Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (This is the final chapter. Read prev chap or browse all chapters here. )
28
After dinner, Rob drops me back at The Coolabah. I check on Bo, who is much recovered, and head for my room to make some notes on the day. I take out my scrapbook and peruse the pictures of Marj and MD as old women. As they moved deeper into old age they each lost weight — it's shocking to see Marj down to 33 kilos and Marguerite couldn't have weighed much more in the famous old lady photo of her lifting her skirt to show her skinny legs. Still, the petite bird-like demeanor they shared as elderly women did not disguise the determination and dignity present in these photos. Marj still had bursts of creativity inspired by the changing of the seasons outside her kitchen window, and after the success of The Lover in the 1980s, rather than fearing madness, MD embraced it. For a time she basked in the international attention she had longed for and now received, although such feelings didn’t last long. She had begun working with Claude Berri on a film script of The Lover but when director Jean-Jacques Annaud insisted on writing his own, MD fell out with him and went on to write several more novels including The North China Lover. Written like a film script, it reads like a haunting meditation on The Lover and many would say it is even better. Fans and admirers still hung on her every word as she held court in her turtleneck skivvies, cigarette in one hand, her amiable wrinkles framed by short hair and dark-rimmed glasses.
Marj also wore the same skivvies and thick rimmed glasses and though her face may not have been as lined as Marguerite's, the camera catches them both with the distant gaze of the poet/writer staring into the distance, deep in thought, caught up in the processes of the mind.
Marguerite was writing until the end. Her last book, No More, * was finished just days before she succumbed to throat cancer at the age of 81. Marj lived on to the age of 87 but the crazy creative mother was gone. A more sedate lady, still sharp and astute, perhaps a version of the mother we knew in our childhood before her illness took hold, sat in her place. No more fat letters stuffed with poems and limericks and magazine cuttings of random dogs and cats, articles on this and that, fashion suggestions, dietary tips. No more phone calls out of the blue, no more cries for help, no more get-me-off-the-planet pleas. A quiet lady who sat on her couch in her nursing home room, who read occasionally and went to meals on time — slipped away quietly early one January morning.
In the months and years following Marj’s death I didn’t fall in a heap as I always thought I would. In fact, I sped up a few notches, sharply aware of the irrefutable fact that once your remaining parent dies, you are next in line. I didn’t consciously forget her as I rushed around the world, running writers’ retreats in exotic places, attending festivals, living the literary life she would loved to have lived. But I didn’t take time out to dwell on her memory either. In the years long, on-off writing process of this book she would often appear beside me and towards the end, while rifling through the Hong Kong bags filled with her writings and typing out her poems, something interesting happened. Years ago when her poems would arrive in the post nestled among cuttings and household tips, I would love them of course, and not quite knowing what to do with them, would add them to my basket of guilt and there they stayed. Now, through the physicality of the typing process and the translation of her scrawls into print, I find myself leaving behind the old narrative I might trot out to people at a party, ‘Oh yeah, my mother was a manic depressive, my father was an alcoholic, that explains me!’ By putting her words into type, I realise I can leave behind the mother of burden, mother of guilt, mother of failed dreams. Instead now I can embrace MC — Marjorie Cornall, poet, in the same way I respect and admire MD — Marguerite Duras, writer. And while my mother never read Duras, it was she who stitched the threads of melancholy beneath my skin — it was Marj who bought me a ticket to the Durasienne show.
While this book started out as notes for a travelogue, before long I realised it was about the two most important women in my life. I hoped if I could articulate something about my connection to them both and their unbeknown connection to one another, the little cloud of melancholy that has followed me around for most of my life and engulfs me from time to time, might evaporate into thin air.
Instead I find as I come to the end, there is nothing left to dissolve. Like the final verse of my daily meditation practice that says — no need to struggle, there is nothing to change, nothing to alter, everything is fine, just as it is.
