In another parallel to the author’s life, the reader is informed at the beginning of the story that “Jacques had just lost his wife… She had died that very day following a car accident.” In real life, before his mother and siblings arrived in France in 1931, Pierre Donnadieu, then nearing twenty-one, had been living in Paris with a wealthy woman who died in a car accident—a possible suicide.
The lover that Maud takes up when the family relocates to their summer estate appears to be modeled on Jean Lagrolet, the handsome scion of an upper-middle-class family, whom Marguerite Duras met at the Sorbonne and dated for two years in the 1930s. The public scandal at the heart of the novel, loss of prestige for Maud’s family, and secret pregnancy that ultimately shatters the clan also seem to have been inspired by real-life events. In 1932, at the age of eighteen, Marguerite Duras was dating one of her schoolmates from the private establishment she was attending—the son of a prominent family of lawyers—and became pregnant. Contrary to the loveless but conventional ending in the novel, however, no wedding was celebrated. A discreet abortion was arranged, which the author would reveal much later in her career.{7}
Literary Influences
In his assessment of the novel for Gallimard, Marcel Arland wrote: “It is very awkward, rather badly put together, confused… rudimentary, sometimes incoherent—but there is here a rather strange atmosphere (à la Mauriac and Wuthering Heights), a certain grasp of family turmoil, of cruelty, of moral degradation.”{8}
That Marguerite Duras was influenced by François Mauriac there is little doubt. She was an avid reader, fully cognizant of the prevailing trends in French fiction between the two wars. While studying law at the Sorbonne, she audited public classes on contemporary literature given by Fortunat Strowski, an eminent specialist who coincidentally had been Mauriac’s teacher at the University of Bordeaux before World War I. At the time she was writing The Impudent Ones, Mauriac had become one of the most eminent French novelists (he was elected to the prestigious Académie française in 1933). His stories of divided and secretive provincial families from the grande bourgeoisie, such as Thérèse Desqueyroux, published in 1927, and Le noeud de vipères, published in 1932, inspired legions of aspiring writers at odds with their bourgeois environment. Mauriac himself was an admirer of Paul Bourget, the late nineteenth-century author of celebrated romans psychologiques set in upper-middle-class families, including a series of novels purporting to analyze “women’s emotions.” (Bourget was supposedly Henry James’s favorite French writer.)
In the late 1930s, the future Marguerite Duras was a regular at the Mathurins, the Paris theater directed by Georges and Ludmilla Pitoëff, where she saw Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Chekhov’s The Seagull. In her novel, Maud is a romantic young woman: “If he [Durieux] loved her, one day he would devote all his moments, his leisure time, to her.” The man she compromises herself with happens to be a gentleman who tells her, “I think it would be more fitting on my part to speak to your mother.” Maud may have loved him at the beginning of their affair, but, like Nora in A Doll’s House or Thérèse Desqueyroux, she ends up locked in a loveless marriage, victim of the social conventions of her milieu. Like Mauriac’s grands bourgeois, her mother puts respectability above everything else. A fille-mère would be an indelible stain on the Grant-Tanerans’ standing in society. It is also worth noting that, as in Mauriac’s Viper’s Tangle, money plays a significant part in The Impudent Ones. Financial needs motivate most of Jacques’s intrigues. Mrs. Grant-Taneran herself displays miserly habits and uses money to keep her favorite son under her power.
The influence of Wuthering Heights, underlined in Marcel Arland’s evaluation of the manuscript, must have seemed self-evident at the time. Emily Brontë’s classic of Victorian literature was popular with French readers—all the more after the release of William Wyler’s movie in Paris in 1939. No less than three new French translations of the novel were published between 1925 and 1937. As an ardent anglophile, Marguerite Duras was familiar with the works of the Brontë Sisters. Les hauts de Hurlevent—the French title most often used—was one of her favorite books. The rivalries between the protagonists, as well as the landscape surrounding their coveted estate—“the rough and unpopulated part of Upper Quercy” in The Impudent Ones; the Yorkshire Moors in Wuthering Heights—invite comparison between the two novels. One can find other similarities: like Catherine Earnshaw, Maud Grant is impulsive and independent. Like her, Maud reconciles herself to marrying a wealthy man she does not love, and like “Cathy,” Maud is the character who keeps the story moving to its conclusion. It is doubtful, however, that Marguerite Duras drew more than remote inspiration from Wuthering Heights. If Jacques Grant shares some of Heathcliff’s innate cruelty, he does not have the dark, romantic stature of Brontë’s hero. The result of Jacques’s intrigues around the family estate pales in comparison to the devastating consequences that Heathcliff’s obsession with revenge brings to everyone around him. The Impudent Ones never rises to the tragic dimension that Wuthering Heights achieves in the end.
While Emily Brontë was defying the literary strictures of her time, Marguerite Duras had more conventional ambitions with her first novel. Looking back on the days she spent in the Lot-et-Garonne as a child, she seems to have hesitated between a rustic roman champêtre and a classic roman psychologique in the vein of Paul Bourget. The pastoral component in The Impudent Ones follows the naturalistic current of nineteenth-century writers such as George Sand (The Devil’s Pool, The Country Waif), Emile Zola (La terre), or the lesser-known but immensely popular René Bazin, whose novels La terre qui meurt (The Dying Earth) and Le blé qui lève (The Coming Harvest) were still must-reads for generations of French high school students. In The Impudent Ones, the sections concerning the trees, meadows, fields, and rivers surrounding the family estate of Uderan bear a striking resemblance to similar descriptions of the countryside found in Bazin’s hymns to nature. The careful attention paid to class structure in The Impudent Ones owes a debt to the theories of André Thérive, one of the three gentlemen whose approval of her manuscript Marguerite Donnadieu put forth in her letter to Gallimard. Thérive, a critic for Le Temps, was co-founder of the École populiste, a literary movement advocating a return to class portraiture and the study of sociological issues. As evidenced by her novel, the class-conscious author of The Impudent Ones was ready to follow Thérive’s precepts.
A Manuscript in Search of a Publisher
Arland’s reader’s report indicates that the manuscript of La famille Taneran was given to him by Gallimard at the beginning of March 1941. The author’s request for a quick decision was not obliged, however, as Gaston Gallimard was still reeling from attempts by the occupying authorities to take control of his company. That same month, Marguerite Donnadieu’s father-in-law died of a heart attack, prompting her mother-in-law to leave occupied Paris and join relatives in Corsica, then still in the “Free Zone.” Her daughter-in-law may have planned to accompany her on the trip to the island, as her letter to Gallimard, dated March 31, would suggest: