Beneath the White Scarf

Awriter​ ‘with whom I feel no affinity’: that’s how Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, described Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. When the 77-year-old Yourcenar entered the Académie on 22 January 1981, wearing a black velvet double-layer cape designed by Yves Saint Laurent, she looked severe, as if she had spent her life as a nun in service to literature. Head swathed in white silk, she was not only forbidding – in her speech to the Académie that day she pronounced ‘fran-çai-se’ with three syllables, drawing out the final ‘euh’ – but refused to see her accession as a triumph of feminism. She told the académiciens in their Napoleonic era uniforms that Colette, George Sand, Madame de Staёl and the salonnières could have preceded her, and the fact they hadn’t wasn’t a consequence of the misogyny of their institution, but of the way it followed the manners of the time, which ‘placed woman on a pedestal, but didn’t offer her a seat at the table’.

It isn’t surprising that the women who are the first to do something aren’t average women. They have succeeded in the world as it is, riven with sexism as it is. I would guess – Ernaux doesn’t say – that the reason she feels no affinity with Yourcenar’s work is because it doesn’t really explore female experience, let alone the abject parts of it that Ernaux is interested in. When asked in the 1980s for women worth writing about, Yourcenar mentioned Florence Nightingale, Mary Magdalene and Antigone – none of whom you can imagine stalking her ex-lover’s new girlfriend. Instead, the work of the first woman to be appointed a defender of the French language is an intoxicating mixture of erudition and freedom: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), her finest book and often considered the best French novel of the 20th century, drew on the surviving contemporary sources of the life and reign of the emperor, as well as more recent works in Latin, German, French, English and Italian, to imagine the dying Hadrian describing his life to his successor. Twenty years of writing, reading, thinking and travelling went into the novel. Several drafts were burned. But the most striking thing about it is the permission Yourcenar gave herself to inhabit the mind of someone she thought was a genius, a man who, as Flaubert put it, ‘stood alone’ after the gods had died and Christ had not yet come.

As Ernaux detected, Yourcenar was not the heroine the times demanded. Feminism seemed like a fad to her, to be criticised in particular for its conformism. Who needed more success-obsessed bureaucrats, this time in skirt suits? ‘What is important for women, I think,’ she told the journalist Matthieu Galey in a book-length series of conversations, ‘is to take an as-active-as-possible role in useful causes of every description, and to win respect by their competence.’ Why, a Paris Review interviewer asked her in 1987, hadn’t she talked openly about her sexual orientation? She had lived with a woman, the Ohio-born Grace Frick, for forty years. Yourcenar answered in a way that destroyed the categories behind the question. ‘Why give so much importance to the genito-urinary system of people? It does not define a whole being, and it is not even erotically true.’ What is love anyway, she asks, that ‘species of ardour, of warmth, that propels one inexorably toward another being?’ It is an eternal question, and perhaps unanswerable. But there’s nothing wrong with being more interested in eternal questions than faddish ones.

And there are plenty of reasons not to agree with Ernaux. After all, isn’t it wonderful that a bisexual woman who spent years channelling Hadrian became an immortelle dressed in couture? Doesn’t it add something to feminism to have at least one writer who believed that the category of woman could one day be unimportant, because women were humans? What is wrong in gaining respect by being useful and competent, anyway? Nearly forty years after her death, the marmoreal figure beneath the white silk scarf is starting to fade from view, to be replaced by a sexier, more abject version. Christophe Bigot’s novel Un autre m’attend ailleurs, one of the hits of last year’s rentrée littéraire, and soon to be published in English by Europa, imagines the last years of Yourcenar’s life, during which she was in love with a gay man 46 years her junior. Bigot, a teacher at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly who has been reading Yourcenar for as long as he can remember, uses her Hadrianic method to portray her as an enduring mystery, a sphinx: ‘A mix of Flemish peasant and Grand Siècle pedant, Roman emperor and Hindu goddess, Tibetan monk and medieval witch’. In 2037, the letters Yourcenar wrote to Frick as they were falling in love will finally be unsealed, after the fifty years Yourcenar requested have passed. What for now can only be glimpsed will be fully known.

