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| France Loisirs, 1985 |
Pendant dix-sept jours, l'aspect de cette merde resta la même. Elle était inhumaine. Elle le séparait de nous plus que la fièvre, plus que la maigreur, les doigts désonglés, les traces des coups des SS. On lui donnait de la bouillie jaune d'or, bouillie pour nourrison et elle ressortait de lui verte sombre comme de la vase de marécage. Le seau hygiénique fermé on entendait les bulles lorsqu'elles crevaient à la surface. Elle aurait pu rappeler — glaireuse et gluante — un gros crachat. Dés qu'elle sortait, la chambre s'émplissait d'une odeur qui n'était pas celle de putréfaction, du cadavre — y avait-il d'ailleurs encore dans son corps matière de cadavre — mais plutôt celle d'un hummus végétal, l'odeur des feuilles mortes, celle des sous-bois trop épais. C'était là en effect un odeur sombre, épaisse comme le reflet de cette nuit épaisse de laquelle il émergeait et que nous ne connaîtrions jamais.
For seventeen days, the look of this shit remained the same. It was inhuman. It separated him from us more than the fever, more than his skinniness, his fingers without fingernails, the blows the SS had dealt him. We gave him golden yellow gruel, gruel for nourishment and it came back out of him as dark green as the mud of a swamp. We could hear bubbles breaking on the surface when we closed the hygiene bucket. It recalled — slimy and sticky — a large glob of spittle. As it left him, the room filled with an odour that was not one of putrefaction, not that of a corpse — there was still dead matter inside his body — but rather that of rotted earth, the smell of dead leaves, of overly thick undergrowth. It was a dark odour, as deep as the reflection of the night from which he had emerged and we would never know.
Excerpts translated by
BR
The Memoir: Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written and published about World War Two and the Holocaust. The majority of them, whether they be novels or memoirs, tend to focus on describing the terrors of battle or the horrors inflicted on the predominantly Jewish inmates of concentration camps by their Nazi gaolers. Few of these books examine what I, for want of a better term, would call the 'other side' of the concentration camp experience — that is, the lives of people who, while not considered eligible for deportation themselves, had friends or loved ones who were deported and then had to wait, sometimes for as long as six years and nearly always in vain, for word of where they'd been taken and what had become of them. This was a different kind of torment for the wives, husbands, sisters, brothers and lovers who had no means of discovering — particularly before eastern Europe was liberated by the Allies and the sickening truth of what went on in places like Buchenwald and Auschwitz was finally revealed — if those who had been arrested and deported would ever return to them alive.
This is what makes La douleur, the first section of the collection of the same name published forty years after the war, a memoir worth reading. Allegedly based on a diary that Marguerite Duras kept between 1944 and the end of the European war in May 1945 after her husband and fellow Resistance member Robert Antelme (identified as Robert L in the book) was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald, La douleur — which translates as 'the pain' or 'the grief' in French but is usually titled The War: A Memoir in English — it describes, in plain but haunting language, the impact that the final few months of waiting while the German army was gradually surrounded and destroyed had on her both emotionally and physically.
Duras is the central figure in La douleur — an intelligent, often courageous woman who develops a persistent fever which prevents her from eating and sleeping while she vacillates between resigned acceptance of the fact that her husband must be dead and hope, however slender, that he may still be alive — a prospect that comes to seem less and less likely as the camps are liberated and the atrocities that were committed in them become the subject of horrifying daily news bulletins. Devastating as this news is, Duras has no choice but to wait for word of her husband's whereabouts and condition while she attempts to live some semblance of a normal, post-liberation life. She shops, she cleans her apartment, she writes and, every day, visits the repatriation centre set up in the Quai d'Orsay railway station to learn if Robert L is aboard that day's Paris-bound train. But her most frequent and perhaps most stressful task is answering telephone calls which generally end with her friends asking her the same well meant but ultimately maddening question — 'Any news yet?'
