CHAPTER 30

Grace Bashing Begins

1969–1971

You can’t prevent it, despite yourself, you will not escape history.

—André Gide

FRICK AND YOURCENAR WERE NEVER more united than when they were fighting a literary battle together, and Éditions Plon continued to fall short of Yourcenar’s expectations for her work. As Frick noted in November of 1969, Plon’s “reprints” of Denier du rêve and Alexis turned out to be “recompositions incredibly massacred as to text, and even as to format (type mixtures, irregular lines and spacing).”1 The reissue of Yourcenar’s translation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves was not much better. “Preparing the case against Plon” cost the women eight full days of more productive and creative work. They were still firing letters back and forth to attorney Marc Brossollet about the “Plon affair” in May of 1971.²

Frick had started work on The Abyss, whose title derives from Zeno’s meditations in the central chapter of L’Œuvre au Noir, sometime in the mid-1960s. In late August 1967 she was translating at night after helping Yourcenar correct the French manuscript of the novel during the day.³ As always, literary tasks were woven into daily life. One work session on the French text took place at Jordan Pond House while the couple sipped tea and watched “fantastic mist descending on the Bubbles,” two of Mount Desert Island’s rounded mounts.⁴

There was great interest in Yourcenar’s new book on this side of the Atlantic. On August 18, 1968, Robert J. Clements of the Saturday Review traveled to Petite Plaisance to interview Frick and Yourcenar about The Abyss.⁵ It was not an easy text to render in English—Yourcenar once referred to the “weighty task” of translating this dense novel—and progress was slow.⁶ According to the daybook, it was not until October 30, 1969, that Frick mailed chapter 8, “The Fuggers of Cologne,” to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. With thirteen chapters yet to go, she was only one-third of the way through the book.

These were busy years for both women. Yourcenar’s French translation of Hortense Flexner’s poems, including the thirteen “for Sutton Island” off Mount Desert, came out in October of 1969.7 The following month Yourcenar gave a talk on André Gide at Smith College commemorating the centennial of Gide’s birth. Other speakers included the renowned American scholars of French literature Germaine Brée of the University of Wisconsin and Wallace Fowlie of Duke University.⁸ Yourcenar went last, on Saturday, March 22, having attended the other two speeches. She had composed her talk in advance and was planning to deliver it from a few pages of notes. But the lectures of Brée and Fowlie had been so cautious and scholarly that she doubted whether students understood them. Hoping to say something they could grasp, Yourcenar tore up her notes and spoke instead “about Gide.”⁹

Perhaps with Newton Arvin on her mind, she said first that the author whose career the Smith community had gathered to celebrate was homosexual. Her improvised lecture, entitled “André Gide Revisited,” later appeared in the Cahiers André Gide. It is hard to imagine that Yourcenar did not think of Grace Frick when she told her audience what Gide once said to his wife, a woman she described as “extremely discreet, extremely self-effacing, never wanting to let herself be put first, never wanting to be talked about”: “You can’t prevent it, despite yourself, you will not escape history.”¹⁰

Yourcenar’s success was beginning to catch up with her and Frick. On March 18, 1970, the Belgian Royal Academy of French Language and Literature elected Yourcenar to its honorary ranks. She would be inducted the following year. The French critic and admirer Patrick de Rosbo wished to do a series of radio interviews on Yourcenar’s work and arranged a late-summer 1970 trip to Northeast Harbor.¹¹ He arrived just three days after Yourcenar was released from the Bar Harbor Hospital, where she had four or five (benign) breast tumors removed.¹² Rosbo was scheduled to arrive the day before, September 2, but he telephoned from Bangor to say he had no money for a taxi.¹³

