The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  • • FRENCH TRANSLATOR’S NOTE • •

  • • ENGLISH TRANSLATOR’S NOTE • •

  • • • A CHILDHOOD • • •

  • • • THE PARIS YEARS • • •

  • • • TRAJECTORIES OF WRITING • • •

  • • • TOWARDS A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS • • •

  • • • LITERATURE • • •

  • • • THE CRITICS • • •

  • • • A GALLERY OF CHARACTERS • • •

  • • • CINEMA • • •

  • • • THEATRE • • •

  • • • PASSION • • •

  • • • A WOMAN • • •

  • • • PLACES • • •

  • NOTES •

  • • LIST OF INTERVIEWS • •

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  Copyright

  This work is published via the Publication Assistance Programme Tagore, with support of Institut français en Inde / Ambassade de France en Inde and the Institut français de Paris

  Seagull Books, 2016

  Published in French as La Passion suspendue © Editions du Seuil, 2013

  English translation © Chris Turner, 2016

  First published in English translation by Seagull Books, 2016

  ISBN 978 0 8574 2 353 5

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  I met Marguerite Duras for the first time in 1987, shortly after the Italian translation of Blue Eyes, Black Hair was published.

  Getting that interview for La Stampa wasn’t very easy.

  To persuade her to do it, I had to call several times and haggle. She seemed in a state of weary indifference. Saying she had flu and complaining of a heavy workload (I discovered later that she was working on the screenplay of The Lover), she declined my invitation. Then, one afternoon, I mentioned my friendship with Inge Feltrinelli.1 Thrown for a moment by that, she came back with: ‘Get her to call me right away.’ I rang Inge and begged her to call Duras. Half an hour later, I was inexplicably granted a meeting.

  I turned up at rue Saint-Benoît a little ahead of time. The third-floor landing was tiny and poorly lit. I rang, but had to wait a few minutes before a male voice from behind the door (I immediately thought of Yann Andréa, the man she had been living with for nine years) suggested that I go and get a coffee in the café on the ground floor of the building and not come back for at least half an hour. From deep within the flat I heard Marguerite’s voice—she was claiming she had forgotten this appointment for our interview.

  Returning at the time specified, I was admitted to find her with her back to me. She was small, very small, and seated, as ever, in her dusty bedroom cluttered with papers and objects, her elbows propped on her writing table.

  She stared at me in silence, not taking the slightest notice of what I was saying. Then she began to speak, painstakingly adopting that extraordinary timbre she is able to assume, modulating her tone and her pauses. From time to time she stopped, with some irritation, to clarify the words I had taken down in my notebook. And as soon as the telephone rang, she clasped my hand, clamping it in her own to prevent me from transcribing even a single word she spoke.

  The whole time I was with her (three hours, perhaps more), she was constantly pulling large mints out of a drawer, choosing only at the end to offer me one.

  When we were done, she even agreed to be photographed. Dressed in her usual ‘Marguerite Duras uniform’—short, flared skirt, roll-neck pullover, black waistcoat, platform shoes—she turned around slowly to pose. It was as if she were defying the lens, ensuring that her blue eyes were in the picture, as well as the precious rings bedecking her fingers.

  As I was leaving, I asked her if I could come back. ‘Do as you like,’ she said, ‘but I don’t have much time.’

  I leant over to say goodbye and she kissed me.

  As soon as I returned to Paris after the summer, I called her. I explained that I’d brought a nice piece of Parmesan back from Italy for her. It was noon and Marguerite had just got up. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘as it happens, I had nothing to eat in the house.’

  She suggested that I come over in a few minutes. However, on this occasion too, she wasn’t the one who answered the door. As for the shy, conscientious Yann, he simply took my heavy package from me and as quickly closed the door in my face.

  I realized that it wasn’t the moment to press matters and I let a few days go by.

  Long afternoons of chatting and conversation followed in that collusive intimacy that (perhaps inevitably) develops over time between two women.

  It was in this way that our talk—her elliptical remarks—emerged, at times without any clear connection, to be re-organized and re-ordered subsequently. Then it would go on, interminably, for hours. Until Marguerite peremptorily announced, ‘That’s enough, now.’

  And, as though he had been waiting for the signal, Yann would enter from another room, offering as usual to take her for a walk, and delicately help her on with her strawberry-coloured coat.

  As she spoke, Marguerite was constantly tugging at the crumpled white skin of her face, then smoothing it out. She would take off the pair of men’s spectacles she had worn since her younger days, then put them back on again.

  I listened to her remembering, thinking, letting go and gradually relinquishing her natural wariness—egocentric, vain, stubborn, voluble. And yet capable, at times, of kind words and enthusiasms, of shyness, of suppressed and then uproarious laughter. She seemed suddenly fired with a consuming, voracious and almost childlike curiosity.

