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- [00:01]
Deborah Treisman
This is a message from sponsor Intuit. TurboTax Taxes was waiting to get your money back, which turned into worrying about getting your money back. Now taxes is matching with a TurboTax expert who can do your taxes today and help you get up to a $4,000 refund advance loan fast. Get an expert now on TurboTax.com only available with TurboTax Live full service refund has $0 loan fees and 0% APR refund advance loans may be issued by a 1st Century Bank NA or we term supplies subject to credit approval. This is the New Yorker Fiction podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear two short pieces, the Bible and the Stolen Pigeons by Marguerite Duras, which were translated from the French by me and appeared in the New Yorker in December of 2006 and April of 2007. The stories were chosen by Rachel Cusk, who's The author of 12 novels, including the Outline Trilogy and Parade, which will be published in June. Hi Rachel. Thank you for joining us.
- [01:18]
Rachel Cusk
Hi, Deborah.
- [01:20]
Deborah Treisman
So when we first talked about doing this podcast, you were very interested in reading and talking about something by a French writer. Why was that?
- [01:28]
Marguerite Duras
I completely upended my life almost three years ago and moved from England to France. And I think that, that, you know, that hasn't just been a complete sort of U turn in kind of personal history and sort of social feeling of belonging, but in terms of literature and language, it's been a fundamental change. And actually being asked to make a choice from something, I suppose roll call of the kinds of writers that I would have naturally sort of searched for that very much belonged to that sort of discarded or defunct history seemed completely strange. And so now I mostly read in French. It felt much more natural to. To find something French. And Marguerite Duras has been very important writer for me in that. In that process.
- [02:20]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. When we talked about Girhas, you said that she had been a lodestar for you. In what way?
- [02:26]
Rachel Cusk
Well, I mean, the way that I.
- [02:27]
Marguerite Duras
Acquired the level of French that I needed to be able to live here was not from going and having language classes, which I probably should have done, but from reading. And when I picked up Duras, I was really surprised to find that of all the writers that I had attempted, she was by far the easiest to comprehend. Her French was so admirably uncluttered that I could read her deeply and Easily. I'd never got on with her that well in translation. And something about the way that she's often translated, and you are a noble exception, that makes her sort of dreary in some way. Her spareness becomes flatness. It was really extraordinary to be able to read her and fully understand her in her own language.
- [03:18]
Deborah Treisman
And is there something, you know, regardless of language, about her particular voice or her style that speaks to you in your own life as a writer?
- [03:31]
Marguerite Duras
Some things that are so important to me and so profound and I think have really. It's not an exaggeration to say that have created a kind of turning point in my creative process. And it isn't just her extraordinarily uncluttered, clear way of using words. It's the way that she occupies time in a narrative to the extent that you can't really call it a narrative. It's a moment in time that she expands and builds an amazing edifice out of. And that, for me, has really, really influenced the book that I've just written and influenced my whole way of thinking, thinking about writing.
- [04:18]
Deborah Treisman
These two stories that you're reading, they're both very short, and they really do that. They are. It's not that time doesn't pass in them, but that they're very pinpointed to one sort of point, one trajectory of it. They were written sometime in the 1940s, when Duras was in her early 30s. And they were in one of four notebooks that she kept. Famously, she talked about it in a blue armoire in her country house in France. And they weren't read or published until after her death. She died in 1996. And those notebooks contained some autobiographical pieces, some early versions of what became novels later, and a few unpublished stories, including these two. Do you think that there's anything else listeners should know before they hear the stories?
- [05:11]
Marguerite Duras
I think these. I mean, these stories are actually rather more delightful than a lot of Duras work. You know, the violence that really does characterize her vision and her writing. And very often the world that she actually lived in, including the Second World War, is absent, by and large, from these. They have more of a sense of fun, I guess, which is. It's a lovely thing to sort of see that side of her.
- [05:38]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah.
- [05:39]
Marguerite Duras
But I think that they. You know, they do share the core characteristic of duress, which is that she. She is always living in reality. She's in reality when she's writing. And the way that she always creates a link between her own reality and then the account that she she sets before us is is for me the noblest thing about her writing and sort of the noblest thing a writer can do. And that's very much present in both of these stories. Although the Bible is a she rather than an I. But it doesn't seem terribly far away.
- [06:17]
Deborah Treisman
From the I will talk some more after the reading. And now here's Rachel Cusk reading the Bible and the Stolen pigeons by Marguerite Duras. Translated from the French by Deborah Treisman.
