Marguerite Yourcenar was a feminist, but you would never have seen her burn a bra in a demonstration. She was the first woman admitted to the French Academy thanks to the efforts of Jean d’Ormesson, but hardly ever set foot there again after her speech. reception. If we forget that she is of Belgian origin, it is because she was first and foremost a citizen of the world. And what about her environmental concerns, which she once shared with a few hippies… and several scientists who were already sounding the alarm about the degradation of our planet.
His life and work will soon give rise to an opera, a libretto written by four hands, those of Marie-Claire Blais and Hélène Dorion, to music by Éric Champagne.
Yourcenar. An island of passionswill present several of the writer’s passions, two of which are very important. Their name is Grace Frick, first his translator, then quickly his spouse, but also the guardian of his work, and later Jerry Wilson, his lover of the last years, who will succumb to AIDS in 1986, then merciless.
This romantic trajectory, from the 1930s to the 1980s, alone proves this woman’s immense taste for freedom, first instilled by her father, an eternal nomad, a rich and happy widower after the death of Marguerite’s mother shortly time after the birth of the latter, and who was not at all offended by his daughter’s first novel, Alexis or the Treatise of Vain Combatwhich tackles the issue of male homosexuality in 1929.
However, do not enter who wants in his abundant work, which passes from poetry to the theater and from the test to the translation (Virginia Woolf, Henry James). The one who studied Latin and Greek and who learned English in London displayed an unequaled knowledge. Just read Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) and The black work (1968) to see the great art of Yourcenar, two important novels, especially in the way of reconstructing the thought of great figures of the past.
Rethinking history
Jean-François Chassay and Robert Lalonde vividly remember their first contact with Marguerite Yourcenar. “I tried to read it at 20, but you can’t at that age,” says the first, writer and professor of literature at UQAM. “In 1971, while on a cruise on a trip to Greece, I threw The black work overboard so much I found it twisted and complicated! recalls the second, author of several novels and actor. A few years later, the second attempt was the right one for them.
Any literary work is made of a mixture of vision, memories of acts, notions of information received during a lifetime by word or by books, and scrapings of your own existence.
In If science was told to me. literary scholars (Éditions du Seuil, 2009), Jean-François Chassay returned to Yourcenar, devoting a chapter to Giordano Bruno, Renaissance scientist and philosopher who is said to have inspired the character of Zeno, the alchemist at the heart of The black work. “Zénon is all the same a collage of different Renaissance thinkers, from Leonardo da Vinci to Tommaso Campanella, specifies Chassay, and this book, like Memoirs of Hadrian are not historical novels, but fictions based on History—it’s not the same thing. Yourcenar starts from the potentialities of History to try to think it. Even if it offers a purely subjective point of view, it is always supported by an impressive documentation, and of course a great culture.
An observation to which Robert Lalonde adheres, but this analysis was not always shared during Marguerite Yourcenar’s lifetime. “Early in her career, she was described as an academic-style writer who writes historical novels. It was already a first misunderstanding, when she used the Emperor Hadrian, for example, to say all sorts of things about life,” says the author of It’s the heart that dies last. And like any good writer, she knew how to draw on her imagination while drawing inspiration from reality, recognizing for example that a chance meeting in Quebec during a lecture tour in 1957 had partly inspired her A dark man (nineteen eighty one).
This admission, Robert Lalonde used it in turn in A walled gardens (Boréal, 2002), recounting this journey where Marguerite and Grace discover the Quebec of the Great Darkness, but also revealing the gray areas of their couple. Between biographical elements and literary freedoms, the author thus reconnects with that which he believes he has already encountered in the past. “It’s an impression, but the dates match: my cousin and I were selling lemonade near the railway in the direction of Ottawa, and I remember that a French lady accompanied by an American woman bought us a drink on the dock. It impressed me a lot. »
Great simplicity
He is not the only one to whom Marguerite Yourcenar made a strong impression. In 1975, as part of the show woman of today broadcast on Radio-Canada television, the actress Françoise Faucher then conducted major interviews, and it was by chance in an article in the magazine The Express at the time of the release of pious memories (1974) that she discovers that a world famous figure in literature lives “a stone’s throw from us”, more precisely on the island of Monts Déserts, in the State of Maine. This interview is one of the great moments of her life, since it was also the beginning of a friendship that continued until the author’s death in 1987, the actress having had the privilege of staying at Petite Plaisance, the mythical residence of Yourcenar. “The worst night of my life,” laughs Françoise Faucher. I didn’t sleep a wink as I was so annoyed sleeping in this adorable house, in this room lined with paintings by Marie Laurencin, and with Marguerite in the next room! »
This place reflected the values and manias of the author of Lights (“a series of portraits of women of extraordinary depth”, according to Faucher), surrounded by a magnificent garden, but not necessarily shining in its functional character. It is even said that Yourcenar refused the presence of a refrigerator in the kitchen, for aesthetic reasons, absence confirmed by the actress. “No Quebecer would have wanted this cuisine! But this woman was very simple: she made her bread, always tried to be in contact with nature, which made her an ecologist before her time. Moreover, on this subject, she had understood everything, saw everything coming, and can still tell us everything. »
opera Yourcenar. An island of passions brings it back into the news, to the delight of Françoise Faucher, present at her last major conference given in Quebec in September 1987, precisely on the ecological question. But we cannot reduce his work to his defense of water, land and animals. “His memoirs offer a very beautiful reading of the XXe century, emphasizes Jean-François Chassay. At the same time, when she delves into the distant past, she can make it very current. The black work, she had been thinking about it since the 1950s, noting what was happening in Algeria, Suez and Hungary: she saw borders everywhere, like Zeno in front of those between Catholics and Protestants, and no fundamental difference between all these walls that the was erected between individuals. »
Beyond her visionary side, her exceptional pen and her extraordinary erudition, many agree that Marguerite Yourcenar alone represented an ideal of freedom. With its share of requirements for those around it…
“Jean d’Ormesson, who had fought hard in his favour, would have hoped for more recognition when he entered the French Academy, says Françoise Faucher, because all she found to say was that he was lovely! Robert Lalonde confirms this character trait. “The portrait that I make of it in A garden surrounded by walls was not so far from what it was, according to some. She had a defiant and ruthless side, but also encouraged young writers to listen to no one but their own voice. A bit always in her work even when she was in reality, she had as much difficulty with the Roman Empire as with an escalator, according to Grace Frick. Even today, this represents an immense opportunity, as much for us as for literature.