Emily L.: A novel about love and loss, steeped in alcohol and madness

Marguerite Duras, Emily L., Les Editions de Minuit, 1987

Marguerite Duras, Emily L., from French: Rama Ayalon, Ruth Library, 2023

This article is dedicated to Marguerite Duras’ novel, “Emilie L.”, which was first published in France in 1987, nine years before the author’s death. In 2008, the novel was reprinted in a paperback edition in France , and in 2023, this year, its Hebrew translation appears in the Ruth Library, from which I received the book. I read it, I was captivated, I wrote the review before you.

Marguerite Duras, writer, intellectual, playwright, screenwriter, and director, was born in 1914 near Saigon, in Indochina (now Vietnam) and died in 1996 in Paris. Her father died of illness shortly after they arrived in the then French colony, and she was left alone with her mother and two brothers and suffered severe abuse, both physical and verbal, from her mother and older brother. Despite her enormous success as a writer, she became addicted to bitter drops and required hospitalization.

With the modernism and originality of her work, Marguerite Duras renewed the novel genre and shook up the conventions of theater and cinema, thus becoming a cultural icon of the second half of the 20th century and still arousing interest. Marguerite Duras burst into consciousness with the autobiographical novel “Dam against the Pacific” (1950) in which a French widow, modeled after her mother, buys a plot of land that is flooded every year by the sea. The mother’s efforts to build dams come to nothing and she sinks into madness.

In 1984, Duras achieved huge success with the novel “The Lover,” a forbidden love story between a 15-16 year-old white girl and a 27-year-old Chinese man. It was a bestseller that was translated into thirty languages ​​and adapted into a film. In 1991, after Marguerite Duras heard of the man’s death, she returned with the title “The Lover from North China.” She wrote many other successful novels, adapted them into plays, wrote screenplays, directed films, and was a columnist for the newspaper “Liberation” (1).

Emily L. – Plot Summary

The narrator arrives with her partner in Killebeest, a small port town in Normandy. In the bar of the hotel where they are sitting, an English couple catches their eye. The man talks to the bar owner while his wife is silent most of the time. Slowly, the French couple learns the history of the English couple: the woman’s parents opposed their daughter’s marriage to a man they employed to maintain their ship, not of their standing; ten years of waiting for the couple in love until the parents’ death; a baby girl who died at birth; endless sailing on a yacht managed by the husband, “the captain.”

Stops here and there, such as in Killebeaf and the Isle of Wight, in their empty house, most of the time. At the age of 24, England wrote 19 poems that were published, without her knowledge, by her father and another unfinished poem after the baby's death. Because of her husband's opposition, England stopped writing. The housekeeper at Wight fell madly in love with her, but she preferred to keep their love in her heart rather than fulfill it. Fulfilled loves become unhappy. The keeper calls her “Emily L.” Emily is like Emily Dickinson and L is like El, “she” in French.

The French couple talks about the English couple and their own relationship, no less convoluted, and also about writing. They are both writers, the man writes almost nothing, the woman writes a lot, but will she be able to write about their love story? They also talk about it and their uncertain future.

Personal impression

“Emily L.” is a novel about love and loss, relationships, life, death, all of which is steeped in alcohol and madness, and especially about the way these themes are reflected in writing: a novel of poetic venom. Writing serves, among other things, to connect the different parts of life.

The speaker, a double of Marguerite Duras, sits with her companion, a double of Jan Andrea , on the terrace of a hotel in a port in Normandy. They look out at the landscape, a port, a river, water – which immediately reminded me of the Asian setting in the novels dedicated to the author’s early life.

A fragment of a conversation between the speaker and the man she is with illustrates the novel's prominent autobiographical nature and his engagement with the writing process:

At first you don't move, and then, from where I am, I see a smile in your eyes. You say: 

“You like this place. One day it will appear in a book – the expanse, the heat, the river.”

I don't answer. I don't know. I say that I don't know such things in advance, that I rarely even know them. (p. 8).

