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.