Marguerite Yourcenar

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Marguerite Yourcenar, 1971. (credit: Gisèle Freund 1971)

(born June 8, 1903, Brussels, Belg. — died Dec. 17, 1987, Northeast Harbor, Maine, U.S.) Belgian-born French-U.S. novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Independently wealthy after her father's death, she led a nomadic life until World War II, when she settled in the U.S. with the American woman who would be her lifelong companion and translator. Her works are noted for their rigorously classical style, their erudition, and their psychological subtlety. Her masterpiece is Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), a historical novel of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Other works include the novels Coup de grâce (1939) and The Abyss (1968), Oriental Tales (1938), and the prose poem "Fires" (1936). In 1980 she became the first woman in history to be elected to the Académie Française.

For more information on Marguerite Yourcenar, visit Britannica.com.

French novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, world traveller, and translator Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987)was the first woman elected to the French Academy.

Marguerite Yourcenar was born on June 8, 1903, and baptized Marguerite Antoinette Ghislaine. Her father, Michel de Crayencour, was a native of Lille and a restless traveller, and it was by chance that she was born during her family's brief sojourn in Brussels. Her mother, Frenande de Cartier de Marchienne, a Belgian, died ten days after the birth of her daughter of puerperal fever. As a young girl Marguerite lived frequently with an aunt in Belgium and with family friends in northern France until 1912 when she and her father settled in Paris. She was educated by a professional teacher, but she was in large measure self-educated by visits to museums, the classical theaters, and extensive reading.

Her first trip beyond the continent was to England in 1914 where she spent a year learning English and visiting famous museums and historical sites. The remaining years of World War I she passed in Paris with her father, who began her instruction in ancient Greek, or in Provence where her father after suffering serious financial losses, attempted to recover his fortune by gambling at Monte Carlo and elsewhere. She continued her education with various private tutors and received a Baccalaureate degree in 1919. At this point her formal education ended.

Between the ages of 19 and 23 she began writing and, with a subsidy from her father, published two books of poems: Le Jardin des Chime‧res (1921) and Les Dieux ne sont pas morts (1922). Equally with the aid of her father she worked out the anagram that became Yourcenar, her pen-name, which became her legal name in 1947. She composed several hundred pages of manuscript during her early years, threw most of them away, yet preserved fragments that she would turn into complete books 30 or more years later. The lucubrations of her youth were seedbeds for her fertile, restless imagination. So were certain events: a visit to the Villa Adriana was the inspiration for her most famous novel, Mémoires d'Hadrien, which was not completed until 1951.

The 1920s were years of continuous travel. In Italy she witnessed Mussolini's march on Rome. Her knowledge of fascism derived from her acquaintance with Italian life and conversations with Italian intellectuals exiled in Switzerland and southern France. From these experiences she published her novel Denier du rêve (1934), revised in 1959. For Yourcenar, a republication became the occasion for rewriting her text, so a new edition was frequently a new book. She travelled extensively in Switzerland, Germany, and Eastern Europe where political transformations were having a degrading effect on the classical culture that had formed the basis of her education. She published several articles in prominent reviews deploring the decline of European culture; she also published several short stories, mostly in the classical style. However, her reading now included contemporary authors as well as the theories of socialism and anarchy, with the result that her outlook assumed a leftward orientation. She even published a story, thanks to Henri Barbusse, in L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's newspaper.

Politics, however, rarely made up the substance of her compositions. In these years she wrote a story - Alexis ou le traité du vain combat (1929) - about a young musician, married and father of a child, who renounced his family in order to follow his bent toward homosexuality. In the 1920s this was a delicate subject, also taken up by André Gide. Its use in fiction was still unusual and provoked perhaps more outrage than her novel Denier du rêve about a failed plot to assassinate Mussolini. Il Duce had many backers in France.

Yourcenar was remarkably prolific, finding time to think, read, and write while travelling extensively in Greece where she wrote the manuscript of Feux, a series of aphorisms and personal impressions on the subject of passion - above all, carnal passion. A visit to London in 1937 led her to Virginia Woolf, whose novel The Waves she translated into French. Two years later she translated What Maisie Knew by Henry James. Back in Paris she made the acquaintance of an American, Grace Frick, who became a life-time friend and the translator of her major novels. In September 1938 she left for the United States, settled in New Haven where Grace lived, and came to love New England. She also travelled extensively in the upper South, became aware of the condition of the African American population, and began collecting and translating African American spirituals in an anthology which she later published under the appropriate title Fleuve profond, sombre rivie‧re (1964).