From the very beginning of the novel, the issue of poetic venom is presented, how and when a novel is born under the influence of a particular place. Inspired by it and here also by a particular person, Marguerite Duras's meeting with a drunk American who transformed her into England in the novel. In an atmosphere of a mighty water threat, standing and hanging in the air: 

And all the while, the railing, fragile and white, blocks access to the water. (p. 7).

The sentence quoted below seemed symbolic to me, a feeling that was confirmed later in the reading, during which I found more parallels between the external landscape and the protagonists' interiors, for example:

It (the sun, A.L.) was very low in the clear patch of sky, gazing at the views of the village and the harbor beneath the storm. The river mouth was illuminated all the way to the sea. And the stormy sky was caught in the wave of light. The storm stopped, no longer spreading across the sky, no longer breaking out, only persisting in its gloom, like a black stone canopy. We continued to look.

We looked at the white railing along the banks of the Seine, its ridiculous fineness compared to its purpose of preventing people from accessing the river. I said that for me, the whiteness of the railing along the water creates an infinite, abysmal problem. You said that the river is networked and held by the outline of the railing – the blue-black water against the milky white – like the blue holding the white in Nicolas de Staël’s latest paintings. (pp. 44-45).

The storm caught in the wave of light symbolizes the triumph of sanity, but the fragility of the white railing warns of a constant threat of collapse. Will madness remain confined within the limits set by reason? Note that the mention of Nicolas de Staël alludes to the temptation of suicide (the painter jumped to his death from the roof of his studio building in Antibes at the age of 41) and there are other references to other suicides in the novel. 

It is impossible not to think of the novel “Dam Against the Pacific Ocean,” in which the waters return and flood the meager plot of land bought by a poor widow in Indochina, the mother of a daughter and a son, a double of Marguerite Duras’s mother. The dams she builds against the destruction of her source of life collapse before her eyes, and she, like them, collapses and collapses into madness.

The vague hints of Asian background sharpen and become explicit when the speaker notices a group of fifteen men, similar to each other, with slanted eyes. And this group, located at the edge of the plaza, a place where no one should be, frightens her. 

The speaker sounds threatened, the Koreans, as she calls them, seem like murderers to her. The man she is with tries to calm her down, to neutralize her irrational fears (in this novel the speaker examines her relationship with him, an unusual connection between a young homosexual and a famous writer, who is 38 years older than him):

You too were afraid that the things of the night would reappear before my eyes. You were looking for an answer, I understood that about you too. (p. 9).

The speaker is dependent on the man she is with (not absolutely, as it later appears that she retains the right to make decisions for herself):

I always followed you, wherever you went. (p. 11).

The English couple

Then the strange couple, the speaker and the man with whom she is, notice that, while a strange couple that constitutes one entity, the woman is four years older than the man, first called “the captain” by the bar owner. Both couples live, each in their own way, love as despair. Tragedies from which they cannot escape weigh down the English man and woman, both drinkers, who spend most of their days on an endless voyage, fleeing, submissive to the circumstances of their lives that do them harm:

They sat on the high bar stools and hardly moved, their heads tilted forward, swaying. Slightly ridiculous. They looked a bit like plants or something, a kind of intermediate creatures, human plants that had just been born and were already dying, that had just begun to live and were already dying. Yes, innocent creatures punished for no wrong they had done. Trees. Trees deprived of soil and water, punished. Condemned to collapse like human beings, before our eyes. (pp. 12-13).

And at the same time, there is also magic in them. The sunburnt woman, in a child's clothes and shoes, shares similarities with the speaker. Like her, she wrote, albeit poems, like her, addicted to alcohol and the sea, like her, mourning the death of dogs. The woman's dependence on her partner recalls the relationship between the speaker and the man she is with (and here too I will add a reservation, it nevertheless has its own vitality):

It is obvious that it is over and that despite everything she is still here. That is equally obvious. And this is also obvious: if he ever leaves her, she will die on the spot. (p. 14).

