New Immortal

Yourcenar's academic victory

"This uncertain, floating me ... is surrounded, accompanied by an invisible troupe of women who perhaps should have received this honor long before ..."

The honor was admission to the Academic Franc,aise, a group of 40 "Immortals," guardians of the French language who are replaced when death cancels their title. The speaker was Author Marguerite Yourcenar, 77, the only female elected to the academy in its 346 years. The members' choice seemed perverse --they had previously spurned such women as Mme. de Stael, George Sand and Colette. Moreover, Yourcenar is a naturalized U.S. citizen who has dual citizenship, and has spent the past 40 years as a resident of New England.

Accordingly, when Journalist Jean d'Ormesson, 55, lobbied in behalf of her membership, he was characterized as a "young thug" and "leftist" by outraged fellow members. Philosopher Jean Guitton, 79, argued that admitting a woman would be "like putting a pigeon among the rabbits." Yet when the pigeon flew in last month, fur did not fly, nor were feathers ruffled.

Not that it mattered to Yourcenar. She never sought the honor, and she is unlikely to be seen within 3,000 miles of the academy. Her psychological home seems even more remote. From birth, the author was separated not only from the common reader but from ordinary life. Her Belgian mother died a week after the child was born, and Marguerite spent her formative years traveling with Papa Michel de Crayencour, a wealthy and erudite gentleman of leisure. Instructed at home, the prodigy was reading Racine and Aristophanes by the age of eight. When the girl was 16, her papa privately published her first work of verse, and the two devised Marguerite's almost anagrammatic nom de plume. Reviewing her own debut, Yourcenar admits, "A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print."

Yourcenar's fortunes altered at 24, when her father died, leaving her alone but financially independent. She had published four novels when World War II decimated her patrimony; at the suggestion of Translator Grace Prick, she left for America. There she became an instructor in comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College, translating in her spare time--Greek poetry and Negro spirituals for pleasure, Henry James and Virginia Woolf for pay. During the war she continued research on her historical masterwork, Memoirs of Hadrian. She was "astounded by the generosity of American universities. They lend you books and let you take them home, which is something the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris never lets you do. So of course I decided to stay."

Home became a house in Northeast Harbor, on an island off the Maine coast, where, with Frick, she resumed her literary career. Memoirs, a fictive letter from the Emperor to his adopted grandson Marcus Aurelius, shows Yourcenar's characteristic traits: the ability to make a vanished society fresh and immediate, a stoic philosphy, and a cool, marmoreal style. The Abyss evoked 16th century France with its skirmishes of science and faith. Save for one other novel, Coup de Grace, set in the Bolshevik revolutionary years, Yourcenar's oeuvre remains untranslated in America. One reason is that Grace Frick, who died in 1979, had been ill for a decade. Recalls Yourcenar: "It would have been too cruel to take her work from her. Then she would have known that her disease was incurable."

If the newest Immortal finds her recent admission academic, it has served several incidental purposes. For one thing, previously ignored works are now being translated into English. A collection of prose poems, Fires, will be published in the U.S. this spring, and a 1934 novel, Denier du Reve (Coin of the Dream), is due next year. The others are certain to follow.

And though she dismisses the new feminists ("You can't obtain anything durable through aggression"), she has advanced their cause simply by standing still and letting the world catch up with her achievements. Typically, Yourcenar's summary needs no elaboration: "The real feminist victory is a woman who does her work well." Les mots justes, Immortelle.

Encore! qed

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