Marguerite Duras is hardly a neglected writer, having at least a dozen books currently in print in English and having kept a number close to that in print since first hitting her stride with English readers in the 1960s. Her 1984 autobiographical novel L’Amant (The Lover), which won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into over 40 languages, is considered a 20th century classic. And several parts of La Douleur (The Pain), which was published in the U.S. as The War: A Memoir, were incorporated into Emmanuel Finkiel’s 2017 film, Memoir of War. Yet despite Duras’s fame, the film, and the book’s profound power, the American edition of La Douleur (New Press) dates back to 2008 and the British edition (Flamingo) to 1987.
La Douleur collects six texts, two straight memoir, two autobiographical fiction, two wholly fictional, so the book’s American title is somewhat misleading. In addition, the texts are presented not in chronological order, but — in my opinion, at least — in order of merit, and the first three are far better than the last.
The book takes its title from Duras’s first piece, La Douleur, drawn from the diary she kept over the weeks when she waited for news of her husband, Robert Antelme. A writer and member of the Resistance, Antelme had been arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944, just six weeks ahead of the liberation of Paris by Allied forces, and like thousands of Resistance members before him, sent from Fresnes prison to a concentration camp in Germany.
Duras’s and Antelme’s marriage had already been strained by the death of their child in 1942, and by 1944, Duras was involved with the editor Dionys Mascolo, referred to as D. in the book, and intent upon divorcing Antelme. This fact hovers over her narrative, contributing to her anxiety and sense of survivor’s guilt.
In April 1945, as the Allies advance into Germany and begin liberating prisoner of war camps, French prisoners start arriving in Paris and Duras’s hopes lift. But at the same time, so do images of Buchenwald, the first concentration camp reached by American and British troops: the piles of corpses, the ghost-like skeletons of the surviving inmates. She associates one photo in particular with Antelme: “In a ditch, face down, legs drawn up, arms outstretched, he’s dying. Dead.” A few of Antelme’s associates, mere shadows of their former selves, return from Buchenwald and speak of seeing him but losing him in the chaos of the camp’s last days.
Then, in May, François Mitterrand, referred to in the book by his Resistance name, Morland, calls from Germany. Assigned by General De Gaulle as a liaison to the American forces liberating camps in Kaufering and Dachau, Mitterrand was passing through one of the blocks at Dachau when he heard his name spoken, so faintly he barely processes it. He recognizes Antelme — and recognizes that the man is perhaps hours from death. He enlists the help of Mascolo and another friend, and quickly arranges paperwork and uniforms so the two men can drive to Germany and help smuggle Antelme out of the camp. Mitterrand understands that the man is too weak to survive the Americans’s usual regime for reviving inmates.
The whole passage of Antelme’s discovery, rescue, and return to Paris in the back of Mitterrand’s car takes perhaps five pages, but they’re among the most suspenseful and emotional I’ve read in many years. Just blocks from Duras’s apartment, Mascolo stops to telephone: “I’m ringing to warn you that it’s more terrible than anything we’ve imagined.” When she sees Antelme’s body being carried up the stairs of her building,
I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and recognized me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking, I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry.
Then begins the slow, painstaking process of bringing Antelme back to life without killing him. In the first days, he cannot even eat, merely taking in sips of pale broth. “His legs look like crutches…. When the sun shines you can see through his hands.” For days, his survival is in doubt and Duras thinks, “My identity has gone. I’m just she who is afraid when she wakes.”
But survive he does, and as Antelme regains his strength, Duras must test it by breaking the news: “I told him we had to get a divorce, that I wanted a child by D.” By August, they are able to travel to the Savoy for a holiday and Antelme is able to read a newspaper: “Hiroshima is perhaps the first thing outside his own life that he see.”
Antelme and Duras did divorce and Mascolo became the second of three husbands. Antelme wrote a memoir of his time in the concentration camps, L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race) in 1947, after which, Duras writes, “he never spoke of the German concentration camps again. Never uttered the words again.”
The texts that follow “La Douleur” jump back in time. “Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier” relates the cat-and-mouse game that the Gestapo agent who arrested Antelme plays with her in the weeks before the liberation. Rabier appears to be a French collaborator but Duras believes him to be German. He entices her with promises to ensure Antelme will be treated well but she suspects his real aim is to get her to betray other members of the Resistance — Mitterrand in particular.
It’s a potentially lethal game they play. “Every time I’m going to see Rabier — and this is to go on right to the end — I act as if I were going to be killed. As if he knew all about my activities. Every time, every day.” As days pass and the Allies near Paris, however, Rabier’s own situation grows more complicated. She looks at him and thinks, “I suddenly see him as an extra in a farcical tragedy…already stricken by a death that is itself devalued, not genuine, deflated.” Mascolo tells her the Resistance plans to kill Rabier, but in the end, he is arrested and Duras testifies at his trial. And then he goes “completely out of my head…. He must have been shot during the winter of 1944-1945. I don’t know where.”
In “Albert of the Capitals,” the last of the three strongest texts, Duras relates an episode in the first days after the liberation, when the Resistance exercised summary judgment on some collaborators. She and another Resistance member hold a waiter, a man known as Albert of “The Capitals” (a café), as a hostage, expecting him to be executed. It’s almost the mirror image of the Rabier piece: Duras recognizes she holds the power of life and death over the man and the dubious ethics involved in the situation. She watches as Albert is savagely beaten in an attempt to get him to disclose how he communicated with the Gestapo.
The story is written in the third person. Duras is Thérèse, she tells us in an opening note, and the approach may have been necessary to enable her to deal frankly with her own responsibility for Albert’s torture. Set in the context of the two preceding pieces, it completes a portrait of the moral and ethical intricacies involved in the Occupation of France and the retribution against collaborators in the first weeks after liberation.
If it were up to me, I would reissue these three pieces separately and encourage them to be read widely, particularly by Americans. One thing I observed in twenty years of life in Europe is the resistance of many Europeans to view the world in black-and-white terms, and I suspect this stems at least in part from the experience of living under various occupations — German, Soviet, Allied. As Duras shows in La Douleur, simple distinctions of good and bad, right and wrong, are luxuries that people have to abandon to survive under an occupation. Even if it’s as petty as doing a little bartering in the black market, trade-offs between ideals and practical needs are constantly being negotiated. Duras tries to understand her choices in La Douleur, but she does not forgive them completely, and this seems the best that anyone who looks back to such times can expect.
I watched Memoir of War after finishing La Douleur, and it seemed like a case study in the problems of adapting books too faithfully to the screen. For one thing, it’s hard for me to believe in the realism of a film shot in color with the polish of today’s commercial productions when this is a time I know best from grainy black-and-white newsreel footage. For another, it’s almost impossible for today’s actors to convey the sheer frailty of people who’d lived under rationing for years, even less under the severe deprivations of concentration camps — or their costumes the decrepitude of clothes that have been lived in for years, mended and threadbare, shiny from wear. And finally, in holding to the framework of Duras’s first-person diary and memoir texts, Finkiel has to rely heavily on voiceover by his star Mélanie Thierry when voiceover is a technique best used infrequently and sparingly. One doesn’t go to a movie to listen to someone read from a book — something Irving Thalberg or Sam Goldwyn probably said more than once.