By the 1970, our protagonists are now scattered. Duras, who is in her mid 50s, has three properties, and employs staff. As we shall see, Blanchot, in his early 60s, is debilitated by illness. Mascolo … I don’t know what he was up to. Antelme would also fall severely ill. But they would continue to follow paths that traversed rue Saint-Benoît.
Duras
In 1975, Duras starts drinking heavily again. She drinks cheap wine, coughs up blood and drinks more. This is at Neauphile. She is taken to hospital in 1976 for five weeks, but when she left, she started drinking again. She writes the play Eden Cinema in 1977. She travels to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, showing her films. But she is still drinking heavily. She makes films, makes short films from offprints of longer films …
In 1979, she meets Yann. Now something new begins. Another great leap, another stream of wonderful books. She is famous. Hundreds of letters arrive at Saint-Benoit. She reads but does not answer them. All except for those of a student at Caen. She began to wait for them. She gives a talk at Caen. At two in the morning, Yann introduces himself. Then she writes to him. It is now 1980. She is severly depressed and drinking heavily. She spends two months in hospital; she writes to Yann again when she returns to Neauphle. She stops drinking for 6 months. Now she has friends to stay again. In this period, Serge Daney records his conversations with her, she rewrites them, to produce a volume published as Green Eyes. Duras always writes great 'occasional' writings. I should also mention the splendid book of dialogues with Michelle Portre from 1976, called – what is it called? Then there is Practicalities, which is a book full of ittle essays, recipes, notes on incomplete projects, rather like a literary blog. The collected volume of journalism, Outside, is good too.
Yann telephones in September 1980. She gives him the surname Andréa. He is happy - full of laughter and talk. He is unassuming, patient, kind. She will tell the story of their meeting herself in Yann Andréa Steiner, published much later. He stays for days. Yann returns. He stays. She will write about the impossibility of loving. This is not by chance – Yann is homosexual. But they stay together, they drink heavily. He disappears from time to time, but returns. She writes to him in July 1982:
The passion that binds us will last as long as I love and for the length of the life that to you looks long. Nothing will be any good. We can expect nothing from one another, no children, no future … You are gay and we love each other … Nothing will be any good. There’s no point you going back to doing the rounds of the Tuileries, to back-rooms, to carriage entrances, to circling the place Saint-Martin. Nothing will be any good. You will llove me for the rest of your life. Because I shall be dead long before you, in a very few years, and because the huge age gap between us reassures you and neutralises your fear of facing a woman.
Mitterand, the friend who slept in the backroom at Saint-Benoit, is elected President of France in 1981. Duras is drinking, drinking. Yann looks after her. She drinks 6-8 litres of wine a day, and writes The Malady of Death. She drinks, vomits, drinks again. She goes for alcohol treatments. She hallucinates. She has visions. She looks like a tramp.
Adler:
Michelle Porte went to visit her. Physically she thought she looked well, but all she could talk about was the hallucinations she kept having, which were on the increase. She really could see things: monsters, mythical nimals – it was like hearing her innermost imagination speak. Each vision was an opportunity for embellishment, an abandonment to words she found beautiful ,Michelle Portre spent an afternoon listening to the story of a blue fish beached on the carpet.
But she is tough; the hallucinations cease. She corrects the proofs of The Malady of Death and plans a stage version. Peter Handke makes a film of it which she doesn’t like. Blanchot writes an extraordinary commentary on the text in The Unavowable Community, but she doesn’t like that either. It is in this text, though, that Blanchot celebrates the Manifesto of the 121, May 1968 ... part of the text was written in response to Jean-Luc Nancy's essay 'The Workless Community', in which Nancy argues that Blanchot, like Benjamin, was unable to sufficiently develop his notion of communism ... Does that mean it is up to Nancy? No - Blanchot writes, The Unavowable Community. But it is an oblique, difficult text ... is it developed? thematic? Then, in this period, there is an attack on Bataille's reputation from Boris Souvarine, his former colleague from the radical left in the 1930s. Intellectuals in Question is a response to Bataille's accusers, but also, like The Unavowable Community, to those who would take Blanchot's friendship with Levinas too lightly. This, in the end, I think, is what separates him from the community at rue Saint-Benoît, and it is why a detour through the work of Levinas is necessary to follow the winding course of Blanchot's own thought.
Perhaps Duras, too, feels Bataille is under attack. She claims in a television interview that Bataille and Blanchot are the writers she esteems most highly.
Duras’s friends are young men. She insults Yann in front of her friends. He is calm. He can take it. He retreats to listen to Schubert. He still disappears from time to time. How difficult it must be to be dependent on Duras!
She writes the beststeller, The Lover. A year later she discovers the diaries she wrote during the way, concerning Antelme’s deportation. Or did she? Here is what Paul Otchkosky-Laurens recalls:
One day she phoned me and said, ‘Come over, I’ve found something incredible’. Evidently extremely moved, she showed me an exercise book that was falling apart. The pages were covered in writing. But the pages were torn and the writing faded. Nothing has been changed since the end of the war.
But Duras had already published part of the diaries anonymously in 1976. When she publishes her account of life in the wake of her then-husband’s deportation and his return as La Douleur, she dedicates it, in part, to his son. Monique Antelme does not acknowledge the volume Duras sends her. The book is rejected by Antelme and others. Mascolo writes, ‘Many things described in La Douleur are true. Some of them are exaggerated’. Mitterand expresses reservations.
