Arts and Letters

Marguerite Yourcenar, who died last year at eighty-four, was, as I expect you all know, the first woman ever to be elected a member of the Académie Française. Her election, which occurred in 1981 when she was seventy-eight, reverberated in waves of contention through the normally contentious French literary world even as it testified to the peak of esteem she had progressively attained over a writing career of fifty years in which she produced eight novels as well as books of essays, books of stories, poems, memoirs, and translations. For these last she chose two of the most sophisticated talents of her time, Virginia Woolf and Henry James, and by contrast a collection of Negro spirituals and a work of James Baldwin. The choice suggests an eclectic as well as an independent mind.

Contrary to the custom of these tributes, I have to say that I did not know our subject personally; I never met her socially or professionally. I never saw her in real life, and even if I had, I would probably not have learned much, for she was a person who was naturally aloof, who, as an acquaintance recalls, even used the formal vous in addressing her dog. My non-acquaintance with Mme. Yourcenar is, I expect, true of all of us, for she lived remotely in Maine when not abroad, and did not circulate in American writers' circles. In the seven years since she was elected to our Institute in 1981, I do not know that she was ever in our company. Presumably, I was chosen for her tribute more or less at random, and what I have to say will therefore have to be based entirely on her work and what she has told about her life and herself in a series of interviews with the French literary critic Matthieu Galey, published in English in 1984 in a book entitled With Open Eyes. A writer's work is, after all, the true biography. Anything else in private life, unless the person is in a position toaffect public affairs, is, I firmly believe, no one else's business. The so-called public "right to know" does not, in my opinion, exist, any more than the right of a Peeping Tom to peep. My report, as a result, will not be a vivid personal portrayal, especially not of this self-contained woman whose work itself remains, for me at least, something of an enigma.

Mme. Yourcenar was born in 1903 on her family's estate in French Flanders, the territory that had become Belgium in the previous century. Of an old Catholic family of the upper bourgeoisie, her parents were well off and well connected, as the phrase goes, and established on their own land called Mont Noir, where Marguerite grew up, with winters spent in the South of France and every summer until June at Mont Noir, interspersed by sojourns at the beaches of Holland and Belgium. At Mont Noir she gathered her early memories of the things that, as she writes, she still loved in adulthood, of grass and wildflowers, orchards and pine groves, horses and cows, sheep and rabbits and the endless dunes that the sea left behind when it withdrew beneath rolling waves. Here, too, she came to know the habits and folktales of rural life through the personalities of the village and of the large domestic staff—gardener, coachman, milkmaid, cook, and little Marie, whose only task was to churn butter in a chilled room. This rural childhood lasted until the eve of the German invasion of 1914, when the family moved to their large apartment in Paris. Marguerite was educated at home largely by her father, a man of cosmopolitan culture and a rare and active interest in the development of a female child. He taught her Latin at ten and Greek at twelve, read aloud to her from Racine and Shakespeare, took her to museums and readily discussed with her as they walked together literary and philosophical questions. Under this tutelage, it is not surprising that she was reading Racine's Phèdre at eight and absorbing his matchless style in her earliest years.

This prodigy published a remarkable first novel, Alexis, when twenty-four, most of it written, incredibly, when she was nineteen and in her early twenties. It is a story of a young male homosexual, a musician, who under the sponsorship of a titled family connection marries a pallid young woman whose fortune will supplement his own family's dwindling funds. Alexis loves her in a fainthearted way, fathers a son and in the end leaves her and their child to seek his own destiny. The book takes the form of a lengthy letter he writes to his wife to explain his desertion. The book is extraordinary not only for the chosen subject at the time but for the delicate understanding of the main character's feelings—not physical feelings, for the narrative is entirely passionless—but of his social feelings, as it were, as he contemplates his relations with the conventional society where he belongs. It is extraordinary, too, especially for what one of her translators well called the "luminous purity" of Yourcenar's prose. Told in Alexis's own words, it perfectly succeeds in creating what the author defines as the "portrait of voice," actually the author's own voice, of course, as a writer's words must always be. I can think of no one else who produced work so mature when so young except Keats, who also was twenty-four when his first volume of poems appeared, the book containing the "Eve of St. Agnes" and the wonderful Odes—to a Grecian Urn, to Autumn, to Melancholy, to the West Wind.