It is easier to hear this wisdom now, to know that my mother’s sadness does not have to be my sadness, and to remember as MD discovered:
‘Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except writing itself.’ *
The last word belongs to Marj:
Happiness
A lady I know runs on happiness
One day, last autumn
I ran out of it
So I phoned her up
Left a message
‘Please send half a kilo of Happiness to last ‘til Thursday week
Pay you later’
Marj
MC 1987
Postscript
I never did find the plaque that I went looking for when I first began my search in Hanoi — the one I naively thought would be attached to a charming French villa, announcing that the famous French writer Marguerite Duras once lived here. I had long given up expecting to find such a thing anywhere in Indochina until in the final stages of writing this book, I stumbled across a video of some French travellers searching for MD’s house in Prey Nop. Not in the spot Rithy Pahn had placed it, but further inland near the 184 km marker on Highway 4, about 25 kms outside Sihanoukville. Down a red dirt track populated with traditional stilt houses, banana trees and cheeping chickens, the camera finds two stone foundation blocks in the garden of Cham family. In between the stones stands a tall plinth with a carved inscription written in the looped lettering of the Khmer language.* According to the info that accompanies the video, it states that ‘the author Marguerite Duras lived here between 1925 and 1933 with her mother and two brothers. This is the place where the book Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique was set.’
An article in the Phnom Penh Post, written in 2012, says the plinth was erected a few years before, but by whom it doesn’t say. Perhaps it was the village council in response to the number of tourists (as in Sadec) who in recent years had come looking for MD’s house. Rithy Panh had also been there researching for his film — maybe he had something to do with it. According to the article, the elders of Samong Leu commune, who were young boys when the Donnadieu family lived here, remembered their wooden bungalow, with its rice loft and small river filled with fish nearby.
As for me, I was so close to finding that plaque that I couldn’t see it for the trees. I had driven right past it on Highway 4 on my way to and from Sihanoukville.
Still, now I have found it online, I can let some one else’s film footage take me there. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter that I haven’t physically been there. Surely this journey is over, this book must go to print, I can’t just go off on a whim following down every last little thing…
Or can I ?
______________________
* Marguerite Duras. Trans. Richard Howard, No More (C’est tout) Penguin Random H 1995
* Writing, Marguerite Duras, p 45.
* https://www.phnompenhpost.com/lifestyle/walking-footsteps-marguerite-duras
Acknowledgements
As well as my Substack readers I must give a huge thanks to all who have helped and supported the long process of bringing this book to fruition. Heartfelt thanks especially to my Masters supervisor and dear friend Catherine Rey. (The early part of this memoir was written while completing a Master of Arts in Cultural and Creative Practice at Western Sydney University, 2012).
To my wise and thoughtful editor Helen Williams, to Virginia Lloyd and Claire Scobie for their early input and fellow Indochine traveller Biff Ward, for her ongoing support. Perpetual gratitude goes to my dedicated readers, mutual mentors, cheering squad and literary friends, notably: Jennifer Moore, Jennifer Smart, Kerry Dwyer, Diana Plater, Helen Stephenson, Lorraine McLoughlin, Deborah Nolan, Walter Mason, Philip Ricketson, Sarita Newson, Ruth Maddison, Brian Joyce, Cheryl Evans, Margot McDonald as well as all the members of our ongoing Draft Busters group and Writer’s Journeys who have been so supportive over the years.
To Sonia Bible whose stories of travel on the Mekong got me going and to the late Rob Schneider for the serendipitous invitation to run a workshop in Sihanoukville which gave me my ending. To Laure Adler whose excellent biography Duras, A Life, was a constant source of insight and inspiration on my Indochine journeys.
To Vietnamese writers DiLi (Nguyen Dieu Linh), Tran Thi Truong, Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat, her daughter Shi and nephew, Binh Duy Ta for introducing me, and all the people I met on my various Vietnam/Cambodia travels who may or may not be mentioned in these pages. In particular my longtime friends Ellie Loudon, Steph Kerr, my godson Asher and his brother Miro, whose own adventures in SE Asia kept bringing me back for more. To my father Chas, my sister Sally and my brother Pip — I’m so glad to have shared the experience of ‘mother’ and the early parts of my life with you.
Extra special thanks to my offspring Cyd Joyce and Louie Joyce, their partners Kyle Murrell and Shikha Sahay for always encouraging and supporting my creative escapades.
Lastly to my mother Marjorie, whose wild and wonderful spirit has finally ended up between the pages of a book I am proud to present. And of course to MD, whose life and writing continues to inspire me.
Well done Jan. You’ve tied this up well and shared your love for both MC and MD with your readers. Marj’s poems appeal more to me than Marguerite’s books and films. I’m happy to have been on this Substack journey with you and very much enjoyed the travel tale. I enjoyed receiving short weekly readings, even if I didn’t get to read them each week, and look forward to more.