Fun fact about Marguerite Duras: in addition to being a brilliant novelist, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and playwright, she was, for many years, a committed communist. And she was very good at it. She joined the French Communist Party in 1944. She was a communist, writes Laure Adler in Marguerite Duras: A Life, “because it was the party of the working classes, because it defended the poor and the pure. But she was a particular kind of communist, a euphoric, utopian, idealistic communist.” She became fairly militant about it—knocking on doors, selling copies of L’Humanité, recruiting whomever she could find, and eventually became the secretary of her local cell. Sometimes she wrote short stories on the backs of communist pamphlets.
Her companions, Robert Antelme (her husband) and Dionys Mascolo (her lover)—by the way, did everyone know that Duras lived with both her husband and her lover and everyone was fine with it? I could not love her any more—joined too. But soon Duras began to have doubts; the Moscow trials and Stalinism, in particular, distressed her, and a new friendship with an alluring Italian named Elio Vittorini showed them a new model: “the free communist though not necessarily Marxist intellectual, the affective, protesting communist.”
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