Les Yeux Ouverts - Entretiens avec Mathieu Galey, by Marguerite Yourcenar

(So, my first post after the one in which I explain why I’m posting in English is in Portuguese… Not very coherent, but there’s a simple enough reason – I think about Marguerite Yourcenar in Portuguese or in French, and I read this book in Portuguese… But I will try to translate, it will be an useful exercise, even if not very successful… Critics welcome!)

I always admired immensely Marguerite Yourcenar’s work, ever since I read, when I was 18 or 19, Memoirs of Hadrian (that I reread several times since – and I still haven’t read it in French, an old project I haven’t fulfilled for a number of reasons, but the Portuguese translation seems excellent. Through the years, I read almost all her books, the novels (my favorites, after Hadrian, are L’Oeuvre au Noir and Alexis), her many superb essays, her letters, and even her biography by Josyanne Savigneau. I just had the opportunity to read Les Yeux Ouverts now, recently republished after the former edition being sold out for many years.

It’s a long interview, in which Marguerite Yourcenar discusses about everything: her life (she had just published two books of the trilogy about her family’s history, Le Labyrinthe du Monde), her books, her way of working, her opinions and life philosophy. And this reading confirmed the idea I had about her. A woman of huge intelligence and sensibility, extremely strong and clearminded, observant and keen in her vision of the world and human condition, but of a great intellectual arrogance, even if under an apparent modesty, that makes me wonder she must have been a not very nice people in every day life. I had this feeling from Savigneau’s biography, and especially from her correspondence in Lettres à ses Amis et Quelques Autres. Her many petty lawsuits against her publishers, the maniac insistence in controlling her public image, the paternalistic tone in which she addressed her admirers, a former pupil’s statement that “it was impossible to picture her using something like a hair drier”, her stance above politics and the repeated assumption that she didn’t care about class and cultural background, that always sounds to me like the statement of someone that can feel above those issues precisely because she comes from a privileged and educated class that allows her to ignore those issues.

But what’s really important about a writer is his work, and Yourcenar’s is magnificent. She’s right when she repeatedly states that trying to know details about a writer’s life misses the point, that’s his work that’s essential, because after all his core message is there. And I really like what she says about her books’ genesis, the way she thought them and wrote them; it’s always extremely interesting to know the way a writer works. And her writing was extremely good, every time I read Mémoires d’Hadrien, for instance, it fascinates me the way each word, each sentence, seems so exactly right, the way it should be, just perfect. And, as much as she might have been unsympathetic or proudly aristocratic, her understanding of man and the world, her connection to a kind of universality and timelessness of life is admirable and inspiring.

De Olhos Abertos - Conversas com Mathieu Galey, de Marguerite Yourcenar

Sempre admirei imensamente a obra de Marguerite Yourcenar, desde que li, aos 18 ou 19 anos, o excepcional Memórias de Adriano, que desde então reli várias vezes - e ainda me falta lê-lo em francês, um velho projecto que por um motivo ou outro ainda não realizei, mas a tradução para português é de enorme qualidade. Ao longo dos anos, fui lendo quase tudo o que escreveu, desde os romances (os meus favoritos, depois do Adriano, são A Obra ao Negro e Alexis), os muitos excelentes ensaios, as cartas, e mesmo a sua biografia por Josyanne Savigneau. Só agora tive oportunidade de ler De Olhos Abertos, recentemente reeditado após a edição anterior ter esgotado há muitos anos.

Trata-se de uma longa entrevista, em que Marguerite Yourcenar fala de tudo um pouco: da sua vida (tinha então publicado já dois livros da trilogia sobre a sua família, O Labirinto do Mundo), da sua obra, da sua forma de trabalhar, das suas opiniões e filosofia de vida. E esta leitura de certa forma confirmou a ideia que eu tinha dela. Uma mulher de enorme inteligência e sensibilidade, extremamente forte e lúcida, observadora e perspicaz na sua visão do mundo e da condição humana, mas de uma grande arrogância intelectual, se bem que apresentada sob uma pretensa modéstia, que me faz pensar que não devia ser uma pessoa muito agradável no tarcto e convivência diários. Ficara com essa impressão ao ler a biografia de Savigneau, e sobretudo ao ler uma recolha das suas cartas - Lettres à Ses Amis et Quelques Autres. Os seus numerosos e mesquinhos processos contra os seus sucessivos editores, a sua insistência maníaca em controlar a sua imagem, o tom paternalista com que dava conselhos aos seus admiradores, a declaração de uma antiga aluna de que "era impossível para nós imaginá-la a fazer coisas como usar um secador de cabelo", a sua postura acima da política e a posição repetidamente assumida de que para ela a classe e a cultura não contavam, que me soa sempre como a declaração de quem se pode colocar acima dessas questões precisamente porque uma classe e educação privilegiada lho permitem.

