CHAPTER 14

A Gift from Jacques Kayaloff

1944

She wrote Electra here . . . and did all the cooking for a slew of guests!

—Grace Frick

THOSE WHO HAVE FOLLOWED MARGUERITE Yourcenar’s creative trajectory may already be familiar with the contribution made to twentieth-century literary history by the New York businessman Jacques Kayaloff.1 It was through his good offices that a forgotten fragment of Mémoires d’Hadrien made its way from a basement in Lausanne to 549 Prospect Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, in early 1949.² Kayaloff also did a much less well-known favor for Yourcenar admirers when for Christmas in 1943 he gave Grace Frick an annual appointment calendar for the new year about to begin. That first daybook was published by the French Relief Fund, created to aid France’s combatants, children, and civilians who were suffering on account of the war.³ For more than four decades, agendas like that one would be kept primarily, though not exclusively, by Frick. They provided a place both for keeping track of social, professional, and medical appointments and for recording the events of daily life. For a biographer, they are an embarrassment of riches. The list of household items the couple brought with them to Hysom Cottage that year—with its comforters, facecloths, aprons, table runners, doilies, kitchen silver, and nutcrackers, all carefully counted—is a cultural artifact in its own right.

It was Marguerite who christened that first daybook because Grace was still traveling with her aunt when the new year began. Over the first three weeks of January, Marguerite carefully tracked her partner’s progress toward home: on January 2 Grace returned to Kansas City from Mexico; on the seventeenth she left Missouri bound for Illinois; on the nineteenth she saw Betsy Lunn in Chicago; and on the twentieth at 10:30 a.m. her train pulled into the station in New York. When she finally arrived after three months away, Marguerite met her in the city. They had decided to treat themselves to a few days in Manhattan to celebrate Grace’s return. Staying at the Biltmore, they attended the Broadway musical Carmen Jones on the evening of Grace’s arrival. The play was an updated version of the opera Carmen with an entirely African American cast, which appealed to both women. The following night they dined with Phyllis Bartlett and her new husband, John Pollard, at the Acropolis Restaurant on West Fifty-Eighth Street. Phyllis was now teaching English at Queens College.

Over the next few days they got together with Jacques and Anya Kayaloff; Kayaloff’s sister, the painter Ina Garsoïan; and Grace’s Wellesley friend Katherine “Katy” Gatch and her companion Marion Witt. On January 24 they saw the black American singer and actor Paul Robeson’s acclaimed performance in the lead role of Othello. This production of Shakespeare’s popular play was staged by the British-American producer and director Margaret Webster, whose work Grace and Marguerite followed with great interest. They had attended Webster’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard the previous March; they would even bring one of Yourcenar’s Sarah Lawrence students with them to her celebrated version of The Tempest in early February 1945, which featured the black actor and civil rights champion Canada Lee; and in November of 1946 they were wowed by Eva Le Gallienne’s performance in Henry VIII.4 Webster worked often with Le Gallienne, her former lover.⁵

On January 25 Marguerite took the train to Sarah Lawrence, and Grace headed for home. Passing through New Haven, Frick stopped off at Yale University to see the chairman of dissertation candidates and update her placement file. The only other mention of Yale in the 1944 daybook is the interrogatory “Register for Yale? Or pay Library Fee?” on March 1. In the thirty-six years’ worth of Frick daybooks, one finds only three brief mentions of George Meredith, subject of her apparently forsaken attempt to complete her PhD.

Back in Hartford, Frick had many calls or visits from friends and associates at Hartford Junior College. Former students came to tea. Norah Tapley, who went on to become a physician, even spent a weekend with Frick and Yourcenar at 549 Prospect Avenue. Frick continued to receive invitations to events at the college, which she most often declined. She was not wallowing in self-pity, however. Daybook comments in the early months of 1944 are full of good humor: on March 6, for example, after “Fatal Oysters!” eaten with friends the night before, “M.Y. ill from oysters mais belle journée!” Later the two women would have lunch alfresco near the fountain at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, where they had gone shopping for clothes. The days they spent together were always full of theatergoing, ballet performances, galleries and museums, movies at Hartford’s Avery Theatre or New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre and Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion), baking bread and sharing it with neighbors, or walking the mile and a half to Hartford’s Elizabeth Park. Grace also had time for horseback riding now, a pleasure she pursued with Jean McKay in Wethersfield or Ada Loewith in West Hartford. The 1944 daybook suggests that other pleasures were often indulged in, strewn as it is with those stars and crosses which biographers identify with “moments of joy, happiness in love, or sensual pleasure.”6 One often finds them in evening quadrants of the days when Marguerite came home from Bronxville.

