Almost 120 years after the birth of Marguerite Yourcenar
When Marguerite Yourcenar began to write, she believed she was responding to her mother’s wishes, for she had been told that she had indicated, before she died, that her young daughter should not be prevented from becoming a nun if she so wished. Nothing more equivocal, nothing so far from the truth. Devoting herself to literature, as profound as a religion, as passionate as a miracle, was the response of the little girl Marguerite Clenewerck de Crayencour, orphaned by her mother ten days after she was born and raised by her father, Michel-René Clenewerck de Crayencour, based on classic lyrics, travel chronicles and shared readings.
Born on June 8, 1903, Marguerite had to wait 16 years to find the name with which she would sign her writings and she found it together with her father: an anagram of their surname from which they took a “c” and ended up in Yourcenar . Thus she appeared in her first two works, published in 1921 and 1922, the collections of poems The Garden of Chimeras and The Gods have not died, but her full name, Marguerite Yourcenar, would remain as it is to date and for the eternity.
In 1929, he published his first novel, “Alexis or the Treatise on Useless Combat”, described as a scandal, but also as a beauty of new and precise style. It is a long letter in which a man, a renowned musician, confesses to her wife her homosexuality and her decision to leave her for the sake of truth and frankness.
Living in Ostend together with his father, after the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1939, he moved to the United States, to teach literature classes, he translated writers such as Henry James, Mishima and Virginia Woolf; but he never stopped writing. She became the first woman to be admitted to the French Academy of Letters, after the publication, in 1951, of Memoirs of Hadrian, a work on which she worked for more than a decade, and perhaps her most famous novel.
Marguerite Yourcenar’s life was an itinerary always in motion – perhaps due to her father’s chronicles and the idea that, if the island is a beginning of solitude, the journey was a beginning of knowledge. She even once wrote that in man there seemed to be a vital need to feel somewhere else. In the days of the writer there were changes, but also exiles. Also vacations, pleasure trips, voyages of infinite pain, academic excursions, love adventures and many back and forth pilgrimages between feeling and reason. Many of them without leaving her desk. Her writings are an example: “The Denarius of the Dream” takes place in Italy; “The coup de grace”, in the Baltic countries; Oriental Tales in Ancient China, Japan, the Balkans, and Greece. Europe, North Africa and the Middle East are the settings for “Memories of Hadrian”; “Opus nigrum” takes place in Flanders, Italy and Germany during the Renaissance and “A Dark Man”, in the island of the Desert Mountains and the Netherlands.
Few times and places are missing: only those that Marguerite Yourcenar herself reserved for herself. (And look, dear reader, there is an anecdote of a meeting between her and Jorge Luis Borges in 1986, six days before the Argentine writer’s death, where Yourcenar supposedly asked him: “Borges, when will you get out of the labyrinth?” And They say that he replied: “When they have all left. That same year, the author gave a lecture on Borges at Harvard University.)
Nor was it affected to give advice. Once, in an interview, Yourcenar was asked what recommendation she would give to a young person. And she, true to herself, answered: “I would tell him: don’t get attached. Don’t ever get attached. You will find too many servitudes in your life that you will freely and haphazardly forge, without knowing where the assumed commitment will lead you. For the sake of others as well as your own, don’t get attached. The misfortune is that it takes frequent attachment to know the price of not being attached.
Yet beyond selflessness and his love of travel, Yourcenar deeply respected reason. Beyond intelligence, he admired thinking ability. Famous, a phrase of his that, resigned, said from time to time: “In all times there are people who do not think like others. That is, they don’t even think like those who don’t think.”
Marguerite Yourcenar passed away in December 1987, at her home “Petite Plaisance”, on Mount Desert Island, in the state of Maine, in the United States. She undertook her last trip still wondering -and not knowing- what those who do not think would think.