1957
Translating is writing.
—Marguerite Yourcenar
A GREAT BLIZZARD ON JANUARY 10 found Grace and Marguerite trekking around the block on snowshoes. “Here, great Winter reigns,” Yourcenar told Malvina Hoffman, “At the moment, it is snowing; yesterday and the day before, the temperature fell to 12 degrees below zero or more. This cold, still, blue, white, silver, and steel world has a marvelously pure and almost terrible beauty, like the atmosphere of certain tales and certain poems.”1
On January 6 Frick had phoned Farrar, Straus and Cudahy to say that the English Coup de Grâce would be ready in two weeks. Despite that hopeful promise, she ended up devoting more time over that fortnight to correcting the proofs of Feux and preparing lists of reviewers for the new edition of that 1936 book than she did to translating. Hadrian was also coming out again in various guises, in both French and English. Entire days would pass without Grace doing any work on Coup de Grâce. She almost never started translating until late in the day and was lucky when she did to get to bed by midnight. On March 15 she and Marguerite left on a two-week lecture tour. Not until April 18 was the manuscript finally mailed.
That trip to Canada landed Yourcenar in the hospital with an attack of thrombophlebitis. The native Canadian writer Robert Lalonde has turned this episode into a short novel. Un Jardin entouré de murailles is based on a line from Quoi? L’Éternité: “Every great love is a garden surrounded by walls.”2 Occasionally verging on slapstick comedy, the book provides what can only be called an offbeat depiction of Yourcenar and Frick.
I happen to share Lalonde’s belief in Frick and Yourcenar’s love, if not precisely his characterization of the two women. Still, just as Élie Grekoff once told Grace that there might be something devilish in her angelic intentions, what “Marg” says about Grace in Lalonde’s novel contains a grain of truth. Following a series of madcap adventures, the fictional author has been hospitalized after fainting on the train en route from Montreal to Ottawa. Yourcenar speaks of Frick to young Dr. Carrière, who has had a run-in or two with her strong-willed helpmate:
Like you and me, Grace is a complex, multiple, and complicated being. But unlike you and me, she comes and goes in the world disguised as an ordinary person. Sometimes even—yes, it’s true—as an utterly untamable shrew. . . . But she is an angel. Though we sometimes have doubts about angels, we know full well that they exist and that without them . . . Plus, she has marvelous courage, whereas I am no more than a forceful, obstinate beast without the slightest valor.3
On returning to Maine, Yourcenar was astonished to receive in the mail, as Grace wrote in the daybook, a “gift of $500 from Aunt Georgia Horner because of her illness!”4 The episode seems to have had no lasting ill effects, and both women were soon back at their double desk collaborating on the translation of Coup de Grâce.
Yourcenar had composed for Frick a unique text to give her a sense of this novel’s main character and a feel for the atmosphere in which he recounted his story. Almost three and a half typewritten pages long, it is called “Commentary for Grace on the Prelude to Coup de Grâce.”5 Reading Yourcenar’s sketch, one can’t help but be struck by how vivid in her mind’s eye is the image of a scene composed by her almost twenty years earlier. The “prelude” in question is set in an Italian railway station where the jaded mercenary Erick von Lhomond, injured fighting under Francisco Franco in Spain, awaits transport to Germany.
Among the soldiers gathered at the station, Erick was “one of the oldest, an officer some forty years old, but also young, with the frightening youth of an archangel. . . . His personal adventures and misfortunes are those of his era. A thousand conflicts, a thousand tensions are subtly balanced within this trim, firm body as on the tip of a sword.” The two men that Yourcenar’s “Commentary” depicts as Erick’s audience are unfamiliar with the Baltic wars in which he took part. But they resemble him in one important way: no one need explain to them the nature of Erick’s “camaraderie” with his friend Conrad. “Erick would not have started talking without a secret understanding on that point.”6
Unlike Memoirs of Hadrian, written during a period of postwar euphoria when many in the West, including Yourcenar, believed that painful lessons had been learned and that enlightened leaders would build lasting world peace, Coup de Grâce was composed on the eve of World War II but set in the violent aftermath of the Russian Revolution in the Baltic States. Moreover, Frick translated the novel into English with the crises of Budapest and Suez still fresh in her mind.
The release of Coup de Grâce was greeted with profuse attention from the American press over the next several months. No major news outlet failed to review the book, and some of them did so more than once. Praise for the novel was—predictably, given its subject and tenor—more reserved than for its English-language predecessor. The earliest published critique, from the Saturday Review, set the tone for many to follow; it was Ben Ray Redman’s “A Look in the Mirror”: “American readers of Madame Yourcenar’s ‘Hadrian’s Memoirs,’ so beautifully translated by its author and Grace Frick, will take up ‘Coup de Grace’ with lively expectations. But if they come to it with the hope of matching the literary experience provided by the earlier translation, they will be disappointed. ‘Coup de Grace’ is a far less substantial book than ‘Hadrian’s Memoirs.’” Echoing certain American criticisms of Hadrian issued with McCarthyism still in full swing, Redman goes on to say that what Yourcenar does in Coup de Grâce, “coldly, dryly, is to draw the likeness of an absolute egotist whose character has been warped by sexual inversion.”7 In the New York Times, Charles Poore called Erick “a psychopathic Don Juan, a soldier of misfortune dragging his memory back through the muck and havoc of falling dynasties and rising totalitarian regimes.”8 But no one had a bad word for the translation. Herbert Kupferberg paid Frick the translator’s ultimate tribute, calling her English rendering “idiomatic and graceful.”9 Even Poore’s distaste for Erick did not prevent him from acknowledging Frick’s gift.
Carlos Baker, a Maine native who later wrote the first biography of Ernest Hemingway, saw Lhomond in a more allegorical light. His New York Times review admired the “Thomas Mann–like prose” of Coup de Grâce and its “lucid translation,” adding,
Judged . . . as the political fable it seems basically to be, with Erick as the veritable Judas-goat of a stricken continent, a bad European leading his confreres toward the coup de grace, the novel takes on the dimensions of a parable. Its internal meaning will be lost on no one who has lived through the wars of our time and has paused to meditate on that cold indifference to human values their perpetrators have displayed.10
William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle called Coup de Grâce “a brilliant novel of doom,” predicting that it would become a minor classic.11
The most perceptive reviewer was Edwin Kennebeck, who wrote frequently for Commonweal and the Nation. Kennebeck focused not on Erick von Lhomond but on Sophie de Reval, the young woman Lhomond spurns as a lover and in the end clumsily executes: “One’s first assumption might be that the ‘principal character’ is Erick, the narrator, but I am willing to guess that the novelist’s source was ‘Sophie’—her death in the story being one of those notes of completeness, of aesthetic inevitability, which real life generally does not provide.”12
Yourcenar herself commented, in a letter to Gilbert H. Montague, on only one American review of Coup de Grâce. In August of 1955 Montague had invited her and Frick to a luncheon at his home in Seal Harbor along with the classicist Edith Hamilton and her companion Doris Fielding Reid. Yourcenar and Hamilton’s names had been mentioned that summer side by side in the Herald Tribune Book Review. Two years later articles about the same two authors were again featured on the same page of the same publication.13 In her letter to Montague, Yourcenar called the Tribune’s article on Coup de Grâce in that issue “very penetrating.”14 Its author, Virgilia Peterson, had experienced the post–World War I turmoil in northern Europe firsthand.
Marguerite and Grace had met Edith Hamilton as far back as 1946, when they were spending the summer at Dickey House on Main Street in Southwest Harbor. They already knew Doris Fielding Reid, who had been Hamilton’s student at Bryn Mawr College. On the evening of September 7, 1946, they made a visit to their home in Seawall to meet Edith. Both lovers of myth and Greek antiquity, Yourcenar and Hamilton no doubt found much to discuss. Years later, on August 28, 1961, either Frick or Yourcenar mailed a copy of Memoirs of Hadrian to Hamilton. They received an immediate reply written in a tremulous hand on light blue stationery:
You have given me a great pleasure, a beautiful book in an adequate setting, a text of high distinction so bound and so printed that all builds up to an ineffaceable impression of what true civilization is. You see that is the way I first read your book, a banner of civilization which does not really alter through the ages. Thank you again and again for the way you have reaffirmed this dogma to my enlightenment and peace of mind.15
Hamilton was ninety-three years old.
As for the “penetrating” review, though its author was American, she had married a Polish prince and lived at his château in the years between the two world wars. They fled for their lives when the Nazis invaded in September of 1939. Peterson’s “Memoirs of a ‘Soldier of Fortune’” stands virtually alone in crediting Coup de Grâce with “the same granite integrity, stylistic skill, and underlying passion” displayed by Hadrian earlier that decade. Having lived in Poland, Virgilia Peterson knew whereof she spoke:
Those unfamiliar with this cold, gray region of the world, and the proud loyalties of every segment of this feudal society will understand them better from reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s story. She has detachment of spirit, economy of style and depth of understanding. The translation in which the author also collaborated, gives every word its full value. The setting and the moral problem of this brief intense book may appear strange to the American reader, but they are actually no less strange than life itself.16
The presentation copies of both the new French edition of Feux and the American Coup de Grâce, sent out by Frick and Yourcenar at about the same time, brought the renewal of ties in several cases with old friends not seen or heard from in years. Frick’s former mentor from the Stephens College days, Louise Dudley, wrote to thank the women for her copy of Feux and to say she was still savoring Hadrian.17 Katherine “Katy” Gatch was Grace’s old friend from Wellesley and Yale, and like her partner, Marion Witt, she taught English at Hunter College. In June of 1957 Katherine thanked Marguerite for two recent mailings:
A month or more ago, when I received from your publisher a copy of Feux, Marion and I had been belatedly reading your superb analysis of Thomas Mann and I believe that the thought waves our conversation sent toward Mt. Desert must have recalled us to you! Indeed, over the years (too many!) since Marion and I have seen you and Grace, we have spoken of you often, re-reading Hadrien with increasing delight, rejoicing in your success; gloating over the best-seller lists, but glowing over the reviews. . . .
Should anything lure you away from Mt. Desert in this direction, do please visit us. We have two guest rooms and I can think of no pleasure greater than having the two of you occupy them.18
A few weeks later, Frick and Yourcenar accepted Katherine’s invitation to stay with her and Marion at the summer home they had recently purchased in Woodbridge, Connecticut.
On November 19 Yourcenar was scheduled to give an evening lecture at Wellesley College, “Greek Poets and Their Influence on French Poetry.” Frick could not wait to show off her companion. She spent hours on November 3 contacting potential audience members: the author Helen Howe, who summered in Northeast Harbor; Emily McKibben, the pianist who regularly rented a house behind Petite Plaisance; Constantine Dimaras, Yourcenar’s Cavafy cotranslator, who was staying in New York with his wife, Helen; Katy Gatch and Marion Witt; Lucille (Carpenter) White, a fellow Wellesley grad and former Kansas City neighbor, now living in Boston; Grace Hawk, a Wellesley faculty member; Martha Hale Shackford, the English professor who had written such a glowing reference letter on Frick’s behalf back in 1939; Chick Austin’s wife, Helen, still in Hartford; and Erika Vollger, Grace and Marguerite’s seamstress friend, who lived in New York City and loved Mount Desert Island, among several others. The talk was a resounding success.
The next few days were spent with the Minears in New Haven, where Marguerite had followed Grace from France two decades earlier.19 Knowing how the couple loved retracing their steps from the past, it is hard to imagine that they failed to walk down Orange Street, site of Frick’s grad-school apartment, or to visit Yale’s Gothic cathedral–like Sterling Memorial Library. Having just reconnected with Wellesley, Grace could hardly not have been contemplating where life had taken her since her college years. She had veered off the traditional academic path, but she was more than content with where she found herself now.
Eager to see her young nieces, Grace had decided to travel to Missouri for Thanksgiving—as always, sans Marguerite. On November 25, after a second weekend visit with Katy and Marion in Woodbridge, Frick left for New York, where she boarded a train for Chicago. Yourcenar, never liking to be left alone, met Erika Vollger at the station in New Haven, and the two friends headed north to Maine.
Grace Frick had much to be proud of and thankful for as 1957 drew to a close. Despite the mixed critical reaction to the American Coup de Grâce, the book sold briskly. As Yourcenar somewhat crankily wrote to Natalie Barney that August, “contrary to all expectations, it has earned a place for itself on this week’s best-seller list, which doesn’t prove a thing, least of all the reader’s intelligent comprehension, but which is nice, like learning one has just won a prize in the lottery.”20 Nor was it only the critics who recognized Frick’s talent as a translator. Kudos came her way from friends, former colleagues, and strangers. She was even solicited by the wife of the Hungarian-born artist and costume designer Marcel Vertès to translate the book he had just published in Paris: “We have read your brilliant, perfect translations of Marguerite Yourcenar and we would be very happy if you could translate the above mentioned book,” Mme Vertès wrote.21 Frick, who always attributed her success as a translator to Marguerite Yourcenar’s assistance, demurred, but there can be no doubt that she was pleased with herself, pleased with her companion, and pleased with their prospects for the future.
Even Monsieur Popover got into the act. The two-year-old “dogster” had fallen ill the day after Christmas. “Black Monday!” Frick wrote in the daybook on December 30. “Monsieur very ill in hospital.” That afternoon the cocker underwent intestinal surgery, causing his mistresses much worry. But by eight o’clock that evening, he “was coming out of anaesthetic enough to raise head and wag tail. Joy!!”22 The couple had sent out fifty invitations to their New Year’s Eve eggnog party, but the real celebration took place a few days later. On January 4 they brought Monsieur home in a taxi, “timid and thin” but healthy enough to “bark boldly at same taxi on arriving on his own doorstep.” Nineteen fifty-eight was now officially “a joyous new year.”23