Yourcenar had initially been hired as a part-time instructor at Sarah Lawrence College to teach French and Italian. In contrast to the experience of many women’s colleges, enrollment went up at Sarah Lawrence just as faculty members were leaving to join the war effort or take better-paying war-related jobs. Thus, positions opened up for European exiles. Located fifteen miles north of New York City, the school describes itself as having been, along with Bennington College, “the first college to incorporate into its curriculum the ideas and ideals of progressive education.” Harold Taylor, who was president of Sarah Lawrence during most of Yourcenar’s tenure there, said this about the school: “The task of the College is to teach liberalism—not the philosophy of an ethnocentric, middle-class, nationalist, Western, white man’s ethic, but liberalism conceived as a classless philosophy, which draws individual human beings closer together, teaches a concern for the welfare of all social groups and all countries, and judges the value of acts and societies by the effect they have upon enrichment of individual human lives.”⁷ At a time when these ideals were under siege in the culture, Sarah Lawrence was a place where differences were not merely tolerated but valued.

Although Yourcenar had little teaching experience, she was hardly unqualified as an educator. She had wide-ranging experience as a lecturer and enthusiastic recommendations from the likes of Horatio S. Krans, director of the American University Union in Europe, located in Paris; Professor Florence White of Vassar College; and Professor Frederick Hoffherr of Barnard College, among others.⁸ André Morize, who had come to teach young men like Grace Frick’s brother Gage how to use a machine gun at Harvard University during World War I and then became a professor of romance languages there, called Yourcenar “one of the most remarkable women I have met.”⁹ The only discordant voice was that of a young Sarah Lawrence instructor, Louis Barillet, who became perhaps the only person ever living to call Yourcenar’s French “not as fluent as expected in a French person”! He also found her English, less surprisingly, to be “not so good.” Something about Yourcenar obviously bothered Barillet: “I am not sure about her personality with students or how good she would be with them. There is a large unknown factor about this woman as regards personality, ability, communication with students.”10 She got the job anyway.

During one of Yourcenar’s years at the school, 1947–48, the novelist Mary McCarthy taught English there for a semester. According to her biographer, Carol Gelderman, McCarthy did not like working at Sarah Lawrence “because ‘the students were so poor’”—academically, that is.¹¹ She was not asked back. The fictional Jocelyn College of McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe is believed to be largely based on Sarah Lawrence. She and Yourcenar shared similar sentiments. No matter what the time of day, wrote McCarthy, “the Jocelyn students were always sleepy, yawning, and rather gummy-eyed, as though it were seven in the morning and they unwillingly on the street.”¹²

It’s little wonder that Yourcenar found her American students for the most part ill prepared and intellectually uninspired. The reading lists for her courses were extremely demanding. Here are the assignments for one four-week period, as handwritten by Yourcenar, in late September–early October, during which classes were held twice a week:

 

Proust Un amour de Swann

André Gide La porte étroite, L’Immoraliste, L’école des femmes

Balzac Le lys dans la vallée

Rousseau Julie (1^re et 2^e parties)

Flaubert Mme Bovary

Prévost Manon Lescaut

La Fayette La princesse de Clèves

Chateaubriand Atalee [sic]

Montherlant Les jeunes filles

Paper due October 15.¹³

 

Yourcenar often assigned translation exercises from English into French. Once she asked her French II class to translate two pages of each student’s choice from Gertrude Stein’s Paris France. When Yourcenar taught comparative literature, she liked to organize her course around a theme. For the all too current theme of war, for example, she would have her students read The Iliad, The Song of Roland, War and Peace, Victor Hugo’s famous depiction of the Battle of Waterloo in Les Misérables, and so on.14 As in Hartford, she brought her advanced literature students into New York to see artworks related to their reading.¹⁵

Yourcenar almost never had much good to say about the nearly ten years she spent teaching at Sarah Lawrence. When the Parisian journalist Matthieu Galey asked her what she had learned from her students, she replied with considerable disillusionment, “How few are prepared for study, how many people never escape the status quo, and how brief the period of awakening is.”¹⁶ Another French journalist, Jacques Chancel, asked if she had taken up teaching as “a pastime.” “No,” she replied, “were it a pastime, I could no doubt have found a more enjoyable one. But it was after the war, and purely a way of making money.”¹⁷

Probably the most positive comment that Yourcenar ever made about Sarah Lawrence was to the Quebecois television host Françoise Faucher in January of 1975:

 

