This house, here, in Neauphle: I thought I’d also bought it for my friends, to have them come visit, but I was wrong. I bought it for myself. It’s only now that I know it, and say it. Some evenings there were many friends here. The Gallimards came often, as did their wives, and their friends. There were a lot of Gallimards—sometimes maybe fifteen of them. I asked people to come a little early to help me move the tables into one room, so we could all be together. Those evenings I’m talking about were very happy occasions for everyone. The happiest of all. There were always Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo and their friends. And my lovers, too, especially Gérard Jarlot, who was seduction itself, and who also became a friend of the Gallimards.
When people were there I was simultaneously less alone and more abandoned. You can approach that solitude only through night. At night, imagine Duras in her bed, sleeping alone in a house forty-four hundred feet square. When I went to the other end of the house, over toward the “little cottage,” I feared the space like a trap. I can say that every night I was afraid. And yet, I never lifted a finger to have anyone come live here. Sometimes I went out late at night. I loved those meandering walks with people from the village, friends, residents of Neauphle. We drank. We talked, a lot. We went into a kind of cafeteria huge as a village of several acres. It was packed at three in the morning. The name comes back to me now: Parly II. In those places, too, we were lost. There, the waiters watched like cops over the vast territory of our solitude.
This isn’t a country home, here, this house. One couldn’t say that. It was a farm at first, with the pond, and then it was the country home of a notary, the great corps of Parisian Notaries.
When they opened the main entrance for me, I saw the garden. It lasted several seconds. No sooner had I walked in than I said, Yes, I would buy the house. I bought it then and there. I paid on the spot, in cash.
Now it has become a house for all seasons. And I have also given it to my son. It belongs to both of us. He is as attached to it as he is to me; I believe that now. He has kept everything of mine in this house. I can still be alone here. I have my table, my bed, my telephone, my paintings, and my books. The screenplays of my films. And my son is very happy when I enter this house. That happiness, my son’s, is now the happiness of my life.
A writer is an odd thing. He’s a contradiction, and he makes no sense. Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent. Screaming without sound. A writer is often quite restful; she listens a lot. She doesn’t speak much because it’s impossible to speak to someone about a book one has written, and especially about a book one is writing. It’s impossible. It’s the opposite of the cinema, the theater, and other performances. It’s the opposite of any kind of reading. It’s the hardest of all. It’s the worst. Because a book is the unknown, it’s night, it’s closed off, and that’s that. It’s the book that advances, grows, advances in directions one thought one had explored; that advances toward its own fate and the fate of its author, who is annihilated by its publication: her separation from it, the dream book, like the last-born child, always the best loved.
An open book is also night.
I don’t know why, but those words I just said bring me to tears.
Write all the same, in spite of despair. No: with despair. I don’t know what to call that despair. Writing to one side of what precedes writing is always to ruin it. And yet we must accept this: ruining the failure means coming back toward another book, toward another possibility of the same book.
This loss of myself in the house was in no way voluntary. I didn’t say, “I’m shut up in here every day of the year.” I wasn’t, and it would have been false to say so. I went out to run errands, I went to the café. But at the same time I was here. The village and the house are the same thing. And the table by the pond. And the black ink. And the white paper, it’s all the same thing. And as for the books—no, suddenly it’s never the same thing.
Before me, no one had written in this house. I asked the mayor, my neighbors, the shopkeepers. No. Never. I often phoned Versailles to try to find out the names of the people who had lived in this house. In the list of the inhabitants’ last names and their first names and their professions, there were never any writers. Now, all these names could have been the names of writers. All of them. But no. Around here there were only family farms. What I found buried in the ground were German garbage pits. The house had in fact been occupied by German officers. Their garbage pits were holes, holes in the ground. There were a lot of oyster shells, empty tins of expensive foodstuffs, especially foie gras, caviar. And much broken china. We threw all of it out. Except the debris of china, without a doubt Sèvres porcelain: the designs were intact. And the blue was the innocent blue in the eyes of certain of our children.
When a book is finished—a book you have written, I mean—you can no longer say when reading it that this particular book is a book you have written, or what things were written in it, in what state of despair or happiness, of discovery or failure that implicates your entire being. Because in the final account, nothing like that can be seen in a book. The writing is uniform in some way, tempered. Nothing more happens in such a book, once it’s finished and published. And it rejoins the indecipherable innocence of its coming into the world.
To be alone with the as yet unwritten book is still to be in the primal sleep of humanity. That’s it. It also means being alone with the writing that is still lying fallow. It means trying not to die. It means being alone in a shelter during the war. But without prayer, without God, with no thought whatsoever except the insane desire to exterminate the German Nation down to the last Nazi.
Writing has always been done without references, or else it is … It is still as it was on the first day. Savage. Different. Except the people, the characters who circulate in the book: one never forgets them in one’s work and never does the author regret them. No, of that I am certain, no, the writing of a book, writing. It is always the open door to abandonment. There is something suicidal in a writer’s solitude. One is alone even in one’s own solitude. Always inconceivable. Always dangerous. Yes. The price one pays for having dared go out and scream.
