5 rue Saint-Benoît (I)

I want to write about the community of 5 rue Saint-Benoît, drawing on Laure Adler’s Marguerite Duras, A Life.

Our cast:

Marguerite Duras, 1914-1995. When she meets Antelme, she is a graduate with the Colonial Office, who will write a book supporting French colonialism in 1940.

Dionys Mascolo, 1916-1997, erstwhile philosophy student. He never took the examination, but wanted to be an intellectual. Mascolo finds a position doing odd-jobs for Gallimard, because of his college friend Michel Gallimard. Duras offers him a job with the Paper Allocation Agency. He will read manuscripts with her. From their first meeting, in November 1942, it is love. At this time, he lives with his mother.

Robert Antelme, 1917-90. Said by all to be an extraordinary man. Arrives in Paris in 1936. Studies Law. He meets Duras in the late 1930s, in 1938, I think. They fall in love. He is called up in 1938. They marry in September 1939 (Duras proposed). At the end of 1940, they move into 5 rue Saint-Benoît.

Duras and Antelme’s flat, 1943. They are married, and have become active in the Resistance (the MNPGD group). François Mitterand, the future president, lives for a while in the back bedroom. So, too, does Jacques Benet (an old schoolfriend of Antelme). Dionys Mascolo, Duras’s lover, visits everyday. Antelme has a lover too. Mascolo edits Combat, the Resistance magazine, working with Camus. He meets Edgar Morin at this time. With a few others, they form an irregular force, ready for action. They often meet in Antelme’s sister’s flat – this is Marie-Louise, who will die at Ravensbrück to whom The Human Race will be dedicated. Robert Antelme and then Marie-Louise are captured …

Duras waits for Robert’s return. Mascolo is with her. She is thin, lethargic. She is writing the pages eventually published as La Douleur (The War). Then, in May 1945, Robert is identified at Dachau. Mascolo and Beauchamp, another member of the Resistance, drive there. They bring him back to Paris. He is starving, on the brink of death. In the car, Robert talks and talks. A famous sentence, said to Mascolo: ‘When anyone talks to me of Christian charity, I shall say Dachau’.

They are all there at the flat to meet Robert Antelme. A doctor used to the effects of famine treats Robert, giving him serum first of all, and then introducing him gradually to food. By the end of June, he is recovered.

In 1944, Duras becomes a communist, joining the clandestine French Communist Party. She sells the party’s newspaper on Sunday morning. It is the party, for her, of the poor, of the pure. Every evening she goes out to spread the word, ringing doorbells, talking in cafes. Robert Antelme talks about his experiences. There are few references in the papers in this period to the persecution of the Jews. At the flat, Duras, Antelme and Mascolo speak of the persecution.

After the war, another great period of hospitality. Raymond Queneau and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are frequent visitors. Edgar Morin is always there. Mascolo often sleeps on the couch in the hall. He and Duras make love in hotels; Antelme, too, has a lover; he and Duras sleep in separate rooms. Mascolo, too, has a lover.

Mascolo and Antelme join the Communist Party in 1946. Duras, of course, is already an activist; she becomes secretary of the cell. But she begins to lose her ardency; Robert is expelled in 1950 … but they remain lifelong communists.

Elio Vittorini (whom I’ve yet to read, although Duras, apparently, owes a great deal to him) comes to the flat. Another communist. Antelme, Mascolo and Duras holiday together with Vittorini in Italy. Vittorini attacks what he sees as the slavishness of the French communists. They form the Groupe d’études Marxistes with Merleau-Ponty and David Rousset (I’ll need to find out about him – Duras falls under his influence after her expulsion from the Party). It is a question, for them, of returning to Marx and Engels, and of remaining within the French Communist Party while criticising it – the Italians, here, are an inspiration. The Italian communists take communion on Sundays; they draw upon a spiritual sustenance.

Meanwhile, Antelme is writing The Human Race at the flat. At night, everyone drinks and laughs and sings Edith Piaf songs. Mascolo’s mother moves in. Michel Leiris is a frequent visitor, as is Georges Bataille; Jacques Lacan visits on several occasions. Duras is pregnant by Mascolo … Antelme wants to get out of the way, but they still live together. In 1947, Jean is born; he is always called Outa (Mite). In the same year, The Human Race is brought out by Cité universelle, the publishing house Duras and Mascolo have formed. The book meets with little success.

Morin (from On Robert Antelme’s The Human Race):

A good many deportees’ accounts are heavily rhetorical, written in a stereotyped language[….] The Human Race was the first book – I would even say the only book – that stands firmly at the level of humanity, at the level of naked experience lived and expressed in the simplest, most adequate words there are.

Meanwhile, Vittorini announces his break with the Communist Party; Duras and Antelme will remain in the Party for two more years, after signing up, with Morin and Mascolo, to the Cercle de la commission des intellectuals, a circle of writers within the Party itself. But gradually, they are ostracised by the Party; they are found to be cynical and disrespectful. A bitter blow. Antelme, in particular, is depressed. But he, like Duras, like Mascolo, like Morin, will remain communists.

