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THE WOMAN - THE AUTHOR Biography 1. 2. |
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time, in the same journey, during the crossing of the same ocean, at
night, in the main living room on the big deck, a waltz by Chopin was
heard that she knew in a secret, special way because she had been trying
to learn how to play it right for months but never could, never, and
that's why her mother was convinced to let her give up the piano. That
night, lost amid so many countless nights, that night, and she was sure
about that, the little girl spent it on the ship, she was there when the
music by Chopin was heard under the starlit sky. There wasn't a breath of
wind and that night the music was spread all over the black liner like an injunction
from Heaven, like an order of God. And the young girl stood up as if she
was about to kill herself as well, to jump into the ocean,, and then she
had wept because she had thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she
was not sure of not having loved him with a love she had not seen because
it had lost itself in the story like water in the sand, and that she was
discovering it now, at this moment of music that flung across the sea.
THE LOVER |
The writer Marguerite Duras died in Paris, on March 3, 1996. Throughout her life and to her dying breath, this astonishing woman never ceased to ascend the steps of national and international fame. Undoubtedly, she owed her success to her obstinacy to be and remain herself, come what may and at whatever cost to her own person.
'One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: "I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged."
Those are the opening lines of The Lover, the novel which, in 1984, brought Marguerite Duras not only the Goncourt, France's most famous literary award, but also a print run of almost three million copies, translations into some forty languages and an enormous world-wide success, magnified by the film subsequently directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Hers was, indeed, an astonishing face, as astonishing as her life story, from the young woman's sensual and disturbing elegance during the years between the wars to the sarcastic pout and reptilian gaze of the sacred contemporary monster, with provocative eyes glaring from behind her thick glasses.
"Between eighteen and twenty five," she wrote, "my face took off in a new direction. My ageing was very sudden. I saw it spread over my features one by one... And I've kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face. It's got older still, of course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed... It has kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste"...
Love, life and death
Destruction. A key word when it comes to Marguerite Duras, who uses her novels, her plays and her films to study herself in as many mirrors; she identifies herself with her work to the point that she no longer knows what is autobiographical fact and what is fiction. Love, life and death Like all her characters, the author suffers the ruthless law of destruction, but her own vitality and her talent are such that, in them, she taps into perennial springs of rapture.
Extraordinary Marguerite Duras! She was born at Gia Dinh, in Indochina, in the suburbs of Saigon, in 1914 (4th of April), a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, Henri Donnadieu (a surname she did not like and for which she substituted the name of a village in the south-west of France from where her family on her father's side originated) taught mathematics and made a career for himself in Tonkin, Cochin-China and in Cambodia. When he was repatriated to France for health reasons (where he died still a young man), his wife, Marie Legrand, born on a farm in Picardy, decided to stay in Indochina with her two sons and her little Marguerite, aged four.
Here, then, is the key figure in the life and work of Marguerite Duras: the Mother figure. The mother figure in The Sea Wall (1950) can be found thirty years later in The Lover, always the same, plain-spoken, courageous and obstinate to the point of absurdity in her choices and her prejudices; loved and hated, respected and denigrated all at once: "The daughter of country folk, she had been so good at school that her parents had allowed her to study on to her higher school certificate," writes Duras. "After that, she had become a school-mistress in a village in northern France. That was in 1899. On certain Sundays, at the mairie, she would stand day-dreaming in front of the colonial propaganda posters "To all you young people, go to the colonies, where a fortune awaits you." In the shade of a banana tree sagging under the weight of its fruit, a colonial couple, dressed all in white, swung to and fro in a rocking chair while natives all around them busily went about their business, smiling. She married a school-master who, like her, was dying of impatience in a northern village; like her, he too had fallen prey to the mysterious writings of Pierre Loti."1. ?
Now a widow, her mother taught French and played the piano at a cinema to pay for her children's education, until she sought a concession of land in Cambodia with the aim of developing it. But, too naive to see the corruption of the administration and to understand that there could not be any worthwhile concessions without under-the-counter dealings, she lost all her savings and went bankrupt trying in vain to build dams to protect her rice paddies against the annual encroachment of the sea.
To write, against all odds
Duras set about her writing with the same determination and obstinacy as her mother's with her plantations in Indochina and, later, in France, with wine-growing and cattle farming. But with less naivety and, more importantly, with a lot more success. There is no denying that the temperament and burning passion for life she had inherited from her mother were far better suited to writing novels than to cultivating rice or growing grapes.
This became quite apparent when Duras published
her first novel, The Impudents, in 1943, and the following year, La
Vie Tranquille, which the writer Raymond Queneau, impressed by the young
talent, had published with Gallimard. It became all the more apparent when she
published The Sea Wall, in 1950, a shortlisted novel with which she
narrowly missed the Prix Goncourt due, by all accounts, to her Communist
sympathies. Indeed, Duras, who had arrived in France at the age of eighteen to
study, had already been through a great deal: a law degree and a post at the
Ministry of Colonies. In 1939, a marriage to the poet Robert Antelme and, in
1942, a still-born child. Paris under the Occupation and the Rιsistance groups.
Her husband arrested along with her sister-in-law, Marie-Laure, who died in
deportation. Antelme was to survive and was brought back from Dachau by Franηois
Mitterrand, who introduced Marguerite to the Rιsistance and accompanied the
Americans as they freed the camps.
After the Liberation, Duras joined the French Communist Party, which she left in
1950, after the Prague Uprising. She did not publish during that period;
instead, she sold copies of L'Humanitι, the Communist mouthpiece, and
militated on behalf of the Party. She also shared a mιnage ΰ trois,
with Antelme and Dionys Mascolo. By the age of thirty, in the creative melting
pot of the post-war period, Duras was already a star among the Paris
intelligentsia and her neighbour at Saint Germain des Prιs was none other than
Sartre. But it would take another forty years and a good many more wrinkles
before she became a leading figure in the world of literature and the cinema.
She was the sort of woman who spared neither herself nor others. The day after her death, the journalist and acadιmicien Bertrand Poirot-Delpech wrote in Le Monde: "When this diminutive character with the large spectacles and a morning-after voice gets involved in the Rιsistance or in politics, when she believes in Communism only to detest it, when she deals with issues of daily life, she does so with her guts, without restraint, and throws caution to the winds."
Borders mean nothing to Duras: There are no borders between the demands of the heart, no matter how contradictory. Just as there are none between the whims of the flesh, or between wine and alcohol, whisky in The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952), campari in Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953) and red wine in Moderato cantabile (1958). There are no borders either between the novel, the theatre, the cinema and journalism. When she writes Whole Days in the Trees (1954), she turns it indifferently into a book, a play or a film.
Duras is a master at only one thing: writing, the very special sound words make when she puts them together on paper. Who could ask for more? Everything she feels, she writes, stringing the syllables together as an artist strings his pearls. Her books, like her films, need to be experienced with the ear, more than with the eyes. It comes as no surprise, then, that she should combine Hiroshima and Mon amour2, nor that she should dare to describe as "sublime, necessarily sublime" the murder of a child found drowned in a river in the Vosges mountains - an incident that led to the spilling of much ink during the eighties - and that, on literary rather than legal presumptions, she points at the mother, Christine Vuillemin, as the murderer3.
Jean-Louis Arnaud
