Marguerite Duras’s ‘The Lover,’ and Notebooks That Enrich It
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Version 0 of 1. Name a current literary trend, and the French writer Marguerite Duras almost certainly got to it first — and took it further than anyone working today. The melding of memoir and artifice called autofiction; the fondness for fragments; the evasive, obliquely wounded female narrator; the excavations into trauma, addiction, maternity. All these preoccupations that feel so fresh, and of this moment — anything you’d find in a book by Renee Gladman, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Bhanu Kapil, Maggie Nelson — has a prototype somewhere in Duras’s work. But still no one writes like Duras or sounds like her, because no one has lived as she did or knows what she knew. No one endured what she had to — who among us could? Duras grew up desperately poor in French-occupied Indochina, sometimes hunting birds and game to survive. One older brother enjoyed beating her, the other creeping into her bed at night. Her mother pimped her out to a wealthy Vietnamese man when she was 14, the basis of her autobiographical novel “The Lover.” She moved to France at 17, studied law, joined the Communist Party, wrote screenplays (most famously for “Hiroshima Mon Amour”). But a catastrophe always lay in wait. Her first child was stillborn. Her husband was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. When he was released, he was near death; she could circle his neck with the fingers of one hand. And all this before she began trying to drink herself to death. A selection of her books has recently been published in an Everyman’s Library edition, with an introduction by the novelist Rachel Kushner. On the face of it, it’s an idiosyncratic grouping, to put it kindly: “The Lover” (1985); “Practicalities” (1990), her riffs on alcohol, men and other forces of mayhem in her life; and her posthumously published journals, “Wartime Notebooks” (2008). Why not “The Ravishing of Lol Stein,” the novel she was proudest of, I wondered, or “Blue Eyes, Black Hair,” to give a sense of her formal experimentation and sheer weirdness (it’s an entire novel more or less about a naked woman lying on a bed with a piece of black silk over her face — and it kind of works)? But the wisdom of these choices becomes apparent. We get as complete a portrait as we can hope for: the writer the world knows (“The Lover” was a global best seller); the one performing her public role (she’s very much the literary grande dame in the chatty essays in “Practicalities”); and the one at work, spurring herself on in notebooks that an editor called Duras’s “workshop, gymnasium, kitchen, treasure chest.” Style always reveals something of one’s survival strategies. For Duras, who seemed to sample from every tragedy the world could concoct, it manifests in tone. She believed in love not tenderness, desire not hope. Her prose is austere, full of fatalism and a tilted grammar that feels like a cracked foundation beneath our feet: “Very early in my life it was too late”; “One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.” Her life was full of sharp shocks and jump cuts — and the work followed suit. She liked abrupt transitions and careening from the first to third person — from embodying a character to handling her like a doll (“the body is thin, undersized almost,” she wrote in “The Lover,” describing herself). She’d bring a scene to life and then pan out, hovering over it as if it were a photograph. There’s always an oscillation between intimacy and detachment, pain and analysis, speech and silence. The richest contribution of this edition might be in its juxtaposition of the notebooks with “The Lover,” and how it enriches our understanding of Duras’s best, most beloved work — that acrid novel of sexual transaction so often and unfortunately read as a grand love story of crossing class and color lines. A starker, sadder picture of the affair emerges in her private papers, where she wrote about it first, and with venom. In “The Lover,” the older man has no name, but his skin smells like honey. In reality, his name was Léo, and he revolted Duras. His face was badly pockmarked, his hands trembled, his mouth was unpleasantly large and loose. Years later she still wondered: “How did I manage to overcome the kind of physical loathing I felt for Léo?” The first time he kissed her, she felt ruined: “Ugliness had entered my mouth, I had communed with horror.” He could be cruel too, controlling and jealous. He would threaten to kill her if she betrayed him, required detailed schedules of her activities and subjected her to “formal interrogations.” Shuttling between these two versions is an unnerving experience, especially at this moment when droves of women are posting photographs on social media of themselves as 14-year-olds with the hashtag #MeAt14, to show solidarity with those who have accused Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for an Alabama Senate seat, of molesting them when they were barely teenagers. Duras was 14 when she met Léo. In the novel, she gives herself a tattered, dissolute glamour — she’s wearing a rakish rose-brown man’s fedora and one of her mother’s threadbare silk dresses. She believes herself adamantly in control. The notebooks, of course, give us the full measure of her youth: “I was small and ungainly, thin, covered with freckles, burdened with two carrot-red braids that hung to the middle of my thighs.” Both versions can be true. Duras makes it so. Better than anyone, she can acknowledge both the young girl’s belief in her power and her absolute vulnerability. She wrote of the Mekong River: “It carries everything along, straw huts, forests, burned-out fires, dead birds, dead dogs, drowned tigers and buffaloes, drowned men.” But she might have been describing her own capaciousness. “All is swept along by the deep and headlong storm of the inner current, suspended on the surface of the river’s strength.” |