The New York Times: Book Review Search Article:
The Celebration of Passion
Date: October 17, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Edmund White;
Lead:
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR Inventing a Life.
By Josyane Savigneau.
Translated by Joan E. Howard.
Illustrated. 527 pp. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. $25.
Text:
Marguerite Yourcenar, who was born in 1903 and died in 1987, was the last echo of a heroic chorus of European writers that included Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, older men whom she particularly admired and whose work influenced hers. Like them, she was a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture, a moralist with a taste for historical perspectives and a virtuoso equally at home in novels, stories and essays (she also wrote rather bad plays and poems).
Like them, she joined a dignified, not to say marmoreal, manner to a penchant for shocking subject matter, for she was as fascinated as they were by sexual ambiguity. Mann explored incest in "The Blood of the Walsungs" and an exalted, if overripe, platonic homosexuality in "Death in Venice." Gide touched on bisexuality and reveled in hedonism in "The Immoralist" and avowed his own homosexuality in "If It Die." In a daring, if often over-the-top, essay, "Corydon," Gide defended homosexuality as natural and even useful to society.
As Josyane Savigneau reminds us in "Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life," Yourcenar, in her very Gidean first novel, "Alexis" (1929), showed how a young husband's homosexuality could compromise his marriage, while in her masterpiece, "Memoirs of Hadrian" (1951), she invented one of the great same-sex love stories of all time, the Roman Emperor's passion for his Greek lover. In her splendid essays on the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy and the prolific Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima she honored two of the remarkable talents of our epoch, each so different from the other but both homosexual. Indeed, her critical introduction to Cavafy is a particularly acute evaluation; for instance, she remarks, "We are so used to seeing in wisdom a residue of dead passions that it's difficult to recognize in it the hardest and most condensed form of ardor, the gold nugget pulled out of the fire, not the ashes."
This Nietzschean celebration of passion would mark her own fiction. In her essay she also contrasts Cavafy's "exquisite freedom from posturing" about his homosexuality with Proust's dishonesty (which led him to give "a grotesque or false image of his own tendencies") and with Gide's need "to put his personal experience immediately in the service of rational reform or social progress." In her own writing and conduct she would avoid the Proustian and Gidean extremes and cultivate Cavafy's unemphatic self-acceptance.
Cavafy's honesty is also similar to that of the Emperor Hadrian in Yourcenar's brilliant re-creation. As she explained, in giving the background to her most famous book and how she came to write it, she had been struck as early as 1927 by one of Flaubert's letters in which he observed, "There was a unique moment between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when the gods no longer existed and Christ had not yet emerged and humanity was all alone." This was the supremely humanist moment that Yourcenar captured with such success.
MS. SAVIGNEAU has constructed a scrupulously accurate, never inflated account of Yourcenar that is surely the best biography to be written in French in several decades, one that quietly and affectionately takes the measure of a woman who could be maddeningly pompous and egotistical but whose single-mindedness still commands respect. Ms. Savigneau, the literary editor of Le Monde in Paris, has traced out every step in the life of this secretive woman who seldom doubted that she was destined for greatness.
As we learn from the biography -- translated now by Joan E. Howard -- Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels to a Belgian mother and a French father, whose name was Michel de Crayencour (Yourcenar, a pen name, is a nearly perfect anagram). Her mother, Fernande, died 10 days after Marguerite's birth, and the child was watched over from afar by a woman who Marguerite later imagined must have been her mother's lover. She was raised, however, by her father, a compulsive gambler (already 49 years old when Marguerite was born), who destroyed the family fortune but who conferred on his brilliant daughter a love of travel and learning. She was not sent to school nor did she embroider or play with dolls. She had few toys and preferred reciting poetry to playing, which must have made her seem unbearably priggish to her friends. At a precocious age she developed a sense that she was "important, even very important," as she later recalled.
She and her father spent the first year of World War I in England where they studied Latin and Greek together but made little headway in English. They returned to Paris in 1915, where she was tutored at home. Her father passed on to the child his favorite books by Goethe, Tolstoy, J. K. Huysmans and the controversial (because pacifist) Romain Rolland. She and her father read out loud Virgil in Latin and Homer in Greek. At the age of 16, she wrote a poetic drama, "Icarus."
