1951
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they really live.
—Gertrude Stein
BY 1951 GRACE FRICK WAS reporting to the Yale Alumni Office that she was a self-employed “Literary Research Assistant.”1 Sometimes she just called herself a literary translator. Either way, she had made the transition from college professor to independent agent. She had also given up on George Meredith’s early poetry. Soon she would be translating one of the great books of the twentieth century. Marguerite Yourcenar, for her part, had been brought back to literary life in France a few years before returning there by the publication of her French translation of Henry James’s What Maisie Knew in 1947. Like so much else, it had been delayed by the war.
The daybook page for the couple’s first week in Paris, in May of 1951, is so full it overflows, and entries are in French no matter who was writing. Settling initially into the luxurious Hôtel Lotti near the tea shops on the rue du Mont Thabor, the women threw themselves into a dizzying spate of cultural activity. They visited museums (the Cluny, the Louvre, the Guimet) and churches (Notre-Dame, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, Sainte-Chapelle). They saw Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale performed in French and Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican at the Comédie-Française. But more than anything else for this pair, Paris was a musical feast. They heard the great French pianist Robert Casadesus at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, revolutionary and imperial works in the illuminated courtyard of the Louvre, an evening of selections from Gluck’s Orphée at the Palais de Chaillot. Ancient and sacred music was especially favored: they went three times to hear the a capella Chanterie de Sainte-Anne; sacred fare was again the draw at an illuminated Chapelle Royale; at Saint-Sulpice, it was Marcel Dupré performing ancient compositions on the great organ.
While Yourcenar met with old friends Jenny de Margerie, “Nel” Boudot-Lamotte, and Joseph Breitbach, among others, Grace often set off by herself on long walks, as she had done when she was discovering Paris for the first time in 1928. One day she took a three-mile round-trip trek across the Seine through Saint-Germain to take in an exhibit of old books and bindings. She loved exploring the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, alone and with Marguerite. Pleasure walks were almost always part of their day, and the Tuileries Garden was a favorite spot. One July night in 1951, the women stayed in the garden so late that they got locked in there. Whether they managed to get out or spent the night on a park bench, the daybook doesn’t say!2
Yourcenar was scheduled to sign the contract for Mémoires d’Hadrien in the offices of Éditions Plon on Thursday, June 7, a date that until 1960 was mistakenly believed to be her birthday.3 Owing to a slight indisposition, she ended up signing the document on her actual birthday, June 8, a coincidence suggesting a kind of rebirth. It also serves to highlight the close personal connection between Yourcenar and this book, which she once told a friend “matters a lot more to me than the others.”4 That evening she and Frick dined with Nel Boudot-Lamotte. The next day the couple packed up and moved to the Hôtel St. James et d’Albany at 202 rue de Rivoli, where their suite contained a bedroom, a bath, and a small sitting room. They were now as close as they could get to the old Hôtel Wagram, the former occupant of number 208.
On June 9 Nel and his sister Madeleine took Yourcenar to meet the sixty-seven-year-old artist Marie Laurencin at her workshop on the rue Vaneau. She and Frick went there together on June 21. By early December both were sitting for their portraits. Laurencin is known for the feminine lines of her softly shaded works in pastel. Marguerite would later say that she became “in the last years of her life a very dear friend for Grace and me.”5 It was at Laurencin’s house, momentously, that they would meet someone else who became a dear friend, the expatriate American lesbian Natalie Clifford Barney.6
Like Grace Frick, Barney was born in Ohio. She also shared Frick’s love of horseback riding, to the extent of being nicknamed the Amazon. She had shocked proper Bar Harborites in the late nineteenth century by galloping through town astride her mount rather than in ladylike sidesaddle. Reminiscing one day about her youthful days on Mount Desert Island, Barney recalled that she often “rode forth of an evening to visit some fair lady and threw pebbles up at the window of Maisie Sturgis (after Mrs. Edgar Scott) or the Lurman sisters to whom I wrote sonnets.”7 Barney’s ancestry was also, like Frick’s, partly German. As their letters reveal, a quick intimacy developed between Grace and Natalie. Frick considered Barney to be such a close friend that she composed a lengthy handwritten chronology of her life like the ones she drew up for herself and Yourcenar. Barney’s indignation in the face of injustice was just as sharp at a young age as Frick’s: her “first memory of Europe,” sometime between the ages of eight and fourteen, was “fury at the sight of women pulling carts in Belgium.”8 Both women had a playful sense of humor and a love of social contact. As the future would prove, Barney also shared with Frick a strong devotion to Marguerite Yourcenar’s career.
