The Impudent Ones

THE STORY BEHIND THE IMPUDENT ONES ^{JEAN VALLIER}

In February 1941, Gaston Gallimard, the founder and owner of the famed French publishing house that bore his name, received a manuscript in the mail, accompanied by the following letter:

This letter, addressed to the publisher of literary giants such as Proust, Gide, and Paul Valéry, was not written by a timorous would-be novelist. Apart from the fact that her name had appeared the year before on the cover of L’empire français, she had reason to believe that the names of the three gentlemen who vouched for the quality of her manuscript would not fail to impress her correspondent: Henri Clouard and André Thérive were at the time two of France’s most influential literary critics, and Pierre Lafue, a novelist and a respected critic himself, was a governmental agent who had played a part in the publication of her first book and was now one of her most devoted friends. She knew he had privileged access to Gaston Gallimard.

Contrary to the legend of poverty and abuse still hanging over the story of her early life, when the future Marguerite Duras wrote her first novel—thanks in great part to the college education her mother enabled her to receive—the young writer had grown into a secure, self-assured young woman.^{2} Now twenty-six and married, she had joined the Parisian bourgeoisie and was not easily daunted—a side of her nature she would continue to display for the rest of her life.

Born near Saigon in 1914, Marguerite Donnadieu was the daughter of two teachers who worked in the educational system put in place by the French in Indochina, a colony comprised of what is now Vietnam, as well as Cambodia and Laos. Her father, Henri Donnadieu, born in southwestern France in 1872, held a university degree in natural sciences, which he taught occasionally in Saigon and Hanoi between assignments as a school director and education supervisor. Her mother, born Marie Legrand in the Pas-de-Calais in 1877, trained at a teacher’s college in Lille before going to Indochina in 1905, where she taught and was ultimately placed in charge of several establishments for Vietnamese girls. When they met, Henri had two sons from a previous marriage who returned to France after their mother died. He married Marie Legrand in Saigon in 1908 and had two sons with her before Marguerite’s birth: Pierre, her frère aîné, in 1910, and Paul, her petit frère, in 1911.

The three children traveled to France several times, first with both parents during World War I when Marguerite was still a toddler, then with their widowed mother, following the premature death of their father to malaria in December 1921. The family remained in France between 1922 and 1924. They lived in a small village in the Lot-et-Garonne, east of Bordeaux, in a house Henri Donnadieu had bought near the place of his birth, presumably for his retirement. Marie Don-nadieu having decided to return to Indochina to resume her career, they left for Saigon in the summer of 1924. After seven years in the Mekong Delta where their mother had been posted, in 1931, Marguerite and her brother Paul returned with her to France for one year (Pierre, the eldest, had been sent back to France in 1924 to study). They lived on the outskirts of Paris, where Marguerite attended a private school in the sixteenth arrondissement and passed the first part of her baccalauréat. Back in Saigon, she completed her secondary studies at the city’s lycée in 1933. In the fall, she left Indochina for the last time, returning to Paris to further her education. She attended law school at the Sorbonne for four years, graduating in 1937 with a degree in common law and political economics. In June of that year, she was hired by the French Ministry of the Colonies to write promotional materials. At twenty-three, she was now independent financially and free to live as she pleased. She was making a good salary, could afford nice clothes, and drove her own Ford coupé convertible, which she used to explore the countryside or go to the seashore with her beau of the moment.

L’empire français

Georges Mandel, a major figure in the history of the Third Republic, was appointed Minister of the Colonies in 1938, and brought with him Pierre Lafue, his speechwriter. Mandel was determined to use his position to counter Germany’s war propaganda, issuing a continuous stream of interventions in the press, on the state-controlled radio network, and in weekly newsreels shown in movie theaters. In 1939, in order to publicize the part that French overseas possessions could play in the looming conflict in terms of foot soldiers and war materiel, he asked his staff to put together a book about the country’s colonial empire. His press attaché, a young man named Philippe Roques, took up that task with the help of the Indochina-born Mademoiselle Donnadieu, whose own pen had caught the attention of her superiors. Her name ultimately appeared on the book’s cover, next to the name of her colleague. Gallimard agreed to publish the book based on an advance order from the ministry for three thousand copies, to be given out at the Salon de la France d’Outremer planned to be held in Paris the following year.

That September, the Nazis invaded Poland. Despite the war, the “Overseas France” salon opened on schedule on May 6, 1940, with Albert Lebrun, the president of the French Republic, and Georges Mandel, the Minister of the Colonies, in attendance. At the salon’s entrance, fresh off the printing press, L’empire français was offered to visitors. The co-authors would not enjoy their nascent notoriety for long, however. Four days later, Hitler’s armies, bypassing the “unassailable” Maginot Line in the East, invaded France from Belgium. Within weeks, as German tanks continued their progression from the north, Paris was declared an open city to avoid its destruction. All the French ministries had to leave town.

