A King Lear-like role for a mature woman exists. In DAYS IN THE TREES, by Marguerite Duras. A character referred to only as Mother is so domineering she authors a tragic role for herself that Shakespeare may have envied. Unlike Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children, DAYS IN THE TREES is seldom produced. This is woeful, an indictment of our stodgy regard for staging drama. Now that life has slowed down for many of us theatre folk on lockdown—consider this neglected play.
THE KEY FIGURE IN THE LIFE AND WORK OF DURAS
Marguerite Duras (1914-96) was born weeks before the outbreak of World War I. Her birthplace is Gia-Dinh near Saigon in what is now Southern Vietnam–then part of the French Colony Cochinchina. After her father died of amoebic dysentery, Marguerite was brought up with her two brothers by her mother. Her mother Marie Legrand decided to stay on in Indochina. She made a humble living as a teacher and by playing the piano for silent films. Later acquiring land on the Cambodian coast. The land turned out to be worthless. She went bankrupt trying in vain to build dams to protect her rice paddies against the yearly advance of the sea. Owing to this, the mother is the key figure in the life and work of Marguerite Duras.
As Jean-Louis Arnaud has written, “The mother figure in The Sea Wall (1950) can be found thirty years later in The Lover, always the same, plain-spoken, courageous and obstinate to the point of absurdity in her choices and her prejudices; loved and hated, respected and denigrated all at once.”
At age eighteen, Marguerite left Indochina for France and began her studies at the Sorbonne. She then worked for seven years as a researcher and archivist with the French Colonial Office. In 1939 she married Robert Antelme, also a writer. During the Occupation in 1943, she became active in a resistance group led by François Mitterrand. A year later her husband was arrested by the Gestapo and was taken to the concentration camp in Dachau. Through Mitterrand’s intervention he was eventually released. Two years later Duras divorced him. An affair with their mutual friend Dionys Mascolo resulted in her only child, Jean, in 1947.
After WWII, Duras was active with the French Communist Party until the Prague Uprising in 1950. During the 1950s, Duras penned eight novels. She wrote The Sea Wall in 1950, a shortlisted novel with which she missed the Prix Goncourt due, probably, to her communist sympathies. Other early novels include: The Sailor from Gibraltar, The Little Horses of Tarquinia, and The Square. During this time, she wrote the story collection: Whole Days in the Trees (the play comes from the title story; and this collection also contains her important short story, “The Boa.”).
A NEW KIND OF WOMAN–STRONGER THAN A MAN
Duras is associated with the Nouveau Roman: a movement whose members include Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. During the 1960s, Duras continued to write novels, but also plays and filmscripts. Including the well-known Hiroshima, My Love. During the 1970s she devoted herself to film, writing and producing thirteen in this decade.
“The Lover” was published in 1984 when she was seventy. It became an international best seller and won France’s literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Duras published three novels in the 1990s. Including The North China Lover in 1991. In 1996, Duras died in Paris at the age of eighty-two. In her obituary John Calder wrote:
Marguerite Duras was the most contradictory, and in many ways perverse, figure on the Parisian literary scene during the post-war period, the subject of popular interest far beyond her many readers, always controversial and both the source and the object of much argument. [. . .] Like Beckett, she understood the fear in a changing and itinerant society of not belonging anywhere, of ending anonymous in a big and unfriendly world, which can lead to committing even a senseless crime in order to be famous for a brief instant. [. . .] Her place in literature is assured, perhaps even more than that of Colette whose niche in the Parisian scene she replaced.
Friend and translator of DAYS IN THE TREES, Sonia Orwell, described her as “not like a man, but rather a new kind of woman, stronger than a man.”
DAYS IN THE TREES begins in midday with Mother’s arrival in Paris to Son’s apartment. Mother has flown in, a thirty-two hour flight, from an unnamed colony of France. The play concludes late that same night with her decision to fly home the next day. What follows here are detailed summaries of the four scenes.