It was a very fruitful period. It caused me to undergo certain experiences: that of earning my living, which is excessively important in our time: without it, one doesn’t know what is going on for people who have had to do it continually and all the time—I did it myself, let’s say, for six or seven years; also the experience of a world that was not the literary world—a world launched on the paths of novelty in art, in literature, in everything—in which I had lived in Europe, and that put me for the first time in contact if you will with the anonymous crowd, which was terribly important.¹⁸

 

But there was nothing anonymous about Yourcenar’s students, and many of them vividly recall their unusual teacher. Phyllis Rothschild Farley remembers her always wearing a large-brimmed hat, possibly made of felt, while teaching: “She would stalk around the campus dressed in this exotic fashion, completely herself, like nobody else.” Farley remembered classes of no more than three or four students, all of them European or French speaking. They had to be, because Yourcenar expected them to write French grammatically! Returning from summers in Maine, she would say how much she enjoyed the solitude there, pronouncing the word the French way.¹⁹

Jane Bond, a retired professor of French history at Baruch College in New York, also remembers Yourcenar wearing a hat around campus, a Napoleonic two-cornered affair. A black student, Bond had transferred to Sarah Lawrence from Spelman College in Atlanta. Her father had been sent to Haiti by President Roosevelt to head up what was then called Point Four, the equivalent of today’s USAID. So Jane was one of the fluent French speakers that Phyllis Farley mentioned, one whose background differed from that of her fellow students. She does not remember most of her peers as having a deep interest in the life of the mind. Although Bond took only one class from Yourcenar, in 1949–50, its instructor made a strong impression. What Bond remembers most clearly is that Marguerite Yourcenar “was the only teacher at Sarah Lawrence College who was absolutely devoid of racism.”20

Bond did not know that her instructor had a lover back in Hartford, but an incident occurred one day at school that made her aware of Yourcenar’s sexuality. Bond was in her teacher’s office, whose small Persian rugs scattered on the floor and artworks adorning the walls made the room feel more like a salon than a work space. Yourcenar was at her desk, and her student, a sensitive young person of only sixteen at the time, was seated several feet away. Remembering the moment and trying to put it into words, Bond takes pains to emphasize that her instructor’s manner was never anything other than impeccable. Yourcenar’s code of conduct was such that she would never behave inappropriately toward a student. But suddenly there was something indescribable in the air, “quelque chose qui a surgi,” said Bond. A mysterious current had passed through the room, and then it was gone. When Bond returned to her residence, Robinson House, she related the experience to “some of the girls” gathered there. They smiled and said simply, “Well, you know, she is a lesbian.”²¹ And that was that.

Marguerite Yourcenar was noted throughout her life for having a seductive way about her. The French television personality Maurice Dumay remarked on it in his interview with her aboard the SS Mermoz right after she was elected to the Académie française.²² Charlotte Pomerantz Marzani, who took Yourcenar’s French civilization course at Sarah Lawrence in 1948, made a similar comment to Josyane Savigneau: “I have to admit, though I have never been attracted to women, that she was seductive like a man.”²³ Those powers of seduction seem to have unwittingly exercised themselves on another Sarah Lawrence student, Marianne Mosevius, whose background, like Jane Bond’s, differed markedly from that of her schoolmates. Mosevius was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.²⁴

Born in Berlin in 1923, Mosevius left there at the age of fifteen as part of the first Kindertransport to England. She would eventually lose two grandparents, seven uncles and aunts, and two first cousins in the Holocaust. Mosevius came to the United States to join her parents in 1943, and by spring semester 1944 she was taking Yourcenar’s course in the French novel as a scholarship student.25 In the fall of the same year, she was in Yourcenar’s civilization class. Just as Jane Bond was one of ten black students at Sarah Lawrence during her time there, Marianne Mosevius was one of ten Jews.

Mosevius was an especially gifted student, and Yourcenar took particular care in her periodic evaluations to shape her way of relating to literature. In a March 3, 1944, performance report Yourcenar credited Mosevius with “great ability in French conversation,” “very good” participation in class discussions, and “a certain maturity in her views, even if they are somewhat too set.” Yourcenar then went on to say that “full maturity should imply more suppleness and more sensibility for nuances, more careful weighing of evidence, and more capacity for adjustment to the views of others. She needs to widen her basis for her approach to the whole subject of literature, for she tends to consider a work of art too strictly as subject matter for ethical or political discussion, and not as a complex unit for dispassionate, though vigorous, appraisal.”²⁶ The next report, dated April 25, suggests that Mosevius had taken her previous evaluation seriously. Her work was “excellent,” her class participation “always most valuable,” and her use of French “perfect.” Mosevius’s papers on André Gide and André Malraux showed “rare maturity, judgment, and power of concentration.”²⁷