Marguerite Duras left the French capital with Lafue and Roques on June 9, first for the Loire Valley, where the ministries took temporary refuge, then for Bordeaux five days later, where the French government withdrew as the soldiers of the Third Reich marched down the Champs-Élysées. At the end of the month, after fighting had stopped (the armistice was signed on June 22), she left Bordeaux with Lafue and went with him to Brive-la-Gaillarde, a small city near the Dordogne where Lafue’s brother and his family lived. After a few weeks in Brive, she returned to Paris in mid-August. (Philippe Roques joined the Résistance movement and went on to serve as a secret agent between de Gaulle and Mandel, as well as between Churchill and Mandel, until he was captured and killed by the Gestapo in 1943.)

A Married Woman Under Vichy

Much had changed since she left the French capital. A new government had been born from the defeat of the French army, with la République française ceding control to the authoritarian l’État français, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of World War I who was recalled from his ambassadorial post in Madrid. Not given to progressive thoughts, the eighty-year-old Pétain, under the pretext of sparing the French further miseries, was soon advocating cooperation with the invaders and taking a series of repressive measures in order to rid France of its “past errors.” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” was now replaced by “Travail, famille, patrie (Work, family, fatherland),” a motto more in tune with the return to ancestral values preached by the old marshal and his entourage. From now on women were expected to stay home. Unless they were under permanent contract with the state (such as teachers in public schools), married women would no longer be authorized to work in the French administration.

Marguerite Duras’s position as an auxiliary with the Ministry of the Colonies was about to be terminated. Newly unemployed, she would have to depend on her husband’s salary, a situation that circumstances related to the war had made problematic. In September 1939, a few weeks after the hostilities started, she had married Robert Antelme, the son of a tax officer in the affluent sixth arrondissement of Paris whom she had met at the Sorbonne in 1937. Three years her junior, he was called for military duty in 1938, shortly after graduating from law school, and sent directly to the front the following year. When he returned to civilian life in the summer of 1940, Robert Antelme had never been employed and now had to look for a job. Through the intervention of François Piétri, a first cousin of his mother who headed several ministries before the war and was now part of Vichy’s first government, he was hired by the Paris Préfecture de Police as a temporary assistant in the prefect’s office. (He would join the Ministry of Industry eight month later, before being reassigned to the Ministry of the Interior). François Piétri could have perhaps intervene at the Ministry of the Colonies on behalf of his young cousin’s wife, but at the end of that summer, as the government was reshuffled he was let go and sent to Madrid to succeed Marshal Pétain as ambassador to Franco’s Spain, a position he held until 1944.

We do not know if Marguerite Duras was distraught at having lost her job, and with it her financial independence, or if she was happy to be able to devote herself fully to writing, thus realizing her early ambition (at the age of twelve, she had allegedly confided to her mother that she wanted to be a writer). What we do know, thanks to a membership card from the library of the University of Paris dated August 20, 1940, signed Marguerite Antelme, is that she was authorized to work in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève from that date until the end of November. This is when she wrote La famille Taneran, later to be renamed Les impudents, published now in English for the first time as The Impudent Ones. She may have started a first draft during her stay in Brive-la-Gaillarde, where she could discuss her work with her friend Pierre Lafue, but the bulk of the novel must have been written during the first fall and early winter of the German occupation.

The Taneran Family

Such was the less-than-glowing reader’s report on the manuscript for Gallimard, written by Marcel Arland, a distinguished writer and winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1929 for L’Ordre, a novel about another dysfunctional family in provincial France between the two wars.

Like so many first novels, The Impudent Ones is partly autobiographical. The portrait of the divided Taneran family found in this book also foreshadows the one the author would paint later in works such as Whole Days in the Trees and The Lover. Freely mixing fiction and reality, the family portrait is drawn here through the subjective memory of an aspiring writer trying to come to terms with an emotionally charged adolescence.^{4} To write her novel, Marguerite Duras drew direct inspiration from events that had affected her and her family during the year they spent in France in 1931–32, and many details suggest that the story takes place in the early 1930s.

The main characters seem to have been modeled on the author herself, as well as on her immediate relatives. Under the English-sounding name of Maud Grant, the anguished heroine at the center of the story brings to mind a young Marguerite Donnadieu, only taller and more self-assured than she was at the time. In the same way, Mrs. Grant-Taneran was fashioned after her own mother, like her a widow with the first name Marie, and also advanced in age (Mrs. Donnadieu was then fifty-four, going on fifty-five).

