FROM FRANCE, THE LAST WORD ON MME. DURAS

In 40 years as a femme des lettres, Marguerite Duras has achieved a rare immortality: She has become an adjective. What Durassien means depends on what side you are on. She arouses fascination, irritation, adulation, boredom--sometimes all at once. Her prose is difficult, spare, obsessive--easy enough to parody but hard to imitate. She makes such bad habits as one-word sentences work. Always. And in both subject matter and in her actual phrasing, she repeats herself. Often.

“(Alain) Robbe-Grillet said, ‘She repeats. She says again things she has already said,’ ” Duras remarked in the Paris theater where she was directing a revised version of her play, “La Musica.”

“He confuses things, Robbe-Grillet. He thinks that to repeat means to say the same thing. But things said in another way are new.”

“La Musica,” which Duras also refers to as “Musica Musica” and “Musica II,” began in 1966 as a one-act play for British television and was made by Duras into a film, with Delphine Seyrig. In the first version, a newly divorced couple meet in a hotel in Evreux for the last time. A new act has them talking in the hotel room until dawn. “I make them talk for hours and hours,” Duras says, “just for the sake of talking.”

Hours of talk is definitely Durassien and, especially in her films, it drives some people mad. It is a particularly French phenomenon for distinguished writers to turn to film--Cocteau, Malraux, Robbe-Grillet--but none has been as unremitting as Duras.

With more than a dozen films to her credit, she is an active and often innovative film maker. Cahiers de Cinema gave her an entire issue in 1980, in which she gave a very funny account of filming with Jean-Luc Godard, and it qualified her “Aurelia Steiner” as one of the most important films ever made.

One French critic says her films are so unvisual and static that one suspects she makes films in order to destroy cinema. It isn’t a medium she seems to love. In yet another book of homage, she is quoted as saying: “I make films to fill my time. If I had the strength to do nothing, I would do nothing.”

Talking in the theater after the rehearsal of “La Musica,” she says she makes films between books in order to keep writing. To write, she has said, is to be unable not to write. She is extremely productive, and even a severe bout of alcoholism did not stop her from writing: “When I am writing, I am not dying.”

This spring she came out with a book of four pieces about the Occupation. (She lived then, as she does now, on the Rue St. Benoit in St. Germain-des-Pres and she saved the life of another member of the Resistance, called “Morland,” real name Francois Mitterrand, now president of France.)

Its publication marked the end of a most remarkable Duras season in which in addition to “La Musica” and a film, “Les Enfants,” she came out with a novel, “L’Amant,” which became a best seller as soon as it appeared last autumn and went on to win the prestigious Goncourt literary prize.

“L’Amant,” which Pantheon will publish in the United States later this year, is set in Indochina, a French colony when Duras was born there in 1914. Her widowed mother (her father had been a math teacher) taught at a mixed-race school, a demeaning position for a Frenchwoman at that time, and scrabbled hard to raise her daughter and two sons.

“L’Amant” re-explores the period Duras described in “Un Barrage contre la Pacifique” (1950), but she says that while her family was alive, she wrote around rather than about them. If some of the material is familiar, the story is new:

“The story of my life does not exist,” Duras writes in “L’Amant.” “It does not exist. There is never a center. No road. No line.” A critic in Le Monde crossly noted, “Duras says ‘the story of my life does not exist.’ This is clearly untrue. She never stops telling it to us.”

The three Donnadieu children (she became Duras when she became a writer) grew up like proud and unruly savages. At the age of 15 1/2, Marguerite takes her first lover, a Chinese 12 years her senior--takes him for her own pleasure, which is immense, and for his fortune, which is considerable. The story ends a year and a half later when the girl leaves for France.

“L’Amant,” which is indeed an extraordinary book, Durassien but totally accessible, was written mostly at Neauphle-le-Chateau, a village near Paris where Deanna Durbin also lives and where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lived before he seized power in Iran. While Duras can labor over a short text for a year, she breezed through “L’Amant” in only three months.

“Sometimes I worked 10 hours a day. But without fatigue. People have asked me why it’s such a success, and I think it is because I found great happiness in writing it, a great happiness that is transmitted to the reader.

“That’s a new phenomenon in French book-selling, because to be serious you had to bore people. I didn’t do it purposely, but the book doesn’t bore.

“It is a difficult book, but I think people will realize I didn’t make it difficult on purpose.”

With “L’Amant,” her publishers released photographs of the young Duras to the press: a most arresting face, quite lovely and untrustworthy, with the impenitent eyes of a subway pickpocket or a child guerrilla. “L’Amant” was originally intended as a collection of old photos rather than a novel, but it became centered on what Duras calls the absolute photograph, a picture that was never taken: Marguerite, age 15 1/2, stands on a ferry on the Mekong River wearing a man’s pink fedora, a pale silk dress so worn that it’s almost transparent, and gold dancing shoes. It is daylight. On the river bank, a young Chinese watches her from his long, black, chauffeur-driven car.

Because “L’Amant” began as a photo album, Duras says she said to herself that she would pay less attention than usual to her style. From this she accidentally developed what she calls ecriture courante , a cursive style that she describes as “writing abandoned to itself, left to itself. I sometimes had the feeling that the writing was going faster than I was.”

Duras is a small terrier of a woman who talks as she writes: The pauses, the repetition, the sudden rhythms all demand attention. They are the verbal equivalent of the Ancient Mariner’s grasp. She is the placid center of a group of admirers, and literary Paris is full of stories about Duras and her groupies. One feels that she does not discourage them.

“My readers, who were already fanatical about me, were cross about the Prix Goncourt,” she says. “They said they are taking you away from us, you belong only to us.”

She belongs to no one and still considers herself a Creole, a Frenchwoman born outside France. “All my books come from that,” she says. “I am very glad to be born elsewhere.”

She is sure of herself. “I have a certain idea of myself,” she says. “One can call it pretentious, I don’t care. It’s what I think.” And right now she is rather mellow. After what she considers a decade of critical neglect and severe alcoholism (her cure was, typically, documented in a book by an admirer), she is feeling on top right now and enjoys making such statements as: “Sartre did not know how to write. He is one of the reasons why the French are mentally and politically retarded.

“He considered himself the interpreter of Marxism. You know how in religion you haven’t the right to go directly to God but must pass by a saint? Well, Sartre and Sartrism were the great intercessors of Marxism. No, he wasn’t a writer. He wasn’t.”

With a grin that could only be called cheeky despite her years and distinctions, she adds that suddenly she finds it easier to talk frankly--about her family, about the Resistance, about Sartre. “It’s all the same to me, now; I couldn’t care less. Getting old has its good points, too, I assure you. You’ll see.”

It’s been a most remarkable Marguerite Duras season in which in addition to ‘La Musica’ and a film, “Les Enfants,” she came out with a novel, ‘L’Amant.’