The young writer developed a deep complicity with her father. He paid to have her first two books published, wrote and signed letters for her in her absence, but expressed no warmth to her. Yet when he was dying, he was pleased to have lived long enough to have read her first genuine literary achievement, "Alexis." In the same year, she began to work on a first (and soon abandoned) version of the life of Hadrian. She was 26 years old. The "Memoirs of Hadrian" would not be published until 1951. Yourcenar had, in fact, already discovered in her 20's almost all the literary themes she would develop over the next 60 years.
Yourcenar quickly forgot about her father after his death and thought about him only several decades later. Passionate and cerebral, she spent the 10 years after her father's death before the outbreak of World War II traveling, living in small hotels, reading, writing and seducing both men and women. She had an unhappy experience pursuing a man, a French writer who was homosexual; the suffering was indirectly expressed in "Coup de Grace," the short 1939 novel that is perhaps her strongest piece of fiction.
The title also alludes to her meeting Grace Frick, with whom she would live until Frick's death 40 years later. Frick, an academic from Kansas City who was the same age as Yourcenar, would help Yourcenar with her research, organize her social life, translate her books and sustain her financially over the decades. Because Frick was American, Yourcenar -- the most thoroughly French of all modern French writers -- would spend most of her life in the United States, and from 1950 on, in Maine, on remote Mount Desert Island. Yourcenar was the first woman ever to be admitted to the French Academy and one of the first living French writers to have her complete works published in the prestigious Pleiade series, usually consecrated to classic authors of the past. How strange that this monument of French letters should have lived as a virtual recluse on an American island where many of her neighbors assumed "Madame" could not even speak English. Her American years, moreover, affected her only in minor ways. She translated African-American spirituals into French as well as a collection of blues and a play by James Baldwin, and she became a committed ecologist; otherwise her adopted homeland scarcely left a trace on her work.
Ms. Savigneau, who knew Yourcenar, recounts every moment of this complex and ultimately triumphant destiny with a rare combination of tact and verve. She never pretends to know more than can be known (Yourcenar's private papers are sealed until 2037). Ms. Savigneau has a sharp sense of the anguish this solitary genius suffered when she taught in the 1940's at a chummy American college; Yourcenar's aloofness at Sarah Lawrence sounds remarkably like Vladimir Nabokov's at Cornell. The comic behind-the-scenes maneuverings that led to her election to the French Academy in 1980 (an honor she never sought) are rendered with abundant and amusing detail.
The intricate checks and balances in what one of Frick's lifelong friends called Your cenar's "good marriage" to Grace are presented with sympathy and equanimity. Frick was forced into playing the bad cop in order to scare off reporters, graduate students, editors and other time wasters long enough for Yourcenar to get on with her work, but most of her victims never forgave her and wrote about her as a neurotic shrew. Your cenar herself dismissed their relationship after Grace's death: "Essentially, it's very simple: first it was a passion, then it was a habit, then just one woman looking after another who was ill."
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR was entering her glory years of international fame in the 1970's at the same time Frick was becoming terminally ill. This disparity produced considerable bitterness in both women. After Frick's death in 1979, Yourcenar was taken up by Jerry Wilson, a 30-year-old American gay man. They enjoyed a stormy relationship during which Wilson often reproached Yourcenar for being tired all the time (she was in her 80's). Despite their fights and her weakness, Wilson enabled Yourcenar to return to her greatest passion -- travel. She and he were in constant motion -- Kenya, Japan, India, Europe -- until 1986 when Wilson died of AIDS. Despite her continuing travels and honors, she lost the will to live and died on Dec. 17, 1987.
Like several other lesbian writers (Mary Renault is the most obvious parallel), Your cenar wrote best when she projected herself into the mind of a male homosexual character. In a note appended to "Memoirs of Hadrian," she said that it was impossible to make a woman her main character since "the life of women is too limited or too secret." Yourcenar's was far from limited, though she did her best to keep it secret. Fortunately for us, Ms. Savigneau has laid many of her secrets bare without violating them.