To describe her attraction to the Emperor Hadrian, Yourcenar used the metaphor of a foot in a shoe. (One of the hallmarks of her writing is its perfect metaphors: apposite, concrete and classical in the sense that they tend to make use of ordinary objects.) Yourcenar – this is the whole fragment, taken from the ‘Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian’, translated by Frick – says:

The human substance and structure hardly change: nothing is more stable than the curve of a heel, the position of a tendon or the form of a toe. But there are periods when the shoe is less deforming than in others. In the century of which I speak we are still very close to the undisguised freedom of the bare foot.

I love that metaphor: the tenderness, even eroticism, of the bare foot; its beauty (in French the phrase about the heel is the curvaceous sounding ‘la courbe d’une cheville’); the way Yourcenar evokes a leather-thonged Roman sandal without saying the words. She makes the foot sound so gorgeous that it seems horrible that we wear shoes at all, especially pointed and heeled ones. It’s a reminder, too, that forward movement isn’t always progress, and that some things have been perfected already: there are so many things to pay attention to now that we barely look at the way our heels are curved. And I think it applies to the way we see Yourcenar too, encrusted as she is by the times she lived in, as well as by the disappointment of feminists who wanted another sort of heroine.

Marguerite de Crayencour was born in the summer of 1903 in Brussels to a mother who died of puerperal fever days later. Marguerite did not ask to see a picture of her mother, Fernande, until she was 35, and didn’t visit her grave until she was 55; she would later say – a bit grandly – that ‘eternity and childhood are my ages.’ Michel, her aristocratic father, took his six-week-old daughter to live at Mont-Noir, his estate on the French side of the border with Belgium. He left her daily care to nurses and governesses, but brought intermittent delight to her childhood: he had the horns of her pet goat gilded, and when the orange tree didn’t bear fruit he had citrus hung on the branches with string. When Marguerite reached thirteen or so, father and daughter began to think of themselves as contemporaries. They read Marcus Aurelius, Tolstoy and Selma Lagerlöf aloud together, passing the books back and forth. Once Marguerite had decided she wanted to be a writer, they took the letters of their surname and rearranged them into a word that would look handsome on a book cover, deciding to start with the ‘beautiful’ letter Y, which they liked because it once stood for a fork in the road, or a tree with its branches spread. When Michel travelled to see the women he loved in Paris, Provence, London and Rome he took Marguerite with him. It was on that first trip to London that she saw a statue of Hadrian at the British Museum, and it was on her first trip to Rome that she saw the Villa Adriana at Tivoli. When she completed a collection of poetry at sixteen, he paid to have it printed. In the last year of his life, she began reading her first novel, Alexis, to him. He responded to this tale of a disillusioned new husband by digging up a draft of a story he had written about his honeymoon with her mother, and proposed she rework and publish it. It was a curious idea: in some ways, he was exploiting his daughter’s talent to fulfil a dream of his own; in other ways, he was offering up what he had to help her achieve what she wanted. He died when she was 24, with much of her psychic and intellectual life already established.

‘The First Evening’, the story her father gifted her, which is included in A Blue Tale and Other Stories, begins in a train carriage. A newly married couple are travelling to a hotel in Montreux, and we overhear the husband’s thoughts. He is wearied already by the shape of married life: they will quarrel, they will raise a child, they will get tired even of their happiness. His new wife, who like the narrator is never named, will be ‘robbed of her grace, deformed, shrivelled down to all the pettiness of conjugal life which would transform her into a woman like all others’. Life, he thinks, ‘tends to pour all beings into identical moulds’, and he, too, may be overcome. Perhaps Crayencour also gave the story to his daughter as a warning – one she heeded. In her seventies, Yourcenar said her father was ‘perhaps the freest man’ she had ever known.

She had already surpassed her father’s rather thin theme in the novel she had been drafting, which would be published in 1929, the year he died. Alexis is a novel in the shape of a long letter to the eponymous character’s wife, Monique, who has just had their first child. In trying to explain why he has left her, Alexis traces the thread from his first erotic encounter with a man to the opportunity for honesty about his sexuality which mysteriously accompanied early fatherhood. His nature develops like an apple ripening on the tree: ‘The fruit falls only in its own time, since its weight has long been pulling it toward the earth.’ Understanding one’s sexuality takes sunlight, rain and time; it is a natural process. (In 1929, when the book came out, homosexuality wasn’t illegal in France, but in 1942 the Vichy government reinstated a higher age of consent which remained in place until 1982.) Alexis is also a violinist, and his playing reaches new heights as he emerges from his self-imposed silence. Improvising on his instrument soon after his son is born, he begins ‘to comprehend that liberty both art and life have when they obey only the laws of their own development’. Yourcenar is saying that our lives can become our own with some courage and imagination; in fact they must, if we treat our inclinations as laws. The influential critic Edmond Jaloux wrote an admiring review of Alexis, noticing the ‘pure tone’ of the voice, its soft modulation, the way it was ‘tender and harsh at the same time’. Yourcenar’s career had begun.

