At a very early age you became used to moving about, to changing houses and moving from town to town.
That was on account of my father’s job as a colonial civil servant. As a little girl, I never looked at the houses—at the objects or furniture in them. But then I knew them all, I could have travelled around them in the dark like an animal with my eyes closed. I remember there were places where you could escape to when you’d had enough of the grown-ups. Since that time, I’ve always been looking for a place and I’ve never managed to be where I would have wanted—a vagabond life, if I can put it that way.
A life in exile, even, since you left your native country for ever nearly fifty years ago.
I think that will condition the whole of my life. As with the Jews, everything I took away with me on my wanderings has become even more intense for being distant, absent.
In what way, as you see it, has this special childhood made you who you are?
There’s still something wild in me, even now. A sort of animal attachment to life.
Books like The Lover or The Sea Wall could, alternatively, be read as ‘family portraits in an interior’, as ‘conversation pieces’. Before we come to the complex relationship with your mother, what were relations with your family like up to your teenage years?
There was something both noble and coarse in the way we lived. It definitely wasn’t a European or French upbringing. And there was no pretence, no recourse to the primal, aggressive instinct that governs families and binds them together. We all knew that we weren’t destined to stay together for long—the family was there to guarantee our shared survival. We would soon be separated and begin to live our lives.
You don’t think all that could have had a major influence on your future as a writer?
I took to writing to make the silence speak—that silence under which I’d been crushed. At twelve, that seemed to me the only way.
After the death of your father when you were four, you stayed with your mother and your two brothers.
Now that they’re all dead, I can speak about them calmly. The pain has gone. The younger of my brothers had a thin, agile body. It reminded me, heaven knows why, of my first lover, the Chinese. He was silent and fearful and I didn’t succeed in detaching myself from him until the day he died. The other brother was a bad lot, with no scruples or conscience—perhaps even no feelings. He was domineering and we were scared of him. These days, I still associate him with Robert Mitchum’s character in The Night of the Hunter, a mix of paternal and criminal instincts. That, I think, is where the wariness I’ve always felt towards men comes from.
One of the last times I saw him, he came to my flat in Paris to take money from me. It was during the Occupation. My husband Robert Antelme was in a concentration camp. I found out many years later that he robbed my mother, too, and that he died alone in hospital, ravaged by alcohol.
In Agatha, which you wrote for the theatre drawing on the plot of Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities, you put the supposed incestuous love between Agatha and her brother Ulrich squarely on the stage.
The ultimate stage of passion, yes. I was in denial for a long time about the passion that I might have felt, beneath my hatred, for my brother. It’s the way he looked at me that convinced me it was real. When we were given a record player, I never wanted to dance with him. Contact with his body horrified me but at the same time I was attracted by it.
The figure of your brother appears in The Sea Wall and in The Lover.
It was only with The Lover that I managed to free myself of this hatred. When he became an electrician, in France, I stayed with the younger of my two brothers, my only bulwark against my mother’s hysteria and tantrums. I suppose we weren’t either of us the children she would have wanted.
Whole Days in the Trees is the story of an old lady who comes back to France after living many years in the colonies and meets up with her eldest son—a thief and a crook—who has always been her favourite.
Yes, indeed. Of the three of us, he was always the most loved. My mother felt guilty for making him jealous by giving him a brother and a sister.
And what was her attitude towards you?
She couldn’t stand our exotic ways. She was constantly telling us we were French. She forced us to eat bread and honey when we preferred rice, fish and the mangoes we stole during her naps. At fifteen, people took me for a half-caste. I didn’t rise to certain insults that came my way. So far as we knew, my mother had always been faithful to her husband, even when he left her on her own for months.
You’ve never spoken much about your father.
Perhaps because, without knowing it, it was for him that, as I’ve lived, I’ve continued to write. I lost and found men as though they had been my father. He was a teacher and wrote maths books. He died so early that I can say I never knew him. What I can see now are just his bright eyes, and at times I seem to feel them fixed on me. All I have of him is a faded photograph. My mother never talked to us about him.
What happened after he died?
We were very poor, and my mother so stubborn that she insisted on going her own sweet way. As a widow, she bought that piece of land, an unworkable paddy field, flooded by the Pacific, on which she worked to no avail for twenty years. After the wall built to hold back the sea collapsed, she never recovered—she more or less lost her wits. She kept saying we’d been abandoned by everyone, while the civil servants who’d sold us the land grew rich. She ended up alone, bitter and poor, after slaving like an animal. As an old woman, she went off to die by the river Loire—the only place where she could live, she said, now that the colonies were gone.
Les Impudents and also The Lover and The Sea Wall—your mother reappears in your novels.
