Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle (1987)

La Vie matérielle is a collection of 47 texts of very differing lengths, almost all of which are taken from what Marguerite Duras said to Jérôme Beaujour about her feelings of her past and present life. They have been re-worked, although what Duras says about them is that they have no beginning and no end, that this is neither journal nor novel, just pieces taken from her everyday life.

They are, though, very revealing: the reader, for instance, may well have known about Duras’s hospitalisations for her chronic alcoholism, but not about her thoughts on alcohol, or the hallucinatory hell she went through coming off drink. She says here that alcohol is made to render the emptiness of the universe more tolerable, that it replaces the lack of God, that even tramps are made intellectuals through alcohol!

Duras also reveals more things about her very violent but very loving sexual relationship with the writer Gérard Jarlot, although (as in the earlier Les Parleuses interviews with Xaviêre Gauthier) she doesn’t mention his name. But she did, in 1958, dedicate her novel Moderato cantabile to ‘G. J.’: she says both in Les Parleuses and La Vie matéielle that the man is responsible for changing her writing style from that novel on.

All in all, it would have been some loss not to have published (as Duras had considered) this often surprising collection of observations by one of the world’s most important writers.

My Marguerite Duras posts:
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Marguerite Duras: La Pute de la côte normande
Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir
Marguerite Duras: Agatha
Marguerite Duras: Emily L.
Marguerite Duras: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
Marguerite Duras: L'Amant | The Lover
Marguerite Duras: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein
Marguerite Duras: L'Amante anglaise
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Marguerite Duras: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras: L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas
Marguerite Duras: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia
Marguerite Duras: Le Marin de Gibraltar | The Sailor from Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras: La Douleur | The War: A Memoir
Yann Andréa: Cet amour-là
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier: Les Parleuses
Marguerite Duras: Savannah Bay
Marguerite Duras: Détruire, dit-elle | Destroy, She Said
Marguerite Duras: L'Amour
Marguerite Duras: Dix heures et demie du soir en été
Marguerite Duras: Le Square | The Square
Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents
Marguerite Duras: Le Shaga
Marguerite Duras: Oui, peut-être
Marguerite Duras: Des journées entières dans les arbres
Marguerite Duras: Suzanna Andler
Marguerite Duras: Le Vice-Consul | The Vice Consul
Marguerite Duras: Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle
Marguerite Duras: La Vie tranquille
Marguerite Duras: La Pluie d'été

Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir | The Man Sitting in the Corridor (1980)

Marguerite Duras began the original version of L’Homme assis dans le couloir, an erotic short story, in 1962, during her relationship with Gérard Jarlot. She asked Jarlot if she should ditch it, start it again, but he said no, it’s great, you must finish it.

Duras made three copies, gave one to Jarlot, one to her friend Madeleine Alleins, and kept one for the bottom drawer – all of this according Laure Adler, who, according to Wikipédia, turned down the post of Ministère de la Culture in 2016 as she thought the offer was a hoax. Laure Adler in exchange for the clueless Fleur Pellerin? Uh?

I digress. Adler continues to say that Duras discovered the typescript in 1968 (after Jarlot’s death) and in 1969 anonymously sent it to Jérôme Lindon (of Minuit, of course), who almost immediately recognised the writing style as coming from Duras. Not too sure what happened between, although Duras re-wrote this slight story and it was published a number of years later.

Here, we have a narrator who at times gets close up to the characters. There’s a woman dressed just in a very flimsy silk dress in front of a man sitting in a corridor, she sucks him, he penetrates her, they come, he beats her and it’s not certain at the end if she’s asleep or.

