1964–1965
The irreversible begins at every corner we turn.
—Marguerite Yourcenar
“SOMETHING SEEMS TO HAVE HAPPENED to my mind!” Grace Frick wrote to Gladys Minear a week after her radiation treatments ended. She had announced her clean bill of health to a long list of people but neglected to inform the Minears. “I was evidently expecting you to get our good news by osmosis!!” As Frick went on to say, “this minor flurry involved quite a bit of inquiry at other hospitals. . . . Naturally, having bothered everyone from here to Houston, Texas, I had to write to give a final report, medically speaking, and can only be grateful that it could be a good report.”1
Marguerite Yourcenar wasn’t convinced. With Frick on her usual trip to Kansas City before sailing to Europe, she expressed her concern to Natalie Barney: “Grace is feeling well, and still has her extraordinary energy (she is traveling at the moment in the Midwest) but an acute alarm was sounded this winter—a recurrence of the cancer we thought cured for more than five years. The treatments checked the spread of the disease, but the doctor and I remain worried. All we can do is live from day to day with ardor and with wisdom (such wisdom as we have) and tell ourselves that days placed end to end make up months and weeks, and hope that they make years.”2
From the moment they left Northeast Harbor heading for Quebec and the ship that would take them to Europe, Yourcenar worried that Frick was overexerting herself. We have a detailed, sometimes poignant description of this trip to Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and Spain thanks to Yourcenar’s unpublished “Traversée sur le Bathory.” Uncharacteristically, it contains a few personal remarks, for example, about Grace buying herself a pair of walking shoes or “some chocolate and two rolls” for them to share. One of the text’s major themes, a theme not unrelated to Frick’s health, is the precariousness of human connection.
Departing on April 3, 1964, the couple drove the nearly three hundred miles to Quebec on frozen roads through the still-wintry forest of northwestern Maine and eastern Canada. Their rental car was soon covered with muddy stalactites, and the icy roadway made for a nerve-racking ride. They arrived, wrote Yourcenar, at the very last minute to find that all the other passengers—Poles, Danes, Hungarians, a “soft and effeminate Englishman,” a “sick old Ukrainian”—had been on board for hours already. Frick and Yourcenar traveled first class along with five others. Since the pet quarters below deck were “disgraceful,” they kept Monsieur in their cabin.3
After disembarking in Copenhagen, the women traveled to the Polish town of Sopot on the Baltic Sea, where they found a good chauffeur to show them around. They were struck here as they had been in Russia by the lack of concern for public spaces. Children played in rubble left over from the war. A “sordid pile of overflowing garbage cans” adorned the courtyard of a lovely old home near Sopot’s town hall; trash had not been collected for weeks.4
The friendly driver pointed out the concrete building where he shared two rooms on the fourth floor with his wife and son. There was no elevator, he explained, but they had running water and heat. This was a source of pride and a feeling that progress was being made. In “Traversée,” however, Yourcenar is skeptical:
This fragile progress, exposed to the bombardments of the future, itself depends on an industrial concentration and human overproduction equally harmful to the earth and to man. They gave no more thought here than in Sicily or Provence to forming a strong agricultural society in harmony with a healthy region. What was, and was bad, by which I mean the great territorial domains of absentee landlords with no regard for the prosperity of the peasants, was neither reformed nor improved upon but destroyed in favor of artificial and totalitarian societies such as they all are today that have broken off contact with life and with things. There is nothing political about what I’m saying: the same reflections would come to mind on the outskirts of Paris or in Bangor, Maine. To an often despicable past we have substituted an unsustainable present.5
This brokenness at the level of society is echoed by the tenuousness of human bonds:
We had promised to send some geographical maps to the [chauffeur’s] handsome child, who collects them. Regrettably, G lost the notebook containing his name and address: the boy must think we have forgotten him. This little incident is for me a new example of the precariousness of human relations that I think about so often. The beings whom we meet and leave become lost in the multitudes like fish in the sea and the dead in death. . . . The irreversible begins at every corner we turn.6
As if to pass in review some of Yourcenar’s broken connections, “Traversée” then enumerates the various Poles with whom the author has crossed paths: the child Maria, once her playmate on a Belgian beach; Theodore de Wyzewa, a translator of Russian novels, and his wife, Isabelle, who had taught French literature in New York; Bronislaw Malinowski and his wife, Valetta. But the Pole recalled most vividly is a woman from Marguerite’s Mediterranean-traveling past:
Then there was Sashia Baldovinetta. (Where did she get that graceful, Italian-sounding last name—from an ancestor come to Italy in the entourage of a Jagiellon? Perhaps it was a nom de guerre . . .) I had met her in Athens, where she performed in a little nightclub. She had no talent, but she was a blond girl with laughing blue eyes, at once slim and round, who had the charm of a young German farm girl. By chance, we met again on a crossing to Venice, I coming from Athens (or was it Rhodes?), she from Alexandria. She had had success as a prostitute in Egypt and quietly put money aside for her good mother in Warsaw and to set herself up for the future in Poland when she “would marry to someone.” A little wife with an uneventful life. We parted in Venice after having presented each other with gifts—she giving me a string of red cut glass hearts, and I her a necklace of blue cut glass. And since that time? Had she become a heroine of the Polish resistance? Or, continuing to ply her little trade with German officers, had she turned into one of those women whose heads were photographed by the Nazis’ anthropometric service and who gaze at you unforgettably from the walls of Auschwitz, almost unidentifiable, their faces all alike with those clear, wide-open eyes and features sharpened by hunger?7
Knowing Yourcenar’s early tendency to base her fictional characters on people she knew and felt strongly about, one can’t help but wonder whether Sashia may have been a model for the prostitute Lina Chiari in Denier du rêve. One might also be justified in speculating that there’s more to the story of Sashia than Yourcenar is letting on.
Although the link between Baldovinetta and Chiari is mere conjecture, there is no doubt about the connection between this trip to Central Europe and L’Œuvre au Noir. Yourcenar’s published essay on composing that book, “Carnets de notes de L’Œuvre au Noir,” informs us that “it was in June 1964 in Salzburg, as I was attending mass (kneeling on the flagstone floor) in the church of the Franciscans, that I saw for the first time a complete vision of the character of the Prior of the Cordeliers. Until then I had only caught sight of the environs (the mentions of the Prior in ‘Return to Bruges’).”8 In the essay “Mirror-Games and Will-o’-the-Wisps,” from 1975, Yourcenar remembered things a bit differently: “In 1964, as I was working on the third section of The Abyss during a stay in Central Europe, I saw in my mind’s eye, in the church of the Franciscans in Salzburg, the character of the Prior of the Cordeliers appear, who was utterly unforeseen until that moment and whose introduction partly changed the direction and meaning of the work.”9
These recollections, with their varying emphases, point to the role of spontaneous inner vision in Yourcenar’s process of writing and highlight the way this author seemed almost to be traversed by her most important characters and plots rather than consciously creating or even intentionally summoning them. Another reflection related to The Abyss illustrates these points even more vividly. In the “Carnets” Yourcenar calls her initial portrait of Zeno, written in 1924 and published ten years later, “awkward and naïve.” At the age of twenty she had conceived of her sixteenth-century intellectual as someone who knew all the answers. That early version of Zeno evolved over the decades into the exceptional protagonist of the author’s creative maturity. One of the most important aspects of his development, and indeed of the narrative more generally, impressed itself upon Yourcenar’s consciousness one evening in Southwest Harbor, across the mouth of Somes Sound from Northeast, when she and Frick were visiting their friends Alf Pasquale and Chuck Curtis. “The principal change occurred,” writes Yourcenar, in “one evening at Alf’s around 1958: while we were listening to a series of works by Bach, I composed entirely in my mind, six or seven years before its real composition, the conversation between Zeno and the canon that took place a few hours before Zeno’s death. Once the music had stopped and the evening came to an end, I completely forgot that dialogue. But I knew I would find it again one day.”10
Frick and Yourcenar were back in Northeast Harbor on July 2, 1964. Yourcenar later reported on their voyage more positively than in her private musings in a letter to Natalie Barney: “Our life has been very full these last few months: after the trip to Poland, then a very delicious stay in Austria and northern Italy, we came back here in July for a cold summer darkened by politics.” As she went on to say,
I worked this morning at removing some bushes surrounding a beautiful young birch tree whose bark is already turning white (since birches, like seagulls and like the beautiful white horses in the stables of Vienna, are born gray and spotted before becoming immaculate).
Today we went up to the garden kept by the Rockefellers at the top of the hill where their father once lived. The great bronze Buddhas imported from Japan and Korea, which sit cross-legged underneath the pines, are already covered with their winter veils, but one can still pray to them through the fabric for a world that is more and more in need of peace.
