1965–1968
In war, resolution.
—Winston Churchill
NATALIE BARNEY HAD BEEN WRITING to Marguerite Yourcenar for years about the changes occurring at Librairie Plon, where Mémoires d’Hadrien was published in 1951. Barney knew something of the inner workings at Plon because her novelist friend Germaine Beaumont was published there. In early 1960 she heard that Yourcenar’s trusted friend and editor at Plon, Charles Orengo, did not see eye to eye with the firm’s president.1 Later that year she wrote, “I saw your Denier in the bookstores here, but I hear from Germaine Beaumont doubtful news of Plon—which even Orengo has left. Who are you confiding your new works to?”2 Yourcenar underlined these sentences in red pencil as she was reading Barney’s letter.
By August of 1965, with L’Œuvre au Noir essentially completed, Yourcenar was telling Barney that the book had cost her “as much research and reflection as Memoirs of Hadrian, or perhaps even more” and that she had put “as much if not more” of herself into it. She was exhausted.3 Though the situation was not (yet) as dramatic as Hadrian’s had been, Yourcenar had lost confidence in Plon. Who would publish L’Œuvre she did not yet know.
Written on the same day as Yourcenar’s friendly letter to Barney—and residing, oddly, in the same folder at Houghton Library—is the carbon copy, torn in half, of a blazing letter to Orengo’s replacement at Plon, Georges Roditi. It details how shabbily Plon has handled dealings with Italian publishers and how repeatedly the house has failed to reissue Yourcenar titles that had gone out of print.4 Meanwhile, letters and telephone calls were circulating back and forth between Yourcenar, her Parisian attorney Marc Brossollet, and Charles Orengo, now at Librairie Hachette, regarding her dissatisfaction with Plon and the possibility of legal action. As relations with Roditi deteriorated, Yourcenar filed suit, seeking to recover the rights to L’Œuvre au Noir, the book that mattered more to her than any other. The outcome was anything but certain.
Sometime in the mid-1960s Yourcenar and Frick met John Olin, a student at Fordham University.5 As young people often did at that time, Olin was hitchhiking around the Northeast during his summer vacation. He had come to Maine often with his family as a child, but this time, a backpack inscribed with a Walt Whitman quote on his back, he was on his own. He spoke with me about meeting the two women in the living room of Petite Plaisance in 2009:
I was standing on the mainland side of the Trenton bridge before you cross over to Mount Desert, and a car stopped. It was an old model, late forties sedan, and there were what I, as a young man of twenty or twenty-one, would have called old ladies in it, which was very unusual. So I climbed in the back seat and noticed that, indeed, they were rather unusual ladies. The passenger was wearing a scarf, a head scarf, and I think she was dressed in black, and the driver was Miss Frick. The passenger was Marguerite Yourcenar. And they asked me where I was going. I didn’t really have a destination, I was just coming onto the island. Often I traveled that way, and I’d find a place to stay and find a little job raking leaves or whatever during the summers in the sixties. So they said something to the effect that we can’t have that, you have to have a place to stay tonight. Miss Frick sort of took charge. So before I knew it, I was on my way to Northeast Harbor.6
After a brief stop in Somesville, everyone arrived at Petite Plaisance. “They settled me in,” Olin recalled. “I had a room upstairs. It’s always nice when you’re on the road to find a warm hearth and something to eat. And they were charming. They were interested in me, and I was certainly interested in them.” Pointing to a green armchair, one of three around the fireplace at Petite Plaisance, he continued: “I remember sitting here. I can’t remember exactly how we arranged these three chairs. But we would sit here after dinner and read Shakespeare. And we would have different parts. And then once we all got in the car and went over to Bar Harbor to see Lawrence Olivier in Hamlet.” Frick helped Olin find a place to stay and a job. An aspiring writer himself, John valued his connection to Petite Plaisance. He came back often over the years to see “Madame and Miss Frick.”7
On February 14, 1966, Grace and Marguerite acquired their second canine companion, Valentine Lady. She was a seven-week-old blond cocker, born on Christmas Day the previous year. “Vallie” was not as much of a scamp as her predecessor, who was not above stealing cakes off people’s plates when there were guests for tea. Indeed, she was renowned for her beauty and sweet nature. But that did not stop her from falling into the pond behind Petite Plaisance when she was two months old, from which dunking she extracted herself “smelling like a sewer rat” to receive her first bath. Two days later she did it again.8