- [06:32]
Rachel Cusk
The Bible he was 20, she 18. He approached her one evening at the Cafe du Hulet Saint Michel. He told her that he had just come from his sociology class. For her part, she waited several days to tell him that she was a sales girl in a shoe store. They got into the habit of meeting up in the back room of the relay, usually around 6:10 after she got off work at the store. She was happy to find him there every night he was company for her. He was polite and sweet. She was happy to find someone with whom she could pass the pre dinner hours before heading back to her room. She didn't talk much. It was he who told her things. He told her about Islam and the Bible. This didn't surprise her particularly, even though he returned to the subject again and again. It didn't surprise her. Nothing surprised her. That was just the way she was made. Nothing really surprised her. The first night he talked to her about Islam. The next day he slept with her and he talked to her about the Bible. He asked her whether she'd read it. She told him that she hadn't. The following day he brought a Bible with him and he read Ecclesiastes to her in the back room of the relay. He read it loudly, his hands on his ears in a passionate voice following a liturgical rhythm. She was embarrassed by this and she wondered whether he wasn't a little crazy. Afterward he asked her what she'd thought of it. She hadn't listened very carefully while he was reading because she was so embarrassed by it. She told him that it seemed reasonable to her, that it was fine. He smiled at her response. He explained that it was a fundamental text and that it was necessary to learn it. He had seen the Nash Papyrus at the British Museum. He told her about it. He had spent several hours in front of the glass case and he'd gone back again the next day and for several days after that. He would never forget those moments. All that was left on the Nash Papyrus was a few lines from Exodus. He talked to her about Exodus and the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty. And the land was filled with them. And they were grieved because of the children of Israel. He told her about all the Bibles, the Vulgate and the Septuagint, as well as the Vatican, the Sinaiticus, the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin Bibles. He never wanted to talk about her. And he never asked whether she was happy working in the shoe store or how she'd come to Paris or what she liked. They made love together. She liked to make love. It was one of the things that she liked. While they were making love, they didn't speak. Once he was finished, he started Talking again about St. Jerome, who had spent his life translating the Bible. He was thin, a little hunched. His hair was wavy and black and he had very beautiful blue eyes lined with thick black lashes. His skin was pale, his mouth very expressive, his pale lips barely grazing his teeth. He had a round nose, pronounced cheekbones. He wasn't particularly clean. The collars of his shirts left something to be desired and so did his nails, which were pink and rounded and too big for his slender hands, making the tips of his fingers look like spatulas. He had a concave chest. He had spent his youth reading the sacred texts of Islam and of Christianity. He had learnt Hebrew, Arabic, English, German. He was still studying Arabic at the Ecole des Langue Orientale, though, in fact he knew it so well already that while he was only in his second year when they met, he could read the Qur'an in the original. Sometimes he took her out to dinner, but always to cheap restaurants. He confessed one night that he was buying, on layaway a Hebrew Bible from the 16th century. His father was rich, but gave him very little money. Still, he hadn't been able to resist buying this Bible. He had already paid for a third of it and would pay it off entirely the following month. He dreamed of the moment when he'd have that Bible in his hands. Even after they'd known each other for three weeks, they still hadn't talked about anything other than the Bible and Islam. Always he spoke to her of God and of the eternal appeal that the idea of God held for men. She herself didn't believe in God. She didn't feel the least need to believe in God. She knew there were people who believed in God who felt that need. She didn't believe that she'd spend the rest of her life at the shoe store. She believed that she'd get married and have children. She believed that she had been given her chance in the world. That was her only way of believing in God. He didn't believe in God either, but that didn't bring him any consolation. He was indifferent to his father's fortune, which was significant. It had been acquired through the process of vulcanizing tyres for cars. He spoke sometimes of his house in Neuilly and of a property in Hosogur. She knew that they would never get married. He didn't even ask himself the question. She had never known a man like him. He talked about Mohammed the way one would talk about a brother. He told her about Mohammed's life, his marriage to a merchant's widow, his liaison with Maria the Copt. He knew the stories of each of Muhammad's 14 wives. Muhammad, who had undertaken the task of monotheizing the Arabs. It had been a grand idea. Muhammad had defended it with a weapon in his hand and with celestial courage. It seemed to her a strange undertaking. But she said nothing to him. Nor did she tell him that sometimes she had had enough of helping people try on shoes all day. No, she kept those thoughts to herself. She didn't, in any case, imagine that they would interest anyone, and that seemed normal to her. In the end, she got used to his ways and whenever he wanted to recite entire surahs of the Quran in Arabic, she let him do so. She thought he was a nice guy. He bored her. He bought her a pair of stockings. He was a kind man. But since they'd begun sleeping together, she had no joy in her life. One night she understood why. I am not made for him, she told herself. All her strength, her youthful joie de vivre seemed to shrivel in his presence. She couldn't help it. Still, she was flattered. In a sense, she was lucky. She told herself that she learned things when she was with him. But those things brought her no pleasure. It was as if she had already known them, so small was her need to learn them. But she did try to please him. In the evening, she read the Gospels as he had asked her to. What Christ said to his mother made her want to cry. That