Back then, we taught each other to recognize the bursts of vitality from those who are brand new. Then there is a kind of protective nihilism among those who have stayed too long. These differences of experience conflict and complicate each other in the painstaking, agonizing, humane process of understanding where a person is coming from. Similarities are usually thought of as inherent to solidarity, but it’s really the differences that create it. One of my favorite quotes about organizing is from the professor and activist Loretta Ross. “A group of people thinking the same thing and moving in the same direction is a cult,” she once said. “A group of people thinking different things and moving in the same direction is a movement.”

Still, there is that one pattern I’ve seen abound in particular, and it is among those women in mourning. Their grief might be recent or it might be embedded in how they understand themselves. It might be the loss of a person in their life that is permanent or temporary, or the loss of an idea that they once felt was necessary for every other thought they’d ever had. Some of them were radicalized by loss and others had their radical nature confirmed by it, but all of them know pain as though it is an essential text. I’m using the word “militant” deliberately, if imprecisely; I don’t know a better word to describe a purity of reason and an awareness of one’s own power.

I should perhaps say, instead, that the most militant people I respect have been women in mourning. I’ve encountered other militancies in other types of people, and often found a resilience that is hollow. I’m suspicious of a force that has no memory of the occasion that warranted it. Certainty and conviction can easily become postures with no interest in either doubt or faith, only in creating a weapon out of that sureness to intimidate those they consider an enemy, whether that’s because they are on the other side of a divide or because they display a weakness that can’t be tolerated. Instead, women in mourning have an understanding of what happens after losing the belief that anything really ever ends. You can stop knowing or seeing or feeling another person, but their presence lasts long enough to convince you that they aren’t completely gone. This is the kind of thinking one has to possess in order to believe things can be made different than they are.

In a 2023 essay in the London Review of Books, Toril Moi writes of realizing that she had been so “used to thinking about Duras as a writer focused almost exclusively on femininity and madness” that she had missed something: Duras’s “enduring preoccupation is with pain that goes unalleviated.… In later works, Duras almost obsessively returns to this theme, most often in the form of the psychic pain experienced by solitary, enigmatic characters (usually women) who are incapable of giving it expression.”

In my past experiences reading Duras I’ve felt uncomfortable with her bluntness, her odd and clipped way of stating the obvious as obviously as possible. She flattens other people on the page and then pulls them back up with her own words. In a 1991 profile for The New York Times Magazine, Duras talked about feeling oppressed by the conventions of literature, such as writing by Balzac, who she complains “describes everything. It’s exhaustive. It’s an inventory.… There’s no place for the reader.” In a 1970 interview, she says that she would “like the material that is to be read as free as possible of style. I can’t read novels any more,” she claims. “Because of the sentences.”

Sometimes I am easily lost in this rough simplicity. Other times I am lost at a distance from these words, unsure of what to believe or what remains in Duras’s famously few words. Something in this style pulls me while it pushes me away: The language is cut clean but the feelings described are frayed.

Part of what makes Duras endlessly compelling, as a person and an artist, is how confusing she is. Her political history, as it were, is not so clean. She and Robert joined the Resistance in 1943, but only a few years prior, she wrote a work of propaganda about the supposed good done by French imperialism. In 1942, she worked as a secretary for the Book Organization Committee, a service dealing with paper quotas for publishers run by the Vichy government. They would deny materials to books considered too dangerous, such as the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Zola, and Colette. Being on this committee is possibly why her first novel, The Imprudent Ones, was even published. “Duras, with her considerable powers to mythologize the past,” wrote Edmund White in a New York Review of Books essay about his complicated love for the writer, “knew how to invent a suitably leftist record for herself.” Her militancy may have been the zeal of the convert, or the penance of a sinner.

The quality I do find in Duras—or rather, the quality I am looking for that I know I can trust to find in her work—is a viciousness. To be vicious is a characteristic I often miss when it’s absent in writing or thinking. Much like organizing, which is not inherently good so much as it is a tool that can be and is used by anyone to any ends they choose, not every instance of suffering makes us worse or better. A thorn can pierce the skin if a stem is held the wrong way; that doesn’t make a rose a weapon. I want someone capable of being brutal in their thoughts and who knows that an idea can be a cudgel; someone who risks unfairness and damage in service to their points. The root of the word vicious, I only recently learned, comes from the Latin for immorality; its antonym is “virtue,” another quality that can be used to immoral ends. Maybe being brave is my form of cowardice.