The interviews began September 3, with Yourcenar still weak and fatigued. The next day, after hosting Rosbo from ten in the morning until eight-thirty at night, Frick drove him to three restaurants before he found a menu to his liking. Both women took him for tea at Jordan Pond House. They had him stay for dinner more than once after long days of recording. One day he stayed until 10:30 p.m. Marguerite and Grace were both exhausted. Finally, on September 9, he went back to France. Upon leaving Northeast Harbor, Rosbo left a trail of unpaid bills and personal loans, even trying—unsuccessfully—to convince the proprietor of the Harborside Inn to let him check out without paying for his stay.14

The radio broadcasts aired on France-Culture in January 1971. The following year Rosbo published a transcription of the interviews that Yourcenar had substantially revised and augmented.¹⁵ He then set about repaying the author and Frick for their hospitality by way of a defamatory article about his week at Petite Plaisance, “Huit Jours de purgatoire avec Marguerite Yourcenar,” in the new gay magazine Gulliver that calls his week at Petite Plaisance “eight days in purgatory with Marguerite Yourcenar.” Rosbo chose to focus most of his venom on Frick, first attacking her physical appearance: “I caught sight of a little, bony face. A shrunken head? The mummy of Ramses II? Her gray hair, sparse and messy, reminded me right away of a little old man, very thin with emaciated features, of some much older sister of Nathalie Sarraute’s, of some woman artist from the twenties, also in a way of André Gide’s little wife. I wasn’t sure which sex.” He then sketched a scurrilous account of his conversation with Yourcenar:

 

A table separated us, on which were placed our two microphones. Off to the side, the Confidante was keeping watch: silent, vigilant, a shade within the shadows. Without letup and insistently, Marguerite Yourcenar’s gaze turned toward her, consulting her, seeming to seek her tacit approval or support. The comedy of the supposed dialogue unraveled, losing its consistency from minute to minute, veering into farce. I had before me nothing more than an anxious profile straining toward its own dark night and making no effort to disguise its dependence.

“Madame,” I asked brusquely, “could you occasionally make an effort to turn toward me, to look at me? Would that not give more life to our exchanges?”

“I could not possibly take my eyes away from Grace’s . . .”¹⁶

 

Yourcenar was appalled by the vileness of Rosbo’s assault. To her Parisian friend and occasional doctor Marthe Lamy, she wrote that Rosbo had attacked Frick for “attempting to defend me, knowing that I did not have the strength to do it myself.”¹⁷ She immediately started to compose an indignant response to Rosbo’s screed with help from an equally disgusted Charles Orengo. As she wrote to Brossollet in February 1973, Rosbo had already taken aim at her by way of a third party the previous September, when an article appeared in Les Lettres françaises depicting her as “avaricious of heart.” The text in question was Josane Duranteau’s review of Rosbo’s published interviews, which alleged that Yourcenar had refused to play by the rules of a spontaneous conversation. “There is something a bit comical in this blockage, this rigidity, this incapacity to let oneself be grasped by the other. It must not be pleasant to dance with Marguerite Yourcenar.”18 Yourcenar, for her part, decided not to dance with Gulliver, recognizing the wisdom of her lawyer’s advice that she let the matter drop.¹⁹

By July of 1970 Frick had translated six more chapters of The Abyss. Yourcenar had begun the first volume of what would eventually become a family trilogy, Le Labyrinthe du monde, inspired while writing L’Œuvre au Noir to delve into her Belgian and French Flemish roots.²⁰

On February 10 and 11, 1971, Frick, Yourcenar, and the cocker spaniel Valentine Lady got their vaccinations for yet another trip abroad. On March 8, they boarded the SS Michelangelo in New York City, bound for Spain. Unlike their previous crossing, this one was smooth, the weather was good, and no one fell ill.

Traveling by train first to Madrid and then to Burgos, León, and Astorga in Spain, the couple did some sightseeing before heading to Brussels for Yourcenar’s Belgian induction. In Astorga they were particularly moved to find themselves in a town that was a major stopping point on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela.²¹ In describing their day there, Frick makes a comment suggesting that she too was not immune to treating Zeno, as Yourcenar so often did, as if he were a real person. Remarking on the extraordinary Renaissance architecture of the Astorga town hall, Grace notes that it had probably been built “after Zeno’s time there, as he was young. It was where Zeno went with Don Blas to see four Jews and one Spanish heretic executed in the Plaza of Ayuntamiento.” Back in Burgos on March 24, they saw Hadrian’s inscription in honor of his Spanish tribe at the museum of the Casa de Miranda.

