Marie (11 page)

W
HEN
MARIE
WAS PUBLISHED
in French in 1943, it was entitled
A la Recherche de Marie:
at its heart lies the sensuous fusion of immediate experience and recovered memory so effectively captured by Marcel Proust, a writer whom Madeleine Bourdouxhe much admired. For today's feminist readers, familiar with a European tradition, its single-minded exploration of a woman's psyche may carry additional echoes: of Virginia Woolf or Jean Rhys, or of Marguerite Duras. And despite that formal homage to
A la Recherche du temps perdu,
the writing of Madeleine Bourdouxhe is so distinctive as to make one continually wary of placing her within any literary tradition, even a modernist one.

This startling singularity, combined with political circumstance and a certain authorial diffidence, explains almost half a century of neglect.
Marie
is the third of Bourdouxhe's works to be translated into English. She began to be reprinted in France
and Belgium in the mid-1980s. A volume of short stories,
A
Nail, a Rose,
first appeared in English in 1989, followed by the novella,
La Femme de Gilles,
in 1992 (republished by Daunt Books in 2015). She died in April 1996, five months before her ninetieth birthday.

The resurgence of interest in her work brought her some gratification but no great surprise. In my conversations with her, which began in 1988 when I was translating the short stories, I came to realise that she had always retained a sense of her literary value. In her own highly developed private world she was sure of her identity as a professional author. She had never stopped writing, but she was not greatly concerned about widespread recognition, knowing that her main literary engagement must be with her own fictional creations rather than with publishers or even readers.

Although my questions were answered with great warmth and politeness, Bourdouxhe was never forthcoming about her life, reserving the right to disdain almost all connection between it and her work: ‘That is what writers do – they invent.' Of
A la Recherche de Marie,
she said only that the chief similarity between herself and Marie was that ‘we were both married women'.

Even so, it was possible to piece together a biographical outline, at least up to the time when
A la Recherche de Marie
was published. In the beginning, success came easily. The positive critical response to Gallimard's publication of
La Femme de Gilles
(1937), published when she was thirty, gave her an instant place among the up-and-coming novelists of the day, along with Simone de Beauvoir and Nathalie Sarraute. From an early age – she was born in 1906 – she had made up her mind to be
a writer. As a small child her main literary influence was her adored Liégeois grandfather, who instilled in her a love of the French poets and philosophers. It was in Liège, too, that she developed her fascination for the minutiae of working-class life, spending much of her time with the family's maidservant. In our conversations she gave me the impression of a comfortable but isolated childhood in which she was an only child until a sister was born in 1915 and a brother in 1921.

In 1914 her father's work took the family to Paris, where they lived for the entire period of World War I. This left an indelible impression on the young Madeleine's imagination that is surely reflected in the many striking vignettes of Paris in
Marie,
where the charm of the city – boulevards, cafés, stations, squares and
petits coins
alike – is evoked in a particularly haunting way. ‘It was Paris,' she declared, ‘that formed my true childhood memories.'

After the family's return to Brussels she entered the fifth form at the Lycée. ‘I lived in a bourgeois ambience: my father was a businessman, my mother spent a lot of time with nuns, and they weren't interested in literature. They let me decide what to do. I studied Latin, French, American literature – then spent two years reading philosophy at the University of Brussels.'

As Bourdouxhe recalled them, these were years of intense intellectual excitement: ‘We formed a little group, four or five of us, all set on going in a different direction from our teachers. We were interested in what came from within ourselves, and in what we discovered through chance reading in bookshops. No one in our families, or at university, guided us – we yielded to no authority. We chose our own aesthetic and our only influences were Nietzsche, Gide and Apollinaire.'

In 1927 Bourdouxhe married a mathematics teacher, Jacques Muller. For the first few years of the marriage she gave Latin and French lessons at home and at a private school. ‘My main preoccupation was always literature and writing – that was my chief aim. But I wrote neither poetry, fiction nor essays: I was expecting a novel.' In 1934 she started an apprentice work,
Vacances,
a version of which was published in a Belgian anarchist magazine,
Le Rouge et le noir,
in 1936. She began
La Femme de Gilles
at the end of 1935 and completed it in June 1936, taking the manuscript in November to the Paris offices of the literary magazine,
La Nouvelle Revue Française.
In 1937, the year that
La Femme de Gilles
was published by Gallimard, she started work on
A la Recherche de Marie.
Although it is not overtly a political novel, the threat of World War II, and the atmosphere of confusion that preceded it, hangs in the air. War was declared soon after the manuscript was completed, followed by the occupation of France and Belgium.

From now on Bourdouxhe played an informal part in the resistance movement, sheltering Jewish refugees and British airmen and, on one occasion, taking important documents to Paul Eluard in Paris. She told the Brussels magazine,
Bulletin,
in 1989: ‘We all helped, the whole neighbourhood. When the Gestapo came looking for anyone, there was a pre-arranged escape route through the back gardens. We knew it was dangerous but it was the only thing to do.'

Her political consciousness had already been raised by the Spanish Civil War and by her friendship with the Russian revolutionary writer Victor Serge, whom she also harboured in Brussels. She was deeply affected by the war, and the reality of the occupation: she once saw an American woman killed in the
street. Such experiences had a lasting effect on the short stories she was now writing. But publication and the life of a professional writer were beginning to seem less relevant. In 1940 she gave birth to her only child, Marie, days before Belgium was invaded. (She evokes her escape to France from the nursing home, baby in arms, in the short story ‘Sous le Pont Mirabeau', its title a tribute to Apollinaire.)

By now she had turned her back on the Paris literary scene, where many publishers had been taken over by the Nazis. Eventually she published
A la Recherche de Marie
with a small Brussels press, Editions Libris, in 1943. She described Libris as ‘above suspicion', by which she meant uncontaminated by fascism.