SCENE ONE: A MOTHER AS GOOD AS GOLD AND SHAKESPEARE
The opening of the play concerns how much Mother has aged since Son last saw her, five years ago. Stage directions describe her as “very, very old. Dressed in black, tiny, skinny. Her arms are covered in gold bracelets.” She describes her state: “I have reached the very last stage, the smallest one. Like those Chinese boxes. There is no further for me to go. I have arrived at the smallest of myself.”
Son’s live-in girlfriend Marcelle enters, wholly entranced by the sight of Mother. An orphan, Marcelle never knew her own mother. Son and Mother scold the awe-struck young woman for staring. Mother says, “Mothers can be found at every street corner, young woman, You ought to know that by now . . .” After a quick look at the ill-furnished two-room apartment, Mother reacts by boasting of her vast living space. Evidently her home in the East has acres of gardens, spaces where she walks from end to end grieving in the greatest of comfort. Marcelle says to Son, “Your mother’s as a good as Shakespeare.”
Because Son has grey hairs at his temple Mother remembers, “He was so golden it made one dizzy just to look at him. And I wept because he was mortal. And now look what we’ve come to.” Marcelle comments on Mother’s arms covered in gold bracelets. No one wears so much jewelry. Mother says, “But it’s gold my dear. From the gold of his hair I have come to this gold. Do you understand?”
FEAST FOR AN ENORMOUS EMPTINESS
Mother announces that she is famished and that they ought to have a feast. A celebration dinner. Mother puts a stack of money on the table. She says, “Ah, my baby, you can’t imagine the kind of hunger I feel . . . Suddenly an enormous emptiness . . . . a wave which rolls over and over . . . bigger than I am . . . and I fall.” Son resists and then stuffs the money in his pockets.
They dine on a pork and sour kraut (choucroute). Mother reveals that she has been thinking of this meal with them for a whole month. “And there were times, you know, when the choucroute and my child became one and the same thing. I was seeing the choucroute again and munching my son!”
Son and Marcelle observe, horrified, the quantity of food Mother eats. She explains that she always ate a lot even when they lived in poverty. And then she tells of the eighty workmen that work in her factory in the French colony. Son knows from letters from his sister Mimi–who has been running the factory with Mother–that the eighty workmen make cement girders for the country’s roads.
Mother suddenly announces that his sister Mimi has become a different daughter and that her former Mimi will never come back. The mood shifts while Mother is eating desert. Marcelle comments that Mother looks quite naked after she has taken off the heavy bracelets. Mother says, “There are thoughts that come with money. That gold is me: even more myself than my rotting heart.” She pushes her plate away. “How disgusting that cake is, all of a sudden.”
Later Son asks her directly why she has come. She replies that she has come to buy a last bed. Then she jokes that it will take six months for the bed to arrive home by boat. She will be dead and buried by the time it arrives. The conversation turns again to the eighty workmen she employs in the factory that she and Mimi run. Son remarks that his mother’s country is “scarcely a colony anymore.” He says that human beings can never be content to let the days go by. And he adds that he is a gambler.
SON’S DISTASTE FOR MONEY
Mother explains the need for her to buy jewelry comes from not being able to take money out of the country. Mimi, she says, has bought a sports car. They discuss what Son and Marcelle do for a living. Son tries to explain. They receive people in a club, get things going, create an atmosphere. The qualifications are to be charming and good-looking, Marcelle offers. Mother muses that Son could have done so many things with his life. She recalls that as a boy he drew engines and carriages and things related to transportation. He drew them all over the place, on the walls. But by the time he was sixteen, she says, he couldn’t be interested in anything.
Mother talks again of the factory. She finishes with: “Haven’t you understood? There’s gold to be earned out there . . . gold!” She boasts about the ease and addictive quality of supervising the factory. How after a while you can’t live without it. “Your life takes on a meaning.” Son counters with his distaste for money, of how the money earned at the factory can’t leave the country. Mother remarks at how good he is at taking money. She says, “Eighty men, all yours: I’m giving them to you.” She concludes pleading with him to take the business.
They decide against shopping for a bed. As this complicated and potent scene winds down, Son announces: “It is now three hours and twenty minutes since you first arrived.”