'ON THIS LITTLE ISLAND'
[ Marguerite ] Yourcenar and [ Grace ] Frick had come up with a plan to buy a house on Mount Desert Island. . . . The cottage, the purchase of which was concluded on 29 September 1950, is located on the road that follows the ocean, but it is the villas across the way that have access -- private access -- to the oceanfront. Originally part of an old farm built in 1866, this little house . . . suited Yourcenar and Frick. . . . They would call it Petite Plaisance. . . .
Yourcenar reasserted constantly that she saw Petite Plaisance as "a country house such as I could have had anywhere in the world. . . . On this little island . . . it is somewhat as if I were in the United States while not being there." This confirms a letter to Jean Lambert, who, in 1956, found himself in the United States and shared with Your cenar his homesickness: "Until such time as one has managed to create on this continent, as Grace and I have done, a domain, however small it may be, governed by fantasy or one's personal wishes, what the transplanted European finds here . . . is quite simply a poorer, harsher Europe, devoid of all the refinements that make Europe what it is for us; (with regard to which we are mistaken; how very small it is, that Europe of refinements). . . . That there is also something else, of this we can be certain: small islands of public-spiritedness, which are submerged where we come from; a will to progress that is grotesque when expressed in terms of publicity, but that has remained sincere and effective; . . . an extraordinarily beautiful natural environment . . . and infinitely more of a past than is generally said: . . . the old houses of New England and the plantations of the South (which, I willingly admit, belong to a vanished world, but is this not also true of Versailles?), and, finally, the admirable Indian country. . . . If I were you, I would start by hitchhiking to San Antonio or San Francisco. It takes time to get to know this great country, at once so spread out and so secret."
To everyone who, coming to visit, asked her the traditional question regarding her choice of America and that island, she tirelessly gave the same responses. . . . "If I left here, I would set myself up in another village, of the same type. . . . I live here in the same way I would live in Brittany, or anywhere. My life's choice is not that of America against France. It translates a taste for a world stripped of all borders."
Text:
Marguerite Yourcenar, who was born in 1903 and died in 1987, was the last echo of a heroic chorus of European writers that included Thomas Mann and Andre Gide, older men whom she particularly admired and whose work influenced hers. Like them, she was a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture, a moralist with a taste for historical perspectives and a virtuoso equally at home in novels, stories and essays (she also wrote rather bad plays and poems).
Like them, she joined a dignified, not to say marmoreal, manner to a penchant for shocking subject matter, for she was as fascinated as they were by sexual ambiguity. Mann explored incest in "The Blood of the Walsungs" and an exalted, if overripe, platonic homosexuality in "Death in Venice." Gide touched on bisexuality and reveled in hedonism in "The Immoralist" and avowed his own homosexuality in "If It Die." In a daring, if often over-the-top, essay, "Corydon," Gide defended homosexuality as natural and even useful to society.
As Josyane Savigneau reminds us in "Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life," Yourcenar, in her very Gidean first novel, "Alexis" (1929), showed how a young husband's homosexuality could compromise his marriage, while in her masterpiece, "Memoirs of Hadrian" (1951), she invented one of the great same-sex love stories of all time, the Roman Emperor's passion for his Greek lover. In her splendid essays on the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy and the prolific Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima she honored two of the remarkable talents of our epoch, each so different from the other but both homosexual. Indeed, her critical introduction to Cavafy is a particularly acute evaluation; for instance, she remarks, "We are so used to seeing in wisdom a residue of dead passions that it's difficult to recognize in it the hardest and most condensed form of ardor, the gold nugget pulled out of the fire, not the ashes."
This Nietzschean celebration of passion would mark her own fiction. In her essay she also contrasts Cavafy's "exquisite freedom from posturing" about his homosexuality with Proust's dishonesty (which led him to give "a grotesque or false image of his own tendencies") and with Gide's need "to put his personal experience immediately in the service of rational reform or social progress." In her own writing and conduct she would avoid the Proustian and Gidean extremes and cultivate Cavafy's unemphatic self-acceptance.
