Happy Birthday, M. Duras

If she were alive, today would be French writer Marguerite Duras’s 93rd birthday. She died in 1996 and her final work, titled simply Writing, is both an autobiography and a meditation on what it means to live your life as a writer. Who would know better than she?

Marguerite Duras was born in Saigon and educated in her parents native country, France. Her novels are a mesmerizing blend of the cultures of her two countries — France and Indochina (now Vietnam) — and have a dreamy, exotic quality for that reason. I don’t remember when I discovered her but I remember falling under the spell of her writing. Her best known work is, of course, The Lover which is partly autobiographical (all her work is, I suspect) about a fourteen year old schoolgirl who becomes involved with a young Chinese aristocrat.

I remember when I read it that I was both fascinated and horrified by the emotional intensity of the book, made all the more compelling by the spare, unadorned language that was so much a part of Duras’s style. The girl in the story was so child-like, I thought, like a frail little bird in her school uniforms and pigtails and yet the ferocity of her attachment to the young Chinese man she loved was nearly unbearable to me.

Later I read The Seduction of Lol Stein and Hiroshima, Mon Amour and a few others that I didn’t find as memorable. What I recall most vividly about my introduction to Marguerite Duras’s writing was that it either awakened in me, or stirred in me (I am not sure which) an indefinable longing that haunts me to this day.

There is something that happens to me when the weather is hot and a wind is blowing in off the ocean and everything is very quiet. In all my years of writing I have never been able to define or describe the mood that combination of heat, wind, and quiet stirs in me. God knows I’ve tried. But I know that when I read The Lover that feeling was everywhere in the book. It is a longing, deep and plaintive, for something half-remembered. Something that may never have been. It is mysterious and seductive and very solitary. I don’t know what to call it but I do know that Duras writes it better than anyone.

One time, many years ago when I was living in Houston, there was a day like that which I remember. It was summer and, because it was Houston, the temperature was climbing toward 100. It was Sunday and I was living in an old apartment complex that was built something like a fortress with square, brick buildings each built around a central courtyard. In the courtyard my apartment overlooked there was a large swimming pool, eight gigantic and very old weeping willow trees, bowers of wisteria growing over walkways, and hedges of holly in which all sorts of salamanders and chameleons lived.

On this day, the wind was blowing hot and fierce in off the Gulf of Mexico and no one was around. All was very still and very quiet. There was a man who lived across the courtyard from me whom I had talked to before and he and I were the only ones in the courtyard that day. I was reading and had brought a glass of tequila with lime out to the pool and he came out and joined me. He was tall and dark but not handsome with a heavy, Eastern European face and a faint accent. He always tried to seduce me and I always declined.

What I remember about that day was that we spent a couple of hours sitting there — flirting or negotiating — call what you will. It ended as it always did, with him telling me I didn’t know what I was missing and me assuring him I could probably live with that. I remember the mood of the day more than the man himself. It was a Marguerite Duras sort of day. I hope there are a few more of them ahead in my life.

Thanks for reading.