There is a picture of Yourcenar from 1936, hair short, expression neutral and collar turned up. Her eyes are still, her eyebrows bushy; her lips are held together but the bottom one is plump, available. She had started to throw her heart around a bit: she had an affair with a married mother called Lucy Kyriakos (Yourcenar would mark St Lucy’s Day in her diary long after Kyriakos died) and fell in hopeless, futureless love with André Fraigneau, who was gay, and dismissive, bordering on cruel to her. In the early 1990s Fraigneau was still telling Yourcenar’s biographer Josyane Savigneau that ‘physically, I found her rather ugly’ – I can’t wait until the 1930s papers are unsealed and we can find out what she really thought of him. Her reaction to being thrown over by Fraigneau was a time-tested one: she wrote a book. Coup de Grâce is the story of a ménage à trois, set in the Baltic states during the Russian Civil War: Erick, his fellow soldier Conrad and Conrad’s sister, Sophie, are thrown together by the conflict. After Erick rejects Sophie’s love, they move apart ideologically, but when Sophie is captured she asks that Erick be the one to execute her. He obliges: the coup de grâce.

There was another meaning to the novel’s title, too. In the summer of 1937, Yourcenar was in the bar of the Hôtel Wagram in Paris, talking to a friend, when an American woman came over and declared they were saying the wrong things about Coleridge. Grace Frick was educated at Wellesley and had taught at colleges along the East Coast. Soon they were travelling across Europe together: ‘Grace and Marguerite to Sicily via Genoa,’ Frick noted in her diary, ‘Italy, Rome, Florence, Venice, the Dalmatian Coast, Corfu, Greece, Athens, Delphi, Sounion. Back to Naples.’ When war broke out, Yourcenar joined Frick in America and they settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where Frick taught. Yourcenar described their first years as ‘a passion’. Frick, who often wrote her first name as ‘Grâce’ (to recall the French word for ‘mercy’ or ‘blessing’), translated Yourcenar’s book about her doomed love. The merciful blow was not only Fraigneau’s evaporation from her life, but Frick’s arrival, with her support of and belief in Yourcenar. Frick would be her companion, translator, handler and lover until she died.

Though she did not experience the war in Europe, 1941 and 1942 were some of Yourcenar’s hardest years. A foreigner in a new country, her cultural patrimoine distant, she stopped writing. The Crayencour inheritance had run out, so she took a job at Sarah Lawrence College, getting up at 4 a.m. on a Monday to catch a train to Bronxville, New York. She hated teaching, spoke to her class only in French, and set her course’s pass mark very high. In 1942, she and Frick began spending their summers on Mount Desert Island in Maine, eventually buying a house there called Petite Plaisance. The island is the site of Acadia National Park, and is, coincidentally, where Willa Cather also came to summer with her partner, Edith Lewis. Yourcenar and Frick’s white clapboard house with black shutters was surrounded by trees and filled with old things, such as Delft tiles and Indonesian tapestry, as well as hundreds of books arranged by century. From 1951 it was Yourcenar’s permanent home.

Her writing life began again in 1948 when a trunk sent by a friend from Europe arrived in Connecticut. In it, she found four or five typewritten pages of a book she had begun when she was twenty. ‘My dear Mark,’ it began. She remembered thinking she didn’t know anyone called Mark, before she realised it stood for Marcus Aurelius. ‘From that moment there was no question but that this book must be taken up again, whatever the cost.’ Memoirs of Hadrian grew from years of reading for pleasure, visiting Italy, taking notes in the library at Yale – and then all of this was absorbed and came out in long bursts of writing. Yourcenar describes the desire to write coming on her during a train ride from New York City, pursuing her to a Chicago station restaurant where she waited to board a train to Taos, and continuing as she sat in the observation car while the train wove through the Colorado mountains, under the ‘eternal pattern’ of the stars. ‘I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardour, or more lucid nights,’ she wrote later. She had exhausted the library, and now she could write.