Jacques, the dissolute troublemaker, is easily identified as a version of Pierre Donnadieu, Marguerite’s “hated” older brother. Although only four year her senior, he is made to be more contemptible in the novel by being past forty and still without any occupation or sense of purpose (Maud decries her brother’s “shameless desire… to live the way he wanted to”). The author’s late father was brought back to life under the insipid figure of Mr. Taneran, Mrs. Grant’s second husband, a civil servant who “at one time… had had a respectable career teaching natural sciences at the high school in Auch,” where he met his wife. Henri, the son they had together, can be viewed as a substitute for Paul Donnadieu, the author’s second brother, or as a salute to Jacques Donnadieu, one of her half brothers, to whom the novel is dedicated.^{5}

The settings of Les impudents, a residential suburb of the French capital and a village in the southwestern part of the country, are versions, under altered names, of places where the author lived when she came back to France as a child and then again for a few weeks as an adolescent in 1931. In the opening chapter, the apartment occupied by the Grant-Taneran family, the septième from which Maud contemplates a landscape extending to “the somber streak of the hills of Sèvres,” appears to be the very same seventh-floor apartment her mother rented in 1931 in a new art-deco building still standing today in its gleaming whiteness at 16, avenue Victor-Hugo, in Vanves, west of Paris. In the novel, walking through the streets of Clamart (Vanves), she can see from a distance “the huge white hulk of the building in which they lived.” Taking us on a tour of the apartment, the narrator takes care to point out the Henri II sideboard in their dining room (for many French readers, a sure sign of petitbourgeois taste), lest we think of the family as fashion-minded sophisticates.

A Bourgeois Drama

Mrs. Grant-Taneran may be a petit-bourgeois who cooks her own meals (by contrast, in 1931, Mrs. Donnadieu brought her cook with her to Paris from Indochina), but the mother in The Impudent Ones owns land in the southwest, an estate she presumably acquired with the savings of her first husband, a tax collector (like the author’s father-in-law). With some major changes in the chronology and the nature of the autobiographical events that inspired it, the story unfolds around that prized Uderan estate, “located in the southwest Lot, in the rough and unpopulated part of Upper Quercy, on the edge of Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne.”

With some minor geographical realignments, one can easily make the short trip on a map to the estate Marguerite Duras’s father bought a few weeks before he died unexpectedly in France in 1921, at age forty-nine, during a medical leave of absence. This is the rural environment where, between the ages of eight and ten, his daughter spent two years with her mother and her two brothers, and which the author would evoke in vivid detail in The Impudent Ones. Le domaine de Platier (its real name) originally comprised forty-five acres of woods, vineyards, orchards, meadows, and a tobacco plantation, situated near the small village of Pardaillan (The Pardal in the novel), a few kilometers east of the historical hill-town of Duras (Ostel in the novel)—the town from which Marguerite later took her nom de plume.

When Marguerite Duras returned to France with her mother and her brother Paul in the spring of 1931 (Pierre was by then living in Paris), the maison de maître in which they had previously lived had been emptied of its furniture and unoccupied for several years.^{6} As it was now unhabitable, they had to take board and lodgings with neighbors for a few weeks while Marie Donnadieu organized the sale of the estate, which included an old farmhouse in the back of the main dwelling that housed a sharecropping couple and their daughter, still tending the land for the absentee owner.

These characters are all made to play a part in The Impudent Ones—the neighbors as the Pecresse family, the tenant farmers as the Dedde family. The Pecresses would not mind marrying their son to their guest’s daughter (thus acquiring a stake in the estate), but they are kept firmly in their assigned rank on the social ladder. The narrator takes pains to explain: “Even if the Grant-Tanerans were only bourgeois folk without distinction, Uderan, their land, conferred on them a kind of nobility.” Thus, while Maud is addressed as Mademoiselle Grant, or “la Demoiselle” and her mother as Madame, or Madame Grant-Taneran, the neighbors by contrast are referred to by the less respectful La Pécresse, la mère Pécresse, Le Pére Pécresse, le jeune Pécresse; and the tenant farmers as La Dedde, le père Dedde, la fille Dedde—the way people in the countryside called each other at the time.

Many of the inhabitants of Pardaillan figure in the novel as extras, vividly rendered through the author’s observant eye and ear for popular parlance (“in the thick dialect of the Dordogne”). Lording over the locals, Mrs. Grant-Taneran gives a grand diner for the villagers in her dilapidated mansion. The guests are seated according to rank, and what ensues is a small comedy of manners in the spirit of Gustave Flaubert or Guy de Maupassant.

In another parallel to the author’s life, the reader is informed at the beginning of the story that “Jacques had just lost his wife… She had died that very day following a car accident.” In real life, before his mother and siblings arrived in France in 1931, Pierre Donnadieu, then nearing twenty-one, had been living in Paris with a wealthy woman who died in a car accident—a possible suicide.

The lover that Maud takes up when the family relocates to their summer estate appears to be modeled on Jean Lagrolet, the handsome scion of an upper-middle-class family, whom Marguerite Duras met at the Sorbonne and dated for two years in the 1930s. The public scandal at the heart of the novel, loss of prestige for Maud’s family, and secret pregnancy that ultimately shatters the clan also seem to have been inspired by real-life events. In 1932, at the age of eighteen, Marguerite Duras was dating one of her schoolmates from the private establishment she was attending—the son of a prominent family of lawyers—and became pregnant. Contrary to the loveless but conventional ending in the novel, however, no wedding was celebrated. A discreet abortion was arranged, which the author would reveal much later in her career.^{7}

Literary Influences

In his assessment of the novel for Gallimard, Marcel Arland wrote: “It is very awkward, rather badly put together, confused… rudimentary, sometimes incoherent—but there is here a rather strange atmosphere (à la Mauriac and Wuthering Heights), a certain grasp of family turmoil, of cruelty, of moral degradation.”^{8}

That Marguerite Duras was influenced by François Mauriac there is little doubt. She was an avid reader, fully cognizant of the prevailing trends in French fiction between the two wars. While studying law at the Sorbonne, she audited public classes on contemporary literature given by Fortunat Strowski, an eminent specialist who coincidentally had been Mauriac’s teacher at the University of Bordeaux before World War I. At the time she was writing The Impudent Ones, Mauriac had become one of the most eminent French novelists (he was elected to the prestigious Académie française in 1933). His stories of divided and secretive provincial families from the grande bourgeoisie, such as Thérèse Desqueyroux, published in 1927, and Le noeud de vipères, published in 1932, inspired legions of aspiring writers at odds with their bourgeois environment. Mauriac himself was an admirer of Paul Bourget, the late nineteenth-century author of celebrated romans psychologiques set in upper-middle-class families, including a series of novels purporting to analyze “women’s emotions.” (Bourget was supposedly Henry James’s favorite French writer.)

In the late 1930s, the future Marguerite Duras was a regular at the Mathurins, the Paris theater directed by Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff, where she saw Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Chekhov’s The Seagull. In her novel, Maud is a romantic young woman: “If he [Durieux] loved her, one day he would devote all his moments, his leisure time, to her.” The man she compromises herself with happens to be a gentleman who tells her, “I think it would be more fitting on my part to speak to your mother.” Maud may have loved him at the beginning of their affair, but, like Nora in A Doll’s House or Thérèse Desqueyroux, she ends up locked in a loveless marriage, victim of the social conventions of her milieu. Like Mauriac’s grands bourgeois, her mother puts respectability above everything else. A fille-mère would be an indelible stain on the Grant-Tanerans’ standing in society. It is also worth noting that, as in Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle, money plays a significant part in The Impudent Ones. Financial needs motivate most of Jacques’s intrigues. Mrs. Grant-Taneran herself displays miserly habits and uses money to keep her favorite son under her power.

The influence of Wuthering Heights, underlined in Marcel Arland’s evaluation of the manuscript, must have seemed self-evident at the time. Emily Brontë’s classic of Victorian literature was popular with French readers—all the more after the release of William Wyler’s movie in Paris in 1939. No less than three new French translations of the novel were published between 1925 and 1937. As an ardent anglophile, Marguerite Duras was familiar with the works of the Brontë Sisters. Les hauts de Hurlevent—the French title most often used—was one of her favorite books. The rivalries between the protagonists, as well as the landscape surrounding their coveted estate—“the rough and unpopulated part of Upper Quercy” in The Impudent Ones; the Yorkshire Moors in Wuthering Heights—invite comparison between the two novels. One can find other similarities: like Catherine Earnshaw, Maud Grant is impulsive and independent. Like her, Maud reconciles herself to marrying a wealthy man she does not love, and like “Cathy,” Maud is the character who keeps the story moving to its conclusion. It is doubtful, however, that Marguerite Duras drew more than remote inspiration from Wuthering Heights. If Jacques Grant shares some of Heathcliff’s innate cruelty, he does not have the dark, romantic stature of Brontë’s hero. The result of Jacques’s intrigues around the family estate pales in comparison to the devastating consequences that Heathcliff’s obsession with revenge brings to everyone around him. The Impudent Ones never rises to the tragic dimension that Wuthering Heights achieves in the end.

