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PARTISAN REVIEW
houses facing the sea weren't inhabited by the rich . I said , no, Car–
narsie wasn't at all fashionable . And Duras, who was reasoning with
her eyes , argued back: I had to be wrong, the sea was beautiful, the
white houses were beautiful , Carnarsie was near Manhattan-why
didn't the rich live there? It was as if she had been injected with
megadoses of LSD behind her eyes, her sense of vision was so over–
powering. She guided us over to the aquarium: there, meditating on
the baby seals and dolphins at play, she remarked she didn't like
Beauvoir's assumption that childbirth was a masochistic act for
women . After deftly checking to make sure I wasn't a Beauvoir
aficionado,
Duras grumbled that the author of
The Second Sex
lacked a
sense of humor and was too much of a schoolmarm: "She knows
nothing about women's real need to have children." And we talked
about my two little girls and her son. (Duras didn't seem very aware
of the presence of my friend, Ed.) We went inside a souvenir shop .
She was delighted to find a dusty button that read "Royal Family Go
Home ." She bought it, pinned it on her lapel , and from that Coney
Island seaside junk memento politically reasoned : "So - America is
antiroyalist?" "Lady," the shopkeeper drawled, "that button is left
over from the 1930s when King George came to New York. It's
dusty- it doesn't mean anything."
But to Duras, everything- Carnarsie, the sea, the dusty but–
ton, all meant something; they resembled other objects that already
were a permanent part of her memory. She and I agreed, at the end
of the afternoon, that the next day we would visit art galleries.
Again, she was very purposeful in what she chose to see . She wanted
to see the work of the sculptor, Marisol , which was at the Stable
Gallery in the East 60s. The gallery was small space for the bizarre–
bizarre repetitive quality of Marisol's narcissistic celebration of a
cloning of icons all having to do with herself-her body, her odd hair
ribbons, shoes and handbags. Marguerite Duras's attention to the
exhibit was so devouringly fierce, so unrelenting, that between the
schizophrenic multiple heads of Marisol, and Duras's visual concen–
tration on them, I got a sudden attack of claustrophobia. Marguerite
Duras wanted to know what I thought of Marisol's work, and I
mumbled that I was an asthmatic and couldn't stay a minute more,
it was all making me dizzy; and I went outside and waited in the
fresh air.
Interestingly, in view of the attention she pays to these things in
The Lover,
she spent a great deal of time discussing clothes and fancy
