On the essays shelf:
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
One of the reasons I cherish this collection of essays by Joan Acocella is that it has introduced me not only to writers I had never read (Stefan Zweig), but also to the personalities of these writers. In a couple of sentences, Acocella can describe someone so incisively and in such a manner that it cracks open my curious brain and I want to know more, more, more. Life is short. There is so much to learn and discover while we are here. If you are an autodidact, like I am, it can be overwhelming. What should I focus on? Is focus over-rated? Should I just keep my research wide and broad so that I can at least discover which path I should follow next? There’s a responsibility inherent in such choices, too. I want to do the topic justice. If I suddenly get interested in, say, Croatia, then I need to not waste my time. I need to read the best stuff possible, the stuff everyone references. Footnotes and bibliographies are an autodidact’s best friend. That’s where I have discovered some of my favorite books, the ones always mentioned, the ones everyone goes to for information. So Acocella’s essays have acted like the most in-depth bibliography of all time.
For example, this essay, on the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar.
I have heard the name, but have never read her books. Don’t know anything about her, not really. Not only does Acocella’s essay make me want to learn more, but it certainly makes me want to read Memoirs of Hadrian
Yourcenar had a fascinating childhood. Born in France to a family clearly of the mysterious leisure class. Her mother died. She was raised by her compulsive-gambler father, who moved them to Monte Carlo to be close to the casinos. She did not go to school. She had tutors, but in general taught herself. She spoke many languages, early. She was a voracious and wide reader. She had grandiose ambitions as a child. Her father supported her in that. He was a wannabe writer, and gave her some unfinished chapters of a novel he had written for her to finish. She was sexually precocious, experimenting with women and men in her teens (and, in one case, even earlier). She seemed to prefer women. Her most successful relationship (forty-plus years) was with a woman. She could be brutal. Reviewers said that she “wrote like a man”. Maybe because she wrote about war and ancient Rome, and her protagonists were usually men. Yourcenar had published a couple of books, and did not take the literary world by storm. She met an American woman and eventually moved to America to be with her (this was the relationship that would last forty years). She became an American citizen in the late 1940s. But she suffered from a ten-year writer’s block. (As we know, writer’s block is another one of Acocella’s essay topics.) Yourcenar lived in Hartford with her partner, and taught, and didn’t write. Then she discovered some manuscript pages in an old trunk, a book she had started when she was in her early 20s about the Roman emperor Hadrian. It set her on fire (well. Metaphorically), and she wrote Memoirs of Hadrian in two years (a fact that Acocella finds amazing, considering the breadth and depth of research in the book). Yourcenar would write for days on end. She would spend hours in the library, researching sources. The journey of Hadrian is actually one I know well, because I went through a phase of needing to know everything about the Roman Empire (which, naturally, I had to launch with reading Edward Gibbon’s huge tome, a book that was daunting but which I will never regret. Great reading!).
Yourcenar comes off as a rather frightening person in Acocella’s essay. Someone who did not suffer fools, who was brutally honest (she said she did not miss her father after he passed, he didn’t cross her mind for 30 years), and who was also so comfortable with herself that you wonder what the secret was. I would imagine that one answer would be: she was born into a class that moved through the world knowing that they were at the top of the heap. But she clearly didn’t rest on her laurels. Her father was impecunious. He left her a small allowance when he passed, which allowed her the freedom to roam around and be “dissipated” for about 10 years. She slept with everyone, read everything, learned Japanese, wrote, did whatever the hell she wanted. She said later that there are books you must not attempt to write until you are 40 years old or over. That was certainly the case for her Hadrian book, which she began at 20 but put aside for 20 years, until she was ready.
Yourcenar was inducted into the Académie Française in 1980, the first woman inductee. Many pissy whining men expressed dismay about letting the Ladies in to their precious organization. But that gives you a sense of her status.
She appears to be one of those writers outside of her own time. Her contemporaries were Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner. She read them all. But she was not a modernist. Her work was compared to Racine, Gide. She wrote in French. Her partner translated into English. It was said that the only thing she loved without reservation was the French language. Thank you, Joan Acocella, for all of these details. It lights me up, to learn more, to read more.
Here are the opening paragraphs of Acocella’s essay on this fascinating author.
Anyone read Memoirs of Hadrian? Please report back.
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
In 1981, six years before her death, Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman ever inducted into the Académie Française, and that weighty honor has been hanging around the neck of her reputation ever since. Every book jacket, every review, speaks of it. But that wasn’t all that set her apart from other midcentury writers. She was an extremely isolated artist. A Frenchwoman, she spent most of her adult life in the United States, on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine, where, to isolate her further, she lived with a woman. Her background, too, made her seem different. She came from the minor nobility and didn’t hide it. Most of the people who knew her, even friends, addressed her not as Marguerite but as Madame. Add to that the fact that she wrote not in English but in her native French, and in a style that was often magisterial, in an old-fashioned, classical way. (People compared her to Racine. This was at a time when we were getting Bellow and Roth.) Add, moreover, that though she was a novelist, she was not primarily a realist, that she never mastered dialogue, that her books were ruminative, philosophical. Add, finally, that her greatest novel, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) , was a fictionalized autobiography of a Roman emperor, and it comes as no surprise that nearly every essay on Yourcenar speaks of her work as “marmoreal” or “lapidary”.
Actually, some of Yourcenar’s prose is marmoreal, but not so that you can’t get through it. Also, it is beautiful. What made her remarkable, however, was not so much her style as the quality of her mind. Loftiness served her well as an artist: she was able to dispense love and justice, heat and cold in equal parts. Above all, her high sense of herself gave her the strength to take on a great topic: time. Time was an obsession with her immediate predecessors in European fiction, but whereas those novelists showed us modern people altered – made thoughtful, made tragic – by time’s erasures, she erased the erasures, took us back to Rome in the second century or, in her other famous novel, The Abyss (1968) , to Flanders in the sixteenth century, and with an almost eerie accuracy. Yourcenar regarded the average historical novel as “merely a more or less successful costume ball”. Truly to recapture an earlier time, she said, required years of research, together with a mystical act of identification. She performed both, and wrought a kind of transhistorical miracle. If you want to know what “ancient Rome” really means, in terms of war and religion and love and parties, read Memoirs of Hadrian.
This doesn’t mean that Yourcenar, in her novels, conquered the problem of time. All she overcame was the idea that this was the special burden of the modern period. Human beings didn’t become history-haunted after the First World War, Yourcenar says. They were always that way.