While Emily Brontë was defying the literary strictures of her time, Marguerite Duras had more conventional ambitions with her first novel. Looking back on the days she spent in the Lot-et-Garonne as a child, she seems to have hesitated between a rustic roman champêtre and a classic roman psychologique in the vein of Paul Bourget. The pastoral component in The Impudent Ones follows the naturalistic current of nineteenth-century writers such as George Sand (The Devil’s Pool, The Country Waif), Emile Zola (La terre), or the lesser-known but immensely popular René Bazin, whose novels La terre qui meurt (The Dying Earth) and Le blé qui lève (The Coming Harvest) were still must-reads for generations of French high school students. In The Impudent Ones, the sections concerning the trees, meadows, fields, and rivers surrounding the family estate of Uderan bear a striking resemblance to similar descriptions of the countryside found in Bazin’s hymns to nature. The careful attention paid to class structure in The Impudent Ones owes a debt to the theories of André Thérive, one of the three gentlemen whose approval of her manuscript Marguerite Donnadieu put forth in her letter to Gallimard. Thérive, a critic for Le Temps, was co-founder of the École populiste, a literary movement advocating a return to class portraiture and the study of sociological issues. As evidenced by her novel, the class-conscious author of The Impudent Ones was ready to follow Thérive’s precepts.

A Manuscript in Search of a Publisher

Arland’s reader’s report indicates that the manuscript of La famille Taneran was given to him by Gallimard at the beginning of March 1941. The author’s request for a quick decision was not obliged, however, as Gaston Gallimard was still reeling from attempts by the occupying authorities to take control of his company. That same month, Marguerite Donnadieu’s father-in-law died of a heart attack, prompting her mother-in-law to leave occupied Paris and join relatives in Corsica, then still in the “Free Zone.” Her daughter-in-law may have planned to accompany her on the trip to the island, as her letter to Gallimard, dated March 31, would suggest:

When the author did not receive a reply, she turned to the ever-obliging Pierre Lafue, who agreed to write a letter of support, which he sent on May 8. Opining that any shortcomings in the composition of the novel were mere “youthful flaws,” easily corrected, he argued: “One could not expect Madame Donnadieu to have already achieved the full mastery of her art…. I believe it would be a pity to deprive oneself of a book revealing rather rare qualities.”

Gallimard replied to Lafue in a polite letter that the manuscript was not publishable as it was, Madame Donnadieu’s writing being “awkward” and “clumsy” in too many places. But he added that La famille Taneran was “a very interesting work” nevertheless, which allowed “something” to be expected from its author.^{10} On May 16, the writer Raymond Queneau—also a member of Gallimard’s reading committee—delivered the verdict directly to Marguerite Duras: “Madame, we have taken a very keen interest in reading your manuscript. It is not possible for us at the moment to undertake its publication, but I would be very happy to be able to talk to you about it if it were possible for you to call at rue Sébastien-Bottin one of these days.”^{11}

It would take two more years for the novel to find a publisher. In the spring of 1942, despondent over the loss of her first child (a son who died during childbirth), Marguerite Duras felt the need to look for work. Through her husband’s connections, she was hired by a new governmental office established at the request of German authorities, in charge of allotting the diminishing stocks of printing paper (which was a clever way for the occupying forces to exercise full censorship over what could be published or reissued since the lists of books had to be approved by the Propaganda Staffel and the German embassy). After starting as an assistant, “Madame Antelme” shortly became the commission’s executive secretary. Although she did not have the power to decide who would be on the lists, her position put her in contact with all the publishing houses still operating in occupied Paris.

Developing a reputation for both her efficiency and her literary inclinations, she was able to recommend friends and acquaintances for the paid task of reviewing manuscripts. Her “recruits” included Pierre Lafue; André Thérive; Ramon Fernandez, a brilliant critic and enthusiastic collaborationist; Jacques-Napoléon Faure-Biguet, a writer friend of the Antelmes; and Dionys Mascolo, a colleague of Albert Camus at Gallimard. (Mascolo became her lover and longtime partner, and the father of her son, after she divorced Robert Antelme in 1947.)

After several rejections and significant rewriting, La famille Taneran was finally accepted by Librairie Plon—the publisher of Paul Bourget, Julien Green, and Robert Brasillach—most likely after the intercession of Faure-Biguet, whose own works were published by Plon.^{12} The book appeared in Paris bookstores in August 1943.^{13} The title on the cover had been changed to the more enticing Les impudents, and the author had adopted the pen name under which she would ultimately become world-famous.