In Alexis one is absorbed by the charm of the language and the keen but gentle perception of the sentiments. Partly, I think, the charm is relief from the current fashion in novels for slush and squalor and characters planning to murder their mothers or otherwise wallowing under the effects of alcohol.

No one drinks or vomits or pulls a gun in Alexis, so the limpid language could be heard for itself and could make known to French critics, as it did at once, that a new literary voice was born.

Yet the book is puzzling in that Mme. Yourcenar does not seem particularly interested in the homosexual condition, which she has made her subject, again, in her more famous book, The Memoirs of Hadrian, published more than twenty years after Alexis. She does not seem particularly concerned with the fact of the Emperor's yearnings for the beautiful boy Antinous. She never refers to the homosexual condition by name, speaking of it as "penchants (leanings) or inclinations." She neither defends nor condemns nor engages in psychological probing, so why has she made this particular aberration her subject? I cannot say, as I do not know.

I know even less about her from other novels of hers I have read. Is she writing about love? Well, not as we generally think of it. The men in her stories do not really like women. In one rather terrible tale called Coup de Grâce, the hero, a soldier of fortune, describes the intimacy that has sprung up between him and Sophie, the sister of a comrade who has fallen in love with him, as like that "between victim and executioner"—rather an odd metaphor for the emotion usually believed to connect men and women. Indeed, in this story, the hero, as Sophie's captor in some ill-defined police action against a band of reds of which Sophie is a part, shoots her in the face and kills her. The bullet smashes her jaw "so that I shall never know (and it haunts me still)," says the narrator, "what expression Sophie would have had in death.”¹ "Well, tough" can be a reader's only comment. Unless I am missing something, which may well be, as I am not practiced in reading novels, at least not modern novels for which one needs, I think, some special faculty to appreciate them. Mme. Yourcenar tends to agree, calling herself "mostly indifferent to what is being written nowadays."

She was indifferent, too, to the prospect of election to the French Académie, and did not lobby for it or activate claques in her support for election as the first woman member because she did not wish to be regarded as a spokesman for the feminist cause or for any cause. As an academician, she wished to be acknowledged purely for her work as a writer. This she achieved: though outspoken in the cause of preserving the environment from human damage and in behalf of a hearing for the voice of blacks in literature, her own writing, unique and distinctive, overshadows any other activity and marks her place in our time.

Her opinions remain individual and emphatic. She was once asked if she had ever suffered from being a woman. "Not in the slightest—I never wanted to be a man," she asserted (echoing my own sentiments), "[for] what would I have gained by being a man—apart from the privilege of taking part in wars?"

On the environment, she was clear and certain: That man places himself in jeopardy by destabilizing the atmosphere and the world's weather. She goes to the heart of the problem without circumlocution when she says, "The central evil is overpopulation." Elsewhere, in a statement that I love her for, she says, "Even silence is being polluted." One may pick up another glimpse of her personality when she speaks of being 95 percent vegetarian with an occasional bit of chicken or fish but "never, of course, of beef," because, she explains, she "feels too much affection and respect for the species whose female gives us milk, symbol of the earth's fertility."

Yourcenar came to America in 1940 when France was invaded on the outbreak of World War II. Invited to stay at a friend's house in North East Harbor on the coast of Maine, she found nearby, along with her longtime friend, companion, and translator, Grace Frick, a house of their own on Mt. Desert Island that they bought and where Mme. Yourcenar made her home for the last thirty years. To support herself in addition to writing, she accepted a teaching position at Sarah Lawrence, which she did not enjoy because she found the students, she has said, so "ill informed."