Cavafy's honesty is also similar to that of the Emperor Hadrian in Yourcenar's brilliant re-creation. As she explained, in giving the background to her most famous book and how she came to write it, she had been struck as early as 1927 by one of Flaubert's letters in which he observed, "There was a unique moment between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when the gods no longer existed and Christ had not yet emerged and humanity was all alone." This was the supremely humanist moment that Yourcenar captured with such success.
MS. SAVIGNEAU has constructed a scrupulously accurate, never inflated account of Yourcenar that is surely the best biography to be written in French in several decades, one that quietly and affectionately takes the measure of a woman who could be maddeningly pompous and egotistical but whose single-mindedness still commands respect. Ms. Savigneau, the literary editor of Le Monde in Paris, has traced out every step in the life of this secretive woman who seldom doubted that she was destined for greatness.
As we learn from the biography -- translated now by Joan E. Howard -- Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels to a Belgian mother and a French father, whose name was Michel de Crayencour (Yourcenar, a pen name, is a nearly perfect anagram). Her mother, Fernande, died 10 days after Marguerite's birth, and the child was watched over from afar by a woman who Marguerite later imagined must have been her mother's lover. She was raised, however, by her father, a compulsive gambler (already 49 years old when Marguerite was born), who destroyed the family fortune but who conferred on his brilliant daughter a love of travel and learning. She was not sent to school nor did she embroider or play with dolls. She had few toys and preferred reciting poetry to playing, which must have made her seem unbearably priggish to her friends. At a precocious age she developed a sense that she was "important, even very important," as she later recalled.
She and her father spent the first year of World War I in England where they studied Latin and Greek together but made little headway in English. They returned to Paris in 1915, where she was tutored at home. Her father passed on to the child his favorite books by Goethe, Tolstoy, J. K. Huysmans and the controversial (because pacifist) Romain Rolland. She and her father read out loud Virgil in Latin and Homer in Greek. At the age of 16, she wrote a poetic drama, "Icarus."
The young writer developed a deep complicity with her father. He paid to have her first two books published, wrote and signed letters for her in her absence, but expressed no warmth to her. Yet when he was dying, he was pleased to have lived long enough to have read her first genuine literary achievement, "Alexis." In the same year, she began to work on a first (and soon abandoned) version of the life of Hadrian. She was 26 years old. The "Memoirs of Hadrian" would not be published until 1951. Yourcenar had, in fact, already discovered in her 20's almost all the literary themes she would develop over the next 60 years.
Yourcenar quickly forgot about her father after his death and thought about him only several decades later. Passionate and cerebral, she spent the 10 years after her father's death before the outbreak of World War II traveling, living in small hotels, reading, writing and seducing both men and women. She had an unhappy experience pursuing a man, a French writer who was homosexual; the suffering was indirectly expressed in "Coup de Grace," the short 1939 novel that is perhaps her strongest piece of fiction.
The title also alludes to her meeting Grace Frick, with whom she would live until Frick's death 40 years later. Frick, an academic from Kansas City who was the same age as Yourcenar, would help Yourcenar with her research, organize her social life, translate her books and sustain her financially over the decades. Because Frick was American, Yourcenar -- the most thoroughly French of all modern French writers -- would spend most of her life in the United States, and from 1950 on, in Maine, on remote Mount Desert Island. Yourcenar was the first woman ever to be admitted to the French Academy and one of the first living French writers to have her complete works published in the prestigious Pleiade series, usually consecrated to classic authors of the past. How strange that this monument of French letters should have lived as a virtual recluse on an American island where many of her neighbors assumed "Madame" could not even speak English. Her American years, moreover, affected her only in minor ways. She translated African-American spirituals into French as well as a collection of blues and a play by James Baldwin, and she became a committed ecologist; otherwise her adopted homeland scarcely left a trace on her work.
