Marguerite landed a job as a press attaché at the French Colonial Office in 1938, producing L’Empire français, a piece of imperialist propaganda to which she didn’t put her name. For Antelme, sainthood, and a touch of masochism, were the prerequisites before, during and after the marriage. After much toing and froing in an I-love-you-but-can’t-marry-you vein, Marguerite and Robert had a party for their wedding. She first dabbled in politics via Robert Antelme, a charming man with a reputation for generosity, a ‘saint’ according to his friends, who were never inclined to say the same of Marguerite.
She hardly noticed the Popular Front marching forward to social conquests and economic disasters. In the golden triangle of Montparnasse, Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter, she began to lead an amusing, somewhat wild life, skimming through the left-wing weeklies, Vendredi and Marianne, going to the races, buying a car, scrounging money from men, which she often handed to her family.
The Donnadieu clan returned to France in the Thirties and MD casually embarked on a law degree. She laughed a lot, it is true, but never at herself. With Lewis Carroll, it was love at first sight, but the infatuation was short-lived: humour was not Duras’s strong point. Her biographer suggests that the ‘purity’ of her style derives from her study of Madame de Lafayette and Racine, but this is hard to reconcile with the alleged influence of Bataille and Blanchot. (Years later, Duras, a taker rather than a giver, would turn her lovers into her own property with much ranting and raving.) The affair with the Chinaman lasted almost two years.Īfter the popular romances of Delly and the novels of Paul Bourget, Marguerite delved into Shakespeare and Molière. As Adler puts it, ‘Marguerite was on sale’ to Leo the Chinaman in French it sounds better: ‘Marguerite était à vendre.’ The girl was her mother’s property. He became her very rich and much older lover, and later cropped up in at least two pieces of fiction and a film with Catherine Deneuve. One of the traumatic ‘events’, real or imagined, of her adolescence was her encounter with ‘the Chinaman’ in 1929. In the process MD, as she liked to be called in the days of JFK and JJSS, was supplied with the plot of a highly readable and moving novel, Un barrage contre le Pacifique. She wanted passionately to acquire land – a common expatriate aspiration – and to amass savings. It may be that Duras was raped when she was four in any case, sex came into her life early on and it was a nasty business, although Adler refrains from any obvious psychoanalytical interpretations.įrom Cambodia the family moved to Cochin China, surviving on Mme Donnadieu’s salary. Her childhood and precocious adolescence were spent in the petty colonial atmosphere of prewar Indochina, where minor civil servants, poor whites and planters looked down on the ‘natives’ and up to the bigwigs. Duras’s novels and plays relentlessly probe the family saga, mixing memory and fabrication, and omitting any reference to her two half-brothers, who have been muscled out of her overcrowded unconscious. The big question, raised by this vigorous biography, is simple: was Duras’s life her best novel? It began in colonial Indochina, where Henri Donnadieu, her father, died when she was seven, leaving Marguerite, as Adler calls her, at the mercy of her neurotic mother, a tough-minded teacher who haunts her daughter’s life and works. a concatenation of words as pure as poetry and as full-throated as a fish-wife’s call.’ ‘I love my gibberish’ (‘mon charabia’), she used to say. Duras produced 73 books and about twenty films her last posthumous work, No More, is currently available in a chi-chi edition and billed as her ‘raucous salutation welcoming death. Laure Adler’s biography, the best so far, proves that the required period of mourning is over. Her personality and the legends about her have fascinated readers of everything from Elle to the Village Voice. For twenty years or so – but particularly after she hit the jackpot with her Goncourt Prize and sold a million copies of her most conventional novel, The Lover (1984) – Marguerite Duras was a literary monster.