Marguerite Yourcenar has always been one of my favourite writers, ever since I read the fabulous Mémoires d'Hadrien at 18 (I still consider it one of the most perfect books ever written). I read most of her books - novels, essays, memoirs, correspondence - and my admiration never decreased, just the opposite. Books like L'Oeuvre au Noir, Alexis, Le Temps ce Grand Sculpteur or Sous Bénéfice d'Inventaire have marked me deeply, and I've read them and reread them several times, always with the same pleasure and sense of discovery and wonder. Not only because the writing is exquisite, whether in French or in translation, but because the characters, the ideas, the feelings and reflections speak to me deeply.
Being such an admirer of her work, it was only natural that I wanted to know about her life. There is a lot of information about it in her writings - especially the essays, memoirs and letters - and I read her biography by Josyanne Savigneau years ago. Now I read this other biography, by Michèle Goslar, which comes near to a hagiography. And the impressions I get from all this reading cause me some ambivalent feelings - as much as I admire and love her work, I don't think I would have liked Marguerite Yourcenar as a person had I ever met her. I guess we are all prone to one particular mortal sin, and in her case what comes across is Pride - it looks like she was endowed with such arrogance that would make her unbearable. I had that impression from some of her essays and memoirs and especially from her letters, and it has been only strengthened by her biographies. So much self-righteousness, so much intellectual arrogance, such pride in her origins and upbringing, such a punctilious attitude in her dealings with her publishers, fans and even with her friends. An example, among many others, is her pride in her father, that she obviously idolised, but if one looks at his life and character as depicted in Archives du Nord and the biographies objectively, was no more than a cultivated fainéant that transmitted his own pride and conceit to his daughter. And this sense of arrogance is just reinforced by her pose as a modest and humble human being, which she certainly was not.
Yet her life was certainly interesting, and I cannot help but sympathise somewhat with her intellectual arrogance, suffering from the same ailment myself - thence the ambivalence. She was a keen observer of human nature, an admirer of the natural world and understood uncommonly well the great picture in history - and those are all admirable features. And I also sympathise with her hopeless passions for André Fraigneau and Jerry Wilson, not so much withe the way she treated her devoted companion of 40 years, Grace Frick. So what bothers me is not her life or personality, but her pretence of modesty, that verges on hypocrisy, which is a characteristic I loathe.
As for the biography - Michèle Goslar takes a too much hagiographic approach for my taste. She even tries to write in the Yourcenar style, which of course she isn't able to equal, and giving much information about a lot of her life events, she doesn't really capture or is able to depict some of the phases I would be most interested in, like her life in the 1930s and her relations to the French and Greek bohemia at the time - many hints, but not much enlightenment. And she seems to assume the same pose of her subject that displeases me - starting with the title of the book, the quote from Feux "qu'il eût été fade d'être heureux". As if she didn't care to be happy! When she obviously did, and the failure to be so haunted all her life, as her strong attachment to keep on living and her late passion for Jerry show. And that's one of the most obvious clues to the distance between her pose and her true self - the inability to resign herself to death, her strong and desperate will to live until the end.
So, I'm left with loving Yourcenar's work, and ambivalently relating to her personality, with her flaws that somehow make her more human and relatable. Maybe she was not a very nice person, but her books are wonderful and will endure and keep on giving us a sense of wonder.
