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| Marguerite Duras |
Marguerite Duras
(April 4, 1914 - March 3, 1996)
by Pilar Adón
On Marguerite
Duras' tombstone at Montparnasse Cemetery (Paris, France) there are a small
plant, a lot of white pills scattered over her sober gray stone, two flowers
and two letters engraved: M. D. Two are also the images that could illustrate
the unbridled process of her existence: the evocation of a beautiful girl full
of eroticism traveling by ferry along the Mekong River with a felt hat on, her
lips in a dark red color, and, just at the other end, a woman with her face and
body devastated by alcohol, dressed in a straight skirt and a vest over a
turtleneck jumper who, after four detoxification cures, went into a five months
coma. Marguerite Duras leapt in just a moment from the beginning to the end of
her life but, in the brief time of that moment, she did what she wanted to do: écrire.
To write.
She wrote and she loved what she wrote
to the obsession. She herself used to wonder what was that mortal need that had
taken her to live in a parallel world to the world of the others and her to
exist less and less because everything, her essence, was given to the all-consuming
writing. When she was fifteen, she said to her mother that the only thing she
wanted to do in her whole life was to narrate and she sincerely wondered what
could do with their time the people that didn't write. Because, even her most
painful memories were filtered through literature. One of the most
heartbreaking statements against Nazism appears in her text La Douleur (P.O.L.,
1985) where she describes her impatience when, from the windows of her house at
the Rue Saint-Benoît (Paris), she gazes people quietly walking by and she wants
to shout out loud that inside that very room there is a man, her husband, who
has come back alive from the German concentration camps and he, as his neck is
so thin that it could be hold with just one hand, only can eat some clear soup
in teaspoons because his stomach would tear with the weight of any other food.
Marguerite Donnadieu was born in 1914,
April the fourth, next to Saigon, in the French Indochina (what today is South
Vietnam) "I cannot think of my childhood without thinking of water. My
home town is a town of water", said M.D. She was the first girl out of
five brothers, two of them, Pierre and Paul, sons of the wedlock, and the other
two, Jean and Jacques, sons of the father and a previous wife who died in Hanoi.
Her father, a math teacher, had to be repatriated to France when she was just
four years old because of infectious fevers and he never went back to
Indochina. He died after having bought a house next to a small French village
called Duras where he wanted to spend next summer with all his
family and that would replace in the future his own surname. This death left
his family in an impoverished economic situation and they started having
financial difficulties. Children grew like vagabonds in the forest, almost
acquiring a native look, and all their mother could do was to feed them with
European food, brought directly from France. Food that they loathed.
Marie Legrand, Marguerite's mother, fought hard
against poverty. She clung to her possessions, to her land that she had to save
once and again against the sea and the wind if she wanted something to grow
from there. And, meanwhile, she was discovering the strange beauty of that
girl, her daughter, that wasn't dressed like the other girls, that had her own
personal way of doing things and that could be really fascinating to men.
Marguerite Duras met her Chinese lover. To become a rich family started then to
be a real obsession. Many years later, the writer declared that money didn't
change a thing because she would always keep "a damned mentality of
being poor". For her, poverty at birth was hereditary and everlasting.
It had no cure.
Any reader of Un barrage contre le
Pacifique (Gallimard, 1950) or of L'amant (Minuit,
1984) will discover that this first data about her biography are already
familiar. Because reading Marguerite Duras' books also implies reading her own
life. In a real act of literary vivisection, she extracted her own pain, she
filtered it through the balsam of writing and then she offered it all to the
reader. And this reader had to find out that what he or she was reading was not
only the account of the vital subsistence of a woman writer, but also the
individual evolution of every character in her books that, at the same time, were
a novelistic reflection of what really happened to thousands of human beings
throughout the twentieth century. Marguerite Duras offers us in her books a
description of different crucial moments at different places of the world. A
description so reliable as that of any good historian, but with a very
important matter added: she shows the suffering, hope and compassion of those
genuine figures of our history.
Gallimard Publishing Company did not accept her
first book, but she kept on writing and when she finished her next novel, Les
impudents, she threatened with committing suicide if it wasn't published.
In 1943, she joined the Resistance, while her beloved brother Paul, who had
remained with their mother in Saigon, died of bronchopneumonia because of the
lack of medicines. Pain was unbearable and she showed it in La vie
Tranquille (Gallimard, 1944), the book that she was writing at that
very moment and that Gallimard published. At last, she received the recognition
she was waiting for, bust she couldn't enjoy it because the Gestapo arrested
her husband at his sister's apartment at the Rue Dupin. Then, suddenly, M.D.
decided not to write again a single line anymore and she didn't published
anything till 1950. She, that had threatened everybody with committing suicide
if her books weren't published, realized all of a sudden that literature was a
trivial little thing compared to the pain of reality.
Literature and reality… Two points hard to be
separated one from the other in the works of this writer who traps and devours
because her writing oozes wisdom and it is always difficult to relinquish the
charm of authenticity. In 1950 she achieved her first literary success, Un
barrage contre le Pacifique and, from that moment, her memorable works
were published: Les petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (Gallimard,
1953) where she tells the story of a vacation in Italy, Des journées
entières dans les arbres (Gallimard, 1954),Moderato Cantabile (Minuit,
1958), Hiroshima, mon amour (Gallimard, 1960) the later famous
film by Alain Resnais, and Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (Gallimard,
1964), novel with which she reached the top of her creative activity. According
to her own words extracted from an interview for the French television, to
write Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein was specially
complicated: "Writing is always a hard thing to do, but in that
occasion I was more frightened than usual: It was the first time after a very
long period that I was to write without alcohol and I was afraid of writing
something common". Of course, she didn't write something
common. She created a character dispossessed of herself who sees at a ball
how the person she loves is falling in love with another woman, and it
consequently means that she, the main character, suddenly is pushed into the
background. M.D. created such a desperate character, and at the same time so
adorable, that many years later she, the writer, would declare that she regretted
the impossibility of being Lol V. Stein herself. Because she had conceived her,
she had written everything about her, she had created her, but she hadn't been
Lol and therefore she felt "that mourning because she was never Lol V.
Stein".
In her next novel, Le vice-consul (Gallimard,
1965) the main character walks out to the balcony of his house in Lahore and
shoots into the air. He doesn't shoot at the passers-by or at the doves. "He
shoots at pain, disgrace and at the million of children that were to starve to
death in the next four months.""Then came the titles: L'amante
anglaise (Gallimard, 1967), L'amour (Gallimard, 1971), L'amant (Minuit,
1984), La Douleur (P.O.L., 1985), Émily L., La
vie matérielle…
Her captivating way of facing her world and her
past is inside every book she wrote. And, when speaking about literature, this
is the only thing that matters: books. Those
fascinating, splendid and incredible books.
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