Five days after meeting Barney, the couple attended a reception at the Amazon’s sixteenth-century pavilion at 20 rue Jacob. Among the people present whose names Frick noted in the daybook on that date were Germaine Beaumont, who translated Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Journal into French; Yanette Delétang-Tardif, biographer of the literary critic Edmond Jaloux, whose notice of Yourcenar’s Alexis in 1929 helped establish the young woman as a serious writer; and Anne Green, a novelist and translator who, like her brother Julien, spent most of her life in France.9 Diana Souhami has spoken of Barney’s place in the European lesbian firmament in Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art. She helps us imagine the scene:
From October 1909, each Friday when Natalie was in Paris she held an afternoon salon at rue Jacob from four to eight. It was at heart a lesbian arts club, where writers, painters, and poets felt at ease. Freud, Kraft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis had pathologised homosexuality, writers like Compton Mackenzie mocked it, lawmakers criminalized it and the Bloomsbury Group euphemised it. Radclyffe Hall apologised glumly about being a “congenital invert,” Gertrude Stein described herself as a husband with Alice B. Toklas as her wife, Vita Sackville-West praised marriage but pursued same-sex affairs. . . . Natalie revised attitudes. She extolled the kiss of the fictional Bilitis. “I am a lesbian,” she said. “One need not hide it, nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage.” With Sappho as her guide she lived the advantages and made light of the perils.10
Men were by no means banned from these occasions, however, and some of the most famous callers were F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, James Joyce, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
As the passage from Souhami’s Wild Girls illustrates, Natalie Barney was extremely straightforward about her sexuality—far more so, for example, than Marguerite Yourcenar generally was. Although we have less evidence to go on with regard to Grace Frick, there is reason to believe that her own attitude toward lesbianism was more matter-of-fact than her companion’s. We may learn more when Yourcenar’s sealed papers are released at Harvard in 2037, but we have already glimpsed Grace’s lighthearted openness regarding sensual matters.
During Frick and Yourcenar’s 1951–52 stay in Europe, Natalie Barney lent the couple what she called a “curious book about a feminine trio” that she thought would interest them.11 It was the first published version of Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D. The novel was written in 1903 but did not appear, entitled Things as They Are, until after Stein’s death, in a print run of just over five hundred copies.12 According to Leon Katz’s introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, it is the thinly veiled autobiographical story of a lesbian love triangle involving Stein, her friend May Bookstaver, and Mabel Haynes. Although its content is intimate and lesbian in nature—“possibly the earliest coming out story,” states Karren LaLonde Alenier, among others—it does not give the lie to what Barney herself had to say about Stein’s style in the foreword she reluctantly composed for As Fine as Melanctha in 1954: “Being a writer of pensées, I like to find a thought as in a nut or sea-shell, and while I make for a point, Gertrude seems to proceed by avoiding it . . . getting at a subject by going not for but around it, in snowball fashion, gathering up everything she meets on her rounds.”13 It was Frick who wrote to thank Barney for lending them the book, perhaps in part because Yourcenar would not have had much good to say about it:
Dear Friend,
Thank you so much for letting me take the Things as They Are home again. Because of its handsome format it had been put carefully away for you previously, for prompt return. I am glad to have read it at leisure, for it not only serves better to explain why Gertrude Stein developed her later style of writing, for which we chiefly know her, but also gives clues, I suspect, to much of her essential content. How close to Henry James, after all.14
Here Frick likely speaks at once of James’s unacknowledged “inversion” and of the book he wrote about another love triangle, The Bostonians. Olive Chancellor’s ménage-à-deux with the younger Verena Tarrant, whom she had heard speak at a feminist rally, is believed to be the first use of the term “Boston marriage.” Although there is no overt lesbian content in the book, both Chancellor and Ransom vie for Tarrant with what in James’s decorous fictional universe amounts to steamy passion.
Grace then went on to comment appreciatively on what Stein was trying to do in Things as They Are, though in her view she did not go far enough:
Labored as this effort is, I nevertheless find it admirable in many ways, and most of all for its honest attempt to set forth the situation in all its undressed dullness. That must have taken courage on the part of the writer; or am I mistaken, and was she so obsessed with the question of principles (as she understood them) that she failed to see the absurdities of her result, just as she seems to have failed in sounding the experience to its depths, in this case at least.15
Natalie would soon give Grace and Marguerite another volume, meant perhaps to show how thoroughly those depths could be sounded.