In 1938 she settled in a villa on the Isle of Capri where she composed Le Coup de Grâce (1939), a novel based on an event that occurred during the civil war in Russia between the Reds and the Whites. She continued her travels in Europe, returning to the United States when war broke out. She established a residence there for 11 years, meanwhile travelling to Chicago and the Mid-West to lecture and accepting a part-time teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College from 1942 to 1949.

She undertook extensive reading in the libraries of Yale University and other research centers to expand her knowledge of classical antiquity and finally completed the original manuscript of Hadrian's Memoires, first sketched in 1937-1938 and published in 1951. Her second historical novel, L'Oeuvre au noir (1968), came to dominate the historical novel school in France. About her family's origins she published Souvenirs pieux (1974) and Archives du Nord (1977). Her writings represent a form of modern classicism. Her language shows a "favorable inclination toward the soft, fluid French of the century of Versailles that gives to the least word the retarded grace of a dead language."

Yourcenar was the recipient of many awards, including the Prix Femina-Vacaresco (1952) for Mémoires d'Hadrien, for which she was also honored by the French Academy; the page one award of the Newspaper Guild of New York in 1955 for Frick's translation of Hadrian's Memoires; the Prix Combat for Sous bénéfice d'inventaire in 1962; the Prix Femina for Oeuvre au noir in 1968; Legion of Honor and officer of the Order of Leopold of Belgium in 1971; the Grand prix national de la Culture in 1974; and the Grand prix de l'Académie Française and the Grande Médaille de Vermeil of the City of Paris in 1977. She received honorary doctorates from Smith College, Colby College, and Harvard University and was a member of the Belgian Academie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Française (1979), the Académie Française (1980), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1982).

Yourcenar died December 17, 1987, at Mount Desert Island Hospital of complications following a stroke. French premier Jacques Chirac said, "French letters has just lost an exceptional woman."

Further Reading

The best English language introduction to the writings of Yourcenar is Frederic Farrell, Marguerite Yourcenar: Criticism and Interpretations (1983). The following sources are all in French: M. Yourcenar, Oeuvres romanesques (Gallimard, 1982), which provides a chronology of events in her life; J. Blot, Marguerite Yourcenar (Seghers, 1971), a useful biographical portrait; R. de Rosbo, Entretiens radiophoniques avec Marguerite Yourcenar (Mercure de France, 1972), an extensive interview; and B. Vercier and J. Lecarme, editors, La Littérature Française depuis 1968 (Bordas, 1982), which is the best study of her writings and her place in French classical literature.

Additional Sources

Savigneau, Josyane, Marguerite Yourcenar: inventing a life, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Yourcenar, Marguerite, Dear departed, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

Yourcenar, Marguerite (pseud. of Marguerite de Crayencour) (1903-87). Elected the first woman member of the Académie Française, she spoke in her official reception address of the women who should have taken their places there before her; her work, however, bears little overt trace of feminist concerns. Yourcenar is a poet (Les Dieux ne sont pas morts, 1922), a dramatist (Électre ou la Chute des masques, 1954; Le Mystère d'Alceste, 1963), a short-story writer (La Mort conduit l'attelage, 1934; Comme l'eau qui coule, 1982), an essayist (Sous bénéfice d'inventaire, 1962), a literary critic (studies of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Thomas Mann, Mishima, and others), and an autobiographer (Le Labyrinthe du monde: I. Souvenirs pieux, 1974; II. Archives du Nord, 1977; III. Quoi? L'Éternité, 1988). Her reputation rests principally, however, on her historical novels, set in ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance period, and the early 20th c.

She was born in Belgium, the child of a wealthy couple. Her mother died shortly after the birth; she was brought up by her father and travelled the world with him at an early age. She began writing in the 1920s, producing most notably Alexis ou le Traité du vain combat (1929) and Le Coup de grâce (1939). Alexis takes the form of a long letter from the protagonist to his wife, confessing his problems in coming to terms with his homosexuality and raising more generally the difficulties of expressing in language deep desires and fears. Le Coup de grâce, set in the Baltic in 1919, also deals with a man of homosexual tendencies who eventually, in the circumstances of civil war, is obliged to execute a woman who loves him, but whom he is unable to love. Yourcenar's interest in male homosexuality marked her life as well as her work: in the 1930s she suffered a painful rejection by a homosexual friend, and in the last years of her life she was close to a young homosexual who died of AIDS. Most of her relationships, however, were with women.

