Do you know as it happens that a particular event is the last of its kind, that henceforward it will harden itself into a kind of icon of a relationship? Everything is there, if you think about it. Everything is concentrated there, and in the future that’s how it will sum itself up, in the event that becomes the last, even if it is not the last.
So the last day with X., even if it was not the last: the Bacon exhibition in a white roomed studio, then to the London Review of Books bookstore for how long? Did I persuade her not to buy the three volume Marothy? But she bought more Bernhard, I remember that. ‘I remember’: and isn’t it difficult to become a kind of archive, to contain more, in memory, than lives in the present?
It’s very early. I woke three times in the night. It’s the beer, I thought to myself. The bottle of Leffe from Londis. ‘A man who drinks becomes interplanetary’, writes Duras. Several times, she took the cure. Her liver was ruined. If she drank anymore, she’d -. But she still drank, she and Yann Andrea – her lover, her non-lover, then in the 1980s, after giving up filmmaking and retreating to write a series of books.
He met her at a book signing or somesuch; he wrote a few letters – and eventually, she replied. And then he visited her, a young gay man. They were lovers for a time – she was in her 70s now – but he would still go out to the hotels to find men. They drank together all night, all day. He soon caught up with her. They were both alcoholics, both wrecking their livers.
I think of them often, not, no doubt as they were, but as I imagine them to have been. Duras writing her journal of the year 1980; The Atlantic Man; The Slut of the Normany Coast; The Malady of Death: should I call them absolute books? And they drank, and walked on the beach, and she wrote, and he went out to pick up men.
They rowed – screamed at each other. Then, reconciliation. Departures and returns. She had to take the cure; she took it more than once. And she wrote, she continued to write, discovering a kind of absolute idiom, an absolute book. Only she could write it.
We have to write what only we can write, I tell W. sometimes. What can we do that no one else can? But who is this ‘we’ – he and I? Each of us, separately? Or more of us – more like us? ‘Develop your legitimate madness’: who wrote that? Nin? I took her books, along with Henry Miller’s, to Oxfam a long time ago.
Your legitimate madness: Sebald, to the last, considered himself a scholar first, a writer second. Austerlitz, of course, is a terrible book – self-consciously grand, inflated, grotesquely exaggerating the tropes that made his earlier books so wonderful: the narrator who wanders, who comes close to madness, the presence of ghosts, of great events … And the book is incessant, immodest; it rambles without cease.
Remember, instead, the story of Ambros in The Emigrants – remember as his journal writings release themselves from the narrator’s account of his life and mental collapse. The writings from his journal, that he wrote when still young, accompanying his master through the Middle East. Ah, lightness itself, and full of youth.
Lightness like Duras’s account of the year 1980, her published diary, that lifted itself into the air of Neauphle like a seabird. Will there have been one time in my life that lifted itself thus? A stream of diary entries, or letters, or posts?
Sometimes I think nothing has been left to chance in my life – there’s no drifting. When was the last time a friend, passing, knocked on my door? Not once over five years; and barely before then. Besides, I wouldn’t welcome it. I like to move undisturbed from one room to another.
Staying at Blah-feme’s during the renovations, I once woke and went out to the toilet, past a sleeping Norn, and found the front door open. It was late – or was it early? The front door was open. I thought: this is like a dream. And then: Blah-feme’s flat has entered my unconscious, and this is how I will remember it, and these days, when, rising early, we would sit at the table and drink capuccinos, before forming our little peloton to head to work.
It’s been a long time since I lived with others. Five years – and wasn’t it unbearable, then? Didn’t R. and I go out to the garage and stare back at our big house, thinking, why are we here?, why do we live here? R. still phones, always drunk. I bought a caller ID phone so I know not to answer him.
Drunk, he has great plans for us. We’re very funny, he says, we should write comedy together, he says. He might join the Foreign Legion, he tells me. This is his last year – you have to be under 40 to join. But it would sort him out, he says, and besides, he would learn French. They’d give you a new identity, too. R. could leave his debts behind. When he gets drunker still, R. tells me I haven’t lived, that he’s lived and I have not. I should write about his experiences, not mine, says R.
I moved into his room after he’d left in a hurry, being kicked out, and not for the first or last time, for drinking. I found a play he’d been writing. He admired the Beats; he left Kerouac’s books, too, in that room. We used to quote favourite lines from Burroughs at one another. Drinking, taking drugs – it was his Beat adventure. R. was an adventurer, he told me; he was truly alive. He addicted himself to crack so he could descend into the underworld. ‘It’s what Burroughs would have done’, he told me.
Meanwhile, Duras and Yann Andrea are drinking. She calls him Yann Andrea Steiner now – another Steiner, another character in her fiction. She writes – what is she writing? She collected some old photographs and decided to write a commentary. So The Lover was born. That’s how it came together – as a kind of commentary.
Once, in a student house, on a visit to the careers service of my old university, a friend of a friend quoted the whole first page of The Lover from memory. I remember two phrases: ‘one day, when I was already old’, and ‘ravaged’. That’s what he quoted, drinking tea in his dark room.
