1948–1950
Faithful are the wounds of a friend.
—Proverbs 6
AS MÉMOIRES D’HADRIEN WAS COMING to life, one of Grace Frick’s favorite people from the past was dying. Emily Hall became head of the Rare Book Room at Yale University in 1931, the year Grace enrolled as a PhD candidate there. She retired from that post in November of 1947.1
It was almost a year later, in October of 1948, that Emily’s name started cropping up regularly in Frick’s daybooks. One day Grace and Emily drove to Wellesley together, stopping for “luncheon” in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, on the way. On another occasion, in early November 1948, both Frick and Yourcenar went for a drive with Hall to a reservoir surrounded by woods and fields, where they sipped tea from a thermos while enjoying the view. In late February 1949 Hall came to Hartford to examine the old books that Yourcenar had gotten from Switzerland the previous month. But mostly it was a matter of phone calls back and forth between Frick in Hartford and Hall, now living in her childhood home of Wallingford, Connecticut.
On November 9, 1949, Hall phoned to say she would be entering New Haven Hospital for “prolonged examinations.” Frick, of course, could always be relied on to marshal her energies whenever someone close to her was ill. On November 10 she was in the hospital at Emily’s side helping her place orders for personal items from local stores. Yourcenar had gone with her on the train to New Haven, and she spent the long hours of Frick’s hospital visit doing research related to Hadrian at the Yale Library. It was midnight by the time the pair got home.
Over the next few days Frick kept tabs on Hall by telephone. When she called on November 14, a Monday, to say she would see her in New Haven on Thursday, Hall became so upset that Grace changed her plans and went to see her the next day. Emily had cancer. From then until the end of November, Grace was almost constantly by her side, waiting in the next room as she had X-ray treatment. On November 22 Hall learned that her illness was incurable. Frick spent most of the next week, a week that included Thanksgiving, at her friend’s bedside.
All this was going on during a time of particular intensity with regard to Mémoires d’Hadrien. On Monday, November 29, Frick and Yourcenar took the train as far as New Haven together, reading manuscript pages of that work the whole way. Yourcenar then continued on to Bronxville, while Grace stayed all day at the hospital with Emily, “correcting proof.” At six o’clock that evening Frick would send those corrected pages off by registered mail to John D. Barrett of the Bollingen Foundation in hopes of receiving a grant to support further research and the eventual translation of the book into English.2 Yourcenar had requested a year of absence from Sarah Lawrence the previous month.3 A Bollingen fellowship would be a welcome boost to the couple’s finances during that unpaid sabbatical as well as a distinguished institutional acknowledgment of Yourcenar’s achievement.
By early January 1950 Hall had been discharged from the hospital, and Grace and Marguerite went to see her in Wallingford. Frick wrote at length about Hall’s illness to Gladys Minear. Having herself been a Yale librarian in the 1930s, Gladys knew Emily well. When Emily learned that her own case was inoperable, she was open, as Frick wrote, to “every help except consolatory remarks!” Grace admired Emily’s no-nonsense acceptance of her plight:
The effect has been something of a revelation to us all, this calling of a spade a spade, without hesitation, and nary a word of wailing as to “Why this one thing should happen to me?”
People have rallied round her from far and near, until the case begins to take on the aspect of a pilgrimage, if one may use the term in all respect for its serious connotation. She is just a simple and very lovable person who has done a thousand kindnesses in her life to innumerable people now scattered far and wide, and everyone seems hungry to have some contact with her.4
Hall’s former colleague Gilbert Troxell and his wife came up with the idea of making a purchase for the Rare Book Room in Emily’s name—not in memoriam, but while she was still living. They spread the word among Emily’s Yale friends. “It was a daring idea,” wrote Grace,
but they knew their woman; within four days of the doctor’s announcement that the case was hopeless I, and others, received the Troxell suggestion in the form of a mimeographed letter. Within two weeks a thousand dollars had come in, simply as a result of a chain relay from friend to friend (limited to Yale connections alone), and by December 15 they could take a Sarum Missal and a Trollope Manuscript to show her before she left New Haven Hospital for her home in Wallingford. Gifts are still coming, and other purchases have been made, all under Mr. Tinker’s direction, and presented by him to her for her inspection.5 She is really quite ill, but she is as delighted as a child by Mr. Tinker’s happiness.6
As Emily was losing her eyesight, Grace volunteered to read her mail aloud and answer it at her dictation. Many of Hall’s friends were in English departments around the country, so Grace knew a good number of them. She enjoyed spending time with Emily. “But most of all,” she wrote, “Marguerite and I have been struck by the fact that she has done what she has so joyously in life, and with a humility, too (for she pretends to no scholarship or high attainments), which has actually resulted in giving her a kind of special ‘first place.’ And she is meeting suffering and death with the same humility, and simplicity, and perhaps not altogether without joy.”7
Yourcenar, clearly, was not uninvolved in the dealings with Emily Hall. In fact, when Hall returned to the hospital in late May 1950, Grace and Marguerite called on her together again, as Frick wrote, “all three of us thinking it might be a last visit.” That was on May 24.8
Five days later Yourcenar sent an important letter to Ruth Hall in Kansas City modifying her will. As she noted in closing, “I am writing this long English letter completely without help, and I am in fact rather proud of it. But please excuse the many awkwardnesses and mistakes.”9 In addition to serving as her American attorney, Hall would now be granted the same full power of attorney over Yourcenar’s affairs that Grace had. With Sarah Lawrence behind her for at least a year and the first chapters of Hadrian in the hands of a literary editor in Paris, Yourcenar wanted her legal business taken care of before leaving Hartford for Mount Desert Island.
