`Durassian" is an adjective that Marguerite Duras's biographer used a lot - there are Durassian words, styles, world-views etc - and catch-all though it is, it goes a long way towards expressing the phenomenon that was Duras, the French novelist and cineaste. It suggests her singularity, and her kind of primitive force that could be monstrous, and her rampant sense of her mythic stature. Duras was nothing if not Durassian. Indeed, as time went on, she even took to referring to herself in the third person as "Duras".
Probably, behind all the egotism and bluster that was her public persona, she lacked a secure identity, and this was one she could take refuge in. "Duras", like so much of her obsessively "autobiographical" writing, was a fiction. Her real name was Marguerite Donnadieu and she took Duras, the name of her father's native place in Lotet-Garonne, when she was publishing her first novel in the 1940s.
Many people will be most aware of her as the writer and protaganist of the book The Lover, later made into a luscious and sensuous film - though not by Duras herself. The Lover brought her at last all the praise - she accepted the Prix Goncourt with a terse "Proust got it" - and all the fame and money she thought was her due, but typically she repudiated the book as soon as it was published. Out of her huge oeuvre, 20 or so films, and at least a book a year - though they tended to be very short - she repudiated all but a few. She was savagely perfectionist, but also she claimed they did not express the truth.
And the fact that The Lover, so perfect and romantic that every reader wanted to believe in its truth, was an idealised re-creation of a shameful episode in her life when she was a schoolgirl in French Indo-China, but one so seminal that she wrote it out and again, before The Lover and after, in different guises.
The real story, which has no place in The Lover, was her loved mother's betrayal. When Madame Donnadieu, widowed, making a hand-to-mouth living as a teacher in Saigon and half-mad with unfulfilled ambitions, became aware of the existence of Marguerite's ugly but wealthy Chinese admirer, he was marked as a source of money and gifts. Marguerite would bring home cash, cars for her brothers, invitations for them all to expensive dinners. Her mother's rapacity turned her into a kind of whore.
There was also the delinquent older brother, the mother's darling; and the younger, whom she herself loved with a sublime, possibly incestuous love. Between them all, her childhood and youth in French colonial Vietnam was difficult and forlorn. The various Donnadieu households were scenes of fights, beatings, screaming. In her stories and films, the mother and the brother appear again and again, along with her central obsessions of passion, often abusive and perverted, and the end of love. Her life was a treadmill of the re-living and the attempt to be purged of those early experiences.
At the same time, she was a model French intellectual. In Paris during the war, she was a member of the Resistance, a tireless Communist Party worker in the 1940s, and in her work never succumbed to the lures of the market. She was also a wonderful cook, mother/lover figure to her coterie of men. But she was also contrary and politically incorrect. Among her many affairs can be numbered the collaborator who had her husband arrested and sent to Dachau. A man's woman, she despised the women greats of the day, de Beauvoir - well, she did know that de Beauvoir considered her "a bad writer" - and Yourcenar. The companion of her last years, whom she loved passionately, was a young homosexual called Yann, and yet she could rail wildly against homosexuality. She seems to have been addicted to conflict.
Laure Adler's biography is deeply interesting in its perceptiveness and honesty. She has an impressionistic and personal style which, irritating though it occasionally is, manages to reflect Duras's own. She also sees through her.
One flaw, however, is that we are told constantly of Duras's legendary charm, but see little sign of it here. There are the photographs of her youth to display her beauty and intelligence, but the picture that remains is one of arrogance to the point of madness, nastiness and disloyalty. We shall never know, of course, who else Duras might have been, as she was a fervent alcoholic who put away five or six litres of wine a day for much of her long life. Did the drinking give her the freedom to write herself? Or did it limit her to a relentless rewrite of the drunken Duras?
Whichever, whatever, she is ultimately admirable. Uncompromising, enormously vital, paradoxically self-aware, she was an original.