Marguerite Yourcenar

Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour (Brussels, Belgium, June 8, 1903-Bar Harbor, Mount Desert Island, Maine, United States, December 17, 1987), known as Marguerite Yourcenar (first a pseudonym, invented with the letters "Crayencour" minus one "c", and after nationalization, official name), was a novelist, essayist, poet, French playwright and translator who became an American citizen in 1947. She stands out for her historical novels written with a poetic tone and features of erudition.

She was one of the most respected writers in the French language and the first woman to enter the Academy of this country (France). She published novels, essays, poetry, and three volumes of family memoirs that were very well received by critics and readers. The most famous work of hers is the historical novel Memories of Adriano (1951).

Biography

Early Years

Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Clenewerck de Crayencour was born in Brussels, Belgium. Her mother, Fernande de Carttier de Marchienne, who came from an aristocratic Belgian family, died ten days after her birth from complications in childbirth, and the girl was raised by her father, Michel-René Clenewerck de Crayencour, who had 50 years old when she was born and that she came from an aristocratic French family. Until they were 10 years old, they lived in the family home run by their paternal grandmother Noemi Dufresne, in the north of France, Mont Noir, in Saint-Jans-Cappel (Nord region, present-day Hauts de France (fr)), near the border with Belgium. Yourcenar was reading Racine and Aristophanes at the age of eight. His father taught him Latin at 10 and classical Greek at 12. After his grandmother's death in 1910, his father sold the family property in 1913, against the advice of his other son Michel-Joseph, the fruit of a previous marriage and bought a summer house in Ostend. From then on, Marguerite's childhood was spent between Lille, the house in Ostend, and long stays on the Côte d'Azur in Menton or Monte Carlo, where her father went regularly because he was very fond of gambling.

The fighting of the First World War forced them to flee Ostend and take refuge in London. The Ostend house is destroyed and before the end of the war they move to Paris. In the midst of the warmongering and anti-German atmosphere that exists there, his father gives him the works of Romain Rolland, a fervent pacifist, to read, which make a lasting impression on him. After the war they moved to Monte Carlo, with frequent trips to Italy and Switzerland, in Montreux or Lausanne, where his father ended up settling when he was diagnosed with the cancer that would end his life shortly after.

Marguerite, who never went to school, received her basic education through tutors and completed it on the advice of her father, who was very non-conformist and had always led a wandering life throughout Europe in the places preferred by the aristocracy of the time. Her father, who had literary hobbies, made her read from a very young age the works of the best European writers of the time such as Flaubert, Maeterlinck or Rilke and introduced her to classical authors such as Virgil, who were one of the favorites of she. They had a shared method of reading aloud in which they alternated reading the same work. When Marguerite shows her inclinations towards writing, her father strongly encourages her and commissions the publication at his expense, in 1921 and 1922, of the writer's first works, the collections of poems The Garden of Chimeras and The gods are not dead, which she later removed from the corpus of her works that was published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Travel and Writing

From 1919 she abandoned her real surname and began to sign as Marguerite Yourcenar, this being an anagram of Crayencour (without a "c") that she created together with her father. Her first novel, Alexis or the treatise on useless combat, was published in 1929 shortly after the death of her father in Lausanne, who read it shortly before he died and described it as & # 34; limpid & # 34;. This short work was well received by critics, especially by Edmond Jaloux, who pointed out Gide's influences in its subject matter and highlighted its classical and austere style. It is a long letter in which a man, an accredited musician, confesses to her wife her homosexuality and her decision to abandon her out of a desire for truth. The wife, Monique, is none other than Jeanne de Vietinghoff, a close friend of her mother's who, upon her death, invites her and her father to spend the summers at her family's vacation home on the Scheveningen beach., since they had promised with their mother to take care of the other's children, if one of them died. The situation of her marriage to a baron from the old Livonian Vietinghoff family, Conrad von Vietinghoff, was similar to that described in the novel, and she had two children. The eldest Egon, the same age as Marguerite, who later became a painter and philosopher, and little Alexis, who died very soon. Her father falls in love with Jeanne, although they soon distance themselves from her and she represents for Marguerite throughout her life the model of feminine beauty and intelligence. Jeanne died in 1926, at age 50, of liver cancer. She dedicated her next work The new Eurydice to him, published in 1931 by the Grasset publishing house, thanks to the writer André Fraigneau, a reader of the publishing house, four years her junior, with whom she would establish from then on an intense literary relationship, which she would have wanted to take further, despite their homosexual inclinations.

After the death of her father, Marguerite relinquishes the administration of her estate to her stepbrother Michel and invests what he earns to allow her to devote herself to writing for about ten years. She begins a wandering life like her father's, first continuing her trips to Italy, Rome and Naples, where she had attended the initial events of fascism years before, such as the march on Rome. Her work El denario del sueño, published in 1934 emerged from these rooms. In that same year she also published Death drives the plot.