The second section of The War is more about Duras’s work in her time of waiting, the assignments she alone was capable of carrying out.“Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier” is a true story about Duras’s time waiting to find out if her husband would return—even though by this point we know he does. It’s a story about bravery. As part of her work in the French Resistance, Duras was tasked with cultivating a relationship with the Gestapo officer who arrested her husband. Pierre Rabier is a fake name, but the personality she describes of an obsequious and pestiferous man was real. Rabier saw himself as only temporarily an agent of Hitler’s agenda. He believed that after Germany’s inevitable win he would belong to a French creative class under German rule. “Rabier was fascinated by French intellectuals, artists, authors,” Duras writes. “He’d gone into the Gestapo because he hadn’t been able to buy an art bookshop.”

The story of their time together is a dangerous one, written in and with the terror that was always a part of Duras’s risk. Still, in the disclaimer in the story’s opening pages, Duras wonders why even publish it. Yes, it’s true, and yes, it terrified her to have done it—so what? Some friends, she tells her reader, convinced her to include it here. Rabier represents, to them, “the illusion that a person may exist solely as a dispenser of reward and punishment. An illusion that usually takes the place of ethics, philosophy, and morality—and not only in the police.”

Rabier seems enamored with Duras as both a woman and an artist, but even more so with the power his access to her husband gives him. He is the only way she can get mail or packages to Robert; he is the only one who can assure her he is even still alive. They walk, go to cafés, eat meals together. Other members of the Resistance are forbidden from any contact with Duras to preserve the lie that she is just a wife and novelist, only married to a member and not one herself, a necessary isolation that is still insanity. Duras secretly talks to D, her lover and later, her second husband, every day about Rabier, finding herself struggling to convey “his fundamental stupidity.” The only thing that calms her is the trust she has that, once she knows Robert and his sister are safe, the movement will have a chance to kill him: a certainty that preserves her balance. Rabier will die, and it will be her people who do it.

She does learn some useful information from Rabier. He tells her that the other Gestapo officers are getting scared, and are no longer certain about Hitler’s victory. He tells her it was another member of the Resistance who gave up her husband’s name. In one tense moment, Rabier asks her to identify another member of the Resistance, showing her a photo of Mitterrand and offering to release her husband if she does so. Duras could have Robert back tomorrow, he promises, if she turns someone else in. But she is unwilling to sacrifice her convictions, even under complete duress. “When it is not just your life that’s involved,” she says to explain the stillness she feels, “you find what you need to say…I am saved.” Duras tells him easily that she doesn’t know who the man is, and if she did, she would never tell him.

Rabier did die eventually, though Duras doesn’t know where or if it was done by the Resistance. She, above anything else, holds onto the messiness of contradiction. Her own description of herself is of a woman who is often strange both in the way she behaves and in the way she recounts her behavior. At the trial of the man Duras names Rabier, she testifies twice: once to tell the story of his evil, the second to tell a story of some good. Rabier had decided not to deport a Jewish family, he had told her during the time of her mission, because when he had gone to their home he had seen their child’s coloring book and crayons. He told Duras, in one of their meetings, that he promised to warn her if she ever was at risk of being arrested. In recounting the story of his supposed mercy, Rabier is “absolutely indifferent to human suffering in general, but indulging himself in the luxury of his own forms of squeamishness. And to this we owe our lives, the little Jew and I.”

When Duras enters these facts into the record, “the whole courtroom,” she writes, “was against me.” The judge yells at her, berates her for being of two minds, accuses her of wasting the court’s time. Duras only says that she wanted to tell more about what she knew in case it saved Rabier from being sentenced to death; he was executed soon after.

Of course viciousness could be a kind of vice. The instinct is faulty and cruel, influenced not by a need to tell the truth or share in a feeling so much as it is a drive to wound with whatever words will do the most damage. For all of Duras’s claims that this book is simply found rather than made, words mystically received rather than chosen, it is still hers and was published to serve her story.

