Marguerite wasn’t always Duras. She was born Donnadieu, but with the publication of her first novel, “Les Impudents,” in 1943, she went from Donnadieu to Duras and stayed that way. She chose, as her alias, the village of her father’s origins, distancing herself from her family, and binding herself to the emanations of that place name, which is pronounced with a regionally southern French preference for a sibilant “S.” The village of Duras is in Lot-et-Garonne, an area south of the Dordogne and just north of Gascony. The language of Gascon, from which this practice of a spoken “S” derives, is not considered chic. More educated French people not from the region might be tempted to opt for a silent “S” with a proper name. In English, one hears a lot of “dur-ah”—especially from Francophiles. Duras herself said “dur-asss,” and that’s the correct, if unrefined, way to say it.
Marcel Proust, whom Duras admired a great deal and reread habitually, modelled the compelling and ridiculous Baron de Charlus on Robert de Montesquiou, of Gascony. Some argue that on account of Montesquiou’s origins and for the simpler reason that Charlus, here, is a place name, it should be pronounced “charlusss.” In “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Proust himself makes quite a bit of fun of the issue of pronunciations, and how they signify class and tact, and specifically, the matter of an “S,” of guessing if it’s silent or sibilant. Madame de Cambremer–Legrandin experiences a kind of rapture the first time she hears a proper name without the sibilant “S”—Uzai instead of Uzès—and suddenly the silent “S,” “a suppression that had stupefied her the day before, but which it now seemed so vulgar not to know,” becomes the proof, and apotheosis, of a lifetime of good breeding.
So vulgar not to know, and yet what Proust is really saying is that it’s equally vulgar to be so conscious of élite significations, even as he was entranced by the world of them. Madame de Cambremer-Legrandin is, after all, a mere bourgeois who elevated her station through marriage, and her self-conscious, snobbish silent “S” will never change that, and can only ever be a kind of striving, made touchingly comical in “Sodom and Gomorrah.” Duras is something else. No tricks, full “S.” Maybe, in part, her late-life and notorious habit of referring to herself in the third person was a reminder to say it the humble way, “dur-asss.” Or maybe it was just an element of what some labelled her narcissism, which seems like a superficial way to reject a genius. Duras was consumed with herself, true enough, but almost as if under a spell. Certain people experience their own lives very strongly. Regardless, there is a consistent quality, a kind of earthy simplicity, in all of her novels, films, plays, screenplays, notebooks, and in the dreamily precise oral “telling” of “La Vie Matérielle,” which is a master index of Durassianisms, of “S”-ness: lines that function on boldness and ease, which is to say, without pretension.
“There is one thing I’m good at, and that’s looking at the sea.”
“When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child.”
“Alcohol is a substitute for pleasure though it doesn’t replace it.”
“A man and a woman, say what you like, they’re different.”
“A life is no small matter.”
Her assertions have the base facticity of soil and stones, even if one doesn’t always agree with them, especially not with her homophobia, which gets expressed in the section of “La Vie Matérielle” on men, and seems to have gotten worse as her life fused into a fraught and complicated autumn-spring intimacy with Yann Andrea Steiner, who was gay.
“La Vie Matérielle” was translated as “Practicalities” by Barbara Bray, but might be more felicitously titled “Material Life,” or “Everyday Life.” The book began as recordings of Duras speaking to her son’s friend Jérôme Beaujour. After the recordings were transcribed, there was much reworking and cutting and reformulating by Duras. In terms of categories, the book is unique, but all of Duras’s writing is novelistic in its breadth and profundity, and all of it can be poured from one flask to another, from play to novel to film, without altering its Duras-ness. In part, this is because speech and writing are in some sense the same thing with Duras. When she talks, she is writing, and when writing, speaking. (Some of her later work was spoken first to Yann Andrea, who typed her sentences, and the results were novels, such as “The Malady of Death.”) The English-edition flap copy describes “La Vie Matérielle” as “about being an alcoholic, about being a woman, and about being a writer.” And it is about those things, and more or less in that order, although drinking is woven throughout. Her discussions of it are blunt. They are also accurate, and spoken by one who knows. When Duras made this book, in 1987, she had suffered late-stage cirrhosis and lost her mind in a detox clinic, an episode she refers to, in the book, as a “coma.” She’d quit, started, quit. Later, in 1988, she was in a real coma, for five months. “It’s always too late when people tell someone they drink too much,” she writes. “You never know yourself that you’re an alcoholic. In one hundred percent of cases, it’s taken as an insult.”