Eventually word reaches Duras through Morland, a fellow member of the Resistance, that her husband is in fact alive, although sick and extremely weak, after being transferred from the Buchenwald camp to Dachau. Although all of eastern Europe has now been plunged into a state of chaos, her lover D — Duras's pseudonym for her real life lover and future second husband Dionys Mascolo — and another friend take it upon themselves to travel to Dachau to personally collect the half-dead Robert L and bring him safely home to his wife.
Duras is in her apartment when the three men return, relieved, apprehensive and vaguely aware that her neighbors are preparing a celebration in honor of what, to them as well as to her, feels like a truly miraculous if deeply unsettling event. 'Dans mon souvenir,' she confesses when she and Robert L are finally reunited, 'à un moment donné, les bruits s'éteignment et je le vois. Immense. Devant moi. Je ne le reconnais pas. Il me regarde. Il sourit. Il se laisse regarder. Une fatigue surnaturelle se montre dans son sourire, celle d'être arrivé à vivre jusqu'à ce moment-ci. C'est à ce sourire que tout à coup je le reconnais, mais de très loin, comme si je le voyais au fond d'un tunnel. C'est un sourire de confusion. Il s'excuse d'en être là, réduit à ce déchet. Et puis le sourire s'évanouit. Et il redevient un inconnu. Mais la connaissance est là, que this inconnu c'est lui, Robert L, dans sa totalité.' [In my memory… at any given moment, the noises cut themselves off and I see him. Immense. In front of me. I don't recognize him. He looks at me. He smiles. He lets himself be looked at. A supernatural weariness reveals itself in his smile, the smile of someone who has lived for this moment. It is this smile that I suddenly recognize, but from afar, as if viewing him from the end of a tunnel. It is a smile of confusion. He excuses himself for being there, reduced to this wreck. And then the smile fades. He becomes unknown to me again. But the knowledge is there, that this unknown person is him, Robert L, in his totality.]
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William Collins and Son first UK edition, 1986
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The first thing Robert L wants to do is take a look at their apartment, which he is shown with the help of D who must physically support his frail emaciated body while he slowly shuffles from room to room. He notices that his wife is in the process of preparing a cherry clafoutis, one of his favorite desserts. He asks to sample some of the delicious smelling pudding but Duras is forced to refuse his request, explaining that they must wait and let the doctor decide what he should eat and, more importantly, how much food his weak and shriveled stomach will be able to tolerate. 'Il avait cessé de poser des questions sur ce qui s'était passé pendant son absence. Il avait cessé de nous voir. Son visage s'était recouvert d'une douleur intense and muette parce que la nourriture lui était encore refusée, que ça continuait comme au camp de concentration. Et comme au camp, il avait accepté en silence. Il n'avait pas vu qu'on pleurait. Il n'avait pas non vu non plus qu'on pouvait à peine le regarder, à peine lui répondre.' [He ceased asking questions about what had happened in his absence. He had ceased to see us. His expression covered up an intense mute sadness because food had again been refused him, just as it had in the concentration camp. And as in the camp, he accepted it in silence. He did not see us cry. Nor did he see that we could hardly look at him, hardly answer him.]
Duras removes the clafoutis from the apartment while her husband is asleep, unaware that he will awaken the next day with a fever that will rob him of all desire to eat for more than two weeks while his overtaxed mind and body fight a pitched internal battle to keep him alive. His fever drops then returns, does the same again, and then one day, as if by magic, leaves him altogether. 'J'ai faim,' he says when he awakes one morning, every part of his body still supported by cushions because his ravaged muscles are not yet strong enough to support its meager weight. 'I'm hungry.'
The doctor tells Duras to feed Robert L only the juice of meat which, in time, he manages to digest without any trouble. Then he gradually becomes ravenous, as though there is not enough food in all of France to feed the insatiable hunger he's now experiencing. Duras continues to feed and care for him and he slowly regains his strength, although she's painfully aware that he is no longer the same man he was prior to his arrest in June 1944. But, as she reminds herself during a vacation they take in Italy in the summer of 1946, he did not perish in the concentration camp. He survived what was a genuinely horrific experience, returned home again after his time in hell when millions of others, through no fault of their own, did not.