In 1934 he began a series of summer trips to Greece, which he confirmed as his spiritual homeland. There he meets Andreas Embirikos, a great intellectual personality, coming from a family of shipowners, psychoanalyst, poet and writer, as well as a communist. They establish a close personal, intellectual and surely intimate relationship, making frequent boat trips around the Greek islands. In the summer of 1936, the poet Constantin Dimaras, a year younger than her, introduced her to the poems of Cavafis, whom he had met before her death. Marguerite is fascinated by her poems and proposes to Dimaras to do a joint translation into French of them. Dimaras explains that they made this translation in the same summer of 1936 at his home in Athens with great difficulty due to their discrepancies regarding the translation, which Dimaras preferred literal and Yourcenar preferred more freely, reworking the verses so that they had their own entity in French. This position prevailed, but Dimaras believes that the translation loses the morbid climate of Cavafis's poems. During these years in Greece, she maintained a continuous intimate relationship, which she always remembered, with Lucy Kyriakos, a cousin of Dimaras's wife, who was married and had a son.

To complete the small income that his works brought him, which did not have many sales at the time, he translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves into French, meeting with the writer at her Bloomsbury home to clarify some aspects of his version, otherwise very free, published in 1937. Later he also translated Henry James's What Maisie Knew in 1939, which was published in 1947, and works by Yukio Mishima.

In 1938 he published two books, Dreams and Luck in Grasset and Oriental Tales in La Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), which he had hired her on the recommendation of Paul Morand, who highly appreciated her works. The first is a set of poetic transcriptions of her dreams, in the manner of Rilke. The second is a set of tales about legends from Eastern cultures, especially India and Japan, which have already become one of the fundamental interests of her thought and are reflected in her work.

Also in 1938, although it was published in NRF in 1939, he wrote the short novel El coup de grace in one run, in one month, which is recognized until by its biggest detractors as a masterpiece. Against the background of the Baltic wars after the Russian revolution of 1917, between whites and reds, he describes the complex relationships of three people, two friends, comrades in arms in the white army, and the sister of one of them, who falls in love with the other named Egon, but is rejected. She ends up on the red side, is taken prisoner and asks to be executed by her lover. The narration has the austere style of Alexis, but even more stripped down and harsh, especially with regard to the figure of the real protagonist, the aristocrat Egon. It is a contemporary tragedy that seems to reflect a true story, according to Yourcenar. On the other hand, one can see in the character of Egon a physical and moral representation of André Fragineau, as he himself recognized, despite the fact that Yourcenar attributes Egon 10 more years. Edmond Jaloux indicated in his criticism that the work possessed the terrible breath of the true, which is always more overwhelming than what is the fruit of the imagination.

Between the United States and Europe

In 1939, so that she could escape the problems of the war, her best friend at the time, an American translator named Grace Frick whom she had met in Paris in 1937, invited her to the United States, where she would teach Comparative Literature. in New York City. Yourcenar was bisexual, she and Frick became lovers and remained together until her death in 1979 as a result of breast cancer. They settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where Grace is head of studies at a College of the University. In 1943, because she had already spent all her inheritance, and in order not to be completely dependent on Frick, Marguerite began working as a teacher of French and Italian at the Sarah Lawrence College for Women, in Bronxville, upstate New York, a very elitist, which uses advanced pedagogy and in which Mary McCarthy also taught in those years. She taught there until 1953, with a one-year hiatus in 1950, which she used to finish writing Memoirs of Adriano.

In 1947 he obtained American citizenship and they began to spend their summers on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, where Grace bought a house they called Petite Plaisance, where they settled permanently at the beginning from the fifties. In 1951 she published in Paris her well-documented historical novel Mémoires d'Hadrien (in Spanish Memories of Adriano ), on which he was working throughout one of each. In Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar recreates the life and death of one of the most important figures of the ancient world, the Roman Emperor Hadrian. The work is written as a long letter from the emperor to his adoptive grandson and future successor, Marcus Aurelius. Adriano explains his past, describing his triumphs, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. Memoirs of Hadrian was a pioneering novel that has served as an influence on subsequent historical novels and has become a masterpiece of modern literature.

The novel Memories of Adriano was an immediate success and a great reception from critics. His presentation was the reason for returning to France after twelve years of absence. Thereafter she and Grace travel to Europe almost every year in the winter and spring to give lectures, resume the trips she was so fond of, and also to avoid the harsh Mount Desert winters. In addition to France, she returns to Switzerland and Italy and also visits the Netherlands and Scandinavia. In Leningrad, she is disappointed to see the suffocating presence of a police state. At the beginning of 1954 they visit Lisbon, later they spend Holy Week in Seville and go to Granada, where they visit the probable place of the murder of Federico García Lorca, addressing an emotional letter about it to the poet's sister.

At that time he proposed to Gaston Gallimard the publication of the translation of Cavafis's poems that he had done in the thirties with Constantin Dimaras and they were published with a critical introduction in 1958.

In 1965 he published his work Opus nigrum (The work in black), whose protagonist is the doctor, philosopher and alchemist Zenón, set in Europe in the < span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">XVI. Yourcenar marks the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with great mastery. Zeno is a wise man with "the rage of knowledge" that he is exposed to the prejudices, religious dogmas and superstitions strongly rooted in the European thought of that century. Another of his most acclaimed works is Fires, written in 1935, and which alternates stories based on classical myths with some fragments about the passion of love.