When the war was over she started to make regular visits to Paris, where she would spend time in literary cafés with Raymond Queneau, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre published one of her stories in
Les Temps Modernes
and de Beauvoir, who became a friend, was a consistent admirer. She identified two recurring themes in Bourdouxhe's work: her acute perception of the chasm that can open up between men and women immediately after the sexual act, and her enduring interest in the special relationship between women and material objects, particularly in the kitchen (‘the nest'). The passage in which Marie reflects upon ‘the mutual understanding between the palms of her hands and the objects they touch' inspired a long disquisition on the subject in
Le Deuxième Sexe
(1949). Housework, de Beauvoir suggests, is for many the ‘social justification' of their existence, an enriching activity that confirms their status in the world. The completion of a domestic task – washing linen or polishing a table – constitutes the active fulfilment of a dream, since the negative (the dirty object) has
been replaced by the positive (the clean one). De Beauvoir cites the intense pleasure felt by Marie as she cleans her stove: ‘The well-polished steel sends her back a reflection of the freedom and power she feels at the very tips of her fingers.' When Marie sees herself in the stove she has so meticulously scoured, she and the stove become contiguous, or mirror images of each other.

The several mentions of Bourdouxhe in
Le Deuxième Sexe
I had to discover for myself: the information was not volunteered, though she was pleased to be reminded of it, and it prompted other memories of her post-war life, when she had some involvement in the artistic
milieu
of Brussels, mixing with the painters René Magritte and Paul Delvaux and discussing with them the Surrealist ideas that were already so striking a feature of her literary style. She eventually became
‘secrétaire perpetuelle'
of the ‘alternative' Libre Académie de Belgique.

Several of Bourdouxhe's stories appeared in French and Belgian magazines during the 1940s and 1950s but
A la Recherche de Marie
was the last novel to be published until her rediscovery in the 1980s. (An experiment in historical fantasy,
Mantoue est trop loin,
was submitted to Gallimard and Grasset but never appeared.) By the end of the twentieth century most of her oeuvre was available in several languages, and in 2009 an international conference was held in Paris to celebrate her life and work.
*

Whilst the power of Bourdouxhe's earlier novel,
La Femme de Gilles,
derives from its tragic inevitability,
Marie
resonates
with female energy and optimism. In
La Femme de Gilles
a young mother commits suicide because she falls out of love with her husband after he has an affair with her sister. By contrast Marie, who has not yet decided whether to have children, takes a lover for herself and finds liberation through her own actions, making the book a true text for our times.

In the very first chapter Bourdouxhe takes us, characteristically, to the depths of the heroine's heart and soul. She shows us a thirty-year-old woman overflowing with love, not just for her husband but for the whole of humanity and for inanimate objects, too: a boat in the harbour, a scattering of light on the sea, a hotel balcony, a cigarette. Marie is revealed as a woman with an interior life so highly charged and discrete that she is in a continual state of euphoria, as yet finding fulfilment only in her fantasy life. Her husband, Jean, is fond of her but – as he himself half realises – cannot match her intensity.

In the blinding heat of a Côte d'Azur afternoon Marie and Jean make their way to the beach; Marie is in a trance-like state. While Jean is in the water she exchanges a meaningful look with a boy she sees lying on the beach. In the work of Bourdouxhe, sexual desire is always non-negotiable. Just as the fatal course of
La Femme de Gilles
is determined by the illicit kiss in the first scene, so for Marie there is now no turning back. The damage – or in this case, the awakening – cannot be reversed. But this is a journey that Marie is more than ready for: the relationship she already knows she will have with the unnamed boy will give her the freedom to delve deep into her unconscious self and rebuild it with the manifold possibilities that erotic love can offer. It will help her reanimate the abandon of her youth; it will enlarge her whole world.

The feelings aroused by the boy give Marie a new confidence, a yearning for her lost independence. She escapes from Jean and his chattering companions and takes a boat out to sea, rowing alone for the first time in her life. If Jean were here he would take charge, but he is not. ‘He is of less concern to her now than the sea, the boat and its oars … It's as though she can see the colour of the water in the night, and breathe the smell that rises up from it, for the first time in years. At that moment she is alone.' This is remarkably reminiscent of the scene in Kate Chopin's
The Awakening
(1899), another rediscovered classic of women's writing, in which the heroine Edna, inspired by her first sensual experience with Robert, swims out into the sea. ‘A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul. She would not join the groups in their sports and bouts, but intoxicated with her newly conquered power, she swam out alone.'

Marie
and
The Awakening
are both unusually open in their descriptions of sexual passion, and both heroines are insistent upon their entitlement to ‘alternative lives'. It would be as unthinkable for Bourdouxhe's Marie to discuss her new state of mind with Jean as it would be for Chopin's Edna to show either ‘shame or remorse' at her behaviour: ‘She had all her life long been accustomed to harbour thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and that they concerned no one but herself.'

Back on shore, Marie's private journey has begun, and so has the prolonged Proustian process of searching for her
identity through memory. As she starts to free herself from the shackles of submissive femininity, she finds she is ‘lost between two shattered worlds', with all its consequences – including the possible loss of both lovers. Her thoughts wander. In the enchanting scene where she is trying to teach Latin to a reluctant teenage boy, she recalls previous loves, her student life at the Sorbonne, and the way in which her early marriage, though outwardly contented, has circumscribed her. She has become a protective creature, self-absorbed and inward-looking, whose life is bounded by her husband, her feckless sister Claudine, and her parents. She longs for release, of the kind that the Renaissance poet Louise Labé seems to offer – she herself has few friends, as she finds most other women tedious. She is progressing towards a series of moments that will free her of the reins she has, until now, held too tightly to herself.