  I can still remember the last time we met. As always, the television was on in another part of the living room and Marguerite’s face seemed tired, as though it had swelled in the course of a few days.

  She wanted to know everything about me. She couldn’t stop asking questions—I had to tell her about my life, my loves or talk at great length about my mother, as she had about hers. ‘To the end, my mother will remain the maddest, most unpredictable of the people I’ve met in my entire life,’ she tells me with an already distant smile.

  Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre

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  • • FRENCH TRANSLATOR’S NOTE • •

  It was more than fifteen years ago, when I read Angelo Morino’s essay on Marguerite Duras Il cinese e Marguerite (Palermo: Sellerio, 1997), that I learnt of the existence of this interview which was then still unpublished in France. In fact, Angelo Morino quoted copiously from it and it was immediately apparent that it contained elements that hadn’t been covered at such length in the various interviews published in French. The fact that Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre was Italian, her very determination and insistence, her thematic organization and her highly structured thinking prevented a certain indulgence and the evasions one finds in most of the interviews published hitherto, in which interviewers are often led, by their high-handed interlocutor, to speak ‘Duras’—a coded language with which all her admirers, imitators and detractors are familiar, a language they variously caricature or practise and in which, most importantly, the many digressions and unfinish
ed trains of thought at times render the dialogue borderline incoherent or, at any rate, divert it from the topic and leave it confused.

  As for Angelo Morino’s book, it was a study of the genesis of The Lover and a detailed comparison of the biographical elements scattered throughout Duras’ work, from The Sea Wall to Yann Andréa Steiner, and supposedly new ones contributed by the novel that considerably widened the author’s audience. It raised doubts about the late ‘revelation’ made in that book regarding the identity of Huynh Thuy-Lê, the ‘Chinese’ lover, who takes the place of The Sea Wall’s ‘Monsieur Jo’. Comparing the three versions of the same events that Duras offers in The Sea Wall, The Lover and The North China Lover, stressing the difference in the number of brothers and, particularly, the identity of the lover (from the French Monsieur Jo, he becomes Huynh Thuy-Lê, a Vietnamese with a Chinese father) and attempting, above all, to explain the very longstanding concealment of the ‘truth’, he puts forward the idea that The Lover recounts an episode in the life of Marguerite’s mother, Marie Legrand, who is said, in his version, to have cheated on Henri (known as Émile) Donnadieu with a Vietnamese or Chinese man. Marguerite and her youngest brother Paulo would then be the children of that lover (there are numerous allusions in The North China Lover to the lover, the daughter and the youngest son having similar skin). Pierre, by contrast, would be the only son of Émile Donnadieu. This argument—that the Lover is the mother’s lover, not the daughter’s—is picked up by Michel Tournier in his book Célébrations.1 It is an argument that would almost be persuasive were it not for Marguerite’s physical resemblance to Émile Donnadieu in the photographs the writer has made public. Marguerite’s gaze and the shape of her eyes come, in reality, from Émile Donnadieu. And in June 1998, by which time Duras was dead, Danielle Laurin published in Lire magazine the story of her meeting with a former classmate of Duras’, Mme Ly, at Sa Dec. She attests to Marguerite’s escapades with Huynh Thuy-Lê and states that in 1952, twenty years after Duras left Vietnam once and for all, she, Mme Ly, had received combs from Paris from her through Huynh Thuy-Lê’s sister-in-law, which would imply that the writer was still in touch with her Chinese lover—or, at least, with his family. The house of Huynh Thuan, the lover’s Chinese father, became a ‘Lovers’ Museum’ in Sa Dec, though Duras never set foot in it. It is visited by tourists, who are also able to stay overnight.

  Though Duras was by no means unwilling to give interviews and many important ones are available in book form—in particular, with Xavière Gauthier in Les Parleuses (Paris: Minuit, 1974), in Le Camion (Paris: Minuit, 1977), with Michelle Porte in Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Minuit, 1978), with Serge Daney and the Cahiers du Cinéma editorial team in Les Yeux verts (1987), with Jérôme Beaujour in La Vie matérielle (Paris: POL, 1987), with Pierre Dumayet in Dits à la television (Paris: EPEL, 1999), with Dominique Noguez in La Couleur des mots (Paris: Benoit Jacob, 2001), with François Mitterand in Le Bureau de poste de la rue Dupin (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) and with Jean-Pierre Ceton in Entretiens (Paris: Bourin, 2012)—and though, as her work progressed, she gave many to the press or to radio and television (with Alain Veinstein, Bernard Pivot, Bernard Rapp, Michelle Porte or Benoît Jacquot),2 no interview project was undertaken in French that was comparable to the conversation with Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre, whose aim was to deal exhaustively with the writer’s life and career in a single volume. Pallotta della Torre modelled her book on the interviews Marguerite Yourcenar produced with Matthieu Galey, published as With Open Eyes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), a work she cites several times in her questions.