The Sea Wall, as I remember, made her angry . . . My life was lived through my mother. She lived inside me to the point of obsession. I would have died in childhood, I think, if she’d died. I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from the day, so long ago, when we parted.
What sort of woman was she?
Exuberant and mad, as only mothers can be. In existence, I think one’s mother is, generally speaking, the strangest, most unpredictable and elusive person one meets. She was tall and tough, but always ready, nonetheless, to protect us from the aspects of that squalid life we were living.
She always dressed in old, worn-out clothes. And I can still see her pacing up and down the bedroom in her nightdress or in the shadows of the colonial dining room, screaming in despair that she didn’t want to go back to France. She was the daughter of peasants from the Pas-de-Calais and, until the day she left the colonies, she refused to speak Vietnamese. And yet she taught in native schools and was certainly closer to the Vietnamese and the Annamites than she was to the whites. My mother’s pupils often came to play with me. I’ll never forget their gracefulness, the joy they radiated. They lived in the water—in the rivers and the lakes—when it was hot. And, in fact, the entire landscape of my childhood is a kind of huge watery world.
What other memories do you have of your mother?
She was an extraordinary storyteller. I’ve forgotten so many things in my life—so many books, so many conversations—but not some of the stories she told us in her drawling voice when she put us to bed at night. The things that most belong to us are, I believe, things that come to us through the direct spoken word.
What do you see in yourself today of your mother?
Her madness left a permanent mark on me. Her pessimism, too. She was constantly expecting war to break out, or a natural catastrophe that would have wiped us all out. She managed to hand on to me this strong, peasant sense of home life—something like a bastion and refuge that she was able to create in each of the houses we lived in.
You’ve said several times that your mother would rather have had another boy than a daughter and that in your adolesce
nce, you’d have done anything not to disappoint that expectation.
Well, not exactly. She didn’t want me to become too educated. That’s definitely the case. She had in her such a visceral fear of intellectuals and of everything that might be beyond her. I can’t remember seeing her once with a book in her hand. It’s for that reason and so many others that I decided to leave for good.
From the banks of the Mekong, what did you imagine life in France was like?
The only image of Europe came from my mother’s stories. It wasn’t easy for me, when I got there, to adopt Western ways and manners. I suddenly had to wear shoes and eat steak.
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• • • THE PARIS YEARS • • •
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You were just eighteen when you set off alone for Paris.
I realized I’d made a mistake waiting all those years, behind a door, for my family to notice my presence. I wanted to start again, to prove to my mother I could make a go of things. Don’t we all run away from home because the only adventure possible is the one our mother has already marked out for us?
In Paris you registered immediately at the university.
I’d been awarded a scholarship. I had to set about doing something. It was very difficult at the start. I began to study mathematics initially, undoubtedly so as to follow in my father’s footsteps. [Italo] Calvino and [Raymond] Queneau claim there’s a very strong connection between the exact sciences and literature. Then I tried to get into Sciences Po, and in the end I did a law degree. When I took the first exams, I began to get over that endemic sense of wretchedness that my mother had handed on to me—she suffered from an inferiority complex towards people she regarded as important, whether it be colonial civil servants or customs officials.
What sort of life did you lead?
A student life. We went to lectures, met up in the cafes to eat sandwiches and talk, then, in the evening, we went to a brasserie. We were all young and hadn’t a penny to our name.
I don’t remember much about those years. Perhaps because I never talk about them. They sometimes seem to have been engulfed by darkness.
Who were the first people you got to know in Paris?
Students who, like me, were at the university. Then I met a young Jewish man from Neuilly. I still remember that as one of the most stimulating, crucial encounters of my life. He showed me places and books I knew nothing about, since all I knew were the swamps and the exotic writings of Pierre Loti and Pierre Benoit. He got me to read the Bible and introduced me to music. Every week we went to Mozart, Bach or Haydn concerts.
Did you also go to the opera?
Those were fashionable, middle-class occasions that bored me stiff. I already found opera tedious. Over-spectacular effects that over-face you visually and detract from the contribution of the music. Music—real music—can never be a background to something else. It has to fill us up with—and empty us of—everything.
Do you still listen to music?
No, to listen to Bach the way I did as a young, naive person, when nothing could shake me, would be painful for me today. We’re talking about enormous, harrowing efforts. I want to laugh when people tell me they listened to Mozart all day long.
Let’s come back to your first years in Paris, the Popular Front years, with the spectacular victory of the Left and the election of Léon Blum, followed by a great many intellectuals becoming politically committed: [André] Gide, [Georges] Bernanos, [André] Malraux, [François] Mauriac.