he had been crucified so young before his mother's eyes was even more revolting. But it wasn't her fault. She couldn't go beyond a certain level of emotion. She did not think that he was God, this man. She thought that he was a man who'd had very noble plans. His death gave him back his humanity, which meant that she was unable to read his story without thinking of that of her own father, who had died the year before, crushed by an industrial wagon, one year before his retirement, he'd been the victim of an injustice that had begun long ago. That injustice had never ceased to exist on Earth. It continued through the generations of man. The stolen pigeons the old Bousque woman always arrived precipitously, as if she were short on time. From Boug you could see her head rising in the distance above the hedge of medlar trees that separated our land from that of her children. A narrow path crossed through this hedge, and at the opening was a little hill that she ascended and descended as nimbly as a young woman. Then she continued along a row of artichoke plants, her head bowed, always at that dramatic pace. It was as if she couldn't slow down without falling. Her body was bent at the waist, thanks to the long winter afternoons she spent leaning over her fire, and her thin arms slid back and forth like the pendulums of a clock. They seemed too long now, even though they'd succumbed to the same shrinkage as the rest of her body. The poor old boosque woman. She had become so small at the end of her life that she was barely taller than the artichoke plants. Every time we saw her, we said, look, here comes the old boosque woman. And every time we were surprised, as if the event was surprising for its very regularity. Well before she arrived, she'd call out a friendly word with what little voice she had left, which was shrill and rasping, and we'd respond at the top of our lungs as if she were deaf. We never left off work in order to speak or listen to her. She simply came over to us and quite naturally began to help with whatever we were doing, all while talking away, telling some story. Sometimes, however, she'd take me aside and murmur to me what she didn't dare say out loud, tell me, when do you think you'll be leaving? Because she liked us very much, she lived in fear that we would leave the area before she died. We had returned from far away, so far away that she didn't even know exactly where. But she did know that a warm wind now blew through the pines of Bougue, comforting her old bones and giving her, at her advanced age, which was well past 65, her fill of fantasy and intrigue, as well as her only real opportunity to go beyond the village. The friends of her youth were all more or less invalids now, and and were happier without her company. It has to be said that the old bosque woman, as old as she was, had not become pious with age, an unusual state of affairs in this part of the country. You saw her only at midnight mass because she liked nighttime as well as celebrations. And as much as you liked her, you couldn't help disapproving a little. She was the first person in the entire area to venture our way to create a bond with people like us who had come back to Bouc after so many years of abandonment. Despite her incredible ignorance, her mind was still sharp and filled with a pure form of curiosity. People were a little afraid of her, as one is afraid of those whose vision is clear and who retain everything as one is afraid of life with its inspirations, its unfathomable poetry. Which is why people chose to call her a gossip when she was really a fantasist. My mother had more respect for her than for anyone else around. For us children, she came with the evening which carried us back to the house. But she was also the old woman we locked our doors against, protecting ourselves from a night that she seemed to bewitch. Only her eyes were still intensely alive in a face slashed with wrinkles, each one lined with a deep black furrow. Still, that extraordinary face was the only thing about her that was old. And it seemed that she'd never die, she had adapted so well to the years. But something awful did happen to her. It was the kind of story that she herself would surely have enjoyed telling if it hadn't nailed her down forever. It was at this fountain that her daughter in law, Jean Bousque, quenched her thirst. Jean hadn't had, so to speak, a real childhood. Hers had been spent in a feverish weight for some power of her own. Her marriage had given her back neither those lost years nor her joy. Still, she ruled in her house. And because she had been for so long unable to exert her authority over her own family, she now exerted it beyond all reason over the family of her husband. There were only four of them. The old woman, Jeanne, her husband Louis, and their son Jean. And the victory was a little hollow, to tell the truth. But what did that matter, so long as, in the eyes of the village, she was now viewed as the mistress of the house? You should have seen her toying with the old Bosque woman as if she were a child. The old woman was much too clever to get angry about it, since she knew that her son would never dare to side with her over his wife. Nor would her grandson. He was only 14 and had other things on his mind. So she cheerfully accepted her role in the household. But it was precisely her good mood, which nothing could subdue, that wounded the vanity of her daughter in law. It was as if the old woman were the only one who could make Jean question her own standing. From year to year, Jean's tone with the old woman became sharper. She looked at her with wild eyes, her face eaten away by who knows what despair. If you had seen that little old woman, so lovable, so easy to take, you could never have imagined anyone hating her in that way. But if you asked the daughter in law for news of her, she'd say with a hypocritical sigh, well, of course she's getting old. Haven't you noticed? She's becoming dirty. She who was once so neat, I hear. Or when Jean is older, we'll give him the upstairs bedroom. She'd point up at the old Busque woman's room, which she never visited. Despite all this, in the eyes of others in the village, the old Bosque woman remained the mistress of the house, even though she had already passed all of her property onto her children and was perfectly content to be fed and allowed to stay in her little room. One March day, as soon as she had finished her housework, Jean Bousque headed off towards the Pelgrin