My Marguerite Duras posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Marguerite Duras: La Pute de la côte normande
Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir
Marguerite Duras: Agatha
Marguerite Duras: Emily L.
Marguerite Duras: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
Marguerite Duras: L'Amant | The Lover
Marguerite Duras: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein
Marguerite Duras: L'Amante anglaise
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Marguerite Duras: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras: L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas
Marguerite Duras: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia
Marguerite Duras: Le Marin de Gibraltar | The Sailor from Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras: La Douleur | The War: A Memoir
Yann Andréa: Cet amour-là
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier: Les Parleuses
Marguerite Duras: Savannah Bay
Marguerite Duras: Détruire, dit-elle | Destroy, She Said
Marguerite Duras: L'Amour
Marguerite Duras: Dix heures et demie du soir en été
Marguerite Duras: Le Square | The Square
Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents
Marguerite Duras: Le Shaga
Marguerite Duras: Oui, peut-être
Marguerite Duras: Des journées entières dans les arbres
Marguerite Duras: Suzanna Andler
Marguerite Duras: Le Vice-Consul | The Vice Consul
Marguerite Duras: Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle
Marguerite Duras: La Pluie d'été

Gérard Jarlot: Un chat qui aboie (1963)

In Laure Alder’s biography Marguerite Duras (1998) she declares – in a sentence that reminds me of Albert Camus’s remark about Jacques Copeau and French theatre – that there is a before Gérard Jarlot and an after Gérard Jarlot in Duras’s work. She met him in 1957: he was a charming seducer, cultivated, and a writer. Adler says she used to drink with him, went to Italy with him, and he was an excellent fuck. He told his journalist friends that he had devised a way of lifting his bed up to allow him to see himself making love to Duras in a mirror, and even allowed some to visit his handywork.

With Jarlot, her books took on a new style, notably with Moderato Cantabile (1958) and Le Ravissement de V. Stein (1964). She also helped him considerably with his third novel, Un chat qui aboie (lit. ‘A Barking Cat’). It just won the prix Médicis, the jury including Duras herself,  although it did so against the wishes of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. So what is this bizarrely-titled book exactly about?

The back cover was presumably written by Jarlot, who says:

‘What makes a barking cat? At worst it’s an incongruity, at best an error in essence: it does precisely that for which it’s not intended.’ (My translation.)

He goes on to ask if Armand Peuche, the main character, is made to love Rose, his wife, whose mother Louise-Anna was against the marriage. Then he mentions Armand’s devouring excesses, and generally excessive behaviour, but the same could be said of a number of other characters in this huge, tiny-font-sized, 464-page book.

In fact I’d say that there are many barking cats here, and not just the characters: scenes tend to merge, possibly in mid-sentence, with for instance the behaviour of two characters merging with two others, and even two more, possibly using different (but usually clearly indentifiable) names. The present also merges with the  past, which is usually revisited in memory: Armand’s infernale mémoire recalls Samuel Beckett’s L’Expulsé (1946), in which this sentence appears: ‘C’est tuant, les mémoires’, and which Beckett later translated as ‘Memories are killling’.

Essentially, the immensely rich Armand from Pracomtat marries Rose, has three children (Jacques, Fernand and Eliabeth, in that order) by her, and then Rose starts disappearing into the countryside with agricultural engineer Albert Colombille. In a desperate attempt to win back her love, Armand in a wildly extravagant, hugely expensive moment, launches a festival that many people come from miles around to see: but Rose escapes to Lyon with her new lover.

Then, after about eighteen months of seclusion in the basement, Armand is smitten by a young woman pissing into the basement window: he must find out who it is! Unfortunately, Armand is rewarded by the woman – Roma Heïdowicz – covering Fernand in love bites and losing her virginity to Jacques. Even worse, as a result of Fernand discovering Jacques and Roma in a post-coital moment, Fernand drowns. Armand’s wrath is huge and he banishes Jacques to his lycée for three years, giving strict instructions that he is to receive no mail from Roma, now Armand’s pet hate.

I could continue by mentioning Rose’s lapse into poverty and alcoholism, Roma’s new love in Lyon and area, a dead body in a basement, the (sado-)masochism, Armand’s turning of the castle into a fortress to keep out Roma, Armand’s cheating in a major cycle race, or even an apocalyptic ending in which virtually everyone is blown sky high, but I’ve probably said enough so far. An insane comedy-cum-tragedy in which almost everyone is mad or obsessed with something or someone.

Gérard Jarlot was jealous of Margaret Duras because she was a brilliant writer. Marguerite Duras was jealous of Gérard Jarlot because he was a brilliant seducer. Nevertheless, Un chat qui aboie is a brilliant (if very unven) novel but Jarlot is now virtually forgotten, which is so very wrong.