Writing is All Around Us

5

French villa, Hanoi, by Ban Hoang, Unsplash.

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. (Read prev chap here).

5.

I don’t know if MD ever had a problem with the blank page, but despite her good results in primary school, high school was another matter. She was failing in every subject, and although shy, she often behaved in an unruly and disruptive manner. As a desperate last measure her mother came up with the idea to send her to a private school in Saigon, a bus and ferry ride from Sadec, the small town on the Mekong River where they lived.  She would board in a lodging house with a teacher friend of her mother’s, Mademoiselle C, and come home on weekends and holidays. The school was attended by a mix of well-off Annamese (Vietnamese) and a smattering of white girls, children of rich colonials who at the end of each day would be picked up in style at the school gate.  But there was no chauffeur waiting for Marguerite. As the daughter of a low-ranking civil servant (teachers were at the bottom of the rung), she had to sit at the back of the class and make her own way back to her boarding house. At first there was no improvement in her results but by the end of her fifth year she blossomed into an excellent essay writer, receiving such good results the teachers often refused to mark her work, believing it to be written by someone else. Marguerite had studied Molière and Shakespeare as well as Lewis Carroll and knew she wanted to write. In The Lover * the girl tells her mother just that. The mother thinks it’s a childish idea, that she should get a degree in mathematics like her father. But Marguerite had been writing poetry since she was eleven about the big questions of life (which she admitted she knew nothing about) and wasn’t going to give it up.

        Similarly Marj discovered her love of poetry in high school where she was introduced to the works of Wordsworth, Kipling, Yeats, Tennyson, Byron, Browning, Lawson and many more.

Was it Blake or Donne who said,

in a grain of sand, exists all eternity?

At the sink in this kitchen for countless centuries

I too, see the pattern that runs through all

In a sliced circle of carrot or beet

in a seed pod or fig, a cucumber, a Spanish onion

I find beauty in such wondrous things

until the making of soup

becomes a philosophic meditation

on our small world

MC  1988

She copied her favourites in pen and ink into a large foolscap-sized book that I still have. It’s a little worse for wear, having been scribbled in by us kids when we were young. A few pages are ripped and torn, but the poems in perfect longhand script with their accompanying ink drawings remain a testament to her lifelong love of the poetic refrain. Later on she would discover Yevtushenko and the Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho, Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood. She was in her forties when she began to write her own poetry and was most prolific in her later years. The closest any came to being published was when my Dad once sent a couple to the local newspaper.  Written about the flooding of the local creek, they were well received but no publishing offers came rushing in.

Bare willows line the swollen waters

racing down to join the river

eddies, whirlpools, effluents

off-white foam

carving out cliffs

weathering rocks

and huge slabs

of erosion-saving granite

At these times it’s so pleasant

to go to sleep with the living creek

bursting through the window

MC 1989

        My walk has made me hungry so back at the hotel I’m happy to see a short, round, Vietnamese trick of a woman has taken command of the kitchen.  Grey hair pulled back in a bun, she is ordering the staff around as if she is the boss.  I find out later she is the mother of the owner and appears regularly to supervise the morning shift. In the tiny breakfast room arranged around the bottom of the stairs, she is speaking French, the language imposed on the Vietnamese during colonisation, entertaining a middle-aged Vietnamese man and three stunning looking Eurasian teenagers, two girls and a boy, while bringing them bowls of phó and side accompaniments.

        The Madam comes over to take my order.

        ‘Un peu de fruits — banane, papaye? C’est possible?’ I ask, feeling proud to have a whole sentence of schoolgirl French.

        ‘Only fruit?’ she replies, ‘C’est tout?’

        ‘Oui,’ I reply in melancholy tone, ‘c’est tout.’  

         She calls out the order to the kitchen in Vietnamese and goes to attend to the other guests. I take out my notebook to do some jotting. My ears however, are busy monitoring the breakfast room, sucking in useful background noise and tit-bits of information.  

        Everyone loves to eavesdrop, but most people don’t whip out their note pad and start taking down conversation like dictation. Only writers are desperate enough to go to these lengths and for me it is a compulsive habit. Some I know even use electronic devices. Although it may be illegal and not great manners to be taping friend’s and stranger’s conversations, a serious writer will employ all sorts of espionage techniques to get the story fodder * they need. You can pretend you are listening to a big talker on the other end of your phone when really you are recording the people around you. Or give the impression you are an introvert, head bent, writing in your journal. The trick is not to look at them, it’s a dead giveaway. Even though you want to, you must not. Just go about your table activities as if you don’t care one iota and let them be drawn to you.

        And he is — the middle-aged Vietnamese man in charge of the teens who look like they just stepped off a Paris fashion runway, comes over and asks me where I am from, where I am going and so on. He is a schoolteacher from Ho Chi Minh City, and is in Hanoi to show his nieces and nephew, visiting from France, around town. It’s also his first visit, he admits, so he jumped at the chance. I tell him about my pilgrimage and ask him if he knows the writing of Marguerite Duras.

        ‘ Oh yes, I like her writing very much, but I like her films even better.’