By mid-November Frick and Yourcenar were preparing to host Grace’s elder niece, Kathie Frick, for Thanksgiving. Kathie was a sophomore at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Her father and her Uncle Fred both thought it too risky for her to attempt a drive to the wilds of coastal Maine in late November, but Kathie was determined to try. Grace admonished her niece to use utmost care on the road and to be sure to bring “a robe or extra coats for the car, so that you can keep warm if you are stalled without a motor going for heat. . . . And have some really protective boots or galoshes to keep you dry in rain.” Nighttime driving was vehemently not to be advised. Grace also insisted that her niece try to bring a fellow student, possibly someone on scholarship or else too far from home to return for only a few days. Or perhaps she could give a ride home to a girl living somewhere in Maine.9
Kathie arrived much later than her aunt thought wise in the evening of November 23 with a friend from Colorado, Sherry Nicola. The next day Grace took the girls to Beech Cliff, one of her favorite spots in Southwest Harbor. Then they took a boat to Cranberry Isle. Thanksgiving dinner, prepared by Marguerite, was served in the parlor at seven o’clock. The next day Richard Harwell, head of Special Collections at the Bowdoin College Library, came for luncheon. On Saturday everyone dined on lobster together at Seawall, a shore meal being de rigueur in Grace and Marguerite’s view for anyone coming to visit them in Maine. On Sunday morning, in plenty of time to get back to school before dark, Kathie and Sherry departed.10
Alas, neither Aunt Grace nor Marguerite got the impression from Kathie’s four-day visit that scholarship was the young woman’s highest priority. Grace wrote despairingly to brother Gage,
Kathie worries me so. She admits to having not really read the books assigned, reading too hurriedly in high school, if at all, and skimming through notes rather than text in her college literature courses. She does not seem to be aware that college courses can be really enjoyed. She is getting none of the art, music, or theater which life in the Boston area affords, and she seems unaware of all the supplements to course work, like outside lectures brought to the college, which make for enrichment of her studies.11
But Kathie had other goals in mind. Despite the hopes of both her father and her aunt, she left Wheaton at the end of that academic year and transferred to the University of Colorado.
As 1966 came to an end, Yourcenar’s attorney Marc Brossollet and Plon’s attorney in Paris were still battling over L’Œuvre au Noir. With Éditions Plon convinced of its ironclad claim to the novel, the matter gave every sign of dragging on. Natalie Barney, always yearning to have Yourcenar and Frick return to Paris, wrote, “At last news of you! I heard, indirectly, that Plon had reedited your Hadrien and one of their young editors informed me that you [had filed suit]. This Guy Deschamps, who used to look like a Japanese is now a stout looking China man and his advice: that you should come over to Paris to see to your affairs with them! If you decide to do so I would gladly finance your trip, and greatly rejoice in seeing you. . . . ”12
Eager though she certainly was to see her book liberated from Plon, Yourcenar had no desire to muddy the waters by making an appearance in person:
I do not think that my presence in Paris would be useful to my “suit,” quite the contrary. I know Paris all too well, and the inevitable society chitchat with people who mix everything up while assuring you they’ve understood you to say what you never said, and the newspaper interviews that almost always twist what you have tried to say, and, worse still, the “business” conversations with people who have mastered the art of procrastination, who tell you yes today only to say no tomorrow and make promises with no intention of keeping them.13
On March 15, 1967, an important article was published in Le Monde whose headline, “Sven Nielsen: Above All a Salesman,” referred to the Danish founder of the publishing conglomerate that had acquired Librairie Plon in 1966.14 Ten days later Charles Orengo called to say that Plon’s lawyer for the first time was advising Nielsen to work out an arrangement regarding L’Œuvre.15 On October 14 Yourcenar got word from Brossollet that an agreement had been reached. In legal limbo for two and a half years, L’Œuvre au Noir had been released. Grace and Marguerite celebrated the victory with “champagne, steak, and mushrooms for dinner!!”16 Yourcenar was free to publish her novel wherever she chose, and she chose Gallimard. As for the English translation, no fewer than five publishers were vying for the book by early 1968.