Her talk of women and domestic life are of her era, although she was her own sort of early feminist, who felt that pregnancy was proof of women’s superiority to men, which she constantly reminded the men around her while pregnant with her son Jean. In a section called “House and Home,” she provides a list of important items with which she stocked Neauphle-le-Château, the country place where she wrote, and where many of her films were made. The list includes butter, coffee filters, steel wool, fuses, and Scotch-Brite. Only frivolous women, she says, neglect repairs. For the “rough” work that men do, in counterpart to domestic chores, she is unimpressed: “To cut down trees after a day at the office isn’t work, it’s a kind of game.” And even worse, she adds, a man thinks he’s a hero if he goes out and buys a couple of potatoes. “Still, never mind,” she finishes off, and in the next paragraph announces that people tell her that she exaggerates, but that women could use a bit of idealizing. From there she is on to the burning of manuscripts, which make the house feel virginal and clean, and her next topic, rolled into seamlessly, is the phenomenon of “sales, super sales, and final reductions” that drive a woman to purchase clothing she does not want or need. She ends up with a sartorial excess, a surplus, new to her generation, and yet this ur-woman, a figment of typicality, maintains the same role, in the home and in the world, that has persisted for all women in all times: a “theatre of profound loneliness that has constituted their lives for centuries.”
Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the nineteen-fifties, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these as insults! (This phenomenon, sadly, has not gone away, even now, in 2017.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, the tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who adapted a short story by Duras into a film called “En Rachâchant,” from 1982, said of their own work that it was best understood by cavemen and children. In fact, their work is difficult to understand by anyone not versed in literature, philosophy, and art, and, moreover, anyone not trained to watch difficult films, but their intensions in making such a claim seem clear enough: “If you don’t get it, you’re judging it through an adapted set of ideologies and traditions that are obstacles, and once you unlearn your bad training, you will understand our films.” Their caveman is a kind of negative, the inverse shadow of cultural bias, an innocent. Fittingly, the Duras story they adapted is about a boy who learns without being taught, who knows things without the corruption of intellect. Unlike Straub and Huillet, Duras might actually have a decent chance with cave people and children. Receiving the full impact of her work has little to do with education, erudition. You either relate to it or you don’t. She could talk to anyone, and replicate any kind of voice (while somehow maintaining that tone, her “S”), like those of the curt but philosophical concierge and street sweeper, who both feature in “Madame Dodin” but made their first appearances in the posthumously published early notebooks that comprise “Wartime Writings.” The moments of truth in her work are elemental and felt, not synthetic or abstruse. She told Delphine Seyrig she might give up writing and open a service station for trucks along the highway. Meanwhile, she was much loved and admired by many twentieth-century intellectuals, such as Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, both of whom wrote about her work (“I never understood much of him,” she said, of Lacan). Samuel Beckett credited hearing her radio play of “The Square” as a significant moment in his own creative life. She had what both Beckett and the filmmaker Alain Resnais marvelled over and admired as “tone.” Durassian. Everything she made was marked by it, and the distinct quality of that tone is certainly what led to the accusation, true enough, that she was at risk sometimes of self-caricature. But every writer aspires to have some margin of original power, a patterning and order that comes to them as a gift bestowed, and is sent to no one else. If Duras weren’t so lucky, if she weren’t such a natural writer, her critics would have no object for their envy, their policing of excess, as well as the inverse—a suspicion of her restrained economy with words.
At the end of “La Vie Matérielle,” she describes an encounter with an imaginary man, a hallucination, as if this man were perfectly real. And he is: he is part of her fictive universe, the primal scenes she spent her life rendering, and reworking, telling, and then telling again. A lot of things happened to Marguerite Duras. She lost a child while giving birth, and in that experience lost God and gained unwanted knowledge of death. Her first husband, Robert Antelme, was deported to Dachau and came back, but weighing eighty pounds. Duras worked for the Occupation, and later joined the Resistance, then the Communist Party. Was expelled from the Communist Party but remained a Marxist. Did television interviews with both President François Mitterrand and the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Aspects of her life are legends, like the destitute poverty of her childhood, in Indochina. In some writings, her mother’s ailment is madness. In others, menopause. Or financial ruin. Sometimes, the mother’s madness is her strength. Maybe these are not contradictions. The erotic charge between her and the older Chinese lover in Saigon seems like art, scenes that bloomed on paper. Things happened to Duras “that she never experienced,” as she put it. The story of her life did not exist, she said. The novel of her life—yes. She obsessively read Proust, Joseph Conrad, and Ecclesiastes. She pursued a poetic absorption in the sacred and secret. She may have popularized a French trend called autofiction, but she dismissed trends, and, more importantly, she was adamant that the genre of autobiography was base, degraded. She held the same view of “essayistic” writing. She resisted the anti-novel rhetoric of the practitioners of the nouveau roman, whom she called “businessmen.” Literature was her interest, that kind of truth.
Even her earliest works, from the notebooks, evince her gift for fiction. None of it reads like diary, even when the experiences are ones we know are close to her biography. Much of it is in third person, as if she were already controlling the levers of character, and the entries include crafted dialogue, artful gaps, compression. “At one time,” she writes, of childhood, “we used to feast on the pickled flesh of young crocodiles, but in the end we tired of everything.” In an early draft of “The Sea Wall,” the sea, “making itself at home, would come in and scorch the crops.” In an unpublished story called “Theodora,” a knack for insinuating authorial intrusion, metafictional but not distancing, is already present: “Her eyes are green and shining, her dress is red. That’s the situation.” In the early drafts from the notebooks of “The War,” she powerfully conveys the chaos of waiting to learn of her husband’s fate in a concentration camp. “I know everything you can know,” she writes, “when you know nothing.” A woman waits to get news of her daughter, chattering that she’s had new taps put on her daughter’s shoes, but then blurts that her daughter is probably dead. “With her stiff leg,” the mother says, “they’ll have gassed her.”