Reluctantly, during the 1970s she had to remain almost secluded in Mount Desert, of her own free will to be with her partner Grace, who had breast cancer, until her death in 1979. This was a difficult period for Marguerite, who loved to travel, but it allowed him to write the first two volumes of the trilogy of family memoirs The Labyrinth of the World: Reminders, which deals with the history of the maternal family and The Archives of the North, which is about his father's family.

The first "immortal"

Winner of the Femina and Erasmus prizes, in 1980 she was the first woman elected a full member of the French Academy (whose members are called "the immortals"), although since 1970 she had already belonged to the Belgian Academy. Her choice was proposed by Jean d'Ormesson, who had to overcome the opposition of almost all the other members, to occupy the chair vacated by Roger Caillois, with whom Marguerite had had cordial relations before the war and over whom gave his brilliant admission speech, which was attended by the President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. She then also met and maintained a very good relationship with François Mitterrand, who was a passionate reader of her work.

In 1980, the book With Open Eyes: Conversations with Marguerite Yourcenar, by Matthieu Galey, was published in which this journalist managed to get him to express his points of view on some topics that he had never wanted to address in public and that facilitate the knowledge of his thought on the part of his readers.

From 1980 until her death in December 1987, she traveled again accompanied now by the young photographer Jerry Wilson, whom she had met shortly before when she was part of a television crew that went to interview her at Petite Plaisance. Apart from touring her usual places in Europe, they went to Egypt, Morocco, Japan and India. From these trips, especially from stays in Japan and India, came the last two books by the writer, published posthumously: Pilgrim and Foreigner and A Tour of My Jail. Jerry Wilson died of AIDS in Paris in 1986.

There is a well-known anecdote of Yourcenar's meeting with the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In 1986, six days before Borges's death, these two authors met in Geneva, where Yourcenar asked him: "Borges, when will you get out of the labyrinth?". He replied: "When they have all left." That same year, Yourcenar gave a lecture on Borges at Harvard University.

Marguerite Yourcenar Pendant

Yourcenar lived most of his life in his home Petite Plaisance on Mount Desert Island, Maine, and his remains rest on the same island with those of his companion. Grace Frick's entire life, in a simple grave in Somesville's Brookside Cemetery. Their home is now a museum dedicated to their memory, open to the public during the summers.

He bequeathed his personal and literary archives to Harvard University in Cambridge. Thousands of letters, photographs and manuscripts can be freely consulted in her Houghton Library, except for some documents, which will be released in 2057. In Brussels, her hometown, there has also been, since 1989, the Centre International de Documentation Marguerite Yourcenar (CIDMY), which treasures numerous graphic and written collections and offers timely information on activities and publications related to the famous author.

Works

• The chimera garden (Le garden des chimères(1921) (poems)
• The gods have not died (Les dieux ne sont pas morts(1922) (poems)
• Alexis or the useless combat treaty (Alexis ou le traité du vain combat(1929) (novela)
• The new Eurydice (La nouvelle Eurydice(1931)
• The denary of sleep (1934) (novela)
• Death leads the plot (1934) (novela)
• Fires (Feux) (1936) (poems in prose)
• Dreams and luck (Les songes et les sorts(1938)
• Oriental accounts (Eastern Nouvelles(1938)
• The shooting of grace (Le coup de grâce(1939)
• Memories of Adriano (Mémoires d'Hadrien(1951) (new, translated into Spanish by Julio Cortázar, among others)
• Electra or the fall of masks (Electre ou la chute des masques(1954)
• The Charities of Alcipo (Les charités d'Alcippe(1956)
• Présentation critique de Constantin Cavafy suivie d’une traduction des Poèmes par M. Yourcenar et Constantin Dimaras (el), Paris, Gallimard, 1958 (réédition dans la collection poésie/Gallimard in 1978 et 1994), (ISBN 2070321754)
• Inventory benefit (1962)
• Opus nigrum (L'empuvre au noir(1968) (Prix Femina)
• Theatre I and Theatre II (1971)
• Reminders (Souvenirs pieux) (1973) (first part of the family trilogy The Maze of the World)
• Northern Archives (Archives du Nord(1977) (second part of the family trilogy The Maze of the World)
• The Black Brain of Piranèse (Le cerveau noir de Piranèse(1979)
• Mishima or vacuum vision (Mishima ou the vision du vide(1980)
• Like the flowing water (Comme l'eau qui coule: Anna, deaf...(1982)
• Time, great sculptor (Le temps, ce grand sculpteur(1983)
• What? Eternity (Quoi? L'Éternité(1988) (third part of the family trilogy The Maze of the Worldpublished posthumously; unfinished)
• Peregrine and foreign (En pèlerin et ètranger(1989)
• A lap for my jail. (Le tour de la prison(1991) (recollection made by the author of fourteen travel texts, most of them on Japan and the last unfinished, published posthumously).