitterrand, keeping records of deportees, trying to coax information from Germans stationed in Paris. It was Mitterrand who went to Germany with Dionys Mascolo, the man who would be her second husband and the father of her son, Jean. They rescued Antelme from Dachau in the first days after the German surrender. Antelme, nearly unconscious, was consigned to a quarantined section for hopeless cases. Mitterrand and Mascolo smuggled him out.
"Mitterrand is wonderful. I worked with him in the Resistance. I protected him in the street. We never met in a house or a cafe. We liked each other so much we could certainly have slept with each other, but it was impossible. You can't do that on bicycles!" She laughs.
"Are you still a Communist?"
"I'm a Communist. There's something in me that's incurable."
"But you left the Party."
"The Party is not Communism." Her mouth hardens into a straight line across her wide face.
"Has there been any true Communist government over the years?"
"Not one. There was one Communist year: 1917."
"Do you hope to see that sort of Communism return to the world?"
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I am a Communist within myself. I no longer have hope in the world."
Yann begins to laugh. "And the other?" he asks. "Do you have hope for the next world?"
She is not amused by his question. "Zero. Zero."
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