Grâce is well, which is a great joy. We both send you our faithful and friendly good wishes.11
Yourcenar obviously decided to remove from this typewritten letter to Barney a more somber and poignant remark, itself partially crossed out, that appears in its first draft. It follows directly the description of the birch trees above and alludes no doubt at once to Grace Frick’s health and to the dark political scenario already mentioned: “Whatever happens, I will never forget this long intimacy which has been mine with the American earth, or rather the Indian earth, a much older one that I hope will survive our agitation and madness.”12
While Yourcenar was creating a fictional alchemist-philosopher-physician whose increasingly perilous self-realization enacts a challenge to the prevailing powers of his chaotic century, she and Frick were vigorously engaged in the peace and civil rights struggles of their own era. The daybooks from the mid-1960s are peppered with meetings of the Mount Desert Civil Rights Committee, Concerned Citizens about Vietnam, and the Mount Desert Peace Committee, which presented concrete ways for the pair to engage in the struggle for racial justice and against the Vietnam War. They attended lectures and panel discussions related to these vital causes on the island and the mainland. They circulated petitions urging President Johnson to negotiate an end to the war. They propagandized musically on open-house Sundays, playing protest songs by Pete Seeger, the Freedom Singers, Bob Dylan, and Woody Guthrie on their new “Hi-Fidelity Record Player.”13 They even donned antiwar sandwich boards on the village green in Bar Harbor.14
Frick and Yourcenar also participated in at least two silent vigils for peace. The first occurred in coordination with the great national demonstration of November 15, 1969, in Washington, DC. The second was held on December 13. According to the Bar Harbor Times, about forty people participated in the December event, which was sponsored by the Mount Desert Island People for Peace in Vietnam NOW, to which Frick and Yourcenar belonged.15
Frick, in particular—ever the educator and possessed now of the knowledge that youth all over America were rising up to protest segregation and acts of terror against blacks in the South—took pains to provide her young friends with the fruits of her own extensive research, conducted both out of fervor for the cause and in support of Yourcenar’s work on Fleuve profond, sombre rivière. Paul and Gladys Minear’s son Larry, a high school teacher, received a lengthy historical synopsis from Frick in April of 1964 that intertwines her perceptions, for example, of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois with those of her companion.16 Frick sent those four single-spaced pages of typewritten notes, parts of which she copiously underlined in ballpoint pen for emphasis, thinking that Larry “might wish to quote them at some time.” Larry went on to become a widely published expert in the field of humanitarian intervention in sites of armed conflict.17
Early in 1965 another opportunity arose to act locally. A state representative from Southwest Harbor, David Benson, introduced four bills in the 102nd Maine Legislature pertaining to hunting and fishing. One of them, LD 155, sought to open Mount Desert Island to a bow-and-arrow deer hunting season. The Bar Harbor Times railed against the bill, evoking “Tammany Hall of the 1920’s.”18 LaRue Spiker, who had a weekly column in the paper entitled “Don’t Bother Me with the Facts,” urged like-minded islanders to circulate petitions opposing LD 155. Frick was a willing recruit. Not only did she and Yourcenar detest hunting, they loved deer.
As Grace noted in her daybook on February 6, not one resident of Mount Desert Island had been present at the January 28 legislative hearing on the deer-hunting bill. The measure, she wrote, “actually passed the House on February 2 and the Senate on February 4, unknown to anyone on Mt. Desert Island, although it pertained wholly to this Island.” The next day, a Sunday, Grace and Marguerite had breakfast at the home of their peace activist friends Beth and Nathan Kaliss on Seely Road in Bar Harbor. Later that day Grace gathered signatures on and around South Shore Road. Neighborhood sentiment, according to her unofficial poll, was “wholly against” the proposal to open the island to hunting.19
On Monday, February 8, Frick and Yourcenar sent a telegram to Governor John H. Reed, asking him not to sign the bill until the citizens of Mount Desert Island could voice their opinion on the matter. They also telephoned their state senator about the legislation. By Thursday, February 11, Frick had collected nearly fifty signatures on her first petition.20 That same day she sent the petition directly to Governor Reed, via registered mail, asking him to pass the document along to “our two Hancock County men.” Indeed, Grace devoted all available energies throughout that week to antihunting petitions and appeals. By Saturday she had lost her voice to laryngitis.21
Yourcenar, meanwhile, was composing a letter to the editor of the Bar Harbor Times. It was published on February 11, 1965, under the heading “Democratic Procedure.” This antihunting campaign was not Yourcenar’s first foray into political activism—she and Frick had fought for passage of the Wild Horse Annie Act protecting wild mustangs from motorized hunters out West—but it provides early evidence of her progressively more fervent advocacy on behalf of animal welfare. Anyone who has read Yourcenar’s “Fur-Bearing Animals” or “Who Knows Whether the Spirit of Animals Goes Downward” will find in her letter a familiar description of animal suffering:
To the Editor:
As a naturalized citizen of the [United States] I have just had occasion to [observe] a completely undemocratic procedure in our local government, passage of the bill LD 155 to permit, without submitting to referendum vote of the residents concerned, a season for hunting deer by bow and arrow on the island of Mount Desert. . . .
How is it that one man can put a bill through the state legislature without advance consultation with his constituents, whereas a substantial number of signatures is needed to get a single article in a . . . warrant of any town government?
As to the hunting of deer by bow and arrow, the only argument advanced openly for it is that it will reduce the herd. But it will not achieve a reduction sufficient to justify the dangers to all concerned, according to all competent biologists and hunters. Petitions are being circulated against the bill, unfortunately too late to have any effect on the house or senate vote, due to the conspiracy of silence described above, and a great number of the signatures on these petitions are from hunters themselves. What this bill will not fail to produce is untold suffering for the animal slowly dying of festering wounds made by weapons demanding highly specialized skills in the hands of inefficient hunters. In the limited area of this Island, even though shooting is prohibited in the national park, the public using the trails and the roads of Mount Desert during the autumn months of the proposed season (October and November) will be dangerously exposed to random shots (and, what is worse, from a silent hunter).22
As a result of all this pressure, Benson’s bill was amended to require a referendum vote on hunting at the regular town meetings of the island’s four municipalities the following spring.23 In polls held on March 7 and 21, 1966, bow and arrow hunting was defeated by margins of 68 and 73 percent.
While the fate of Mount Desert Island’s deer was being debated in 1965, the health of another four-legged creature dear to Frick and Yourcenar’s hearts was deteriorating. As early as February 7, Grace reported in the daybook that Monsieur was “strangely ill: restless and confused, as if dazed.”24 Another bout occurred in early May, when she and Marguerite had taken him with them to Bangor. Later that month he collapsed after an outing to Beaver Dam Pond in Acadia National Park. The couple attributed that episode to heat exhaustion, but the situation worsened over the next few months, with Monsieur having frequent convulsions.
A large proportion of the entries in the 1965 daybook pertain, in meticulous detail, to Monsieur’s progress or setbacks. No event in the couple’s life, large or small, was recorded without noting how well or how poorly it was borne by Monsieur. Though Marguerite had an electrocardiogram in late July showing vascular weakness and impaired heart muscle function, the experience goes almost unmentioned in the calendar, sandwiched between Monsieur’s low blood sugar, the forbidden bone feast in which he had naughtily indulged the previous day, and reports of him begging at teatime.
By early December his confusion and convulsions became so severe that medications had to be delivered by injection. Surprisingly, Yourcenar administered them. On December 4 the cocker spaniel was behaving so wildly that he needed an emergency shot. After spilling the first spurt, Yourcenar succeeded at injecting the poor creature with a few cubic centimeters of a tranquilizer. Later that day they delivered him to the veterinarian.
On the morning of December 6, Saint Nicholas Day, Monsieur died in his sleep at the Ellsworth Animal Hospital. Speaking as she and Marguerite sometimes did of the grounds around their home, Grace wrote in the daybook, “We dug the grave ourselves in Grande Plaisance and buried him about 600 p.m. in pale moonlight on early, light snow. Very peaceful and pretty when we brought him home from the hospital. Apparently his heart gave out, following a tranquillizer and anesthesia on Sunday evening.”25 A few days later they traveled to Veazie, near Bangor, to purchase a stone for Monsieur’s grave in the wood garden, providing a mockup of what it should say. They brought the heavy granite marker home on December 16 in the front seat of their rented car, where it lay on the floor under Marguerite’s legs. In addition to the years of Monsieur’s birth and death, it bears a line from “The Scholar’s Dog” by the English poet John Marston: “And Still My Spaniel Sleeps.”