SCENE TWO: A MOTHER’S RIGHT
The play differs from the novella Whole Days in the Trees in important ways. In the novella the sister Mimi is hardly mentioned. In the play, however, Mother refers to Mimi often for reasons important to Mother’s agenda in Paris.
Scene Two of DAYS IN THE TREES commences with the three of them returning from shopping arm in arm. Mother talks of how at forty-two Mimi has turned pretty. She has been going out on dates to the cinema. Scene Two is short. It is mostly Mother’s monologue about how her daughter has been running the factory more and more in allegiance with someone referred to as the Mayor. Mother exclaims: “I can’t really believe my Mimi goes in for politics, and against her mother.”
She says that Mimi has something she has waited for a long time: happiness. Son has gathered the gist of things. “Tell me, this Mayor . . . and Mimi?” Mother admits what she has long withheld. “The marriage takes place in two months! Now you know everything.” From here, Mother shifts to thoughts of being alone. This triggers fantasies of first selling and then dynamiting the factory.
Then Mother shifts again from this extreme negative to an extreme positive. Her reminiscence of Son as a child spending whole days in the trees–how she loved him the most of her six children. “They say I was unfair to the others. I am called, so they say, an unjust mother! What a world! What justice! By what right would they prevent me from loving you the best!”
SCENE THREE: EVERYTHING SPINS—MONSTROUS CHAOS
Scene Three takes place in the nightclub where Marcelle and Son work. Mother tells them to put her in a quiet corner with a bottle of champagne. She says to the owner of the bar, “You see I became rich at an age, when, more often, people die . . . which explains the especial importance I have for him.”
Still curious, Mother prods the owner for the name of her son’s occupation there. He says, “There’s no real name for what your son does here, it’s everything and nothing at the same time. [. . .] He greets people, he dances, he is there: above all he is there, you understand.”
Marcelle and Son return having changed into their evening dress. Son dances with Mother. He tells her, “I wanted to tell you Mother that I love no one but you.”
Marcelle tells Mother her orphan story. Of being abandoned when she was six months old and found half-frozen in the Place de la Republique. She was cared for by Public Assistance until she was thirteen. She failed to pick up dressmaking and then went to work on a farm until she stole five francs from the farmer’s wife on Christmas Eve. Rather than return to Public Assistance, she ran away. She ended up hiding in a cave. Where she met a lorry driver and her life began. Mother catches on that Marcelle has been living ever since as a prostitute.
A SECRET PIRATE, HIDING IN A TREE
Mother keeps drinking champagne while talking to Son. Son praises the idle life. “To go on living quietly from day to day, you don’t know what a pleasure that can be . . . the feeling of fooling the whole world, of being a pirate, a secret pirate, perfectly at ease, the only one doing nothing in the middle of all this fuss and agitation.” Mother confesses that she never cries about anything anymore. Son remembers waking as a child and finding her sitting on the floor silently crying. He asks why. She admits it was because she let him sleep instead of going to school.
Son remembers differently. They argue. He describes hiding in the trees instead of going to school. Mother says, “I saw you, my baby. I pretended you were far away at school preparing for a safe existence . . . But I could see you . . . Oh, yes . . . I could see you.”
From here the talk turns again to Mimi. How she has developed feelings of “vanity and arrogance.” Mother says, “They may be base feelings, savage ones and even painful but they are strong, very strong . . . Mimi is getting to know them and she is full of wonder at her discovery . . . Her famous humility is changing . . . And you? Ah! Those are feelings you will never know. Go and dance, my child.”
On a roll Mother says, “When I look back, everything spins . . . chaos monstrous chaos . . . I fought through all those difficulties, and what for, now, what for? The unhoped for marriage . . . the belated happiness . . . of my daughter. I’m supposed to thank heaven for it . . . but who will give me back my ugly little Mimi, pure, virginal . . . My little fighter!”