In her early correspondence with Barney, Yourcenar was sometimes open to a playful Sapphic allusion. In one letter from the summer of 1952, for example, she wrote Natalie’s first name in Greek. Barney responded,
“To thine own self be true” remains in fact the only livable morality. . . . You’re right to write my name in Greek, for I have never had any complexes of that kind. As proof of which I submit this lived novel, written in verse, a long time ago, which has only now been published, “under cover,” and which may nonetheless still strike you as too blatant? And above all from a Sappho “fastening wholly on her prey”?16
Barney quotes here from one of the most famous French plays of all time, Racine’s Phaedra: “It’s no longer an ardor hidden in my veins: / It’s Venus fastening wholly on her prey.”17 The book she refers to is Nos Secrètes Amours, which had been written near the turn of the century by her lover Lucie Delarue-Mardrus. According to Suzanne Rodriguez’s Wild Heart: Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey from Victorian America to Belle Époque Paris, Barney had that book privately printed in 1951 without naming its author. Rodriguez calls it a collection of “extremely passionate love poems,” and she’s not kidding.18 The deluxe edition on Madagascar vellum at Petite Plaisance attests, by way of X’s and other marks, to the fact that it was appreciatively read from cover to cover.19
Barney, who once traveled with a lover to Sappho’s Mytillene in hopes of establishing a colony of women poets there, tried to get Yourcenar to translate the ancient poetess of Lesbos.20 In an August 1952 letter addressed as her letters often were to “My Dears,” Barney wrote, “That you, Marguerite Yourcenar, have also the gift for verse makes me hope that you will reveal to us the recent fragments of Sappho. Why wouldn’t they be an appropriate suite to your fragment by Anacreon?”21 Yourcenar answered her later that month, sending a postcard of birch trees along a foggy wooded path on Mount Desert Island. “Sappho, yes,” she said, “but her fluidity, her limpidity (a flame in crystal) discourage me; I prefer Theocritus’s dense flesh.”22 Not until 1979, after Barney’s death, would Yourcenar translate Sappho, along with many other ancient Greek poets, in La Couronne et la lyre. At least one commentator, the Sappho scholar Joan DeJean, finds that Yourcenar’s free translations “convey more successfully than any others in French the sparse evocative economy of Sappho’s verse.”23 Natalie would have been pleased.
After many get-togethers with old and new friends, including several days spent seeing sights with Ruth Hall and her family, Frick and Yourcenar left Paris for Switzerland. Jacques and Marguerite de Saussure had invited them to stay at their family home, the Château de Vufflens-sur-Morges. They were met by the Saussures at the train station in Lausanne on July 22, with their twelve bags. Grace and Marguerite awoke the next morning to the “sound of hundreds of cowbells passing far below under our window on the second floor.”24 The château, surrounded by vineyards and orchards, sat on a hillside above the town of Morges. Mont Blanc could be seen in the distance. A few days later Grace sent a postcard of the inner courtyard of Vufflens to Gladys Minear, along with a description of the place. As always, Grace was game for an adventure:
How would you like to keep house here? Believe it or not, this is where we are staying for two weeks with old friends of Marguerite’s. Am I thrilled! From cottage to palace, so to speak. I have already climbed the donjon tower which dates from the twelfth century, and have been over every inch of the “modern” part (1410) where we live. We are high on a hill above Lake Geneva (Leman) and vineyards cover the hills below us. If the vintage is good the owners will paper their own bedrooms this fall! Italian builders constructed this part for a Savoian [sic] counselor to one of the Popes at Avignon. Same family still lives here, so the library is magnificent.25
Also staying with the Saussures at that time was a German couple, Herr and Frau Finch. When they left Vufflens on August 5, Jacques revealed to Yourcenar, as Frick cryptically notes, their “connection with Coup de grâce.”26
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Gaston Gallimard wanted Mémoires d’Hadrien, and, no less than Racine’s Phaedra, he was wholly fastened on his prey. On September 4 Yourcenar and Frick, still in Switzerland, sent the first section of the second set of corrected proofs to Plon, requesting a third.27 The next day Gallimard wrote to Yourcenar laying out his plan: she would convey to him the Hadrian manuscript and he would publish it immediately. Although the contract she had signed for Le Coup de grâce did indeed require her to give Gallimard first option on her next book, Yourcenar felt she had fulfilled that obligation by offering Dramatis personae to that house in 1947. She had high hopes for those plays written during the war. At Gallimard, Dramatis personae was read and rejected by Albert Camus, and Yourcenar was stung by this refusal. Nor was she pleased upon returning to Paris with Gallimard’s handling of her titles from the 1930s, which had long gone out of print. Though she was willing to reach an arrangement with Gallimard for future works, she had no intention of changing horses in midstream where Hadrian was concerned.28 On September 18 the final batch of corrected proof was mailed to Plon.
