The Taneran Family
This family is composed of the father and the mother (already advanced in age), of two sons and one daughter. The eldest of the brothers, Jacques is a mawkish lout, cowardly and spiteful; the younger one remains uncommunicative; Maud, the daughter, romantic, passionate, vindictive, who feels unloved or forsaken, in any case misunderstood, goes to live for a few weeks with a man she has met. Her mother comes to fetch her, does not upbraid her too much. The mother cares above all for her elder son, and, perhaps because Maud is fallen and no longer superior to Jacques, she does not blame Maud for this transgression. Maud, intending to show herself worthy of the baseness one attributes to her, denounces her brother to the police for a scam of fake bills of exchange.{3}
Such was the less-than-glowing reader’s report on the manuscript for Gallimard, written by Marcel Arland, a distinguished writer and winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1929 for L’Ordre, a novel about another dysfunctional family in provincial France between the two wars.
Like so many first novels, The Impudent Ones is partly autobiographical. The portrait of the divided Taneran family found in this book also foreshadows the one the author would paint later in works such as Whole Days in the Trees and The Lover. Freely mixing fiction and reality, the family portrait is drawn here through the subjective memory of an aspiring writer trying to come to terms with an emotionally charged adolescence.{4} To write her novel, Marguerite Duras drew direct inspiration from events that had affected her and her family during the year they spent in France in 1931–32, and many details suggest that the story takes place in the early 1930s.
The main characters seem to have been modeled on the author herself, as well as on her immediate relatives. Under the English-sounding name of Maud Grant, the anguished heroine at the center of the story brings to mind a young Marguerite Donnadieu, only taller and more self-assured than she was at the time. In the same way, Mrs. Grant-Taneran was fashioned after her own mother, like her a widow with the first name Marie, and also advanced in age (Mrs. Donnadieu was then fifty-four, going on fifty-five).
Jacques, the dissolute troublemaker, is easily identified as a version of Pierre Donnadieu, Marguerite’s “hated” older brother. Although only four year her senior, he is made to be more contemptible in the novel by being past forty and still without any occupation or sense of purpose (Maud decries her brother’s “shameless desire… to live the way he wanted to”). The author’s late father was brought back to life under the insipid figure of Mr. Taneran, Mrs. Grant’s second husband, a civil servant who “at one time… had had a respectable career teaching natural sciences at the high school in Auch,” where he met his wife. Henri, the son they had together, can be viewed as a substitute for Paul Donnadieu, the author’s second brother, or as a salute to Jacques Donnadieu, one of her half brothers, to whom the novel is dedicated.{5}
The settings of Les impudents, a residential suburb of the French capital and a village in the southwestern part of the country, are versions, under altered names, of places where the author lived when she came back to France as a child and then again for a few weeks as an adolescent in 1931. In the opening chapter, the apartment occupied by the Grant-Taneran family, the septième from which Maud contemplates a landscape extending to “the somber streak of the hills of Sèvres,” appears to be the very same seventh-floor apartment her mother rented in 1931 in a new art-deco building still standing today in its gleaming whiteness at 16, avenue Victor-Hugo, in Vanves, west of Paris. In the novel, walking through the streets of Clamart (Vanves), she can see from a distance “the huge white hulk of the building in which they lived.” Taking us on a tour of the apartment, the narrator takes care to point out the Henri II sideboard in their dining room (for many French readers, a sure sign of petitbourgeois taste), lest we think of the family as fashion-minded sophisticates.
A Bourgeois Drama
Mrs. Grant-Taneran may be a petit-bourgeois who cooks her own meals (by contrast, in 1931, Mrs. Donnadieu brought her cook with her to Paris from Indochina), but the mother in The Impudent Ones owns land in the southwest, an estate she presumably acquired with the savings of her first husband, a tax collector (like the author’s father-in-law). With some major changes in the chronology and the nature of the autobiographical events that inspired it, the story unfolds around that prized Uderan estate, “located in the southwest Lot, in the rough and unpopulated part of Upper Quercy, on the edge of Dordogne and Lot-et-Garonne.”
With some minor geographical realignments, one can easily make the short trip on a map to the estate Marguerite Duras’s father bought a few weeks before he died unexpectedly in France in 1921, at age forty-nine, during a medical leave of absence. This is the rural environment where, between the ages of eight and ten, his daughter spent two years with her mother and her two brothers, and which the author would evoke in vivid detail in The Impudent Ones. Le domaine de Platier (its real name) originally comprised forty-five acres of woods, vineyards, orchards, meadows, and a tobacco plantation, situated near the small village of Pardaillan (The Pardal in the novel), a few kilometers east of the historical hill-town of Duras (Ostel in the novel)—the town from which Marguerite later took her nom de plume.
When Marguerite Duras returned to France with her mother and her brother Paul in the spring of 1931 (Pierre was by then living in Paris), the maison de maître in which they had previously lived had been emptied of its furniture and unoccupied for several years.{6} As it was now unhabitable, they had to take board and lodgings with neighbors for a few weeks while Marie Donnadieu organized the sale of the estate, which included an old farmhouse in the back of the main dwelling that housed a sharecropping couple and their daughter, still tending the land for the absentee owner.
These characters are all made to play a part in The Impudent Ones—the neighbors as the Pecresse family, the tenant farmers as the Dedde family. The Pecresses would not mind marrying their son to their guest’s daughter (thus acquiring a stake in the estate), but they are kept firmly in their assigned rank on the social ladder. The narrator takes pains to explain: “Even if the Grant-Tanerans were only bourgeois folk without distinction, Uderan, their land, conferred on them a kind of nobility.” Thus, while Maud is addressed as Mademoiselle Grant, or “la Demoiselle” and her mother as Madame, or Madame Grant-Taneran, the neighbors by contrast are referred to by the less respectful La Pécresse, la mère Pécresse, Le Pére Pécresse, le jeune Pécresse; and the tenant farmers as La Dedde, le père Dedde, la fille Dedde—the way people in the countryside called each other at the time.
Many of the inhabitants of Pardaillan figure in the novel as extras, vividly rendered through the author’s observant eye and ear for popular parlance (“in the thick dialect of the Dordogne”). Lording over the locals, Mrs. Grant-Taneran gives a grand diner for the villagers in her dilapidated mansion. The guests are seated according to rank, and what ensues is a small comedy of manners in the spirit of Gustave Flaubert or Guy de Maupassant.