          Finally, someone who knows who I am talking about! My excitement is allayed as he continues, ‘I am sorry we have to rush. We have a lot to fit in today. Good luck on your journey.’

‘Au revoir et bonne chance.’ I call out as they disappear through the doorway, berating myself that I didn’t strike up a conversation earlier.  My fruits du jour arrives. It is so beautifully arranged it seems a shame to eat it. I do so slowly as I’m caught up in a revery of the first film by MD that I ever saw.

        On a cinema screen in a Melbourne theatre, a blood-orange sun hangs above a dusty blue-green horizon. A high-pitched female voice sings a song of Laos, laughs and chatters. The camera doesn't move, stays until the last sliver of gold is gone, stays even after that. There's nothing else to see and yet you can smell the heat, the monsoon rains, the jungle rotting into mud. Off screen, two young women begin to speak in French; they are telling of a beggar woman who has walked all the way to the Ganges from Savannakhet in Laos — to lose herself they say. Nearly four minutes in and the camera finally cuts to another scene. No people, just a slow pan of a colonial interior; a French embassy in Calcutta, as day turns to night; fringed lamps on a piano, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, French doors open to the gardens outside— the beggar woman's song wafting in on the hint of a tropical breeze.  The commentary of the young women is slow and reflective, wistful even. They are piecing together memories as they talk about the characters who begin to appear on the screen; handsome young men and women in evening dress. A haunting piano tune begins to play, a man and a woman dance. There is beauty, grace, but the air is thick with a hopeless torpor. At this point in the screening, some people in the audience walk out, bored with this French New Wave experimental stuff, but I am captivated, I want to hear/see more, want to enter completely into this sad, scent-laden world.

          The year is 1978 and the film I am watching, India Song (originally a play), was written and directed by Marguerite Duras. It is being screened at the Pram Factory, a collective run theatre where in the same year I'd acted in another of her plays— L'Amante Anglaise (The English Lover). I belonged to one of the Pram’s sub-groups called Nightshift who championed the dark side and the avant-garde and Duras was one of our heroes. Like her, we loved to experiment, to break the rules and we were in awe that she was deconstructing theatre, film and new prose forms to create her panoramas of melancholic intensity.

        The thing I enjoyed most about acting in L’Amante Anglaise was its insistence that we actors be so intensely present to each word we uttered. As in all of MD’s works, conventional rules just didn’t apply. The dialogue consisted solely of an interrogation of two characters, Pierre Lannes and his wife, Claire Lannes, who is accused of murdering her deaf mute cousin. Based on a true crime that took place in Paris, in MD’s version, pieces of the body are found on goods trains all over France. Pinpointing a common bridge that all the trains pass beneath, the police ask questions in nearby cafes. There they meet Claire, who confesses to the crime. None of this is played out for the audience as MD has stripped all narrative action from the play. What remains is the dialogue of interrogation — questions asked by an anonymous person for a tape recording. It is no whodunit for we already know the murderer  — the question being asked here is why? And in true Duras fashion no clear answers are given. It is left to the audience to fill in the gaps, to extrude from what is not said, as much as what is, some truth or meaning.

        Each night I would enter the world of ‘no character’. As the interrogator, I had to be anonymous, emotionless — a vehicle for the characters opposite me to reveal themselves. It was an experience not dissimilar to reading MD’s later works — of being at one with the text, not analyzing, not judging, just integrating completely with the experience of the word.   Our production in the Back Theatre at the Pram was directed by James Shuvus Williamson, who was the inspiration for the character Javo in Helen Garner’s * novel, Monkey Grip, published the year before. The season was short, maybe only a week or two, but it was one of the highlights of my acting life.

_______________________________

*The Lover, p 24.

* In her book (Writing), Minnesota Press 1993, P3, MD describes how writing was the only thing that made her life magic. It was the mainstay of her life.

* As an adult, MD went about her French neighbourhoods talking to friends acquaintances, strangers, jotting notes down on bits of paper or cafe tablecloths. I wonder if this activity falls within the term ‘sousveillance’. Surveillance from the French ‘sur’ (on) meaning watching from above or seeing with the eye of god (CCTV), whereas ‘sous’ (under) gives sousviellance the meaning of watching from below or at human level with listening devices and worn cameras.  In Writing, p 35: MD says (paraphrase) writing is all around us. All phenomena is writing. 

*  Helen Garner wrote in One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987 – 1995. (Text, 2020) P 12. ‘The flight to Sydney lasted only five minutes because I was reading Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur. When her husband comes back from the war I cried so much my face twitched, I had to wipe my eyes on my skirt. ‘ I remember the sobbing all through the house, the tenants lingering on the stairs, the doors standing open.’ Her writing is so physical. The movement of her sentences captures the movement of emotion and thought—it’s real women’s writing, shameless but never sloppy. Maybe she’s what I’m looking for—to show me how to control emotion without being false to its power, how to be absent and fully present at once.’

PS. This manuscript is still in draft form. I’m in the process of seeking permissions for the various quotes used through out.