MOTHER’S SCENE IN THE SCENE
After Marcelle returns, Mother complains bitterly of Mimi being loved. She asks Marcelle where she has been. Marcelle offers the euphemism that she has been out for a breath of fresh air. In a moment of painful honesty the young woman confesses to loving Son even though he tries to put her out every morning.
The tone shifts. Mother begins ordering Marcelle to pour her more champagne as if she were a servant. Then Mother returns to Son spending all day in the trees, “as if there were nothing in the world but birds!” She is amazed that he has lived this kind of life and isn’t even nice. “Here he is trying to get rid of this poor girl when she is no more in the way than a chair . . . Why?”
Drunker now, Mother loses control. She says, “Let them take it back, that rotten factory. I’ll make them a present of it. I’ll give them everything! They can have my daughter and my factory! But give them my dying days? No. That I won’t do.” She complains loudly of her farce of a life, going on for more than seventy years. Mother wishes she could throw all of them back into the sea. Her shouting stuns the room of revelers.
Embarrassed, Son wants to return home. Not having it, Mother talks of beating Son until he was fifteen. She says, “You see it would have been best if I had killed you at birth.” They finally convince her to go home to eat again. Before leaving, she makes a scene, refusing to pay for her two bottles of champagne, until Son shames her into it. Son loses patience at her slow exit and shouts at her to “Come along.”
He sends Marcelle to escort Mother home without him. Marcelle points to a door that leads to a gambling room. “For your son that room is a green meadow . . . his garden . . . his real garden . . . there he becomes pleasant, young and handsome . . . What have you to complain of?”
SCENE FOUR: THE BAD DEED OF A BAD MOTHER—A PRINCE-LIKE SON
Scene Four takes place hours later. At two o’clock in the morning, Marcelle is curled up in an armchair whimpering. The remains of dinner are on the table. Son enters and Marcelle says Mother ate enough to frighten her. Son says, “I wish she would die.”
Relief will come as Mother is leaving tomorrow, Marcelle reveals. The old woman’s plane seat is already booked. Son complains of losing badly at his gambling. He finds the money and gold bracelets Mother has left on the mantel. He tells Marcelle that Mother had left them there for him to take. Then it occurs to him that Marcelle has stolen some of the money there and he makes her give it back.
Unable to control his gambling addiction, Son puts some of the money and bracelets in his pockets. He paces the room and sobs. “She was a bad mother. She knows it. We both know it. She was vile, a vile mother . . . I was her bad deed. She is the only witness to my cowardly life and now she is going to die.”
Marcelle pleads with him not to go back to the club. He has lost one hundred thousand francs that evening. She asks for the truth about the factory and Son tells her: “The factory was nationalized a year ago. Mimi threw in her lot with them. It was either that or repatriation. Mimi tells her anything she pleases . . . but she knows it all.”
He says Mother left her things on the mantel for him to take so she would know there was no more hope for him. Somehow this justifies his action. “All the children in all the world would be doing what I am doing this evening if she had brought them up as she brought me up.” Marcelle offers her take. “You are the child she wanted you to be.” Son tiptoes out of the apartment just before Mother enters.
THE SAMENESS OF HIS BEHAVIOR
“How long the nights become at my age!” she says. Mother inquires about Son’s gambling. Marcelle admits that he loses more than he wins. Between the lines Mother catches on that Son has gone back out again. With her money and bracelets. She says that nothing about him surprises her. “He could have taken more from that mantelpiece. Thousands, I know it . . . . What does surprise me is the . . . how to put it . . . the sameness of his behavior.”
He has already ruined her once, Mother reveals. “He is as inflexible in illusion, in error, as other people are . . . in other things.” Strangely optimistic, Marcelle suddenly believes that he will somehow win. She accuses Mother of entrapping Son, of knowing full well that he would take the money. Mother says that she didn’t know exactly everything. “I wasn’t sure . . . not absolutely.”
She tells Marcelle to stop crying. “There are many things sadder than that; than not having had a mother. If you only knew.” Mercifully, she explains why she has to return home: her presence there has no significance, only “appalling embarrassment.” At this point Mother can no longer remember the sight of Son hiding in the trees, the sound of his voice. She concludes that children are not worth having since one remembers nothing. “If I stayed he could only kill me,” she says, “and I could only understand.”
