Oh hello
Performing, wearing a maroon silk blouse and inky blue trousers that fall from high up my waist, my shirt hanging over, small olive green mules poking out beneath, an attempt at dressing like a 45 year old lesbian who runs a creative agency, but on my less toned body, the resemblance lies closer to a sweaty jester, I see, in a break between Allegro and Largo, not Dana who I had decided that I did like but who had decided that they were going away for 3 months to Estonia, but, instead: Iris. She stares at me, throughout my performance, and after slides over to say, “Well done.” She is glad that she attended. It is the first time that she’d been out since November. She’s developing a book on surfing and Bach and she is interested in my decision to disrupt frictively with bow movements the natural harmonies in Bach like a surfer executing a front side snap. Unsure how to respond, I tell her that my interest is in perfume. I want to make scents that revolted and enticed, like the smell at petrol stations or a smell that evokes a happy memory that, in being a memory and not the present, conjures sadness. She tugs at the second button of my blouse and says she would like to keep talking but now, now, now she has dinner plans. I’m seeing her next week. She is cooking which, to me, is very forward but she says it is more affordable and a better ambience than most London restaurants. She asks that I wear impractical shoes and a blouse that is similar to this one but more at risk of staining. I think she just means white.
This week, in a period of dazed melancholy, I’m writing about Marguerite Duras: first, The Easy Life, in which Francine Veyrenattes, surrounded by death and the nausea of rural life, travels to the sea, and then Baxter, Vera Baxter, a film directed by Duras that hovers, dream like, on the life of Vera Baxter.
The Easy Life (1944) by Marguerite Duras
The “I” character of Duras’ The Lover, around whom the novel occupies itself, describes her mother like this: “The way she sees everything to the bitter end without ever dreaming she might give up, abandon - the cousins, the effort, the burden. … It’s in this valor, human, absurd, that I see true grace.” Forty years earlier, Duras wrote The Easy Life, La Vie Tranquille in French, a novel that is concerned, also, with the shape and folds and shadows of grace. It follows Francine Veyrenattes as she comes to terms with the patience, the grace, that is needed to find fulfilment and calm in her life.
The Easy Life begins with death and ends in marriage. Francine, 25, lives on a farm in rural France. Her brother, Nicholas, kills her uncle, Jérôme. Not long after the burial, Nicholas is crushed by a train “like a dead bird”. Life on the farm is “chaos, boredom, chaos”, but the gaps and emptiness between moments of chaos shrink. Death becomes central: “It was a chaos of souls, of blood”. It gets too much. “I thought of my age, the age of all those sleeping in this house, and I heard time gnaw at us like an army of rats.” So she leaves, by train, perhaps on the same train that killed her brother. She wants the sea, “something that, like my fatigue, was unchanging and endless”. She goes to T, a town not too far away. There she stays in a hotel, looking at the sea. Eventually, she comes home.
At T, Francine is more reflective, alone. She looks at the “mirrored armoire” and, surrounded by jigsaw images of her body, the perspective shifts to the third person, “she’s a tall girl with blond hair, yellowed by the sun, a tan face”. She closes the mirror and still she senses it contains “an unknown character, at once fraternal and full of hatred”. “I am forever trapped by this story, this face, this body, this head.”
There is, though, in The Easy Life, a reconciliation with “this face, this body, this head”. Her impatience with the chaos and boredom of her life recedes. What causes this? The sea, perhaps, or time away from her family, or more time alone to think about the rhythm of her life. I don’t think Duras is that interested in sharing the motivating logic of her transformation. Francine remains, always, subject to her environment and the people around her. Yet she begins to want to return to Les Bugues, her farm. There she seeks a contemplative appreciation for nature: “I will watch the earth cover itself back up alternately with snow, with fruit, with mud, sometimes with white betrothals, with milk, with catastrophes, with tears.” What sparked boredom, chaos, boredom becomes something calming, peaceful in its endless variation.
The model for this change lies, I think, earlier in the novel, when Francine is speaking about her mother, someone who does not feature that much in the story. She sees her Maman as “full of grace … fascinated by the shimmering of the passing days; no matter whether they’d been somber or gay, she had never dreamed of lamenting or celebrating them”. There is a grace, Duras suggests in The Easy Life and again, 40 years later, in The Lover, in a patience as to the passing of time, a gracefulness in watching change take place, in remaining calm as to the swirling moments of her life, the “[c]athedrals of wind” as she puts it, or coming to terms with the changing face she sees in her armoire.
Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) by Marguerite Duras
Vera Baxter is sheltering or trapped in a beautiful mid century home. No one is quite sure what she is doing. Her house has lots of edges, columns, windows that frame her and obstruct our view. Vera lies on her bed, or lies on the couch, or moves from room to room. There is a soft blur to the shots like a photo from your iphone when the lens is dirty. Outside, there is a banjo playing and maybe a flute or a recorder, a kind of folksy rhythm, that Vera can hear, the tune is like somewhere between the montage to Fly Away Home or the Ukulele playing in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Vera never sees the musicians and nor do we. She is in her home. “I shut myself away here, to kill myself, I think.”
Guests come and speak to Vera. Through them, she recounts her life. Vera is married. She is being used by her husband to keep his business going. She is also having an affair with Michel Cayre (Gérard Depardieu), about which the husband seems to be aware of.
Where The Easy Life presents domesticity as full of action (murder, marriage, lust), in Baxter, Vera Baxter, there is a tragic claustrophobia, a pain that builds over time like a balustrade slowly deteriorating. Anguish is also found simply lying on your bed. If there is optimism in this dreamscape it is that Baxter’s self awareness of her situation comes through the conversations she has with women who speak to her and ask her about her life, notably Delphine Seyrig, the feminist icon, who, among other things, co-directed a short film using the text from Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto. These conversations are reminiscent of the slow questioning of an interested friend, yet Duras suggests something radical or, at least, powerful, in doing so. The conversations help us and help Vera to see what is wrong in her marriage, and a fuller understanding of her life.
Love
Anne