This year for the first time, after summers spent in Somesville (two and a half), Southwest Harbor (two), and Seal Harbor (three), the couple would be renting in Northeast. Preparing for summer stays in Maine was always time-consuming and disruptive. This was the first summer with no predetermined end point, and they had a longer list of items to take with them than usual. Cardboard boxes were scattered throughout the Prospect Avenue apartment, some packed and ready to go, some half full, and some labeled but empty. In the midst of all this Grace “dropped everything,” as Mme Yourcenar remembered almost thirty-five years later, “to go off and take care of” a Yale friend. That friend “had been part of one of the happiest periods of her life. Besides,” continued Yourcenar, “she felt that she and I were going to be separated, that my future would have its own trajectory which somehow wouldn’t include her, and that this was for her.”10 For Yourcenar the incident was doubly prophetic, because she did have her own future, and Grace’s battle with Emily’s cancer foreshadowed her own.
Tellingly, this revelation about Grace Frick in 1984 occurred during a conversation about fidelity between lovers—a conversation, moreover, in which Mme Yourcenar laid claim to three or four “affairs” over the course of her forty years with Grace. In other words, the attention Frick had lavished on her friend felt like an act of infidelity. Did Yourcenar suspect—or even know—that Grace and Emily had been intimate once? Was Emily the special “friend” that Marianne Zerner asked Grace about in a 1933 postcard from Switzerland? It is hard to imagine that anyone other than a onetime lover could have caused a wound so deep that Marguerite still felt its sting decades later.
Perhaps it seemed especially incongruous that Frick was abandoning her duties on the home front while Yourcenar was giving her ever more power over her personal and literary estate. And as they may or may not have suspected at the time, that estate was on the verge of a precipitous increase in value. Éditions Bernard Grasset, one of Yourcenar’s publishers during the 1930s, had recently put 3,320 francs on her account at the Comptoir National d’Escompte in Paris.11 Christine Hovelt de Crayencour had died in Pau on April 24, 1950, leaving everything to her stepdaughter—including a family business near London that had supplied Mme de Crayencour with an income of four hundred pounds a year. It was extremely important to Yourcenar that Frick inherit the English concern so that she would be able to provide a small income to Crayencour’s niece, Eulalie de Hovelt, who was in difficult financial straits.12 She also wished to reconfirm Grace as her sole literary executor should she herself not be able to oversee her most important project to date, the publication of Mémoires d’Hadrien.
Making matters more mysterious, there is an unusual two-week gap in Frick’s chronicling of daily events in the appointment book that spring—this from a woman who meticulously tracked not only her own life but the travels far and wide of friends and family members whom she hadn’t seen for years. She and Marguerite had gone to see Emily together at the hospital in New Haven on May 24, and Grace had recorded their visit the same day. But from May 25 through June 10, the daybook contains only a reminder written in advance of an Antiquarian and Landmarks Society open house that no one seems to have attended and a few inconsequential lines in Yourcenar’s handwriting. Granted, the women were busy preparing to leave for Northeast Harbor and tending to important legal matters. But on May 24 Emily had sent some blankets back to Hartford with her friends to be dry-cleaned. There can be no doubt that Grace returned those items faithfully to her friend, probably leaving Marguerite to fend for herself in an apartment full of packing boxes while she was away. Whether Yourcenar finally told Frick, possibly in no uncertain terms, how she felt about her companion’s prolonged stint of extracurricular care giving is anybody’s guess. What can be said with certainty, however, is that there is not a single additional mention of Emily Hall in Frick’s daybooks after the joint visit of May 24—including the date of October 9, 1950, when Emily died.