property on the high plateau above the village. Normally she took this route only on Sundays on her way to mass, so we were surprised to catch sight of her there on a weekday. Plus, she was walking fast and barely greeting those she passed for fear of being delayed along the way. She picked her way through the alfalfa and took the road that ran through the village. Then she began to climb the hill, following the path that snaked between the vines. She arrived at the property line that dominated the landscape at around 11 o'clock. Her face was red from the wind and she was panting a little, having hurried through the long ascent. Well, what kind wind has blown you our way, Madame Bousque? Once everyone began referring to her mother in law as the old Bosque woman. This one had become Madame Bousque because she was respected in the area, but also because she came from another village. She didn't immediately answer the question. If, when she embarked on this errand, the words and sentences had been whirling around in her head, they had got themselves in order en route, and now she had it down, her story. Commendably having prepared it along the way, she wanted to make the most of it. Where was she going? She was carrying her seed as far as possible in order to plant it in the most fertile spot on the Pell grounds, high plateau, from which the bit of gossip would be Carried like the wind to at least three neighbouring villages. Ah, she had good aim, Madame Bousque. She knew her neighbors. You know, my cousins from Algeria? Her haste and fatigue had left her so breathless that she had to begin again. You know, my cousins from Algeria? The ones who were supposed to arrive tonight. Imagine this. Last night, before going to bed, I prepared a pair of my best looking fattest pigeons. Only the best for them. So I cook the birds, I put them away in the pantry and I go to bed. In the middle of the night, I hear a noise downstairs. I give Louis a nudge and we go down together. I even told him to bring his gun. You never know, you know, with all those railway workers going through here at night. The two pelgram were all ears. Their pupils burned like coals. What do I see? The boosque woman continued. I thought I was dreaming. Louis and I were speechless, paralyzed. The old woman, it was terrifying. Sitting on her stool, she was devouring my pigeons with both hands, like this. I barely recognized her. She looked so different. After a long time she turned around. She froze when she saw us. I thought for a moment she might be in shock. But then she pulled herself together and ran out of the room. Ran. She's spry, that old woman, you know. She took the stairs four at a time and locked herself up in her room. My goodness, the Pellegrin woman said. But she's kept her wits about her for so long. Who would have imagined such a thing? But he, Monsieur Pelgrin spoke seriously, as the situation required. So it's all over for her, the old boosque woman. She's lost it, just like that. It's not as if I were depriving her of anything, the mischief maker said. But one day or another, age will get you. Some old people talk all day, others become misers. This one, her madness will be to steal food and stuff herself when she's not even hungry. Well, it's not so bad. It could have been a lot worse for us. The old Bousque woman stayed in her room for several days. To those who were surprised not to see her around, Jean Bousque said, laughing, oh, with that pair of pigeons, she's eaten enough for two days, the poor old thing. Well, it's not that I begrudge her the food. She said this loudly enough for her words to reach all the way up to the old woman's attic room. The old bush woman was ashamed. What had come over her? It was true that old age had finally got her. As her daughter in law said, the Excessive appetite for pigeons that had overcome her suddenly. And the way she had devoured them like an animal. She was doomed for sure. And everyone knew it. Everyone in Boog, the village, the whole world knew it. What a delicious thing it would have been for that little old woman to die just then. What a deliverance. Not to have to think anymore. But unfortunately, for two days and two nights she stupidly watched the sky, the clouds that passed before her, running the way the children of the village would doubtless run after her from now on. She watched, without seeing it, the enormous mid March moon sitting at the center of her room, more hunched over than ever. She didn't even dare to move her head for fear of setting off the laughter that followed each of her movements and worried her ears. According to her daughter in law, she tried to steal one more time. But everything was locked up that night. Can you imagine? Then the following day, depleted, the old woman resigned herself to coming downstairs. She took advantage of a moment when the house was empty in the middle of the afternoon. Like an animal whose hunger has forced it out of its hole, she humbly took her seat by the fire and stayed there. And because from that day on she didn't speak, nobody spoke to her either. Her son didn't bother to wish her a good evening when he came back from the fields. And her grandson soon stopped kissing her when he got home from school. Because she was no longer clean. My mother tactfully allowed the old woman to die without trying to see her again. But she was the only one to do so. No one else in the village could resist the pleasure of getting at least one more look at her. Fortunately, all she could see now was her fire. She had become so grey. Grey like her old companion. She was covered in ash. There was ash in the folds of her dress, in her hair, in all the wrinkles of her old skin. Whenever someone came to the boosque house and made it as far as the kitchen, which was big and bright, her daughter in law always apologized for the corner where the old woman sat, which she could never manage to clean. And if you could see her room, she sighed. A real sty. Jean had to wait until the fall to clean the place. The old busque woman took eight long months to die. Eight months of beautiful spring and summer. You'd almost have believed that she was doing it on purpose. But in the end, that long wait only increased the delight that Jean Bousque experienced when she could finally put all of her mother in law's rags in a pile in the middle of the courtyard and light them on fire, a big fire that spread smoke through the whole village and which she stirred from time to time with a long poker.