I’ve always thought that I write to be where I’m not. In writing, I can be anywhere besides where the sentence lives. Duras is and isn’t like that. She rewrote her own stories again and again, returning to where she had begun to retell the same story, although maybe it was her own form of searching for another place: When she comes back to her own story, she finds it as she expected and entirely different. Her characters in film repeat the same lines of dialogue over and over again, like the lovers in Hiroshima, mon amour, when the woman repeats over and over again to the man: “You destroy me. You’re so good for me.” The character of Anne-Marie Stretter appears as the impetus for the events of The Ravishing of Lol Stein as well as The North Chinese Lover and The Vice-Counsel; it is the name of the woman in her film India Song. Her real name was Elizabeth Striedter and she was married to a French governor; apparently when the couple moved to Vinhlong, Elizabeth’s lover in Laos killed himself. The woman Duras remembers had “an invisible quality, the opposite of showy, very quiet.… But there was also this power of death in her, death-giving power, the power to provoke death.” Duras often said that she wondered if learning about this moment in someone else’s life is why she became a writer: so that she could keep telling and hearing this story of a love only known as grief. With each repetition, she had another chance to reify and contradict the stories of her life.

In The Places of Marguerite Duras, a transcript from a documentary recently published by Magic Hour Press, Duras says that writing, for her, begins without faith. “You start out mistrusting yourself,” she said, “with a sense of guilt and second-rate baggage that others have thrown together forever. “ We put our faith in other people, she notes. Why not ourselves? “I trust myself as I would trust any other,” she claims about where she ends up as a writer. “I trust myself completely.”

Duras could have believed her decisions and her actions and her beliefs during the war and the time after were perfect, if she wanted, as “perfect” usually is meant to describe that whatever is is only how it could ever have been. Of course, that usage of perfection is really only applicable to death. Still alive, Duras would never know or feel that everything has happened as it should have and that everything she was capable of doing was right to have done. All she knew was the trust she put in her ability to write, and her writing the same story only stopped when she died. Afterward, they have happened to you, is how Duras described her story of torturing an informant. They might happen to anyone.

There’s an element of propaganda here, one that I have to remind myself of: not to warn myself away, but just to remember that the word isn’t restricted to when it’s used in service of ideas I don’t agree with. I have also been influenced by the women I’ve encountered in my time in labor organizing who are as committed to their cause as they are to their pains, and I know I’m not alone. All organizers are, to the people they organize, celebrities of sorts. While the work is certainly not easily described as glamorous, the work they do is a mixture of cool and warm; it requires charisma and absence. Taken together, these contradictions become a kind of grace. I can only imagine what someone like Duras would say to a modern term like “emotional labor,” and believe she would most likely reject something that takes such pride in being able to contain an impossible depth of experience into a single phrase. But sometimes we need the stupidest labels to remain smart about what we know.

This work requires more secrets, more silences, than others. Inside it is babies being born and parents dying, people abandoned by or trapped in their commitments. Car crashes, botched surgeries, abortions, miscarriages, evictions, empty fridges, court summons, broken contracts. Betrayals and heartbreaks are the background of every life and in a movement that needs its martyrs these wounds can become a virtue.

In Jaqueline Rose’s book Mothers, the writer tells a story about speaking to her therapist after the death of her mother. Rose was waiting, she felt, to return to normal; this grief was interstitial, she believed, and only an era of her life that would soon pass. The therapist replied with exactly the kind of viciousness I admire and hope to convey here when she told Rose that that would never be the case. Grief is the real life, and the reprieves of peace are just places we visit in between. To treat a woman in mourning as something special, extraordinary? It would be harder to find one not in mourning.

Grief’s capability to level the griever is one I respect probably too much, trusting pain as though it is eternal honestly and pleasure as though it is a temporary lie. Destruction can be as much of an art as creation, in the way it reveals what was once unseen or unknown. But destruction is easy to valorize because it is easily misunderstood as quick. I often hear people use the phrase it just happened to explain all kinds of disasters, as though they are events disconnected from the rest of time and made of a substance designed to dissolve. Loss is inevitable, and love is a miracle: Only one, in this way of thinking, is guaranteed, and it’s not the one that makes us feel the happiest. Is this the kind of thinking that comes from living through too much war, or too much peace? The English translation of Duras’s memoir title claims that this is a book about wartimes, but I think the reason I fell so completely into the writing is because of the impossible dissonance between which life Duras is in: Technically, this is not a book about the end of a war, but of the first days of peace. Technically, these are the days of a new era of history. And yet the days never lose the feeling of suffering, and the idea of peace never replaces the memories of what preceded that arbitrary declaration. When Duras published the original text in French, she called it La Douleur. What name did she think this time deserved? Pain.