The speaker in the novel seems to project her feelings and her own situation onto the English woman. And at that moment she tells the man with whom she decided to write their story. Because what is the novel if not a reflection of the reality of her life and what is the English couple if not a reflection of the French couple. In appearance but not copy because unlike the heroine in the novel, whose writing career came to an end, Marguerite Duras was an extremely prolific writer. And unlike the heroine, who lost a baby girl at birth and did not die, Marguerite Duras did lose a son in 1942, when she was married to Robert Antlem but gave birth to a son to her second husband, Dionys Mascolo. Marguerite Duras's only son, who will be distinguished for a long life, was named Jean Mascolo and this novel is dedicated to him.

Additional autobiographical details were implanted in the character of England, such as the author's alcoholism. Another detail is related to the opposition of England's wealthy parents to her marriage to the "Captain" due to class differences, and one cannot help but think of the opposition of the rich Chinese man's father in the novel "The Lover" to a marriage with a poor white woman and the opposition of the white woman's family to a marriage with a foreigner who they considered inferior.

And more. The description of England's clothes and shoes that are inappropriate for her adult age is similar to that of the girl in the novel "The Lover." England is described as having remained a child, and again it seems to me that Diras's desire to connect with the young woman who was in Indochina and to connect with herself, that is, to love herself, is a tendency that is opposed to the self-destruction that manifested itself in alcoholism and her tormented marital relationship:

We look out into the fading day. A convoy of oil tankers returns to the heart of the sea, drifting with the tide. You say:
“You’re alike, both of you. Always looking at the river, never laughing. It’s always moving, a resemblance between women who are not alike.”

I say I feel a kind of passion for her. You say you also feel a kind of need to embrace her, to embrace her to your body.
Her birdlike thinness. (pp. 89-90).

The English couple, who also sailed in Asia, seem to me like a kind of version of the girl and the Chinese man from “The Lover” if they had married against the opposition of their families.

Poetic Poison and Seasonal Loves

In the Poetic Venom section at the beginning of the book (pp. 15-19), the speaker says that writing allows us to go back in time, to that primordial time before the story came into being, to erase what hurts, to wonder whether it was or was not. And for us, readers interested in Marguerite Duras, this section (and there are more such literary manifestos later and at the end) allows us to grasp a little of the abysmal complexity of the relationship between the young, unknown man and the older, famous writer, who could have been his mother. According to the dialogue between them, presented in the novel, they help each other but also torment each other (and torment themselves at the same time) in endless power games. These characteristics can also be found in the relationship of the English couple. 

It is not easy, for me, in any case, to read about these tortured and tormented loves, to enter the last years of Marguerite Duras's life, but her unique style stands on its own and brings pleasure even in a place of despair, let alone a place of joy:

Kilbef begins the moment you reach the chalk plateau. Each bend takes you out of the darkness of the forest into a patch bathed in sunlight – clearings that were created in the damp forest for the benefit of the cattle herds in the bad years. Then you leave the light and return to the darkness, and your heart screams with joy because here too summer begins with the alternation of darkness and light. With the babbling of water. In the marshes watered by streams, fertile as gardens. Right here, in the stronghold of the fields and gray elms, in the area of ​​the overflowing estuary, the daily floods surge. The young river was already here. The sea swept into it the salt and fresh water alike. The sea polished the walls. And the rush of the waves in the wind who can describe in words? (pp. 20-21).

A paragraph that echoes the great myths of creation, expressed in the Bible (2) and in other cultures. The light and the dark, the sweet and the salty, the fertile swamps, the forests that were created, the union of opposites from which the main stream emerged, which fertilized the universe (the gardens, the meadows) created from chaos (the forest, the sea infested with monsters), that happiness that was at the beginning of things – descriptions that soften a little the despair and atmosphere of the end, which dominate the novel:

We look at them. These people, all at once before us. They come from an immeasurably vast distance. They have reached the end of their last journey, the end of life. It is evident, it is as clear as day. Here, in the humility of the spirit before death, these travelers are given to us. (p. 22).

And the threat of the end of the universe, not just of the mortals who inhabit it, takes on varying degrees of reality, in explicit words and symbols, throughout the novel, for example: 

“Death will be Japanese. The death of the world. It will come from Korea. That’s what I think. Maybe you’ll still get to see it in action.”