In the house, I always used to write on the second floor; I would never write downstairs. Afterward, on the contrary, I wrote in the large living room on the ground floor, perhaps to feel less alone—I don’t really know—and also to see the garden.
There is some of this in the book: its solitude is that of the entire world. It is everywhere, has invaded everything. I still believe in this invasion. Like everyone else. Solitude is the thing without which one does nothing. Without which one stops looking at anything. It’s a way of thinking, reasoning, but only with one’s own everyday thoughts. There is also some of that in the function of writing, and perhaps first and foremost it means telling oneself every day that one mustn’t kill oneself, so long as every day one could kill oneself. That is the writing of a book; it is not solitude. I’m talking about solitude, but I wasn’t alone since I had this work to complete, to bring to clarity, this forced labor: writing The Vice-Consul of France in Lahore. And it was done and translated into every language in the world, and it was preserved. And in this book the Vice-Consul shot at leprosy, at lepers, at the poor, at dogs, and then he began shooting at Whites, the white governors. He killed everyone but her, she who on the morning of a certain day drowned in the Delta, Lola Valerie Stein, the queen of my childhood and of South Tahla, the wife of the governor of Vinh Long.
That book was the first book of my life. It was in Lahore, and also there, in Cambodia, in the plantations; it was everywhere. The Vice-Consul started with a child of fifteen who was pregnant, the little Annamite driven from her mother’s house who stayed in that blue gravel pit outside Pursat. I don’t remember what happens after that. I remember having difficulty finding that place, the mountains of Pursat, where I had never been. The map was on my desk and I traced the paths taken by beggars and children with broken legs, whose eyes had died, who were thrown a
way by their mothers and who ate garbage. It was a very difficult book to write. There was no possible plan to express the amplitude of the misery, since nothing remained of the visible events that had caused it. Nothing remained but Hunger and Pain.
There was no link between violent episodes, so there was never any thought to a schedule. There never has been in my life. Never. Neither in my life nor in my books; not once.
I wrote every morning. But without any kind of schedule. Never. Except for cooking. I knew exactly when to come to make something boil or keep something from burning. And for my books I knew it, too. I swear it. I swear all of it. I have never lied in a book. Or even in my life. Except to men. Never. And this is because my mother had terrified me with the lie that killed children who lied.
I think that what I blame books for, in general, is that they are not free. One can see it in the writing: they are fabricated, organized, regulated; one could say they conform. A function of the revision that the writer often wants to impose on himself. At that moment, the writer becomes his own cop. By being concerned with good form, in other words the most banal form, the clearest and most inoffensive. There are still dead generations that produce prim books. Even young people: charming books, without extension, without darkness. Without silence. In other words, without a true author. Books for daytime, for whiling away the hours, for traveling. But not books that become embedded in one’s thoughts and toll the black mourning for all life, the commonplace of every thought.
I don’t know what a book is. No one knows. But we know when there is one. And when there’s nothing, one knows it the way one knows one has not yet died.
Every book, like every writer, has a difficult, unavoidable passage. And one must consciously decide to leave this mistake in the book for it to remain a true book, not a lie. I don’t yet know what happens to solitude after that. I can’t talk about it yet. What I believe is that the solitude becomes banal; eventually it becomes commonplace, and so much the better.
When I spoke for the first time of the love between Anne-Marie Stretter, the French ambassador’s wife in Lahore, and the Vice-Consul, I felt like I had destroyed the book, had removed it from its expectation. But no, not only did it stand up, but it was even the opposite. There are also author’s mistakes, things like that which are actually strokes of luck. There is something exhilarating about successful, magnificent mistakes, and even the others, the easy kind, such as the ones that come from childhood; those, too, are often marvelous.
I often find others’ books “clean,” but often as if they derive from a classicism that takes no chances. Inevitable would probably be the word. I don’t know.
The great readings of my life, the ones for me alone, are things written by men. It’s Michelet. Michelet and again Michelet, to the point of tears. Political texts as well, but less so. It’s Saint-Just, Stendhal, and strangely enough it isn’t Balzac. The Text of Texts is the Old Testament.
I don’t know how I got out of what one might call a fit, the way one might say a fit of hysteria or fit of lethargy, of degradation, like feigned sleep. Solitude was that, too. A kind of writing. And reading was the same as writing.
Certain writers are terrified. They are afraid of writing. What matters in my case, perhaps, is that my fear was never that particular fear. I wrote incomprehensible books and they were read. There’s one I read recently that I hadn’t read in thirty years and that I find magnificent. Its title is Une vie tranquille [A Peaceful Life]. I had forgotten everything about it except the last sentence: “No one had seen the man drown but me.” It’s a book that was written in one go, in the banal and very dark logic of a murder. In that book, one can go further than the book itself, than the murder in the book. One can go who knows where, no doubt toward adoration of the sister, the love story between the sister and brother, still, yes, for all eternity, a dazzling, inconsiderate, punished love.