By late October 1944, in a course that Yourcenar entitled French Civilization through Literature and the Arts, she had risen even higher in her teacher’s esteem: “M. Mosevius may legitimately be classed as a truly advanced student. She uses her intellect with ardor, and is gifted with a remarkable capacity for work and organization.” But as in the case of previous assessments, Yourcenar believed that Mosevius could still improve. Her remarks have as much to say about the Frenchwoman’s own evolving manner of appropriating a literary text as they do about that of her student:

 

Her inclination is toward the social and the historical, and she has yet to develop more fully her literary taste and her capacity for disinterested enjoyment of literature and the other arts. Her actual abilities [Mosevius’s underlining] and her various maturing experiences, while all excellent factors, tend to make her rather rigid in her views [Mosevius’s underlining], and to support her in a fixed picture of her personality; whereas she should be employing her unusual capacity for learning, as applied to the materials of literature, more to correct, transform, or even check her opinions by comparison with other points of view. She has developed already a very distinct personality and does not need to throw her effort into an intensification of it, but rather to an extension of it, imaginatively and emotionally [Yourcenar’s underlining]. She needs, especially, that valuable method of study which asks of a student not only to admit the reasoning of a character in a work (especially the reasoning of a character who is unsympathetic to her) but, for the time, to be that person in order fully to evaluate his position or his temperament. (She needs, in other words, the specific exercise of the imagination which Shelley describes in his essay on poetry, when he discusses the moral use of the imagination.)28

 

Not only has Mosevius underlined the phrases indicated above, placing question marks next to them, she has also virtually filled the margins of the page with handwritten responses to Yourcenar’s remarks. Namely, “Y. does not practice what she preaches” and “Shelley: the great secret of morals is a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively. He must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” Next to the preceding, Mosevius writes, “What about kindness? That must be included in ‘to be greatly good.’ Practice what you preach!!”

Judging from another—extraordinary—handwritten document, Mosevius still was not at peace with her instructor a year later, even though she was no longer in her class. She obviously had maintained contact; in fact, it was Mosevius who accompanied Yourcenar and Frick to Margaret Webster’s production of The Tempest on Broadway in early 1945. Years later Mosevius’s daughter Donna Levinsohn deciphered and translated what her mother had written—in her native German—on the back of an October 1945 faculty report. Some of the original text had been partially erased. What Levinsohn could make out, she put in brackets; where there were gaps in the text, they are indicated. Words with an asterisk were originally in English:

 

[Dear Marianne,]

Now be very calm, pull yourself together, and try to see matters concerning Y. clearly. Above all be honest. You do know very exactly in what manner and [how much you loved her . . . ]. You have [ . . . ] seen for yourself that she [?was pleased with this?] and that she [definitely didn’t? . . . ] makes her uncomfortable and she is more angered than anything else. Therefore you must do whatever you can [to stop loving her.] She says that a [ . . . relationship*] can only be very slight*, and that anything else is false. In the sense of not genuine. You know that this is not true. But you can see that your [relationship*] to her is definitely [?not genuine?], precisely because she treats it as such. So for God’s sake pull yourself together and [like* . . . That, too, is a part of life.]

[Marianne]29

 

Clearly, Marianne Mosevius was infatuated with “Y.,” and “Y.” had done what she could to discourage her. A connection had nonetheless been forged that would last beyond Mosevius’s departure from Sarah Lawrence. When she married in late 1948, Yourcenar sent the newlyweds “two different (but combinable) products of the American earth”: hand-ground buckwheat flour from the South and maple syrup from the North.³⁰ As the future will prove, Yourcenar discussed personal topics with Mosevius that she would speak of to almost no one but Grace Frick.

From the fall of 1942, when Yourcenar started working at Sarah Lawrence, through the spring of 1950, when she took a two-year break from teaching, the life she shared with Frick followed the rhythm of the academic calendar, with school years spent in Hartford or Bronxville and long, restorative summers on Mount Desert Island. Time at Hysom Cottage meant swimming in Somes Pond before breakfast, in the nearby fjord later in the day, and occasionally at locations farther away. On August 23, 1944, for example, when the couple walked to a popular swimming spot southwest of Somesville, Grace noted in the daybook that Marguerite swam “nobly in Long Pond in her halter and black bloomers.”31 There would also be hikes in the woods; sunbathing; strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry picking; boating parties to Great Cranberry Island or the Porcupines; tea and popovers at Jordan Pond House; lobster suppers; moonlit walks along the shore; and, for Grace, horseback riding.