I wasn’t really politically committed at the time. Politics was something very distant. I felt young and indifferent. For example, the eloquence and commitment of Malraux— even before he became Minister of Culture much later, when I would follow him a little distractedly on television— already seemed just a torrent of rhetoric.
This period without political commitment was a pretty short one for you since a few years later, after your marriage to Robert Antelme—who would later publish a committed work like The Human Race—and shortly after the declaration of war, you joined the Communist Party. Why?
I needed to overcome my loneliness, to leave behind a diaspora I’d joined enthusiastically and become part of a group, enter into a collective consciousness that could be shared. I knew about the gulags, Stalinism, Siberia, the German–Soviet Pact and the pogroms of 1934, but joining meant recognizing myself in the Party’s destiny and sloughing off my own. At the same time, my misfortune became a class misfortune.
How do you assess your eight years of activism in Communist Party ranks?
I’m still a communist who doesn’t recognize herself in communism. To join a party, you have to be more or less autistic, neurotic, deaf and blind. For years, I stayed in the party as a branch secretary, without realizing what was happening, without seeing that the working class was a victim of its own weakness, that even the proletariat was doing nothing to overcome the limitations of its condition.
What caused you, in the late 1950s, to leave the Party?
The Stalinist model spread confusion around revolution, and the events of 1956 in Hungary had sickened me. Obviously, it was traumatic to leave. Only when 1968 happened did I stop feeling like a victim, in spite of myself, of communist ideology. I’d had enough of Marxist demagogy which in its attempt to wipe out individuals’ contradictions merely alienated those individuals more. Any attempt to simplify human consciousness has something fascistic about it (in that respect, Stalinism and Hitlerism are the same thing).
What was the view inside the Party of the fact that you were an intellectual and, moreover, that you wrote?
I wrote on the sly in the early years. My comrades didn’t even know I had academic qualifications. They lived by very rigid dogmas. Reading and writing books outside the Party’s prescribed, ordained texts would have been akin to a theoretical crime that undermined its stifling credo. Anyway, they managed to make me feel guilty—when I began making Jaune le soleil, they accused me of anti-communism to stop me going on with it, then they tried to force me to live as part of a couple, a family, like all the other members, as they put it. And there was a scandal when a written report criticized me for going to nightclubs and said that I’d been living with two men—my new lover and my former one.
Did the experience of the Communist Party condition your work?
If it had, I wouldn’t have been a real writer. When I write I forget all ideology and cultural memory. Only perhaps in The Sea Wall is there anything political—in my mother’s monologues about poverty and in the description of the colony. But this is still the private dialectic of a desperate woman. I don’t believe you write to send messages to readers—you write for yourself, breaking with preceding styles, reinventing them each time.
Do you know a Party writer who did that? And don’t tell me [Louis] Aragon’s surrealism is like that. He wrote well, that’s all there is to it. But he didn’t change anything and he remained a faithful Party representative who knew how to charm with words.
And yet you believed in a political utopia.
I believed in Allende, in the 1917 revolution, in the Prague Spring, in the early days of Cuba and Che Guevara.
And in 1968? You were a member of the Students and Writers Action Committee.
I believed in it precisely as utopia. Its great strength was to stir up the stagnant waters of Europe—of the whole world, perhaps.
You once said, ‘When [Charles] Baudelaire talks about lovers and desire, the revolutionary spirit is strongest in him. When the members of the Central Committee talk about revolution, it’s por
nography.’1
Like all regimes, Marxism is afraid that, if not appropriately channelled, ‘certain free forces’—the imagination, poetry, even love—can undermine its foundations, as it were, and it has always set itself up to censor experience, desire.
Among your texts, which do you regard as political?
In Abahn Sabana David, there’s the whole of my hatred for the Party. David is the symbol of the man anaesthetized by Stalinist demagogy and lies, Abahn is the figure of the intellectual condemned by events to a schizophrenic existence and Sabana is, perhaps, the emblem of pain itself which cannot be concealed. By contrast, in L’Amour, there’s all my fear of the Apocalypse, the sense of an end of the world. In Destroy, She Said, Elisabeth Alione, Alissa and Stein call for the destruction of the world as humanity’s only solution.
Alternatively, Destroy could be seen as a kind of manifesto for May 1968.
Madness, as an extreme rejection of models, and utopia, too, save us by distancing and preserving us from everything.
[Michel] Foucault agreed with me on that. I can’t understand how [Philippe] Sollers could state that it wasn’t a political novel but only a literary one.2 [Maurice] Blanchot, who knows me very well, understood the revolutionary significance of the text immediately, the love-death pairing, which I pointed to as the only path of salvation, the one, precisely, that involves the total destruction of what existed before and was preventing the unfettered flow of the drives.3
The Suspended Passion Page 2