You said it was possible. (p. 11).

Wait a minute, isn't Malaysia a place with so many islands that it looks like a continent on a map... how to say... that was blown to pieces by an explosion? The captain said: 

That's it. That's exactly what happened. The volcanoes in the sea caused it. On the map you see plenty of small islands scattered all over the Pacific Ocean. Yes, that's what it is, …The Pacific, an ocean full of volcanoes and sharks… That's what the Pacific Ocean is… (p. 22).

The Pacific Ocean is full of volcanoes and sharks, what an irony! A symbol, of course, of the subconscious. Memories of the speaker's past in Siam – her childhood in the colonies, the horrors, the alcohol – some of which were repressed and forgotten and some of which were already engraved in previous books, rise and float, liable to return. The man she is with has no connection to them, has no idea about them, and perhaps does not want her to deal with them again. And is also seemingly indifferent to her plan to write about their love story.

At this point, the French couple resembles the English couple in which the husband did not understand his wife's poems and saw them as a threat to his existence, a betrayal of her name (3). This is the point at which their love withered and they became strangers to each other and to themselves. She too saw her husband's behavior as betrayal and from that moment on their relationship became impossible, hopeless, together and not together, a futile sailing across the water, futile wanderings interrupted by stopovers in bars and in their abandoned house on the Isle of Wight. 

The book was probably written both to shed some light on the speaker's relationship with her last companion and to connect the different periods of her life. Her life is like being blown up, dismembered, islands of islands, the tears are jarring and distressing, and the writing tries to bridge them in an attempt to turn them into a single whole.

And the plot is deep and branching, the reader learns why the English couple chose to leave their home and sail on the water, a second man comes unexpectedly to love the English poet, but here too the love is tormented, especially on his part, and is experienced from a distance after a single touch of lips. The second man, unlike her husband, although from a lower class than her, like him, knows how to appreciate her poems, although without understanding them. 

The song that was thrown into the fire

At the heart of the novel is an unfinished poem written by England, “A Winter’s Day Twilight,” which is very similar to a poem by Emily Dickinson (4). In the poem, the Englishwoman, whose nickname will be given to her by her housekeeper will be Emily L., expresses the heartbreaking pain over the death of her daughter while recreating the atmosphere of that tragic day, bathed in blood-soaked light. The main part of the poem tells of the rays of the winter sun that penetrate the nave of a cathedral and the light reaches down to the floor, which is as dark as night. The rays of the sun cut like celestial daggers but without leaving any visible mark or scar, only “an internal difference in the field of meanings” (pp. 57-59). The husband made a very serious mistake when he threw the poem into the fire, in his anger that this poem and the rest of his wife’s poems indicate, as it were, that he has no existence in her life because he is not mentioned in them (5). 

Why Emily L.

The novel will undoubtedly interest veteran readers of the great writer, but it will also be very suitable, in my opinion, for those who have never read it or those who have only read “The Lover.” This is because it is quite easy to read in terms of understanding the content, compared to her other books.

The more I read, the more it dawned on me how much it sheds light on the events that shaped Marguerite Duras' personality, how complex it is, and the more I admired the unique yet understandable writing. I read the novel in French but at the same time glanced at Hebrew, and Rama Ayalon's translation conveys Marguerite Duras' style in the best possible way.

This book is a key to the author's world, for beginners and advanced readers. A deep novel, full of symbols, full of layers, and the more I think about it, the more I find in it more and more wells and explanations.

Comments

(1) For a detailed article on Marguerite Duras, I recommend this article

(2) Orna Lieberman, Rivers: From the River of Eden to the Temple Stream, on the Imago website, May 5, 2015

(3) A feminist interpretation can be read in this article

(4) The poem and a brief analysis of it can be read at this link

(5) To deepen the theme of lack of communication and to understand the novel in general, I recommend this article to French readers.

Jean Arrouye, l'étrangeté dans Emily L, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013

Did you like the article? If so, you are welcome to read the following related articles:

On the novel “The Little Horses of Tarquinia” by Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras's Last Lover

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