The other five sections of La douleur deal with different aspects of Duras's wartime life in Paris. Two of these pieces — L'ortie brissée [The Stinging Nettle] and Aurélia Paris — are, by her own admission, pure fiction while the others, in which she renames herself Thérèse, are based on her experiences as a member of the Resistance following the liberation of Paris. The best of these pieces, Albert des capitales [Albert, the Waiter from the Café Capitales], depicts the questioning and savage beating of a collaborator who was paid by the Gestapo to divulge the whereabouts of Jews in hiding. This grim chore is undertaken by members of Duras's own Resistance cell, an interrogation she is tasked with initiating and personally supervising. Her colleagues beat the naked man to a bloody pulp and plan to execute him until she, appalled by what they're doing and what she herself is witnessing and sanctioning, insists that he be freed despite knowing that he will most likely be recaptured and hung by his vengeful captors later that same day. The implication is that Duras herself will not be directly responsible for the waiter's death as he was responsible for the capture, torture and executions of so many innocent Jews.
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Folio France, 2010
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There is a similar form of irony at work in Monsieur X dit ici Pierre Rabier [Mr X called here Pierre Rabier], a piece that describes her relationship with a Gestapo agent she befriended in the hope of using him to get her husband freed or at least to gain some solid information regarding his condition and whereabouts inside Nazi Germany. Rabier, who was probably based on the Gestapo agent Jean Delval with whom Duras had a brief sexual liaison during the war, comes off as a ridiculous, almost comical figure, scuttling around Paris toting a satchel that contains his revolver and a pair of handcuffs, a buffoon who can happily sign the documents that will send helpless human beings to their deaths in the gas chamber but cannot stand to see her losing weight and looking so pale. This piece, in which the author is again identified as Thérèse, is joined by Ter le milicien [Ter the Militiaman], another character study of a young collaborator who was glad to fight on the side of the Germans because he was keen to fight somebody and they happened to be the ones handing out the weapons. 'C'est chic une arme,' he confides to Thérèse while awaiting the decision on whether he will be allowed to live or shot for his activities. 'J'étais le dernier des derniers dans la bande, j'aurais pu tuer de resistants.' ['A gun is the thing… I was the last of the last of the group, I could have killed some resisters.'] The piece ends with Duras wondering if Ter was shot after she and D parted company with him or if he somehow survived. 'Si Ter a vécu,' she speculates, 'il a dû être de ce coté de la société où l'argent est facile, où l'idée est courte, où la mystique du chef tient lieu l'idéologie et justifie le crime.' [If Ter lived… he must be on the side of society where money is easy to come by, where ideas are in short supply, where the mystique of the boss takes the place of ideology and justifies crime.]
Although La douleur was generally praised for its forthright depiction of the homefront war and the often contradictory behaviors and emotional responses it produced in those experiencing the end of the conflict as relieved but often uninformed non-combatants, there were some critics who questioned the validity of Duras's claim that the book was based on diaries she supposedly 'did not remember' having kept back in 1944. They argued, and not without justification in my view, that in stylistic terms the book was much closer to her recent 1984 bestseller L'Amant [The Lover] than it was to her first two novels, published in 1943 and 1944 respectively — books she would have been working on, if her story was true, concurrently with her supposedly 'forgotten' wartime diaries. Some also questioned her choice to disguise the identities of her former husbands Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo — both of whom were still living when La douleur was published — with pseudonyms that render them all but anonymous and seem to minimize the importance of the work they did on behalf of the Resistance. These critics were perhaps ignorant of Duras's lifelong habit of self-mythologization, a literary process that placed her squarely in the center of every book she published, every film she directed and every other artistic project she undertook during her long and inconsistent career.
