- Persévérer dans l’être: correspondance, 1961–1963 (D’Hadrien à Zénon, III)
The correspondence of Marguerite Yourcenar is, in effect, appearing in reverse order. In 1995 Gallimard published Lettres à ses amis et quelques autres, a deeply rewarding selection of three hundred of the two thousand letters she had transcribed (with her companion Grace Frick’s help) and deposited at Harvard’s Houghton Library; two thirds of the volume covered the last twenty years of her life, the period of Souvenirs pieux (1974), Archives du Nord (1977), and her election to the Académie française (1980). Since 2004 Gallimard has been releasing letters from the period from Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) to L’Œuvre au noir (1968). As for the younger Yourcenar, the most revealing personal letters from the 1930s and 1940s are sealed until 2037. In Persévérer dans l’être (a quotation from Spinoza), Yourcenar is sixty and mainly at home on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine, where she settled in 1950 after moving to the United States in 1939. The success of Mémoires d’Hadrien has ensured her an income and recognition (it is the work most often referred to in these letters), but we are not yet in the period of celebrity, nor has she established herself as the author of plays, essays, translations, short stories, and other historical fiction to complement the [End Page 120] experiment in imaginative erudition carried out with the Roman emperor. Letters to editors of journals and reviews planning critical appraisals of her work (Cahiers des quatre saisons and Livres de France) indicate how much remains to be done, and there are ongoing contractual disputes with Plon and Gallimard. We learn about the volume of essays Sous bénéfice d’inventaire (1962; Prix Combat, 1963), the revision of the stories in Nouvelles orientales (1938, 1963) and La Mort conduit l’attelage (1934; ‘D’après Dürer’ became L’Œuvre au noir), the reception of the play Le Mystère d’Alceste (published in 1963), further illustrated editions of Mémoires d’Hadrien (1963), and her translations of Cavafy (1958) and Negro Spirituals (1964), the latter leading her to Kentucky, Louisiana, and up the Mississippi. The workaday quality of about half of the correspondence is offset not only by the range of these interests and literary genres, but also by the engaging details about Yourcenar’s links with the nearby Oblate seminary’s drama group, five letters from the exceptional correspondence with Natalie Clifford Barney, and exchanges about poetics with Alain Bosquet and drama with Gabriel Marcel. Writing to Jean Schlumberger about the correspondence between Guizot and Princess Lieven, Yourcenar admires Guizot’s feeling for nature, precision in thought, and wisdom, and praises both correspondents’ refinement and civility; these are among the qualities she seeks to emulate. Her correspondence is impeccably edited by five of the leading specialists, although nine important letters from Lettres à ses amis are only cross-referenced and the original letters in English and Italian have been omitted, with translations or summaries provided instead. This chapter in Yourcenar’s correspondence is not over, with many details about L’Œuvre au noir yet to come, while speculation about Yourcenar’s life before the Mémoires d’Hadrien will continue.