The War: A Memoir

"This is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve ever read. There’s one part of it which is about her partner at the time, Robert Antelme. He was part of the French Resistance and was imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. When I was researching The Liberator —which is a book that came out in 2012 about a guy who ended up liberating Dachau—I was looking for suitable characters that I could have in Dachau, as the liberating forces were approaching. I did a lot of research and found Robert Antelme, who was a really cool guy. Then I came across Margaret Duras’s book, which tells the story of her relationship with him. It’s so powerful. Duras’s description of how she nursed him when he arrived back in Paris…it’s difficult to turn the pages. She talks about having to feed him so delicately with a spoon, with a very thin broth, how you could see through his skin to his ribs and his internal organs. That’s how emaciated he was. He was actually rescued from Dachau by Francois Mitterand, the future French president. She writes about how, when he was driven back from Germany to Paris by Mitterand, Mitterand was afraid that if they went across too many bumps in the road that it would literally kill him. He was so close death. Duras writes about how she was terrified of the responsibility that she now confronted of having to try and save him, to try and nurse him back to some kind of health. The kicker is that she no longer loved him. She had had relationships and fallen in love with somebody else. But she did everything that she was capable of doing to give Antelme the chance of living. Then there’s a scene near the end where she has to tell him, ‘You’ve recovered sufficiently to walk on your own, but we can’t be together.’ It’s enormously powerful. I just remember the descriptions of how she fed him, what would go in at one end of his body and come out at the other. It’s extraordinary. It’s an incredible account of what you can do for someone. He was a great writer too. He only wrote one book, about his experience in Dachau. It’s not the whole war. There are a number of novellas within the book that cover different aspects of the war. One, controversially, involves her relationship with a German. But the relationship with Antelm is the one that forms most of the book, and it’s really, really well done. It’s really moving. I was always taken with the idea that you can devote almost every last ounce of your energy to somebody else and then break their heart. It’s the kind of thing that Duras, as a writer, excelled at, this sort of ambivalence and complexity and things that people might not like to dwell on too much. When people think of Margaret Duras, they don’t think of this memoir, but for me, it’s her most powerful, beautiful writing. It’s very elegant and moving. As a woman writing about her experiences in World War Two, about what Nazism did to people and the consequences of trying to bring someone to life after that evil, there’s nothing like it. It’s really extraordinary. I’m not that interested in strategy or tactics, or what the inside of a tank looks like. I’m finishing a book now about the Battle of the Bulge and my editor has a whole bunch of notes like, ‘More on weapons, people love tanks’ or ‘Where were they on this day? Where are they moving towards?’ These are good points, and you have to address them. But I’m much more interested in what they were feeling and thinking and how they coped with the stress, what they believed in, what motivated them, how much they loved the guys around them, how they led their lives later, how they endured, what they were inspired by, whether they prayed, whether they didn’t pray. The thing about World War Two that is really compelling for me—and always will be—is that it’s like the perfect pressure cooker for testing humanity in different ways. With Duras, it’s ‘How do you save someone you don’t want to be with?’ With Audie Murphy it’s ‘How do you carry on? How do you keep moving? How do you wake up every day and do the impossible? And then how, when you emerge from that, do you put the thing that disfigures and scars you to the side and still function?’ Those are the things that are enduring about World War II. It’s not about lots of people killing each other and flag waving and ‘aren’t we wonderful?’ and all that. It’s about human beings tested over and over again. Yes. It’s a good question."