Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras
"In 1979, aged 65, the iconic French writer Marguerite Duras was
exhausted, creatively emptied out and drinking herself to death. For many
months, the only thing that had sustained her was writing fragments of letters
to an imagined addressee, perhaps as notes to be turned into an epistolary
novel but mostly because she needed a confidante and would have to create one
if he didn’t exist. The notes were full of exclamations like ‘I must stop
drinking at night, I must go to bed early so that I can write you long letters
and not die.’ These were perilous times for Duras who, despite a hectic life in
the thick of political and artistic movements, was lonely, in a way that not
only ate at her soul, but undermined her creative vitality. She had always
needed to give voice to her inner violence, either in difficult love affairs or
in her difficult texts and films, but here she was, old and ugly and all washed
up. What would become of her now?"
Cet Amour-La, a book by Yann Andrea
"And what was in it for him? ‘I can’t live without her,’ a friend of
Duras’s, Michèle Manceaux, quotes him as saying. ‘She’s a drug; I’m her main
focus, the focus of all her attention. No one has ever loved me like that. Her
writing about it, about the passion, it doesn’t kill me, I’m no longer me,
Yann, but she’s made me exist to the power of a hundred.’ Yann received, then,
the classic payback of the muse, a chance to be vitally enmeshed in the
creative genius of another, to be transformed and immortalized, and he seemed
to be satisfied by it."
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