- [27:50]
Deborah Treisman
That was Rachel reading the Bible and the Stolen Pigeons by Marguerite de Ras, Translated from the French by Deborah Treisman. The stories were written between 1943 and 1949 and were first published in French in the book Cahier de la Guerre et outre text. In 2000, the book was published in English as Wartime Notebooks in a translation by Linda Coverdale and was included in the Everyman's Library Contemporary classics series in 2018. I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [28:21]
Rachel Cusk
I'm Alex Schwartz and we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker.
- [28:25]
Deborah Treisman
Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.
- [28:31]
Rachel Cusk
That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the.
- [28:39]
Deborah Treisman
Ether and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
- [28:45]
Rachel Cusk
We talked about the midlife crisis, starting.
- [28:47]
Deborah Treisman
With a new book by Miranda July, but then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno. You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so called disappearance, and from that we moved into right wing conspiracy theories. Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes the Beatles. You know, we've also noticed that advice.
- [29:06]
Rachel Cusk
Is everywhere, advice columns, advice giving, and we kind of want to look at why.
- [29:12]
Deborah Treisman
Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.
- [29:14]
Rachel Cusk
New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [29:20]
Deborah Treisman
Rachel Given that Duras published her first novel in 1943, these pieces come from quite early in her writing life when she was still, I suppose, to some extent exploring what she wanted to do in fiction. I know you spoke before about the idea that they were sort of more joyous or upbeat than some of her later work. Do you feel that the voice and perspective is similar or representative of the later work?
- [29:47]
Rachel Cusk
I mean, in some senses it is.
- [29:49]
Marguerite Duras
Because, I mean, in the cahie de guerre that you just mentioned, you know, as well as some absolutely harrowing accounts of her experiences in the immediate period, there are some character sketches in those Cahiers that are, they're sort of portraits in the way that she's, she's sort of painting portraits here and you can see her instinctive artistry, I guess, her sort of artist's brush working away even in These, you know, very, very, very stressful and upsetting situations that she describes. I mean, that is true of her early work and of her writings about her early life. As her work matured, as she matured, and her work became, you know, much more abstract and, I suppose, more challenging in a way. And, you know, this very painterly gift for sketching character was kind of phased out. So it's very lovely to see it here.
- [30:53]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. Well, let's talk about the Bible first. You know, so much of Duras fiction draws on her life. I can't really find any evidence that this does directly. You know, as you said, it's told in third person, not first person. Duras did live in Paris at 18 or 19, but she was a law student. She wasn't a sales girl in a shoe store. Unless there's some chapter of her past that I haven't found in biographies. So I'm wondering what you think inspired this piece. Maybe perhaps it's based on someone she met in those years.
- [31:28]
Marguerite Duras
I mean, it's so strange. Its only excuse can be that it happened and that it's real. I mean, perhaps it's something that she witnessed, maybe in the same Cafe de Relais Saint Michel. But it very much has that feeling of the oddity of experience. But some of the things that, you know, these wonderful lines, it didn't surprise her. Nothing surprised her. That was just the way she was made. Nothing really surprised her. I mean, that is absolutely the voice of Duras. It is her sensibility. It is her. The harshness of her world and the sadness that kind of underpins so much of her vision. And further on her remarks about belief in God. Then the end of the story, beautiful end of the story, thinking about Christ being crucified in front of his mother. So all of that feels very much part of her emotional violence, as it were, which is really her. It's not even ability to. It's almost as if she feels she has a duty. That her duty to truth also involves a lot of kind of bashing down of conventions and pieties. And she has to be the one to stand up and say, I don't believe in God, and I don't really believe in anything. And you know, that. That is part of how she kind of sets the stage, I suppose, for her particular voice.
- [33:04]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, I mean, interestingly, the boy doesn't believe in God either.
- [33:11]
Marguerite Duras
I'm not sure I quite believed in that.
- [33:13]
Deborah Treisman
But I mean, I find that the dynamic here is so interesting because here we have this educated sociology student talking nonstop About Islam, about the Bible, reading Ecclesiastes. He's somewhat condescending to her, knowing she's uneducated, but he's. Yeah, he does some mansplaining, as we would call it now, but is very interested in sharing his enthusiasms with her and. And in the meantime she's kind of embarrassed by his behavior. She thinks he might be a bit crazy. She's really mostly interested in the sex which she enjoys and maybe the only moment of self expression for her because she's more or less silent when he's expounding. You know, in some ways you'd expect the student to be bored by the salesgirl, but in fact the salesgirl is bored by the student. And I don't know whether to read it through a kind of lens of class difference or lens of, you know, who is realistic and who is not, who's pragmatic and who actually has the sort of social intelligence here. What do you think?
- [34:28]
Marguerite Duras
Perhaps the alias of the shop girl is sort of the one error in the story because. And perhaps what duress lacked then was the confidence to fully inhabit her own indifference, atheism, sort of depression occasionally and you know, which in. In other works or later works, she very much sits impassively witnessing the madness of others or the. The their characters. I mean, she. She sits and is a witness to other people's characters. And so, you know, there's definitely shades in. Of what came later in Lamont, for instance, the description of herself as a very young girl, sort of taking this lover who has, like our man in the Bible story, a very rich father. There's a lot of passive observation, I suppose that you get in Duras early work of, you know, men very often and you know, some of that is. Is given her youth in those stories and novels. It's sort of. Her sexuality is a very sort of strong and slightly shocking element of that. So I find some of those same elements are in this story.
- [35:53]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. It's sort of more of a portrait of the man but more revealing about the woman.
- [36:02]
Marguerite Duras
Yes, I'm not sure that we. I'm not sure we believe that she. That she actually worked in the she. But as you say, if she'd said she was a student at the Colle Normale, the story wouldn't have worked quite so well.
- [36:14]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. You know, she feels herself superior to him because she knows how to behave and, you know, not go on and on and bore people. So yeah, the story definitely presents this, what feels like a very accurate Picture of the sort of arrogance and self involvement of the young man.
- [36:35]
Rachel Cusk
Yes.
- [36:36]
Marguerite Duras
And perhaps, you know, what might be interesting to consider is that maybe in a piece like this, Duras was trying to work out how to name and frame her traumatic early life. Her loneliness, her extraordinary. The requirement for self sufficiency, the fact that she had to sort of look after herself, and also her status in France as an immigrant. So perhaps in her sort of early forays into writing, she imagined that could be expressed in terms of a character of a different, you know, of a lower social status or, you know, just someone who was living in their lonely room and led a sort of fairly comfortless life. You know, I think she. She must have felt at sea. And indeed, you know, she describes that more accurately, more sort of truthfully in some of her later work.
- [37:38]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, the girl's. The woman. Young woman's take on her relationship with this man is that he's removed joy from her life, you know.
- [37:52]
Marguerite Duras
Yes. So that's an absolute classic. This is what you read Giraffe for. It's a classic bit of Jurassian analysis. You feel that you are. When you read her, you feel you are in the presence of somebody who's understood that she just has to work out what is true. And once she's worked out what is true, that then it can be comprehended and accepted to a degree. And that, you know, I think that the instability of what is true, you know, becomes very, very complicated in. In her later writing, that in, you know, relationships between mature people, the truth shifts, you know, constantly. And. And, you know, that. That very much becomes something that. That is really central to her work. But I think this little paragraph that you've just cited is a sort of lovely early example of that.
- [38:52]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. She feels he's removed joy from her life and made it dreary. And yet in the same breath, she still tries to please him and sort of dutifully reads the Gospels. And I suppose in a way, he does give her something with that because he gives her a framework for thinking about her father.
- [39:15]
Rachel Cusk
Yes.
- [39:15]
Deborah Treisman
That she didn't have before. And that's what we end on.
- [39:19]
Marguerite Duras
I mean, one of the lovely lines in the Stolen Pigeons about people were a little afraid of her, as one is afraid of those whose vision is clear and who retain everything as one is afraid of life with its inspirations, its unfathomable poetry. You know, I think that that unfathomable poetry is very much, you know, something that any young person probably recognizes The. The kind of randomness and powerlessness of one's encounters when you're young that has you ending up reading the Bible when you would never have thought to do that for yourself. And then to find something in it that speaks to you, you know, not just about her father, but. But about this death of a man in front of his mother. In that sense, in the sort of Jurassian universe, maybe every experience, good or bad, contains a measure of that poetry and gives you some access to truth.
- [40:19]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah. And for her, the message about the message of Jesus death is that there's injustice in the world and always will be. He's never ceased to exist on earth.
- [40:32]
Marguerite Duras
And Christianity just came up with a particularly revolting. Which is her word image for that.
- [40:40]
Deborah Treisman
Revolting form of it. Let's think about Stolen Pigeons, which is a little easier to pinpoint in Duras biography because the area where it's set, which he calls Les Bugues, which I'm pretty sure is a fictionalized. Fictional name, or it's a fictionalized version of the region of France where her father came from. And as a girl she spent some time on this sort of failing family farm there. So I suppose if we read this as autobiographical, it's set sometime in the 20s or early 30s, when she's back in France at some point between her mother's postings in Vietnam. What do you think this story is about? Because in a way, I feel like it's a murder story.
- [41:30]
Marguerite Duras
I mean, it's sort of more.
- [41:32]
Deborah Treisman
Here's where that emotional violence really comes in. You know, in the Bible, the man was so oblivious of her emotion that he couldn't really inflict violence on it. But here we have some really sort of horrific violence.