It’s not so early anymore. I should be writing my review. Should be doing anything else but writing here. But I need to wake up – to wake myself up, and there is a kind of writing that does that. Tilt your head back, says my brother-in-law. It’s good for you to look up at the sky. Tilt it up then; look up: is the dawn coming? Not yet; soon.
Sometimes I imagine my unconscious is full of rooms, like Doom, or like Quake. Pass from one to the other. That room opens onto that one, unexpectedly. Doesn’t the artist’s room in The Trial open unexpectedly on the court? And I remember Wolfe’s Peace, too – the ghost awoken in a vast house whose doors open into rooms of his past: the orange juice factory, the party at which he plays at Indians with his mother, the room beyond which he knows the Christmas tree is, burning by itself. Open the door, I tell myself. But it is already open, like Blah-feme’s front door, letting in the orange light from the streetlights.
Duras died in her Paris flat, I think. At least that’s where she used to receive her biographer. Monique Antelme is the last of them, the writers who used to gather at the rue Saint-Benoit. Blanchot had returned from the South; Mascolo and Antelme were already at work on le 14 Julliet, then came the drafting of the Manifesto of the 121 …
This morning I tell myself I stand at the end of a whole history, that the door has opened onto a final room. Everything’s been written; that world, the literary one, is finished. Pick over the remains, the memoirs. That there are some who can link you to the past: this is marvellous. That there are others, like you, who remember – this, too, is important, but in the end, your knowledge is for nothing, and you will die like one who is the last speaker of a language, with no one to understand you.
It was over, the literary dream drained away, when Duras moved back to her apartment to Paris and then – as I learnt from the only edition of Le Monde I ever bought – died. Back to the rue Saint-Benoit, no. 5, where Merleau-Ponty used to visit, and Lacan; where she would prepare ‘steak a la Blanchot’ for him to eat very slowly (he was always ill – that photograph of him as a young man, sitting with Levinas on the back of a car already has him with a cane). Duras, who would drink with the others every night.
Didn’t I see, in Paris, the last time I visited (many years ago), a Duras cookbook? How funny! Her son published it, I think – the one they nicknamed Outa, the mite., and whom she spoke about in the interview attached to the English edition of Destroy, She Said, as belonging to a new, blank generation who cared nothing for the future. She placed all her hopes in them, the new generation, but what happened?
Picture it: Duras, between Blanchot and Leiris, their arms joined, during the Events of May 1968. Later, Leiris would condemn Blanchot for playing revolution in his journals. How indiscreet! How disrespectful! But I have always admired Leiris for the pictures of himself he allowed to circulate. An uncalm man, a man disturbed: yes, I like him very much, this rich man, this Sunday writer (he only had one day a week, he said, on which he had time to write.)
I think the dawn is coming. Open the curtains: is that the dawn? Outside, the big box that contains a dishwasher delivered to me in error. Should I sell it on, or let it rot there, outside. I’d asked B and Q to pick it up, they’d send delivery men, they said, but I waited a whole Wednesday in vain, and in the end crossly pushed it outside, scratching my wooden floor as I did so. But staying in, didn’t I discovered the new joy of my flat, which I used to leave as early as I could in the morning, even at weekends, even on Sunday, to work, instead, in the office?
A whole life with X. finished in the summer. John Sandoe books, the London Review of Books bookshop – and World’s End bookshop at the bottom of the King’s Road. I think we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at the Globe the last time I was down – too much of a pantomime, played for laughs, X. and I standing stiff-legged among the groundlings.
Isn’t that where Corin Redgrave stood when he came to the Globe? Where else? Where else would he stand? Was it a year before that we went to the last night of his King Lear by chance? And I remember cycling across London Bridge in the rain to see Kevin Spacey as Richard III. But that life is over; the door is closed, althoughI think it stands slightly ajar in my dreams, like the door at Blah-feme’s house.
R. rang twice last night. Neither time did I answer. How loudly the phone rang! But it was his number that showed up on the caller ID. Doesn’t he understand that while he drinks, he belongs to the past. The door is closed; I’m pushing it against him.
‘In Paris’: and that, too, was another life. I remember looking for the bookshop, Des Femmes, to see Cixous books all lined up. It was closed, though we took a long time to find it. The bookshop by the Sorbonne, that was the best. But I didn’t belong in Paris, just as I didn’t belong in London.
Another life. Did I know it then? Did I know it was an episode? Your affairs are like novellas, David used to tell me. And I thought, no, like recits – events that never quite seemed to happen, to complete themselves. That turned around a moment that could never come into the present.
Affairs – that could never be lived in the present, leaving memories oddly stranded, without context. The Rodin museum. The Picasso museum; his glorious ceramics. The day out at Versailles; it was my birthday that day; I had turned 30, and I couldn’t accommodate the size of the gardens – were those dots people? How far, then, did the water stretch?
Later, we walked through the woods, and I thought of the House Absolute in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: a House whose rooms opened to the outside, a House so vast, so ancient, that huntsmen pursued their prey through its corridors. But did I know it was only an episode – that that day, like so many others, would set itself back in my memory, as though it were behind glass? But an episode that did not complete itself, and set out to look for writing, like a hunter searching for its prey.
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