The couple sailed for France on April 17, 1968. They arrived five days later in Cherbourg, as a young Grace had done thirty-one years earlier, unaware of what awaited her in Paris. They would stay for a whirlwind six weeks, the first eight days of which were spent in northwestern France. They visited Mont-Saint-Michel, the Breton walled village of Dinan, Carnac and its menhirs, and the medieval city of Angers. They strolled along the banks of the Loire.17 At Fontevrault Abbey near Chinon, the couple paid their respects to Eleanor of Aquitaine; it was their second pilgrimage to the tomb of the fabled twelfth-century queen.18
In Paris, Natalie Barney could not wait to host a reception in honor of her friend’s important new book. She would hold it on May 17 in her beloved pavillon at 20 rue Jacob. It had been twelve years since Frick and Yourcenar’s last trip to France, and the first two weeks of their stay were awash in newspaper, radio, and television interviews, book signings, dinners with critics, and reunions with old friends. But as cramped as the pages of Frick’s daybook already were with appointments at all hours, they soon became virtually illegible as the “events” of that revolutionary month thwarted most of their plans.
Students in the famed Latin Quarter had been protesting the rigid French education system since early May, holding antigovernment marches, and occupying the Sorbonne. The security forces of Charles de Gaulle’s government responded with tear gas and violence. On May 13, the tenth anniversary of the coup d’état that had toppled the Fourth Republic and put General de Gaulle back in power, labor unions joined students in calling for a nationwide strike. Grace reported in her daybook on that date a “manifestation of students and other groups in sympathy, march of 500,000 to 1,000,000 from Left Bank, Place de la République, to Denfert-Rochereau.” That same day a six-hour strike of the electrical workers shut down, among many other things, the elevators at her and Marguerite’s hotel. On May 16 students took possession of the Odéon, one of France’s national theaters. Soon train stations, airports, buses, the Metro, post offices, banks, and all the state museums would close in solidarity with the young people’s cry for reform.19
Ironically, as Janet Flanner noted in her May 16, 1968, New Yorker “Letter from Paris,” “the intellectual capital of Europe” had been chosen as the site for peace talks intended to end the war in Vietnam. Delegations from the United States and North Vietnam arrived in a French capital strewn with burned-out automobiles, hastily mounted barricades, shock troops, tear gas canisters, and fighting in the street. “If the Champs-Élysées represented the road to peace last Monday morning,” wrote Flanner, “it was almost devoid of transportation.”20
Grace and Marguerite, staying at the Hôtel Saint-James across the Seine from the Latin Quarter, had no choice but to walk to Natalie’s reception. Barney’s biographer has described the scene in Wild Heart: the Sorbonne was closed, Paris was paralyzed, riots were still going on in the streets, but “These circumstances did not prevent Natalie from holding her Friday, as planned, on May 17, to celebrate publication of Yourcenar’s L’œuvre au noir. Informed that taxis were avoiding the area, Natalie remained unruffled. Her guests, she said, would come on foot. And they did, arriving in various states of exhaustion and terror. Sipping champagne and eating Berthe’s cucumber sandwiches, they could hear loud explosions a few blocks away.”21
Like everyone else, Natalie’s young journalist friend Jean Chalon had to make his way on foot to 20 rue Jacob. He remembered crossing the Pont de la Concorde, which was occupied by “a crowd of CRS,” or riot control forces, and purchasing a bunch of blue flowers near the corner of the rue du Bac and the boulevard Saint-Germain:
In addition to the flowers, I brought Natalie all the graffiti I had collected from the walls. “It is forbidden to forbid,” repeated the enchanted Amazon, who wondered if she hadn’t written that herself somewhere in her Reflections or the New Reflections. We were about to start looking up this maxim, when the large white lace jabot of Marguerite Yourcenar appeared, together with the white foxes of her translator, Grace Friks [sic]. These ladies had come on foot from the rue de Rivoli. As the Pont du Carrousel was blocked by the CRS, they had decided to come by the more peaceful Pont des Arts. Natalie approved of their caution.22