Politically, as might be expected, during the 1930s when her career was taking shape, she took an outspoken anti-fascist position. Her novel of 1934, A Coin in Nine Hands, focuses on an attempt to assassinate Mussolini. Marcella, the central female character, has obtained a pistol from her lover, or is he her husband? The characters are so tangled and convoluted that I could not follow who was who. In any event, Marcella makes her way to a grand public ceremony in the Balbo Palace, finds an arranged position, takes aim, fires, "and missed." That is that, but what is the significance? Marcella obviously had to miss, since the real Mussolini at the time of the writing was very much alive, but what, then, is the story saying? I am left at a loss. Seeking to find a clue to this writer, I tried her book of Oriental Tales, which in their total fantasy call to mind Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales but lack entirely the hard fiber and grim incidents of Dinesen's fantasies and in comparison seem like foam. They, too, leave one asking What is her subject, what is she writing about? I suppose one could also ask what Shakespeare was writing about. Joseph Epstein, editor of American Scholar, whose essays under the name Aristides are some of my favorite reading, states in an essay on Yourcenar, "Marguerite Yourcenar's subject is human destiny." That is too amorphous; if I may paraphrase a complaint heard in the presidential debate the other night, ''Joe, you have not really answered the question." Who knows, in any event, what human destiny is? The nearest I can come to Yourcenar's subject is to suggest that it is the artistry of language to use as a tool in pursuit of truth.

In 1947, Mme. Yourcenar became an American citizen. Four years later, in 1951, when she was forty-eight, her most famous book, The Memoirs of Hadrian—considered her masterpiece—was published. In the form of Hadrian's letters to his adopted grandson and successor, Marcus Aurelius, they are reflections on his twenty-year reign by this Roman emperor of the first century A.D. Grounded in intimate knowledge of the period, the letters have been called by Joseph Epstein, "a triumph of historical ventriloquism…. It is impossible," he writes, "to read the book and not think that had Hadrian left memoirs, this is how they would have read. To bring off such a novel," he continues, "requires not only artistry and sure scholarship but intelligence of a high order." These are faculties that Yourcenar possessed in abundance.

Unschooled as I am in Roman culture, I cannot judge how accurately she represents, in her rather high-flown philosophical aphorisms about physical and spiritual love, the true tone of the great commander who built the Roman wall across Britain, crushed revolt in Judaea, and otherwise extended Roman power in the Near East. If the reflections seem not entirely in character for a general of armies in the field, the book's classical learning received international acclaim and its lofty dicta on human emotions appealed to French taste.

When the proposal arose of Yourcenar's membership in the Académie Française and her American citizenship became an obstacle, Yourcenar's native citizenship was restored. The fact that she wrote in French, her supporters pointed out, was enough evidence of her nationality, and as she said of herself, "I am French by culture."

This did not dispose of objections, among which not the least serious for France was the claim that the tight green and gold embroidered trousers of the Académie uniform traditionally worn with a sword would not look well on a woman of ample figure. At this stage, the couturier Yves St. Laurent stepped in with an offer to adapt the uniform into a gown. Objectors on the Right, who in any case were being ridiculed by the wits, were silenced. Yourcenar had let it be known that she would not refuse election if offered. National crisis was resolved. Dignified and elegant in green and gold, Marguerite Yourcenar was duly installed. I do not know whether she carried the sword.

Now I must apologize for failing to carry out the proper task of a tribute, which should be to portray the personality and to honor and celebrate the work of the deceased. I have given you a critique rather than a tribute. But if I have been less than wholly laudatory, let me say again that as a creative writer and intuitive historian, Marguerite Yourcenar had a quality as unique as the elevated place she has achieved.

¹Excerpt from Coup de Grâce by Marguerite Yourcenar. Copyright 1957, renewal copyright 1985 by Marguerite Yourcenar. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.