Mother tells Marcelle, “My child, try and change your way of life.” Marcelle vows to leave Son the next day. The play ends with Marcelle pleading Mother to stop talking. Mother reverses herself again, saying how much like morons her other grown children are. And how much she loves Son. She recalls him as a prince-like child. She says she is the only person in the world who has this pride in him. That once she’s gone no one else will feel the pride in Son she has. “It is the only thing in the world it hurts me a little to think about, that’s all . . .”
PSYCHE DRAMA UNDER THE SURFACE
For much of the play DAYS IN THE TREES seems to be about an elderly mother’s last shot to make something of her lazy son by having him take over the running of her factory. The surprise is that the factory has been nationalized, wrested from Mother’s control, and that her entreaties are for Son to take over a factory she no longer owns. For all practical purposes, her visit in Paris is groundless.
An even bigger surprise is that this is something they are both fully aware of. (Perhaps that the factory makes cement girders for supporting roads is intended to contrast with Mother’s unsupported agenda.) With the ease of a magician, Duras removes the surface plot. Even if Mother could persuade Son to move to the unnamed country and supervise the factory, he has no legal claim there. The conflict is a fantasy, a fairy tale.
So the question becomes: What is Mother and her seventeen gold bracelets doing there? Why this charade now at seventy-seven years old? What does she want from Son near the end of her life? Her existential motives become the play’s main concern.
HER FIGHT WITH ANONYMITY
Mother’s real fight is with anonymity. In her last days she has lost relevance with her adult children. There are indications of this tension even in the opening stage directions of Son’s apartment. It is a “two-roomed anonymous apartment” and sparsely furnished with “bits of furniture from disused hotels.” The living space of transients, strangers.
In the opening lines, Mother remarks off-stage that her elderly appearance has taken her by surprise. She is unrecognizable to herself. “One morning I saw myself in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself. There it was . . .” Son understands her fear of having lost her individuality. He says, “At the airport there could have been ten thousand of you and I couldn’t have made a mistake, so you see . . .”
Mother laughs and declaims as if from a newspaper heading, “Ten thousand mothers . . . from the four corners of the earth . . . have gathered on the banks of the Seine! You see what I mean?” Here she enters from the corridor and the audience gets its first look at her and what she fears: becoming just another ancient mother. Duras achieves a similar effect in prose with the opening lines of Whole Days in the Trees, the novella.
He was looking away so as not to meet her thin, pale expression. From the moment she’d stepped off the plane from the infinite care she had taken to step onto the gangplank, he had understood. There it was: the truth of it stared him in the face. It was an old woman who sat beside him. And the mother saw it because there were tears in the son’s eyes. So she took his hand.
SYMPTOMS OF NEEDING VISIBILITY
The character Marcelle and her mother awe add to this tension. What Marcelle seeks is what most people take for granted. A sense of ordinary motherhood, sentimental, nurturing. Marcelle’s savvy comment that Mother is as good as Shakespeare hints at the play’s subtextual agenda. Mother will author her own character as if she were Shakespeare writing her into a play.
Son and Marcelle marvel at the seventeen gold bracelets on her arms. Her excessive use of jewelry is the vulgar symptom of her need to be visible. Her insatiable hunger for “horrifying” quantities of food is another symptom of her need to stay fully present.
She speaks to the fact that she is like every mother: “ . . . there are no two ways of leaving one’s mother. There’s only one way of doing that.” In this regard, Son is her last hope–the child she has saved for a rainy day. Now that Mimi has undergone the big change, Son is the only child of hers who hasn’t grown up.
SON ONLY LOVES MOTHER
She lays out the obsessive nature of her visit, “I don’t know . . . I am . . . afraid . . . afraid . . . and I want to tell you the truth, because of all the children I have had, six when I come to think of it, I now love only you: I tend to forget the others.” Instead of accepting that her children have forgotten her, she forgets them too—which only worsens her condition.