At rue Saint-Benoît, Italo Calvino and John Dos Passos are entertained as they pass through Paris. Duras’s The Sea Wall, is published in 1950; The Sailor from Gibaltra follows in 1952. Duras has a long affair with Jacques-Laurent Bost, a friend of de Beauvoir and Sartre, whom Duras never liked. Vittorini, Mascolo and others insist she ends the affair. He is bad for her, they think. In this period, Duras spends time with Maurice Blanchot, whose influence, I’m told (I haven’t read it), is strongly marked in The Sailor from Gibraltar. The Little Horses of Tarquinia is published in 1953.

Robert Antelme has already left (but when? And when did Mascolo move in permanently? After his mother died); he is now with Monique. Duras begins to drift from Vittorini.

Adler:

The apartment at 5 rue Saint-Benoît was Marguerite’s universe, filled with her family photos, her bunches of dried flowers, her beautiful shining furniture, her broken stove, her shawls draped over the backs of shabby armchairs, loose parquet, the smell of rose petals. She was a talented DIY enthusiast and she entertained several times a week. Marguerite was considered an intellectual and charming hostess.

Men would turn up alone just to flirt with her. She was careful to kindly their admiration and passion. The small world in which they lived encompassed a tiny area of Paris. A few hundred metres separated rue Saint-Benoît from the offices of Gallimard and the bistro Espérance, where Robert and Dionys often stopped for a drink after work. Head of rights and reproduction for Gallimard, Dionys was one of the six section leaders. Robert Antelme worked for another publishing firm, la Pléaide.

1951-60 Antelme works as a critic for the French radio television network. From 1951-1981, he is a reader for the Encyclopaedia of the Pléiade, directed by Queneau.

Mascolo publishes Le Communisme in 1953.

Duras is becoming a diva. Gallimard must send a messenger to collect her manuscripts. Louis-René des Forêts is the only editor she trusts. Duras wants financial independence from Mascolo.

In 1955, The Square is published. It is staged a year later.

Duras and Mascolo support the Algerians in hteir war of independence against France. Mascolo sets up the Committee of Intellectuals Against the Pursuit of the War in Algeria. André Breton comes to the first meeting. Claude Roy, an old friend of the rue Saint-Benoît community, is there too. The Committee is dissolved and replaced by the Committee of Revolutionary Intellectuals (Blanchot is a member).

There are arguments at rue Saint-Benoît about the Algerian situation. Morin and Roy are hesitant about the Algerian National Liberation Front who shot at the French. The group, which formerly had included Left and Right, begins to dissolve in the face of the attempt of the French and the British to occupy the nationalised Suez Canal and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

In 1957, Antelme’s The Human Race is reissued by Gallimard to great acclaim.

Mascolo and Duras are drifting apart. Mascolo has been having an affair all along; he is a womaniser. They split, but Mascolo will live at rue Saint-Benoît until 1967. Duras takes up with Gérard Jarlot, a journalist and novelist. Duras’s Moderato Cantabile, published in 1958, is dedicated to him (It is published by Minuit, not Gallimard; Alain Robbe-Grillet persuades Duras). Mascolo dislikes Jarlot, who does not visit rue Saint-Benoît often.

Mascolo launches le 14 Juillet, a magazine opposed to Gaullist power, in which he sees the risk of a French-style Francoism.

Adler:

At this time Blanchot was a very regular visitor to rue Saint-Benoît. He got the poet René Char involved in the magazine and wrote (for the second issue) a long political trace entitled ‘The Refusal’ (sic: it was ‘The Essential Perversion’ – Lars). One of the consequences of the magazine was to bring Dionys and Maurice Blanchot closer together.

Here is what Blanchot himself writes, when he remembers Mascolo in ‘For Friendship’:

I don’t think I exchanged many letters with D.M. (if I recall correctly, none at all until the publication of 14 Julliet). I was silently absent. Political responsibility and urgency are what in some sense made me return and look to Dionys with the certainty (or premonition) that he would provide an answer). On receipt of 14 Julliet I heard his call and responded to it with my resolute agreement.

Le 14 Juillet is a magazine unlike the others. Giacometti and Matta contribute works to sell in order to raise cash for its distribution.

Duras takes up journalism, interviewing Bataille in 1957. She no longer distributes her manuscripts to Antelme and Mascolo before she publishes them. She begins a sequence of great works, the books I love, and find frightening. In the early 1960s, she buys a house called Neauphle, a house in the country. She welcomes her friends to stay. She will later buy a flat in Trouville, by the sea.

Meanwhile, the ‘Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la geurre d’Algérie’, the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ is drafted at rue Saint-Benoît. Blanchot writes to Mascolo:

Insubordination, the actual word can appear limiting. We could add to it and say quite bluntly: the right to insubordination and desertion in the Algerian War. But I think insubordination should suffice. Insubordination means the refusal to carry out military duties. And on the basis of this, the principle can be expressed through different behaviour …’ (cited Adler, 233)

Here’s what Blanchot remembers years after:

Unable to tolerate what was intolerable in the events of that time (the Algerian War), I had telephoned D.M., saying: "We have to do something …" – "As it happens, we’re working on something". Inumerable meetings followed, on an almost daily basis, and the preparation of what would become, with the support of all concerned, the "Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la geurre d’Algérie"’.

From the ashes of Le 14 Juillet, a new dream is born: a Revue Internationale, with Italian, French and German editions. A lack of financial backers meant the magazine only came out in one edition, in Italian: Gulliver, as it was called, was published as a supplement to a newspaper.

Jarlot died in 1966. Vittorini died that year, too.

1968. I will write about the Events another day.