Mas o que interessa num escritor é sobretudo a sua obra, e a de Yourcenar é magnífica. Ela tem razão quando repetidamente afirma que procurar conhecer detalhes da vida de um escritor falha o essencial, que é a leitura da sua obra, porque ao fim e ao cabo, o principal, aquilo que ele nos transmite, está lá. E gosto muito do que ela diz sobre a forma como os seus livros foram pensados e escritos; é sempre muito interessante conhecer o método de trabalho de um escritor. E ela escrevia extremamente bem, quando leio Memórias de Adriano, por exemplo, fico sempre fascinado como cada palavra, cada frase, parece ser exactamente aquilo que devia ser, perfeita. E, por muito pouco simpática ou altivamente aristocrática que tenha sido, a sua compreensão do homem e do mundo, a sua ligação a uma universalidade e intemporalidade da vida é admirável e inspiradora.

(Why I'm writing in English)

I've been blogging, on and off, for about 7 years now. Don't know why I do it, I never took myself and these postings too seriously, but somehow sometimes I just feel the urge to write and post, like the "itching" Virginia Woolf describes in Orlando, or, as Marguerite Yourcenar says about writing, "there is, above all, a need to express oneself, that is very mysterious". Anyway, I just do it when I feel like it. And naturally I used to write in Portuguese, my mother-tongue and the one I feel most comfortable with. So why have I lately started to post in English?

The answer has to do with facebook. I never cared about having an audience, I just used to send my posts to the outer space, so to speak, and didn't think about who would read them, if anyone did. It was a somewhat liberating experience, just expressing my feelings anonymously to the outside world... But as time went by, several of my friends found out about it, and when I created a facebook account, I published the link to the blog, and later I posted a few of my blog links there. And since a good part of my facebook contacts are not Portuguese, I thought it would be better to post in English. Besides, it's a good exercise in English learning. I agree with Frederico Lourenço, when he says learning other languages widens our capacity of thinking, because there are untranslatable words for several ideas and feelings (he says so in an essay about why it's useful to learn Greek; I know no Greek - apart from a few words - but it applies to any language).

So, it's not (just) pretentiousness, my writing in English. Hope to learn something, anyway. And to make myself understood to a few people that, even if I never met them in person, came to mean a lot to me.

Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens

It was with some ambivalence that I ordered Hitch-22 from Amazon. I usually enjoy reading memoirs and biographies, as Marguerite Yourcenar used to say, History is made of person's histories, and an intelligent person remembering his life and times, or the story of an interesting person's course through life, can be very informative and enlightening about their time's history, and life in general. My ambivalence was due to, although generally agreeing with Hitchens's ideas (at least as far as I knew them) and liking his essays and denouncing of religious hypocrisy, I didn't much like the image I had from him from the media, and was somehow annoyed by the atheists hagiographic view of him, especially after his recent death (even if I admired immensely his brave attitude concerning his imminent demise). But my curiosity won, and I ordered it anyway - after all he came with the endorsement of some of my favorite contemporary writers, like Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.

And I'm glad I did it, it's a very interesting read. It's true some parts are quite boring, like his school days, and he indulges too much in a kind of over elaborate writing that evokes the great Bloomsbury tradition that he's just not up to - how infinitely superior is the elegance of Lytton Strachey, that he seems to try to emulate - and then he looks as just too vain.

But in the end, I found myself admiring and respecting him more than I did. His evocation of the '70s writers set let me down a bit, but I loved the way he speaks about the Rushdie question, and the chapter about the Jewish issue is a masterpiece. I like the way he parted with the old Left - the loony Left, as a friend of mine calls it - and I think he would probably be equally critic of his involvement with the neocons in a few years time (as I read in a very good article of Salman Rushdie's after his death). And I was moved by this statement about himself:

Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell's matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one's own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

How I relate to that! That single paragraph could be enough to make me forgive his vanity and flamboyant demeanor. And I couldn't agree more with the statement with which he ends the book:

It's quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while still insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.

Yes, we must certainly do have to unashamedly assert our values and beliefs. And I think that Christopher Hitchens, in spite of his vanity and self-assured ways, did just that and I admire him for it, and think the world is poorer after his death. And I intensely admire the brave way he dealt with his terminal illness, so well expressed in the preface.