After an absence of five years, she comes calling on the son whose gambling addiction makes her still a force in his life. His telling her that he loves only her while they are dancing is his admission that he still needs her the way a child does. Central to the play is her contradictory feelings about his refusal to work that began with his refusal to go to school. While tipsy on champagne in the bar, she makes an exalted, bardic speech of world-weariness:
Yes, I know it but I can’t stop myself wanting . . . I’d have wanted every-thing for you. I wanted work as well as the rest; the love of work as well as the love of idleness . . . I know I am contradicting myself but I am at home in my contradictions. I no longer know what I want, but I know I still want. I am these days, full of ill will and I no longer feel inclined to fight these feelings . . . I have nothing left [she opens her hands and holds them out to him] no more heart, no more principles, no more hair, no more sleep . . . [calms herself] Even my name: who calls me by my christian name any more? [silence] Give me a little more champagne, go on!
NO-NAME MOTHER SPECTACLE
This speech gives some understanding to the terrible things she says, that she is fighting a losing battle against non-existence. She’s right about her name not being spoken. Son is referred to by his name Jacque. The bar owner has a name, we learn in the opening lines of Scene 3. Son says, “My mother. Monsieur Dedé.” The bar owner says, “Delighted, Madame. I have heard a lot about Jacques’ mother.” By the end of the scene she loses control and makes a spectacle of herself. At first the other guests come over and laugh politely.
I was happy with my little factory and people want to find fault with that! No! But . . . you’d better get it clear that if I’m here it’s simply because I was good enough to remember it was my duty to see my son before I died! Nothing else, mark you! I have no more duties. I’m rid of them. This is the last one. From now on the world can go to hell and you won’t see me raising a little finger to stop it.
SOUNDING OFF LIKE LEAR
Her claim she has performed her last duty and is now free degenerates into apocalyptic indifference. During a moment of infantile grandeur, she says she could save the world from going to hell if she cared the least bit for it. Her lengthy speech spins out of control until she silences the room. Sounding like Lear for her rage and remorse, she says that her life is a farce that
adds up to nothing, to nothing, to absolutely nothing . . . Death isn’t here yet. Well! I must think . . . I want to scrub out the past, I want to find myself again, just as I was, a girl in the fields, in the hedges. . . Ah! If only I could throw you all into the sea, the lot of you . . . just as you are . . . how marvelous that would be.
Here she is the Destroyer Mother who says to Son she should have killed him at birth. Son remembers that when she used to beat him she would laugh. And she admits that deep down while she beat him for not going to school and hiding in the trees she was singing. But why was she singing? Perhaps she understood that his “secret pirate” life in the trees and her beating him over it is something that would bond them into obsessive kinship that would last a lifetime.
If raging confessions and silencing the room weren’t enough, she adds to the embarrassment by refusing to pay her bill. This finale to the scene rings remarkably true. It is not about money. These kinds of disputes in restaurants never are. It is about getting one’s due notoriety. The small crime of refusing to pay and having the police summoned is Mother’s “attracting attention wherever I go.”
DURAS MOTHERHOOD SCANDAL
In her long scandalous life Marguerite Duras created a sensation involving motherhood in 1985. She published a front-page article in Liberation announcing that she had solved the unsolved murder case of Little Gregory. She did this by studying the house where Little Gregory had lived and solved the crime through literary means alone. She believed that the child’s mother, Christine Villemin, had committed the murder because there was no garden around the little house. The lack of a garden proved that she was unhappy and that her husband was forcing sex on her and that Christine had nothing to do but dream up horrible crimes.
To me, biographical information like this is not a cause to dismiss this author. Nor does it detract anything from DAYS IN THE TREES. If anything, the scandal confirms Duras to be as capable in extreme leaps of thought as her central character and underscores her intense associations with motherhood. DAYS IN THE TREES is a beautiful and rare play that goes beyond what I thought drama was capable of in exploring a mother. With the many gold bracelets, Duras dresses her elderly heroine up like a treasure and she is a treasure.
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