Ms. Savigneau, who knew Yourcenar, recounts every moment of this complex and ultimately triumphant destiny with a rare combination of tact and verve. She never pretends to know more than can be known (Yourcenar's private papers are sealed until 2037). Ms. Savigneau has a sharp sense of the anguish this solitary genius suffered when she taught in the 1940's at a chummy American college; Yourcenar's aloofness at Sarah Lawrence sounds remarkably like Vladimir Nabokov's at Cornell. The comic behind-the-scenes maneuverings that led to her election to the French Academy in 1980 (an honor she never sought) are rendered with abundant and amusing detail.
The intricate checks and balances in what one of Frick's lifelong friends called Your cenar's "good marriage" to Grace are presented with sympathy and equanimity. Frick was forced into playing the bad cop in order to scare off reporters, graduate students, editors and other time wasters long enough for Yourcenar to get on with her work, but most of her victims never forgave her and wrote about her as a neurotic shrew. Your cenar herself dismissed their relationship after Grace's death: "Essentially, it's very simple: first it was a passion, then it was a habit, then just one woman looking after another who was ill."
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR was entering her glory years of international fame in the 1970's at the same time Frick was becoming terminally ill. This disparity produced considerable bitterness in both women. After Frick's death in 1979, Yourcenar was taken up by Jerry Wilson, a 30-year-old American gay man. They enjoyed a stormy relationship during which Wilson often reproached Yourcenar for being tired all the time (she was in her 80's). Despite their fights and her weakness, Wilson enabled Yourcenar to return to her greatest passion -- travel. She and he were in constant motion -- Kenya, Japan, India, Europe -- until 1986 when Wilson died of AIDS. Despite her continuing travels and honors, she lost the will to live and died on Dec. 17, 1987.
Like several other lesbian writers (Mary Renault is the most obvious parallel), Your cenar wrote best when she projected herself into the mind of a male homosexual character. In a note appended to "Memoirs of Hadrian," she said that it was impossible to make a woman her main character since "the life of women is too limited or too secret." Yourcenar's was far from limited, though she did her best to keep it secret. Fortunately for us, Ms. Savigneau has laid many of her secrets bare without violating them.
'ON THIS LITTLE ISLAND'
[ Marguerite ] Yourcenar and [ Grace ] Frick had come up with a plan to buy a house on Mount Desert Island. . . . The cottage, the purchase of which was concluded on 29 September 1950, is located on the road that follows the ocean, but it is the villas across the way that have access -- private access -- to the oceanfront. Originally part of an old farm built in 1866, this little house . . . suited Yourcenar and Frick. . . . They would call it Petite Plaisance. . . .
Yourcenar reasserted constantly that she saw Petite Plaisance as "a country house such as I could have had anywhere in the world. . . . On this little island . . . it is somewhat as if I were in the United States while not being there." This confirms a letter to Jean Lambert, who, in 1956, found himself in the United States and shared with Your cenar his homesickness: "Until such time as one has managed to create on this continent, as Grace and I have done, a domain, however small it may be, governed by fantasy or one's personal wishes, what the transplanted European finds here . . . is quite simply a poorer, harsher Europe, devoid of all the refinements that make Europe what it is for us; (with regard to which we are mistaken; how very small it is, that Europe of refinements). . . . That there is also something else, of this we can be certain: small islands of public-spiritedness, which are submerged where we come from; a will to progress that is grotesque when expressed in terms of publicity, but that has remained sincere and effective; . . . an extraordinarily beautiful natural environment . . . and infinitely more of a past than is generally said: . . . the old houses of New England and the plantations of the South (which, I willingly admit, belong to a vanished world, but is this not also true of Versailles?), and, finally, the admirable Indian country. . . . If I were you, I would start by hitchhiking to San Antonio or San Francisco. It takes time to get to know this great country, at once so spread out and so secret."
To everyone who, coming to visit, asked her the traditional question regarding her choice of America and that island, she tirelessly gave the same responses. . . . "If I left here, I would set myself up in another village, of the same type. . . . I live here in the same way I would live in Brittany, or anywhere. My life's choice is not that of America against France. It translates a taste for a world stripped of all borders."
From "Marguerite Yourcenar."
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