For Yourcenar those summers always meant time for creative as well as recreative pursuits. After composing Le Mystère d’Alceste on the island in 1942, she wrote Électre ou la Chute des masques in 1943.³² The following summer, as more information was revealed about wartime atrocities, Yourcenar began revising Ariane et l’aventurier, a sketch from the 1930s, which became Qui n’a pas son Minotaure?. These plays are not usually considered to be Yourcenar’s best work, but they are intimately tied to her most important themes and concerns: sacrifice, the love triangle, man’s inhumanity to man, the always avoidable but rarely avoided resort to violence. And, of course, they are all based on ancient Greek myths.

The summer of 1944 was a particularly hot one during which Frick and Yourcenar were deluged with guests—so many, in fact, that they sometimes had to lock their doors and pretend not to be home to steal a moment of privacy. In response to one particular “onslaught,” Marguerite retreated “in rage” to the Hysom Cottage pantry, then stole away for a cool swim; on returning, she summarily dispatched “the throng.”³³ Guests had been overabundant the previous summer as well, but this year they seem to have prevented the completion of Qui n’a pas son Minotaure?, which did not finally see the light of day until 1963. The summer of 1945 would bring “Three Greek Myths in Palladian Perspective,” a joint writing and translation project; that two-part essay would be published the following year in the distinguished “little magazine” Chimera: A Literary Quarterly.³⁴ Throughout these island holidays Yourcenar worked, too, on her French translations of Negro spirituals and gospel songs.

It was also during the summer of 1944 that the two women tried to purchase the log house in which they were staying for the third and, as it turned out, final time. Nearing the end of their last stay at what Grace once called “a heavenly place,” Grace and Marguerite spent the early morning gathering wood for their fireplace. It was an extremely hot and humid day, and they decided to walk the two miles or so south to Echo Lake, progressing at a very slow pace because of the heat. When they arrived, they could barely make out Beech Cliff covered in gray mist across the water. Walking along Route 102 on the way back, Marguerite complained of pain climbing up a steep hill and had to take a taxi the rest of the way home. She continued to experience fatigue during the week of packing and traveling that followed.35

Yourcenar was well enough to return to Sarah Lawrence on September 8, though, and the weekly student newspaper published a humorous report on her summer vacation: “Mme. Yourcenar was busy finishing her book on the Greek drama, Dramatis Personae, and leading a country life. Cows to be milked, fish to be caught, mountains to be scaled, such were the challenges she faced. Her essay on the Greek drama was recently published in Les Lettres Français [sic], Argentine-printed French literary organ.”³⁶

On September 17 Yourcenar fell ill again on Fifth Avenue after dining at New York’s Covent Garden Restaurant. A Dr. Bernat prescribed a week of bed rest. Another episode followed on October 11, causing Yourcenar to become “hysterical” at Sarah Lawrence. In the midst of all this, Mary Marshall wrote to offer Frick a one-year position teaching English at Colby College. She declined. Frick was on the lookout for a job, though, which may be why she tried to find an apartment in Upper Manhattan that fall. But both women were comfortable at 549 Prospect Avenue. They loved their fellow tenants—Miss Taylor, of the Taylor Lumber family, across the hall on the first floor; “the Emmas,” Trebbe and Evans; and elderly Mrs. Mathewson. Their apartment also had a lovely fireplace, in which, according to the daybooks, many a “nice fire” blazed and in front of which many a “good time” was had. In the spring semester of 1945 Frick took a post at Connecticut College for Women in New London, to which she could take the train from Hartford in roughly half the time it took Yourcenar to reach Bronxville.

Not until early November did Yourcenar’s health allow her to resume a normal teaching schedule. The rest of the school year went smoothly, with Yourcenar adapting Antoine de St. Exupéry’s Petit Prince for her French students to perform as a Christmas play. On Christmas Day itself, Grace and Marguerite invited some of their neighbors and friends for eggnog, a holiday concoction around which they would create a New Year’s tradition. To old Mrs. Mathewson upstairs in their building they delivered a serving of their dinner. After a “foggy evening walk in St. John’s churchyard” around the corner from their apartment, they read Alice Parker’s book of Christmas poems together.

Nineteen forty-four ended, as it had begun, with Yourcenar tending the daybook—though not, this time, because Frick was away. Two days after Christmas she joyfully noted, “squirrels come to breakfast, begging nuts from us through the window panes! Much play.” On December 31, despite the disappointments and alarming health problems of the previous months, Marguerite’s last word, in English, was an expression of gratitude to her companion: “End of a very happy year—thank you.”