One sentence from the trunk remained through all the drafts of Hadrian: ‘Je commence à apercevoir le profil de ma mort’ – ‘I begin to discern the profile of my death.’ It is the insight that gives the book its form: a near death meditation on the uses made of a life. In the final version, Yourcenar puts this sentence at the end of a paragraph in the first chapter, preceding it with a metaphor: ‘Like a traveller sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift towards evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death.’ I can’t help thinking of Mount Desert in Maine, surrounded by archipelagos, reached every summer by boat; as with the ripening apple in Alexis, Yourcenar is describing a natural process of enlightenment, of a knowledge that becomes surer the closer to death we come. Reading Hadrian, you have the illusion that you are an enlightened emperor too, your worries pitched higher than your next doctor’s appointment or next deadline, looking towards the restive borders of the empire and the benevolent institutions you would like to outlive your reign. I often thought of both parts of Henry IV and Henry V, or of Thomas Cromwell as portrayed by Hilary Mantel. Hadrian is clear without overexplaining, honest without being ingratiating. Mavis Gallant said that the novel’s sentences in English were overcomplicated compared with the French, but I’m not sure I agree: in the one above, ‘à apercevoir’, with its double vowel, isn’t as elegant as ‘begin to discern’, a phrase Frick and Yourcenar found together. The sentences seem to me ideally weighted, calm but capable of carrying emotion, bearing traces of Latin and Greek vocabulary and syntax. At times, the book seems astonishingly modern – Hadrian is dealing with problems in Jerusalem, and sees his appointments of armies of civil servants as a bulwark against the ‘one fool’ who rules every century – but its most famous episode is its most Roman.

The ‘high noon’ of Hadrian’s life, as he sees it, came when he met Antinous, a younger Greek man, in Bithynia. (There are extant sculptures of Antinous, but it might help to know that when a friend of Yourcenar’s saw an image of one, she said: ‘Nijinsky!’) A latecomer to true love, the unhappily married Hadrian declares that ‘every bliss achieved is a masterpiece’. While he is on a trip to Egypt with Antinous, a fortune-teller sees trouble in store for the empire and recommends a sacrifice. Antinous offers his falcon, which they kill and bury in an elaborate rite directed by the sorceress. Without Hadrian knowing, Antinous returns to the sorceress and, not long after, disappears. Searching along the Nile, Hadrian and his party enter a temple, where they find a lock of hair in still warm ashes – whose hair? Hadrian steps into the water. In the riverbed, half-buried in mud, is Antinous. ‘Everything gave way; everything seemed extinguished. The Olympian Zeus, Master of All, Saviour of the World – all toppled together, and there was only a man with greying hair sobbing on the deck of a boat.’ Hadrian prepares the body with the embalmers: ‘All the metaphors took on meaning: I held that heart in my hands.’ In these two simple sentences, balanced across the colon, metaphors capture both the word and the world. We say the hackneyed phrase ‘she holds his heart in her hands’ to mean that we are our lover’s keeper, but it becomes fresh again in the story of Hadrian and Antinous.

Antinous’ death is also when one of the book’s most powerful ideas reaches its height. Hadrian recalls riding, swimming and running when he was younger, and decides that:

Thus from each art practised in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such sympathy would be one of the least revocable kinds of immortality.

It is contact that matters. Perhaps this is an emperor’s delusion, but it is also a recognition of a shared experience: when I run or ride, I can have some notion of what it is like when you run or ride. And running or riding will outlive us all, like the curve of our heel. This idea appears again at the end of the book, when Arrian, the governor of Armenia Minor, sends Hadrian a consolatory note on Antinous’ death. ‘As seen by him,’ Hadrian writes, ‘the adventure of my existence takes on meaning and achieves a form, as in a poem.’ We are meant to be useful to one another, and sometimes to be useful is to see a person from a particular vantage point, whether near like Antinous, or far like Arrian. One of the thoughts that comforts Hadrian as his memoirs draw to an end is that after his death ‘some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.’ We do not just rely on our contemporaries, but on those yet to be born. We live for the handful of people who will find our mortal life useful to them, as guide or warning.