Six days later, at Gallimard’s initiative, “a formal injunction against pursuing the publication” of Mémoires d’Hadrien was served at Éditions Plon.29 In early October officials from Plon and Gallimard met with the president of the writers’ union to air their respective grievances. Over the next few weeks, offers and counteroffers flew back and forth between the two houses. Not until October 14 did Frick and Yourcenar leave Switzerland for Paris, where the couple engaged the legal services of Jean Mirat with the intention of obtaining a nullification of Yourcenar’s prewar contract. None of this prevented them from attending a concert of medieval music at the Church of Saint-Gervais or Bach’s Passion of Saint John at the Protestant Temple de l’Oratoire du Louvre.30
Nor did it stop them from making new friends recommended by Gladys Minear. Jean and Roger Hazelton were renting a house that fall in the village of Lamorlaye outside Paris with their three young children. Roger, who taught at Andover Newton Theological School near Boston with Paul Minear, had a Fulbright Scholarship to study the manuscripts of Blaise Pascal at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Grace, as usual, took the initiative to arrange a get-together. Jean Hazelton still remembered at the age of ninety-nine the first lines of the note Frick sent her that October: “Dear Friends,” she began, having never laid eyes on the Hazeltons, “it would be worth your while to come into Paris to see us just to see the view from our balcony in the hotel.” Jean heard all about the lawsuit in which Yourcenar was embroiled during the very first luncheon she had with Marguerite and Grace, a lawsuit she described as “making life miserable for them.” The two couples liked each other immediately and were soon going to concerts, plays, and museums together. Jean and Roger would often stop by their friends’ room at the Saint-James for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, after which the foursome would dine out at restaurants chosen almost always by Marguerite. It was a habit that made of them eyewitnesses to literary history.31
“One night we were up there having a drink and the telephone rang,” Jean Hazelton recalled. “It was Gallimard calling to say that he was withdrawing the lawsuit! Then someone came to the door with a huge bunch of flowers, a bouquet of roses, and that was from the Gallimards, too. I remember thinking that was so French. And so it turned out that it would have been our Thanksgiving Day back in the U.S. So we went out on the balcony and toasted Thanksgiving and the fact that the lawsuit had been withdrawn.” In the daybook Grace enthused, “Hadrien!!! Thanksgiving—and how!”32 Yourcenar had triumphed in a months-long battle with the head of France’s top publishing house. There was indeed reason to give thanks.
A few days before this momentous event, on November 17, Frick had made a personal pilgrimage in memory of the cousin whose untimely death had brought her into Yourcenar’s world. She laid flowers on the grave of Sister Marie Yann at the congregation’s communal cemetery and brought another bouquet to the nuns who had cared for Sister Yann so lovingly. On December 2 Grace and Marguerite visited the Sion house together, probably for the first and only time. Were they thinking of the long and improbable road they had traveled since their paths had crossed nearly fifteen years earlier? With Yourcenar soon to be a world-renowned author, that visit to Issy-les-Moulineaux would have been a fitting juncture for such musings. But no one knew yet what the future held in store. In the daybook Frick said only that they bought Christmas cards at the convent to mail to her nieces in Missouri.
Mémoires d’Hadrien finally went on sale on December 5, 1951. Frick and Yourcenar spotted it that day in two bookstores near their hotel, the Librairie Galignani and the Vendôme. Although the “Hadrian affair” caused this novel of a lifetime to miss the deadline for the major prizes, it suffered few if any ill effects from the loss of that favorable publicity. The book was an immediate best-seller. Reviews were universally admiring, and some of the novel’s most enthusiastic readers were themselves distinguished European authors: the French writer Roger Martin du Gard, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for literature; the great German novelist Thomas Mann, another Nobel laureate; and Jean Cocteau, the French playwright, poet, and filmmaker whose career would soon be crowned by his election to the Académie française, were all moved to write directly to Yourcenar about her astonishing novel.
