The sad end of Marguerite Duras and Yann Andréa

“I started writing The Lover because Yann has returned to men.” They are barely seated in the writer’s bedroom-office when Marguerite Duras makes this confession to a journalist she is seeing for the first time. Marianne Alphant, from Release, came to ask him about this novel that had just been published in 1984, and was left speechless. At that precise moment, Yann Andréa entered the room, sprayed himself with a Marguerite perfume that had been placed on the mantelpiece, then said without a hello or a glance: “Okay, I’m going out.”

This relationship, both intimate and theatrical, has lasted for more than four years between Yann Lemée, a former philosophy student, homosexual, and the star of the French literary avant-garde. He is 32, Duras, 70. The writer, who has often professed “to live reality as a myth”, transmutes this last love into a novel. He is in the prime of his youth, she is heading towards decline, but this encounter reverses, for a moment, the course of time.

They met for the first time in Caen in 1975, where the novelist and filmmaker came to present her film India Song. He was 22 years old and asked Marguerite Duras if he could write to her. The former khâgneux was dazzled by The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Gallimard, 1953), this book in which a group of friends spend a holiday in Italy under a blazing sun, tormented by secret and floating feelings. The Bitter Campari they ingest at all hours helps them to bear their existence full of boredom. “There is nothing, assures one of the characters, qwhich locks up more than love. And being locked up, in the long run, makes even the best of us mean.” The young Yann Lemée, in the midst of Durassian delight, starts drinking Bitter Campari in Caen, forgetting this premonitory aphorism.

“I gave up all other books to read only her books. (…). I love all the words, in their entirety, without any restraint,” he wrote in This love (Pauvert, 1999). For five years, he sent letters to Duras, who never replied. One day, the writer sent him The Man Sitting in the Corridor (Editions de Minuit, 1980), a short, violent text, almost without a story: that of a woman who wants to be loved, brutalized and killed by a man and of a narrator who observes, split, in a “triangulation” dear to the writer. The student from Caen does not like this book at all but does not dare to write to her. Then she sends him her following stories, The Night Shipthe three parts ofAurelia Steiner et Negative Hands (Gallimard, 1979). “I am crazy. I love madly.” He drinks.

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