None of these criticisms invalidate La douleur as a record of the past, no matter how unreliable it may be in terms of factual accuracy. The book is a self-acknowledged mixture of fact and fiction, an attempt to recreate a state of mind rather than delineate a specific moment in history. In choosing to write it in the terse, post-modern style she adopted and subsequently perfected in the 1960s, Duras ensured that it would be read by people not only in the 1980s but on into the future. Despite its dubious source material, it tells a harrowing story that should never be forgotten, particularly now that Holocaust denial is gaining traction in every part of the world thanks to the internet and the increasingly problematic phenomenon that is fake news. The Holocaust did happen. Millions died and some returned to the world to speak of the horrors they had endured. And not every survivor who lived to testify to the murderous cruelty of the Nazis happened to be Jewish. There were others, like Robert Antelme, who were persecuted for believing that freedom should be a basic human right rather than a racially or religiously defined privilege.
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MARGUERITE DURAS, c 1970
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The Writer: Marguerite Donnadieu, known professionally as Marguerite Duras, was born on 4 April 1914 in Gia Dinh, a small colonial settlement located not far from the city of Saigon in what was then the French possession of Indochina and is today known as Vietnam. Her father Henri Donnadieu, an expatriate mathematics teacher, became principal of the school at Gia Dinh where his wife Marie (née Legrand) worked on his staff between giving birth to their three children — Pierre, Paul and Marguerite, the baby of the family. The future writer also had two older half-brothers, Jean and Jacques, by her father's first wife, a woman who had died some years previously in the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi.
Henri Donnadieu's own health began to fail in 1918, seeing him repatriated to France where he too eventually died — in the house he had purchased in Duras (pronounced in the south of the country with a hard S to rhyme with 'glass') in his home département of Lot-et-Garonne — on 4 December 1921. Marie was granted compassionate leave following his death and returned to France with her children in 1922, where they stayed with her family in the nearby town of Pardaillan until the middle of 1924 when, struggling to make ends meet, she took them back to Indochina, this time to the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh.
The family's stay in Cambodia was not a long one. Marie and her children soon returned to Vietnam, living first in Vinh Long before relocating to Sa Dec and eventually to Saigon. Still struggling financially and weary of the peripatetic life they had been living for the past five years, Marie was persuaded by the colony's male administrators to buy a rice plantation on the Cambodian coast approximately 80 kilometres from the southern provincial capital Kampot.
The plantation, which legally became Marie's property in 1929 and was routinely inundated by the Pacific Ocean during the rainy season, proved impossible to cultivate and was virtually worthless, making her already dire financial situation that much worse. The failure of her mother's scheme to build a wall that would protect her land from the ever-encroaching sea would haunt Duras for the rest of her life and become, along with the sexual relationship she had as a teenager with Huynh Tuy Le — the adult son of a wealthy Chinese merchant — a key theme of her writing that she would explore in the play L'Éden Cinema [The Eden Cinema, 1977], the novels Un barrage contre le Pacifique [A Barrier Against the Pacific, usually translated as The Sea Wall, 1950], L'Amant [The Lover, 1984] and the film scenario L'Amant de la Chine du Nord [The Lover from Northern China, 1991].
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MARGUERITE DURAS, c 1930
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By 1930 the family was once again living in Saigon where the strikingly beautiful sixteen year old Duras entered secondary school, obtaining her baccalauréat (equivalent to the North American SAT exam or the British GSCE exam) in philosophy which enabled her to return to France to complete her education. Except for one brief visit to the colony in 1932, Duras would never again live in Indochina, settling instead in Paris with her family where she intended to study mathematics as her father had before her, only to change her mind and eventually obtain degrees in law and political science.
In January 1936 she met Communist writer Robert Antelme, becoming his lover and, a few weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 which marked the beginning of World War Two, his wife. Within a year she was employed as a secretary at the Ministry of Colonies, a position she would retain until 1942 when, following a miscarriage that she never fully came to terms with, she was recruited by France's puppet Vichy government to work for Le Comité d'organisation du livre [the Committee for the Organisation of Books], a Nazi-sanctioned department responsible for distributing rationed paper to French publishing houses which functioned, in essence, as a kind of unofficial censorship bureau.
Working for the Vichy government did not prevent Duras from joining the Communist Party and, along with Antelme and her soon-to-be lover Dionys Mascolo, the Resistance movement. Nor did it prevent herself and Antelme from hosting informal gatherings in their Paris apartment where the subjects of literature and politics were regularly and passionately discussed by some of the occupied city's leading scholars and intellectuals. These visitors, who eventually became known as le groupe de Rue Saint-Benoît [the Saint-Benoît Street Group], encouraged Duras to write her first novel, Les Impudents [The Impudent Ones] which would be published by the firm of Plon in 1943 while she was still working for the Vichy government in close proximity to people like the collaborator Ramon Fernandez and his charming, socially prominent wife Betty whose life she would intervene to save following the liberation of Paris by the invading Allies in August 1944.
After being watched by the Gestapo for several months, Robert Antelme was finally arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp in June 1944, with Duras herself only evading capture through the efforts of her friend and comrade (and future President of France) François Mitterand. It was probably her sexual relationship with the Gestapo agent Charles Delval that caused her husband to be transported rather than shot as so many members of the Resistance were — a relationship that did not prevent her from having Delval himself arrested and shot following the liberation. It was Mitterand and Dionys Mascolo who located Antelme, who had been transferred to Dachau and now weighed only 38 kilograms, and arranged for his return to the French capital. After nursing him back to health Duras divorced him in April 1947, marrying Mascolo just prior to the birth of their son Jean, her only child, in June of that same year. (Antelme continued to work with Duras both politically and professionally following their divorce, living until 1990 despite suffering a paralyzing stroke in 1983.)
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ROBERT ANTELME and MARGUERITE DURAS, c 1943
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Although she had followed her debut novel with a second novel titled La Vie Tranquille [The Tranquil Life] in 1944, Duras would not publish her third novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique until June 1950, by which time she had been ejected (as had Antelme and Mascolo) from the Communist Party for indulging in the petit-bourgeois habits of visiting nightclubs and supposedly being 'too ironic' in her treatment of some of her fellow party members. Her second marriage to Mascolo ended in 1956, allowing her to focus on what, in collaboration with friend and fellow novelist Gérard Jarlot, was a new career as a scenarist, playwright and script writer which resulted, in 1958, in her being asked to create an original screenplay by the young nouvelle vague [New Wave] director Alain Resnais. The film Resnais made of her script, titled Hiroshima mon amour [Hiroshima My Love], was released in 1959 and became an international sensation, with critics making special mention of Duras's outstanding gift for dialogue.
Her film and stage work — her first play, Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise [The Viaducts of the Seine and Oise Rivers], was performed in Marseille in 1960 — directly influenced her work as a novelist, seeing her abandon what fellow writer Raymond Queneau criticized as the 'romanticism' of Un barrage contre le Pacifique and her other early work for the oblique minimalism of the nouveau roman [New Novel] with its emphasis on direct speech and implied action and steadfast refusal to conform to the reader's expectations of what a novel 'should' be. The latter half of the 1960s would see Duras apply these same techniques to the films she wrote and, beginning with Détruire, elle dit [Destroy, She Said] in 1969, directed — a decision prompted by her dissatisfaction with most if not all of the films which had thus far been adapted from her novels. As with her work for the theater, much of Duras's film work was of an experimental, non-linear nature, often featuring images from one place or culture superimposed on top of another accompanied only by music and her own voice reading her own text.
Duras's decision to live alone in the town of Neauphle-le-Château, located in the Ile-de-France région not far from Paris, following her second divorce may have led, some of her friends came to believe, to her lifelong fondness for alcohol developing into uncontrolled dipsomania. She was hospitalized for alcoholism in 1975 not long after meeting Yann Lemée, a homosexual writer thirty-eight years her junior who, following a relapse and further hospital stays in 1980 and 1985 (for emphysema this time) became, under the name Yann Andrea, her companion, secretary and, following her death, literary executor. Duras wrote of her ongoing struggle with alcoholism in La Via Materielle [The Material Life], a collection of short essays published in 1987 three years after the phenomenal success of L'Amant had made her the most widely read living French author in the world.