So was her old friend Emmanuel Boudot-Lamotte, who specifically addressed the death of Hadrian’s adolescent favorite, paraphrasing that popular line from Racine:
I threw myself on the bereavement of Antinoüs as on a prey. It engulfed me. At the same time, the good that’s done by tears is ignoble—the unilateral character of that child is more revolting than the weakness tears express. Now there’s a strange literary criticism, perhaps no more worthy of me than it is of you. But there you have it. It is justified by the one for whom the tears are shed. That is why I am abasing myself to admit them to you in a double homage. You have received and will receive more considerable testimonies. I will find, I have already found, in Memoirs of Hadrian a hundred other things, and even a summa. Today, I have nothing better to offer for your immense graces than this wordless homage. I guarantee, at least, that it was lived.33
Praise came as well from Yourcenar’s Greek friend and cotranslator Constantine “Didy” Dimaras. Having read only the three sections published in La Table ronde, Dimaras wrote,
You can imagine what a joy it was for me finally to read something of yours again in French. My first impression, still somewhat cursory, is that French readers have suffered no loss for having had to wait so long: the qualities that people infinitely more qualified than I associate with you—a masterful style, an effortless development, knowledge of the human soul, courage in seeking the truth—all of these are here again now, with more power and—how to put it?—more confidence, more calm. I have also had the pleasure, personally, of noting that one finds nowhere in this work any trace of the anguish discernable in some of your previous books; and since I am as attached to you as I am to the quality of your prose, you can well imagine how much that counts for me.34
Dimaras’s perceptive comments touch on the transformation undergone by Marguerite Yourcenar over the years spent in America with Grace. Joan DeJean has cast a uniquely penetrating glance at Yourcenar’s evolution as a writer in her Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937. It should come as no surprise that Yourcenar would claim a place for herself in what DeJean calls the “unbroken chain of fictions, from the early seventeenth century to the 1940s” that make France a site of “uninterrupted dialogue with Sappho.”35 Yourcenar’s “Sappho ou le suicide” is the final text in her 1936 collection of prose poems, Feux. It depicts an aging Sappho who, from lyric poet, has been transformed into a trapeze artist in a modern-day circus.
In Yourcenar’s post–World War II writing, DeJean detects a change in both her style and her subject matter: “At the same time as she developed her new style, the petrified, sparse (more Sapphic) neoclassicism of her masterpieces, she replaced Sappho, no longer in vogue (hers is, in fact, the last major French Sapphic fiction) with other figures from antiquity, notably that devout practitioner of the cult of Winckelmannian beauty and erotic pederastia, the emperor Hadrian.”36 As we have seen, even Natalie Barney couldn’t coax her back to Sappho again.
While “petrified” is not a word I would use for Yourcenar’s postwar style, DeJean puts her finger squarely on what is at stake in Mémoires d’Hadrien. Noting that the young author’s initial work on the novel went back to the interwar, “Sapphic” years and that Yourcenar finally completed it in America after the war, DeJean goes on to say that “both her presence here and the novel that would eventually grow out of the research and writing done in the Yale library in 1937 are the most forceful indications of a reaction, on the part of a member of the French Sapphic tradition, to the role reserved for the doctrine of pederastia in the nationalistic German ideology that fueled World War II.”37 As I have tried to show elsewhere, Yourcenar was already headed down this path in her depiction of Erick von Lhomond in Le Coup de grâce.38 By 1949, when she began the definitive Hadrian, much more was known about where that ideology would lead. Yourcenar, explains DeJean,
uses the eulogy of pederastia to subvert the ideology of conquering nationalism and violent militarism that it had previously been made to serve. She portrays the founder of the cult of Antinoüs as a spokesman for peace: the Mémoires d’Hadrien is a profoundly antimilitaristic novel, a monument—completed after “what seemed the definitive end of a world”—to the need to preserve civilization, Yourcenar’s homage to the emperor who tries to break the bond between nationalism and xenophobia, between the empire and the narrow definition of its civilizing mission as the automatic impulse to replace Other (barbarian) with Same (Neo-Greek or Roman).39
In a lamentable instance of historical irony, the country to which Yourcenar had, however nominally, shifted her allegiance in 1947 was itself embarked on a decade-long campaign of demonizing the Other based on the same kinds of lies, fear mongering, and false accusations that were propagated by the Nazis. Yourcenar and Frick would themselves fall under its dark shadow.