The advent of World War II disrupted her writing; she went to the United States in 1939, largely as a result of her relationship with the American Grace Frick; after a period spent teaching she eventually began writing again in the late 1940s, took American citizenship (1947), and settled on the island of Mount Desert off the American east coast with Frick. She gained an international reputation with the publication of Mémoires d'Hadrien, in 1951. Based on meticulous research, the text is again a first-person narrative and builds up a historical and psychological portrait of Hadrian which includes the emperor's meditations on literature, philosophy, the running of the Roman Empire, and his love for a young Greek boy. In 1968 she was awarded the Prix Fémina for L'Œuvre au noir, a novel set in the Renaissance but whose hero, in his consistent challenging of the institutions and ideologies of his era, could be considered as a forerunner of the 1968 protestors. In Paris at the time of May 1968, the unconventional Yourcenar and Frick, with their idiosyncratic dress, their vegetarianism, and their pacifist and ecological concerns, seemed curiously in tune with the times, despite their age.

In 1971 Yourcenar was elected to the Royal Belgian Academy, and the first of a number of French television crews made its way to Mount Desert. The increasingly serious illness of Frick kept Yourcenar at home throughout much of the 1970s; she completed two volumes of her autobiography which, rather than presenting her own life, investigate the history of her family. In 1979 she published La Couronne et la lyre, a thick volume of her translations (sometimes so free as to be adaptations) of ancient Greek poems; the same year Pivot interviewed her at home for a special number of Apostrophes. In December the death of Frick deprived Yourcenar of a devoted friendship which had lasted for 40 years. In 1980 she was elected to the Académie Française, and in 1982 her works were collected and published in the Pléiade, a rare honour for a living writer. In her last years she travelled a good deal, wrote an essay on Mishima, and was writing the last volume of her autobiography, reaching up to her own birth, when she died.

[Elizabeth Fallaize]

Bibliography

• J. Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar (1990)

Quotes:

"Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself."

"The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness."

Marguerite Yourcenar
Born	Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour 8 June 1903(1903-06-08) Brussels, Belgium
Died	17 December 1987 (aged 84) Mount Desert Island, Maine, USA
Occupation	Author, essayist, poet
Nationality	France
Citizenship	United States
Notable work(s)	Mémoires d'Hadrien
Notable award(s)	Erasmus Prize (1983)
Domestic partner(s)	Grace Frick (1903-1979)

Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a French and Belgian novelist. She was the first woman elected to the Académie française in 1980, and the seventeenth to occupy Seat 3.

Biography

Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour in Brussels, Belgium to Michel Cleenewerck de Crayencour, of French aristocratic descent, and a Belgian mother who died ten days after her birth. She grew up in the home of her paternal grandmother.

Yourcenar's first novel, Alexis, was published in 1929. Her intimate companion at the time, a translator named Grace Frick, invited her to the United States, where she lectured in comparative literature in New York City and Sarah Lawrence College. Yourcenar was bisexual and she and Frick became lovers in 1937, and would remain so until Frick's death in 1979.^[1][2]

Marguerite Yourcenar translated Virginia Woolf's The Waves over a 10-month period in 1937.

In 1951 she published, in France, the French-language novel Mémoires d'Hadrien, which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim.

In this novel Yourcenar recreated the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who writes a long letter to Marcus Aurelius, his successor and adoptive son. The Emperor meditates on his past, describing both his triumphs and his failures, his love for Antinous, and his philosophy. This novel has become a modern classic, a standard against which fictional recreations of Antiquity are measured.

Yourcenar was elected as the first female member of the Académie française, in 1980. One of the respected writers in French language, she published many novels, essays, and poems, as well as three volumes of memoirs.

Yourcenar lived much of her life at Petite Plaisance in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Petite Plaisance is now a museum dedicated to her memory.

• Her fight for animal rights was a very important element of her life : «Les animaux sont mes amis et je ne mange pas mes amis.» ( Animals are my friends and I do not eat my friends ). She also considered that " The fight for the protection of the Animal is the same than the fight for the protection of the Man " : «La protection de l'animal, c'est au fond le même combat que la protection de l'homme.» She has been a great inspiration to many intellectuals, artists, animal right activists such as Brigitte Bardot, Frédéric Back, ...