Yet more films … the Villemin scandal. Duras wins more awards, investing prize money in property. She is often on television. She is famous, famous. She is something of an egomaniac. She is rich, she has staff.
In 1990, the book only a famous author would be allowed to write: The Lover from North China. It was subjected to savage cuts by the publsiers.
Only a few years left. She waits calmly for death, according to Adler, who knew her well in this period.
What I remember most about her, apart from her writing [..] was the gentleness of her presence, the way she had of taking me in her arms, of saying, as I left, ‘Take care of yourself’.
I wasn’t feeling particularly relaxed as I rang at the door of the rue Saint-Benoit [I get the impression this was around 1986 – Lars]. Duras intimidated me. Her voice, her style, her outbursts, all had contributed to creating a Duras legend where a rather unhealthy interest in the person vied with admiration for the writer. I soon realised I had been quite wrong. The famous author opened the door, led me into the kitchen and made coffee. The first thing that struck me about her was the sparkle in her eyes and her tremendous laughing energy. That impression was to stay with me. Her closest friends from her different lives […] all said, when they talked about her, that what they most remembered of Marguerite was her laughter. That mischievous, childish laughter, that communicative laughter of friendship, that mocking, indeed sometimes spiteful laughter.
She writes (dictates) No More …
28th February 1995: Duras is dead. I bought Le Monde by chance that day. The first and last time I bought it. What did I discover? Duras was dead.
Blanchot
Between 1970 and 1973, Blanchot is in poor health, and is hospitalised. From 1970 onwards, he is no longer able to meet his friends regularly; he writes to tell them he will be unable to see them in January 1972. In 1972, he gives up his apartment in la rue Madame – he is no longer able to cope with the stairs - for a new apartment in rue Jean-Bart. He gives out his address and phone number only to a few friends. He spends a lot of time with his brother René and his sister-in-law Anna who live in a grand house near Versailles. Little by little, he will abandon his Paris residence altogether, moving into the house at Versailles.
Le Pas au-delà appears in 1973; The Writing of the Disaster in 1980. What can I write about these books? They are inexhaustible. We haven't begun reading them.
1976 – Gramma devote a double issue to Blanchot. A complete bibliography reveals the extent of his prewar journalism. Blanchot’s early career is discussed in the articles. Michael Holland and Patrick Rousseau are the editors. In 1982, Jeffrey Mehlman’s article on Blanchot’s early journalism appears in Tel Quel. Accompanies Todorov's slurs in an article, originally publised in 1979, but gathered in Critique of the Critics, published in 1982.
Blanchot remains extremely ill. His brother René dies of cancer in 1978. A few days later (January 23rd), Denise Rollin dies at 71.
In 1983, Antelme is rendered hemiplegic through a stroke during surgery. He will live until his death in a hospital, confined to bed, speaking only with great difficulty.
From 1983 onwards, Blanchot begins to correspond less, and to use the telephone less frequently. He is still ill – his eyesight is weakening, his hands tremble, he is losing his voice ... sometimes, he is able to write. Short texts, denser, more allusive, issuing from arguments he has made elsewhere, they are inexhaustible. How difficult they are to get hold of!
1987, Farias’s book on Heidegger begins the ‘Heidegger Affair’. Blanchot writes a letter, ‘Thinking the Apocalypse’, published in Le Nouvel Observateur, which supports Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Art and Politics.
1989, Blanchot in a letter to Bernard-Henri Lévy: ‘today I think of nothing other than Auschwitz’.
In 1993, Blanchot contributes ‘For Friendship’, a prologue to Mascolo’s A la recherché d’un communisme de pensée.
In 1994, Blanchot publishes ‘The Instant of my Death’. Derrida (poorly translated):
In the first words of the letter which accompanied the sending by The Instant of my death, July 20, 1994, marking the return or the repetition of the anniversaries: "July 20, fifty years since I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death. 25 years ago, we put our steps on the moon."
Derrida also notes, in the same obituary:
Regularly, one or twice per year, I telephoned him and sent him a postcard of the village of Eze [the village where Blanchot lived during the 1950s - Lars]. However each time, I addressed an old postcard to him from before the war after having chosen it in a shop in the lanes of this old village of Eze where Blanchot, had remained and undoubtedly crossed the path of Nietzsche [...] each time, therefore, as the years passed, I hardly dared to hope, while murmuring that I will still have time to send other postcards to him with same ritualistic enthusiasm, affectionately and a little superstitiously.
So many deaths. Antelme dies on the 26th October 1990.
Joe Downing:
I find that there is a noun missing from the French language. Robert was a voluptuary. This man, who had known every privation, the worst possible fears and humiliations, loved good cooking, great wines, conversation, friendship, travel. And he revered women[….] He loved to laugh and to make others laugh, and he didn’t hold back.
Robert would not have been Robert without Monique – who is a flame, as clear and transparent as crystal; like Robert, indignant at life’s many injustices; like Robert, lover of the good ,life, good company, a good table, good wine; like Robert, filled with a thirst to know, to understand, curious about everything. They had this loveliest gift of fate: perfect complicity as a couple.
Downing would visit Antelme in hospital, and take him, in his wheelchair, to the Rodin museum.
Blanchot's little text on Antelme, 'The Watched Over Night' is the last piece, I believe, that he wrote.
In 1997, Mascolo dies.
In 2003, Blanchot dies.
Of the community, Monique Antelme remains. Denise Rollin's son wrote a book in which he quoted letters from Blanchot in 1997. Presumably there's more to come. Blanchot's political writings, from 1958 onwards, are finally going to be published in one volume in France.
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