Her success did not insulate her from her detractors, many of whom criticized her work for what they felt to be its lack of substance, with one critic going so far as to describe her as the 'vieux corbeau litteraire' [the old crow of literature] who should be 'jeter dans la Vologne' [thrown in the Vologne river]. Nor was Duras herself above criticizing other writers, several of whom — Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes to name just two — were considered iconic intellectual figures not only in their native France but in many other parts of the world as well.
'Des gens très célèbres,' she told an interviewer in 1984 on a nationally televised programed devoted to examining her literary legacy, 'pour moi, n'ont pas écrit. Sartre, il n'a pas écrit. Pour moi il n'a pas su ce que c'était, écrire. Il a toujours eu des soucis annexes, des soucis en second, de secondes mains. Il n'a jamais affronté l'écriture pure. C'est un moraliste, Sartre. Il a toujours puisé dans la société, dans un espèce d'environnement du lui. Un environnment politique, littéraire. Ce n'est pas quelqu'un de qui je dirais: << Il a écrit >>. Je n'y penserais même pas. J'ai lu une chose du lui qui m'intérresait dans Situations, il parlait de la littérature américaine, oui. Sans ça, rien… Mais vous savez ce n'est pas un jugement de valeur que je porte là. Il y a des gens qui croient écrire, et puis les gens qui écrivent. C'est rare, c'est très rare.' [Very famous people, for me, don't write. Sartre, he doesn't write. For me he didn't know what writing was. He always had other problems, second-rate problems, second-hand. He never confronted the act of pure writing. He was a moralist, Sartre. He always had a position in society, in the specialized environment he inhabited. A political, literary environment. He's not someone of whom I would say: "He wrote." I wouldn't even think that. I read something of his which interested me in Situations, he spoke of American literature, yes. Besides that, nothing… But you know this isn't a value judgement I'm making here. There are some people who believe they write, and then some people who write. That's rare, that's very rare.]
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MARGUERITE DURAS, c 1990
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Duras made a similarly controversial statement about Christine Villemin, mother of a four year old child named Gregory who was found murdered in October 1984 not far from his home in Lépanges-sur-Vologne, accusing the woman — who had refused her request for an interview — of having killed the boy herself. (Villemin was arrested and convicted of the crime — partly on the strength, it was rumored, of what Duras wrote about her in an article titled Sublime, forcement sublime Christine V published in the French newspaper Libération — only to have her conviction overturned in 1993 due to lack of evidence.)
Duras published C'est Tout [That's All], a collection of her final thoughts dictated to Yann Andrea, in October 1995. She died on 3 March 1996 in her apartment at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, the location of her wartime salon, and was buried four days later in Montparnasse cemetery, her plain gravestone identified only by the intials 'MD.' In 1999 her son Jean Mascolo published a book of her recipes titled La Cuisine de Marguerite [The Cooking of Marguerite] which was soon withdrawn following a complaint from Andrea acting in his capacity as her literary executor. Mascolo, who worked as an editor with his mother for many years, is also the founder of the publishing house Éditions Benoît Jacob which devotes itself exclusively to publishing her cinematic work and the many audio recordings she made about and for it.
Use the link below to read a 1991 article by journalist LESLIE GARIS about French writer and filmmaker MARGUERITE DURAS:
A French film adaptation of La Douleur, directed by EMMANUEL FINKIEL and starring MÉLANIE THIERRY as Marguerite Duras, BENJAMIN BIOLAY as Dionys Mascolo, EMMANUEL BOURDIEU as Robert Antelme and BENOÎT MAGIMEL as Pierre Rabier, was released in 2017. It was released as Memoir of War in its subtitled English version and may be available to view via your preferred digital streaming service.
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