«Soyons subversifs. Révoltons-nous contre l'ignorance, l'indifférence, la cruauté, qui d'ailleurs ne s'exercent si souvent contre l'homme que parce qu'elles se sont fait la main sur les bêtes. Rappelons-nous, s'il faut toujours tout ramener à nous-mêmes, qu'il y aurait moins d'enfants martyrs s'il y avait moins d'animaux torturés, moins de wagons plombés amenant à la mort les victimes de quelconques dictatures, si nous n'avions pris l'habitude des fourgons où les bêtes agonisent sans nourriture et sans eau en attendant l'abattoir.»

Bibliography

Le jardin des chimères (1921) Alexis ou le traité du vain combat (1929) Alexis (translated by Walter Kaiser), ISBN 0-374-51906-4 La nouvelle Eurydice (1931) Pindare (1932) Denier du rêve (1934, revised 1958–59) A Coin in Nine Hands (translated by Dori Katz), ISBN 0-552-99120-1 La mort conduit l'attelage (1934) Feux (prose poem, 1936) Fires (translated by Dori Katz), ISBN 0-374-51748-7 Nouvelles orientales (short stories, 1938) Oriental Tales, ISBN 1-85290-018-0 Les songes et les sorts (1938) Le coup de grâce (1939) Coup de Grace (translated by Grace Frick), ISBN 0-374-51631-6 Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951) Memoirs of Hadrian (translated by Grace Frick), ISBN 0-14-018194-6 Électre ou La chute des masques (1954) Les charités d'Alcippe (1956) Constantin Cavafy (1958) Sous bénéfice d'inventaire (1962) Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays (1984) Fleuve profond, sombre rivière: les negros spirituals (1964) L'Œuvre au noir (novel, 1968, Prix Femina 1968) The Abyss, aka Zeno of Bruges (translated by Grace Frick - 1976) Yes, Peut-être, Shaga (1969) Théâtre, 1971 Souvenirs pieux (1974) Dear Departed: A Memoir (translated by Maria Louise Ascher), ISBN 0-374-52367-3 Archives du Nord (1977) How Many Years: A Memoir (translated by Maria Louise Ascher) Le labyrinthe du monde (1974-84) Mishima ou la vision du vide (essay, 1980) Mishima: A Vision of the Void, ISBN 0-226-96532-5 Anna, soror... (1981) Comme l'eau qui coule (1982) Le temps, ce grand sculpteur (1984) That Mighty Sculptor, Time (translated by Walter Kaiser), ISBN 0-85628-159-X Quoi? L'Éternité (1988)

Other works available in English translation

• A Blue Tale and Other Stories, ISBN 0-226-96530-9. Three stories written between 1927 and 1930, translated and published 1995.
• Dreams and Destinies, ISBN 0-312-21289-5 (1999)
• Two Lives and a Dream, ISBN 0-226-96529-5

(contains An Obscure Man, "A Lovely Morning" and Anna, Soror...)

• With Open Eyes: Conversations With Matthieu Galey

References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marguerite Yourcenar

1. ^ Joan Acocella (14 February 2005). "Becoming the Emperor". The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214crbo_books?currentPage=6. Retrieved 2009-01-08. 
2. ^ "Marguerite Yourcenar". 2002-02-21. http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/bioy1/yource01.html. Retrieved 2009-10-15-05. 

• George Rousseau: Marguerite Yourcenar: A Biography. London: Haus Publishing (2004). ISBN 1-904341-28-4
• Judith Holland Sarnecki: Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar (2004)
• Josyane Savigneau: Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, 1993
• Marguerite Yourcenar on Books and Writers, kirjasto.sci.fi.
• Jacob Stockinger (3 March 2004). "Yourcenar, Marguerite (1903-1987)". glbtq Encyclopedia. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/yourcenar_m.html. Retrieved 2009-01-08. 
• English translations of Marguerite Yourcenar by Walter Jacob Kaiser Catalogue of correspondence and manuscripts concerning Walter Kaiser's English translation of works by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar located at Houghton Library, Harvard University

v • d • e Académie Française Seat 3 Jacques de Serisay (1634) · Paul-Philippe de Chaumont (1654) · Louis Cousin (1697) · Jacques-Louis de Valon (1707) · Nicolas Gédoyn (1719) · François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis (1744) · Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard (1803) · Denis-Luc Frayssinous (1822) · Étienne-Denis Pasquier (1842) · Jules Armand Dufaure (1863) · Victor Cherbuliez (1881) · Émile Faguet (1900) · Georges Clemenceau (1918) · André Chaumeix (1930) · Jérôme Carcopino (1955) · Roger Caillois (1971) · Marguerite Yourcenar (1980) · Jean-Denis Bredin (1989)

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