Chalon concludes his account of the Amazon’s last party, after pointing out the presence of “Mary McCarthy, rakishly dressed as if for battle,” with this parting shot: “Suddenly Marguerite Yourcenar appeared, to whom I gave up my place for her to say to our hostess: ‘Really, the eighteenth century is your time, much more than la Belle Epoque. How young you are Natalie, for a contemporary of Madame du Deffand and Rivarol.’”23
When Portrait of a Seductress first came out in 1976, Yourcenar did not hesitate to set Chalon straight on a few “sartorial” details, after thanking him for sending her the book and complimenting him on it. “Grace,” she writes,
points out to me that she has never worn white foxes, which would have been superfluous on a stormy day in June [sic]. M.Y.’s large white lace jabot was a white nylon jabot of modest dimensions; I have it still. Nor do I believe that I told Natalie that she was very young for a contemporary of Rivarol; I wrote that to her in one of the letters that are going to appear in the Doucet catalog, and that’s where you will have read that sentence, which I surely did not reuse that evening. In any case, nothing serious.24
The worst days of the insurrection followed, with de Gaulle giving what Grace calls a “long-awaited but empty speech on television” on May 24.25 She and Marguerite took advantage of the situation to go three times to the guignol puppet plays in the Tuileries Garden, sometimes staying for several performances.26 They even took a horse-drawn carriage ride to Notre-Dame one night before a late dinner at the Restaurant Voltaire.27
Before the women set sail for home, Marguerite confided in a letter to Jean and Roger Hazelton,
I leave Paris with great sadness. The students (despite a few excesses) and the workers are by and large in the right, and the provisional triumph of the bourgeoisie whose members got scared and were reassured by de Gaulle’s use of force (dangerous in itself) is hideous in its superficiality and stupidity. Nothing is definitively resolved. In the midst of all that, Paris remains very beautiful, and the common people are nearly always the essence of kindness and grace.28
When L’Œuvre au Noir finally appeared, on May 8, 1968, the timing turned out to be surprisingly good. The character at the crux of the book whose quest for knowledge rendered him heretical in the eyes of the Catholic Church was engaged in just as ardent a revolt against the dogma of his era as were the young people protesting on the streets of Paris in that extraordinary month of May. Despite the extreme disruption that the demonstrations represented for the commercial promotion of a dark and challenging novel, L’Œuvre sold out its entire first run of twenty-five thousand copies by July.29 It was hailed by the critics as a masterpiece.
Before they left Paris, Frick and Yourcenar made “a long call at 20, rue Jacob,” paying homage to Barney, their ninety-one-year-old friend, who had never missed a chance to further Yourcenar’s career since the three women first met in 1951.30 On June 3 the couple traveled to Rotterdam to catch their boat home. The Nieuw Amsterdam had called at Dublin and put out to sea when word came over the radio that Robert F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Los Angeles. Shocked by the loss of JFK’s progressive younger brother, who supported social justice for both black and poor Americans and sought to end the Vietnam War, Grace and Marguerite attended a hastily organized shipboard memorial service.31 Only two months earlier, they had mourned the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the eloquent crusader for nonviolent resistance to oppression, poverty, and war. As Yourcenar wrote to a French friend shortly after King was shot, “The murder of this great pacifist adds another link to a chain of violent acts of which there is no end in sight.”32 With the slaying of Senator Kennedy following so closely on the chaos of Paris, it must have seemed to both Yourcenar and Frick that their world, like that of Zeno, was engulfed “in a circle of flames.”33