In a section about losing a baby, a nurse says, “When they’re that little, we burn them.” The piece ends, “People who believe in God have become complete strangers to me.” The notebooks are full of that tone, that “S”: high stakes, and brute experience.
By the time she wrote “The Lover,” Duras was seventy years old. The book, some may forget, begins with a man telling her that he prefers her face “as it is now, ravaged.” But she was, according to men I’ve spoken to who knew her, devastatingly sexy, even in her advanced age. My surprise makes one of these men, the film director Barbet Schroeder, laugh. It suggests a hopeless ignorance of the force of Duras. Does it matter that she was sexy? In a sense, yes, because it allowed her to feed her insatiable need, so her biographers report, for erotic attention, and to understand her way around desire, which is to say, around writing. “The Lover” begins with that comment about her ravaged face and then corrects for the ravaging of age by presenting childhood, and memories, as ideals that continue to glow through the haze of history. “The Lover” is not an autobiography, but it was received as disclosure. Duras became a huge star. Readers were eager to wade into a steamy vision of a colonial childhood and to presume it was her life. As a novel it is no more conventional than her others, but in its vivid compactness, the way it marbles and integrates the close and distant sensations and memories of one mind, it is a kind of artistic zenith.
The girl in the novel, never named, the “I” and the “she,” is “a little white child prostitute,” dressed in “a clown hat and gold lamé shoes,” wearing a millionaire’s diamond. The millionaire is a handsome Chinese landowner who takes her to a secret apartment in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon. Their liaison is forbidden, since he’s not white, but all the better; a forbidden love is more urgent.
The first instance of a lover appears in the notebooks of “Wartime Writings.” He’s called Léo, and he’s not Chinese but Vietnamese. He is ugly, scarred, and repulsive to her, but because of his wealth, and the pressure of her family, the young Duras pursues a relationship. She describes him as “truly pathetic” and “profoundly stupid” (how all suitors seem, whose affections are not requited). At one point Léo kisses her, and she’s revolted. The scene is described almost like a rape.
In “The Lover,” the young girl has transformed into a pleasure doll. The lover bathes her, dries her, carries her to the bed. She’s worshipped and adored and enjoys it, as power and as sensual rapture, and the reader feels the author’s pleasure in this, too. The child prostitute is gloriously self-possessed; her humiliations are society’s hangups, not her own, and they only make her shine brighter, for the author and reader both, who collude in whoring her out. It’s the “good” whoring, not the bad whoring—which may or may not have taken place, but, either way, came first. Later, Duras said the depiction in “The Lover” was her actual childhood, but those who knew her best suggest she had begun to confuse her fiction with reality. The affair in the novel is a “structure,” as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might say, a triangle of narrator, child, and lover. Even Alain Vircondelet, the most credulous of her three biographers, calls the story a legend she invented, which, “having ripened during her whole life, finally became true.” In “La Vie Matérielle” she offers a corrective that seems only a further embellishment: she says that the lover didn’t actually dry her after he bathed her with jars of water but set her down on the bed still wet.
Rainwater. Bathwater. Rice paddies flooded by the Pacific: these are reflecting pools of an internal universe. Later, Duras poured the volume from “The Lover” into a new jar, “The North China Lover,” a new telling. But “The Lover,” a wisp of a book you can read in an afternoon, is the primal scene around which other myths and reveries all revolve.
Alcoholic, woman, writer: these identity acts, the one who drinks, who lives as woman, who writes, seem to relate, all three, to a more fundamental, primordial action: the production of fiction, even when that fiction is somehow rooted in memory, the return to a childhood scene. If we associate fiction with writing, what about with women? With drinkers?
The scene in “La Vie Matérielle” when Duras encounters the man who does not speak and cannot hear her was no mere daydream but a full-blown hallucination brought on by delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal. The man wears a black overcoat. She wonders if maybe he is there to remind her of “some immemorial connection” that has been cut but had been her raison d’être ever since she was born. She calls him a “master apparition.” He’s been in her house for a fortnight, looking at her, unaware she can’t understand him, and unwavering in his plea, whatever it is. This man is distinct from the imagery in her novels. He’s something else—a nightmare, in which a lifetime of expression, of finding a way to speak, fell on deaf ears.
The hallucination broke. When the man finally left, she wept for a long time. Three years later, she found a way to speak of him, to Jérôme Beaujour. Probably she even embellished the account a little, who knows? But in any case, how do you straighten the facts of a phantasm?
This text was drawn from the introduction to “The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities,” by Marguerite Duras, which is out November 14th from Everyman’s Library.
Rachel Kushner’s most recent book is a collection of short fiction, “The Strange Case of Rachel K.” Her new novel, “The Mars Room,” will be published this coming spring.