  Since La Tartaruga, the publishers of the original book, had ceased operations, it was impossible to unearth a copy until I met Annalisa Bertoni, a teacher at the University of Limoges and the press attachée of the Italian publishers Portaparole. On the occasion of the publication of a little book I co-authored with Adriana Asti, Se souvenir et oublier, published by Portaparole (2011), I spoke to Annalisa Bertoni about these mythic lost interviews. It turned out that, having done her PhD on Duras’ work, she had kept a copy.

  Enquiries among friends in Italian publishing enabled me to track down Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre’s family in Bologna. And I was ultimately able to obtain contact details for her in Lucca.

  Clearly, in retranslating the words of a French writer from Italian, there is a danger that the way those words were expressed will be distorted. I have attempted, as far as is possible, to restore Duras’ tone as it is familiar to her French readers. And to provide in the notes such additional information as seems useful, and any necessary rectifications.

  I should like to express my gratitude here to Annalisa Bertoni, without whom this book would not have been available to a French audience.

  René de Ceccatty

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  • • ENGLISH TRANSLATOR’S NOTE • •

  Given the complex circumstances of this book’s origin, the English translation has been based mainly on the French edition published by Éditions du Seuil in 2013, rather than the Italian edition published by La Tartaruga edizioni in 1989. Since access to the original French has not been possible, the French translator René de Ceccatty has generally been assumed to have fulfilled his mission of restoring Duras’ ‘tone’ in the production of his text.

  There are no footnotes in the Italian edition of these interviews and those which appear in this book are, therefore, generally the work of Monsieur de Ceccatty. On the rare occasions where a footnote is marked [Trans.], it has been supplied by me.

  I would like to thank Professor Emeritus Leslie Hill of the University of Warwick for his assistance with some aspects of this project. Overall responsibility for the translation rests, of course, with me.

  Chris Turner

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  • • • A CHILDHOOD • • •

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  You were born at Gia Dinh, a few miles from Saigon, and, moving countless times with your family—to Vinh Long, Sa Dec, etc.—you lived in Vietnam, which at that time was a French colony, until you were eighteen. Do you think you had a special childhood?

  I sometimes think the whole of my writing originates from there—between the paddy fields, the forests and the solitude. From that emaciated, lost child that I was, the white girl not from those parts, though more Vietnamese than French, always barefoot, with no regular hours or social graces, accustomed to watching the sun set slowly over the river, my face always thoroughly sunburnt.

  How would you describe yourself as a child?

  I’ve always been small. No one ever said I was pretty. In our house, there was no mirror to see yourself in.

  What relation is there between these strata of memory and your writing?

  I have overwhelming memories, memories so strong that they can never be evoked by writing. It’s better that way, don’t you think?

  Your Indochinese childhood is an essential reference for your imagination.

  My imagination will never be able to equal it in intensity. Stendhal’s right—childhood has no end.

  What are your oldest memories?

  It’s in the highlands, amid the smells of rain, jasmine and meat, that I locate the earliest years of my life. To us children, the exhausting afternoons in Indochina seemed to have in them that sense of a defiance of the stifling nature all around us.

  A sense of mystery and the forbidden hung over the forest. We so enjoyed those days, my two brothers and I, when we ve
ntured out, battling through the tangled creepers and orchids, in danger at any moment of coming across snakes or, I suppose, even tigers.

  I talked about this at great length in The Sea Wall.

  The superhuman calm and indescribable gentleness I was surrounded by have left indelible marks.

  I found fault with God, of course, when I went by the lazarettos outside the villages—a vague impression of death floated over the hillsides all along the Siamese frontier where we lived. And yet I still have the melodious laughter of that people in my ears—the laughter that attested to an unwavering vitality.

  What image do you have now, after all this time, of India and Indochina?

  They are the core of the world’s absurdity, a point where delirium, poverty, death, madness and life are all jumbled together.

  The East you reconstructed in your books is a deliquescent, devastated place. I don’t know to what extent it can be described as real.

  I experienced it at the height of colonial times and I’ve never been back since.1 Moreover, the veracity of so-called realism isn’t my concern.

  You grew up speaking French and Vietnamese. What influence did that experience of bilingualism have on you? What have you gained from knowing a culture so distant from the European?

  For years I repressed a large part of that life. Then, suddenly, the things I went through in the unconsciousness of my first twelve years returned violently. The poverty, the fear, the forest darkness, the Ganges, the Mekong, the tigers, and the lepers I found terrifying, gathered by the side of the road fetching water, all came back to me whole. I felt my country was taking its revenge.