We are sick with hope, those of us from ’68. The hope is the one we placed in the role of the proletariat. And as for us, no law, nothing, no one and no thing, will ever cure us of that hope. I’d like to join the Communist Party again. But at the same time I know I shouldn’t. And I’d also like to speak to the Right and insult it with all the force of my rage. Insults are just as strong as writing. It’s a form of writing, but addressed to someone. I insulted people in my articles, which can be every bit as satisfying as writing a beautiful poem. I draw a radical distinction between a man of the Left and a man of the Right. Some would say they’re the same man. On the Left there was Pierre Bérégovoy, who will never be replaced.* Bérégovoy number one is Mitterrand, who isn’t like anyone else either.
Personally, I’m like everyone else. I don’t believe anyone ever turned around to look at me in the street. I am banality itself. The triumph of banality. Like the old woman in my book Le Camion [The Truck].
Living like that, the way I say I lived, in that solitude, eventually means running certain risks. It’s inevitable. As soon as a human being is left alone, she tips into unreason. I believe this: I believe that a person left to her own devices is already stricken by madness, because nothing keeps her from the sudden emergence of her personal delirium.
* Bérégovoy was finance minister, then prime minister under Mitterrand. He committed suicide in 1993, when Duras was putting the finishing touches to Writing.—TRANS.
One is never alone. One is never physically alone. Anywhere. One is always somewhere. One hears noises in the kitchen, noises from the television, or the radio, or the neighboring apartments, throughout the building. Especially when one has never demanded silence, as I always have.
I’d like to tell a story that I first told to Michelle Porte, who had made a film about me. At the time, I was in what we might call a state of expenditure in the “little” house that is attached to the main house. I was alone. I was waiting for Michelle Porte in that state of expenditure. I often stay alone like that in calm, empty places. A long time. And it was in that silence, on that day, that I suddenly saw and heard, on the wall, very near me, the final moments in the life of a common fly.
I sat on the ground so as not to frighten it. I didn’t move.
I was alone with it in the house. I had never thought about flies before, except probably to curse them. Like you. I was raised like you to be horrified of that universal calamity, the thing that brought plague and cholera.
I leaned closer to watch it die.
It was trying to get away from the wall; it was in danger of becoming prisoner of the sand and cement that the dampness from the garden made stick to the wall. I watched to see how a fly died. It was long. It struggled against death. The whole thing lasted ten or fifteen minutes, and then it stopped. Its life must have ended. I stayed where I was to watch some more. The fly remained stuck to the wall as I had seen it, as if sealed to itself.
I was mistaken: it was still alive.
I stayed some more to watch, in hopes that it would start to hope again, to live.
My presence made that death even more horrible. I knew it, and still I remained. To see, see how that death would progressively invade the fly. And also to try to see where that death had come from. From outside, or from the thickness of the wall, or from the ground. What night it came from, from earth or sky, from the nearby forests, or from a nothingness as yet unnameable, perhaps very near, perhaps from me, trying to recreate the path the fly had taken as it passed into eternity.
I don’t know the ending. No doubt the fly, at the end of its strength, fell. No doubt its legs came unstuck from the wall. And it fell from the wall. I don’t know anything more, except that I left. I told myself, “You are going insane.” And I left that place.
When Michelle Porte arrived, I showed her the spot and I told her a fly had died there at three twenty. Michelle Porte started to laugh. She couldn’t stop laughing. She was right. I smiled at her to put an end to the story. But no: she kept on laughing. And when I tell you this story, plainly, in all truth, in my truth, it’s what I just tol
d you: what took place between the fly and me, which is not yet fit to be laughed at.
The death of a fly is still death. It’s death marching toward a certain end of the world, which widens the field of the final sleep. When you see a dog die, or a horse die, you say something, like poor thing … But when a fly dies, nothing is said, no one records it, nothing.
Now it is written. This might be the kind of very dark slippage—I don’t like that word—that one runs the risk of experiencing. It isn’t serious, but it’s an event in itself, total, with enormous meaning; with inaccessible meaning and limitless breadth. I thought of the Jews. I hated Germany as I had in the earliest days of the war, with all my body and all my strength. Just as during the war, whenever I met a German in the street I thought of his murder committed by me, invented by me, perfected; of the colossal happiness of a German corpse, killed by me.
It’s also good if writing leads to that, to that fly—in its death agony, I mean: to write the horror of writing. The exact moment of death, recorded, already rendered it inaccessible. It conferred an overall importance on it—call it a specific place in the general map of life on Earth.
This precision of the moment at which it died meant that the fly had a secret funeral. Twenty years after its death, the proof of it is here: we’re still talking about it.
I had never told anyone about the death of that fly, its duration, its slowness, its horrible fear, its truth.
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