- [41:49]
Marguerite Duras
Well, but also there's this interesting. This very fine line of respect that the mother feels respect for the old lady, and she's the only person in the area that she respects, we're told. And so then you understand that the narrator respects her mother and indeed mentions at the end that her mother was the only person who could let the woman die without needing to go and peer at her. So I think that that feeling of an agonizing fragility about the household that the narrator is in because they've come from somewhere and the old woman seems pretty sure that they're going to go somewhere else. So there's this feeling of sort of itinerance and, yeah, a fragility about that and yet a trust in the mother, which, you know, is an absolutely agonizing subject in so many of Duras's books about that period of her life. This figure of the mother who they depended on, you know, for their lives, but they were so frightened of her mortality, really. So then the sort of flip side of that is this very sort of wicked. Yeah. Murder of the old lady. The feeling of sort of feuding and scheming that is so absent from the sketched out environment of the narrator's own family. So I think there's kind of an attraction to it, I suppose. But also perhaps what she's describing in the story is the dawning of her own moral vision which she inherits. You know, it's a female moral vision, this is a female story, and she inherits the narrator, her moral vision from her mother. So the sort of twisting or perversion of. Of that process in. In the busque household, you know, it's pretty clearly contrasted, but it's still a nice contrast.
- [44:06]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. And we never really see any. We don't see the mother in the story and we don't really see the narrator either. Except.
- [44:16]
Marguerite Duras
Yeah, I suppose I so feel the mother is there. There's a feeling of order, I guess, to the narrator's doings and occupations and also, as I said, her noting of her mother's moral superiority, I guess, to others in the village.
- [44:35]
Deborah Treisman
And in the middle of it, there's this old woman who's sort of delightful, who has an interest in outsiders, who has an interest in kind of. She's just not afraid of the unknown. She feels like their unfamiliarity is a warm wind blowing in from somewhere, you know, and so unlike the. So unlike her daughter in law, so unlike sort of the classic small town figure who's trying to maintain this very strict order on her life, pecking order.
- [45:10]
Marguerite Duras
But I think this is what's so wonderful and tragic about Duras's vision that she finds in this little story such an example of, you know, the person who loves life, the old woman, you know, who loves life and her. This very, very true fact that in the end, what is indestructible about her in the eyes of her daughter in law is her good humor. It can't seem to be broken. And the awfulness of the fact that in the end she. She gives herself away, you know, she. She makes a mistake, basically, and. And is kind of brought down. So. So there's a feeling of such savagery.
- [45:53]
Rachel Cusk
In the middle of that.
- [45:54]
Marguerite Duras
What is so good about the old, old woman is. Is indeed her love of life, her enthusiasm for life, and so the cruelty of it. So it's a, it's a very, you know, she really is a master to take such small, apparently not that significant elements and, and make such a moral tale out of them.
- [46:19]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, though you could transpose this story to, you know, a fairy tale. A princess wanting to get rid of the queen or, you know, there's something very kind of universal about this daughter in law trying to take control, take over, boot out the previous generation and the hapless husband being afraid of his wife and standing by and letting his mother be destroyed and so on. I mean there's, it feels like a classic, classic setup for a story.
- [46:56]
Rachel Cusk
I think one of the things that.
- [46:57]
Marguerite Duras
Is interesting in Jurass is that she does not desist ever. And I mean, this is one of the things I admire so much in her. But you never feel her observations and the moral universe that they belong in. You know, they never seek into, into politics. You know, you feel that, that she writes so brilliantly about, about women, but not. There's no political motivation in, in what she's doing. And, you know, nobody has to be a victim and nobody has to be, you know, she's very interested, I think, in how, how people sort of engineer their own destinies to an extent, you know, So I think she ends up showing the world in a very, very brutal light without the reader ever feeling that there's political or other motivation to that. You know, she'd made up her mind, you know, before, you know, and sort of chose her characters in order to make some point that she wants to make. Which, you know, in fact is an incredibly difficult thing to do as a writer. You know, what you feel with your ass is she's just as she describes herself, you know, standing there in her. On her land or her family's land, and she sees this little old lady zooming up and down the hill and that you just feel the whole thing is narrated from that very, very compact circle of the self. And the legitimizing of the self and its perceptions is absolute in Jurassic. And it's not, as I say, not abused or aggrandized with anything from anywhere else. It's really herself as a witness.
- [48:45]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, she's really only observing in the story. There's no action on the part of the narrator and the only action on the part of the mother is her inaction, her respect, the end of the old woman's life.
- [49:01]
Marguerite Duras
So it's this deep acknowledgement of the harshness of life in someone very young. And in fact, I think both of the stories have that characteristic and a kind of acceptance of it that also seems to be a question about what would happen if you cared. Am I allowed to care? No, I'm not. I'm going to become an artist. I'm going to become a writer. And that means that I am a witness and a perceiver, but I'm not. I'm not gonna. I can't care. There's some keys there to very much the heart of Giras's kind of enterprise.
- [49:44]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, I mean, she's very much. She's very much the. What she describes in the old Woman. This person whose vision is clear, who retains everything.
- [49:53]
Rachel Cusk
Yes.
- [49:55]
Deborah Treisman
And you know, that people maybe chose to call her gossip, but she was really a fantasist or a storyteller, you.
- [50:03]
Marguerite Duras
Know, I mean, one wonders that, you know, because Duras was so committed to, as I say, staying within this small circle of experience and. And writing about time in existence. And I think that that's sort of one way of putting it. Sounds a bit clumsy, but certain periods of life that were clearly still happening for her were still alive for her. And, you know, this is part of what gives the form of her novel such a strange, semi abstract modernity that these periods of time become almost like buildings, you know, that you can sort of walk around in. And yet you read the story and you think, what would it have been like if she'd grown up in provincial France? And, you know, this had been her canvas, as it were, almost a quasi Victorian novel landscape of characters. And, you know, and her humor that comes out in this and her ability to sort of dramatize human situations, you know, she might have been a very different kind of writing.
- [51:10]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah, but she's very much talking about power in both of these stories and in a lot of her work, you know, who has the power in a situation?
- [51:20]
Rachel Cusk
Well, and also about change.
- [51:22]
Marguerite Duras
And I think that's what's so remarkable about her work. And the only other writer I really can think of who does this as well as jurass does is D.H. lawrence. This feeling that there's no. We're not working towards an ending and everything can suddenly change. Life just swerves around the corner and suddenly the balance of power has changed. Things are different. The woman is. You know, the old woman is suddenly been caught, is suddenly an animal. Essentially. That's repeated a couple of times towards the end of the story. Humiliated, reduced to the status of an animal. And so it's really this combination of telling the truth about the brutality that is in the. The most sort of humble Ordinary situations. That's very much her hallmark.
- [52:21]
Deborah Treisman
Yeah.
- [52:21]
Marguerite Duras
One of my early experiences of living in France was listening to a radio program. There was a French astronaut who was on a space station somewhere out in space, and he had been asked to choose a passage from Duras to read to his listeners on Earth from his space station. And I can't remember what this was in. In sort of celebration of, but I thought anyway, that that, to me, rather exemplifies the attitude of the French to.
- [52:59]
Deborah Treisman
Duras, she's fine if she's in outer space.
- [53:03]
Marguerite Duras
Well, she's. No, she's definitely a big figure here. And perhaps not so polarizing.
- [53:12]
Deborah Treisman
A Joas is sometimes just taken to task for being shameless. Shameless about. Not shameless in that she's behaving badly, but having no shame in describing her own brutality as well as the brutality of others. And perhaps for Djeras, it is that not lack of feeling, but lack of surprise. It's the willingness to observe, sometimes without judgment, that maybe sets people, makes people uncomfortable.
- [53:48]
Marguerite Duras
Yeah, I mean, I know pretty much as much as Jiras has a lot to teach the young woman writer of the future about, I suppose, honesty and the price of honesty, but really about what a female voice actually sounds like. And as I say, it's been a surprise and an incredible source of interest and energy for me to be able to read these writers in their own.
- [54:24]
Deborah Treisman
Language and to translate them.
- [54:29]
Rachel Cusk
Are you.
- [54:29]
Deborah Treisman
Are you working on a longer translation?
- [54:31]
Marguerite Duras
You set the bar quite high, Deborah. No, no. I mean, I filled me with a sense of purpose having read these. I mean, I I just. In fact, I wrote something about Annie Anno for the New York Times, and I did those, and I used various extracts from her work, and I did those translations myself, and they published them. So that was a little feeling of achievement that I had.
- [55:00]
Deborah Treisman
Well, thank you so much, Rachel.
- [55:02]
Rachel Cusk
Thank you.
- [55:04]
Deborah Treisman
Marguerite Duras, who was born in 1914, was the author of numerous plays, essays, screenplays, including one for the 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and works of fiction, among them the Ravishing of Law Stein and the Lover, which won the preconfidence in 1984. Duras died in 1996. Rachel Cusk, a winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, is The author of five books of nonfiction and 12 novels, including Arlington Park, Outline, Transit, Kudos, and Parade, which will be published in June. You can Download more than 200 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free in a Apple podcasts on the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by Jill Duboff. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm proud to share the news that three films from the New Yorker documentary series have been shortlisted for the Academy Awards and they are Incident, Seat 31, Zoe Zephyr and Eternal Father. And they all immerse you in the finest cinematic journalism exploring themes of justice, identity and the bonds that shape us. These extraordinary films, which were created by established filmmakers as well as emerging artists, will inform, challenge and move you. I encourage you to watch them along with our full slate of documentary and narrative films@newyorker.com video.
- [56:53]
Marguerite Duras
From PRX.