Memoirs of Hadrian​ was an instant success and Yourcenar’s reputation grew until her death. After its publication, she returned to another of the ‘projects of her twentieth year’, the life of Zeno, a fictional philosopher and alchemist in Renaissance Bruges. The Abyss was published in May 1968 and won the Prix Femina. A new volume of Yourcenar’s correspondence from the post-Femina years, published in French in 2023, reveals a writer at her most professional, fussing over the text to go on a band round the book (‘Zeno, sombre Zeno, Zeno of Bruges,’ she suggests, after a line in Valéry). Nothing escapes her, and she is unafraid of saying what she thinks. When Philip Rahv writes to ask if she might contribute to a quarterly he’s editing, called Modern Occasions, she offers him an essay on Piranesi, but admonishes him for the ‘colourless and ambiguous’ title of his journal (he didn’t take the essay). An old-fashioned courteousness is also on display. Yourcenar, perhaps remembering the role Edmond Jaloux had in her early career, writes to thank reviewers for their engagement with her novel more often than I expected, often going into depth about points they had made. But there is very little sense of her life outside of her books: only a dog, Valentine, who’s a hit with TV crews, and the weather, never as dry as she would like. You long for the boxes in Harvard’s Houghton Library to reveal the writer we nearly know. Even when it comes to the événements of May 1968, she says rather wanly that of course reforms are needed.

As Yourcenar entered her seventies, her affinity with the younger generation began to break. She was living in her own past, composing three volumes of family memoir. Every year, she reread Far from the Madding Crowd: she described herself as someone who deepened her relationships with books, including her own, rather than moving on to something new – though she did like Bob Dylan. When she wrote, she would take a pencil to the fourth draft, which was ‘practically a fair copy’, and delete any word she could, putting a tally at the bottom of each page: ‘crossed out seven words’.

As Frick’s health began to falter, Yourcenar became attached to Jerry Wilson, who first came to Maine as part of a French television crew in 1978, when Yourcenar was 75. Jerry was gay, unintellectual, cruel – Fraigneau reborn. When Frick died the following year, Yourcenar was eager to see the world again, this time with her Jerry-Antinous. She poured Grace’s ashes into a sweetgrass basket, wrapped the whole in a woollen scarf her companion had frequently worn, and buried it on Mount Desert Island. ‘One can reinvent a rite,’ Yourcenar said to an interviewer, ‘at any moment in life.’ (She was establishing one: Yourcenar’s own ashes were buried in a basket wrapped in the white silk scarf she had worn to the Académie.) She found out she would be the first immortelle when she was in Miami with Jerry. After the ceremony in Paris, she went south. With Jerry, she finally visited Antinoöpolis, where she poured coins into the Nile near where Antinous may have drowned. (Instead of a sword, the académiciens had marked her accession with a coin from Hadrian’s time.)

Perhaps predictably, her relationship with Jerry became strained: he was often silent in the presence of ‘Madame’, particularly if the conversation went over his head, as it must often have done. On a trip to India in January 1985, Jerry insisted they bring along a man he’d met called Daniel, who made frequent requests for money. In Goa, Jerry became ill. He died a year later in Paris of Aids; the following spring Yourcenar visited the Hôpital Laennec to see the room he had died in. In November 1987 she had a stroke. Her housekeeper was with her for her last breath in the hospital on Mount Desert Island; Yourcenar opened her eyes, she reported, and they remained open, as blue as ever. ‘Let us try, if we can,’ reads the last line of Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘to enter into death with open eyes.’

Ernaux was the seventeenth woman to win the Nobel Prize. The first was Selma Lagerlöf, who won in 1909. ‘Novelists of genius are rare; novelists of genius who are women are, of course, even rarer,’ Yourcenar wrote of Lagerlöf in 1975. ‘Among these women of great talent or of genius, none, in my opinion, is to be placed higher than Selma Lagerlöf. She is in any case the only one who consistently mounts to the level of epic and of myth.’ I wouldn’t say that I became eager to read Lagerlöf after finishing Yourcenar’s essay, but I like the sense I got of a thickening forest, first planted at the turn of the last century. There is no longer one type of woman who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, or one type of woman who has been allowed into the Académie Française. Now there are genealogies, affinities, branches that have not yet grown but will blossom and fruit and cross. As of today, Yourcenar’s life has been useful, which is all she wished it to be.