Once Grace and Marguerite reached Brussels they were caught in the academy whirlwind. Right after they arrived at their hotel, Paul and Gladys Minear’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Anita Fahrni, appeared, having traveled from her home in Switzerland to represent her family at the induction. Pamela Frick, who was studying that year at the Sorbonne, would also attend. That first evening, a Friday, the Belgian Baroness Vaxelaire gave a celebratory dinner for thirty guests. As Fahrni recalled, the formal servers wore white gloves. The tables were adorned with orchids. Among the guests was the Québecois novelist Anne Hébert, who would receive a prize the next day given jointly by the French and Belgian Academies. Next to Yourcenar sat Marie Genevoix, wife of the Belgian Academy’s perpetual secretary Maurice Genevoix, while Frick’s place was beside the evening’s hostess. Among the others present were the novelist Suzanne Lilar and her husband, the Count and Countess d’Aignan, and Duchess Edmée de la Rochefoucauld.22

The main event took place on Saturday afternoon at the Belgian National Theater. Mme Lilar, an academy member since 1952, presided. After Anne Hébert received her prize, the distinguished Belgian poet and novelist Carlo Bronne spoke of Yourcenar’s life and literary work. In her response Yourcenar discussed the American professor whose academy chair she was taking, Benjamin Mather Woodbridge. A descendant of the influential early New England Puritans Richard, Increase, and Cotton Mather, Woodbridge had taught romance languages and literature at Reed College in Oregon.

That evening Frick and Yourcenar dined at the Hotel Amigo with Anita Fahrni and two friends come from Paris for the induction, Charles Orengo and Jeanne Carayon, Yourcenar’s valued proofreader. Sunday would be a day of rest, which in this instance meant a taxi ride to the eleven-thousand-acre Sonian Forest on the outskirts of Brussels. Now protected as an endangered ecological site by the European Union, that great woodland was once described by May Sarton as “the magnificent Forêt de Soignes, miles and miles of soaring beeches pruned and cherished ever since it had been set aside as a hunting forest for the Dukes of Burgundy.”²³ Grace and Marguerite took Anita Fahrni with them on this outing, thanks to whom we have photographs of the women together in their late sixties.

After touring the house of Erasmus, dining with Aunt Loulou de Borchgrave, and visiting with Yourcenar’s half nephew Georges de Crayencour, Grace and Marguerite jubilantly left Brussels for Zeno’s medieval Flemish birthplace of Bruges. There they would enjoy the rare luxury of staying in one place for five weeks. Marguerite took Valentine every day for her morning walk, retracing the steps of her protagonist in the cobblestone streets with Valentine Lady at her side. Together they brought her to the country home of Lucienne de Reyghere just outside Bruges amid blooming jonquils and narcissus. As Grace noted in the daybook, the elegant cocker was “full of joy to run free on the grass!”²⁴ The couple also haunted the Gruithuis Museum and its “superbly exhibited” holdings, which ranged from medieval and Renaissance sculpture to kitchen tools, medical instruments, and a guillotine.²⁵ They went to vespers and a mass at the Béguinage.²⁶ They visited the English Convent of Bruges, staying twice for the evening service there.²⁷ During a leisurely day-trip with Dominique Willems to Ostende, they were treated to the sight of a “group of horses and riders on the sand, silhouetted against waves and wet sand at sunset.”28 It was a scene that could have come from The Abyss.

All the while there was a steady stream of literary work. In addition to the proofs of the new paperback version of L’Œuvre au Noir, the eighth French edition of Memoirs of Hadrian was coming out, as were the new or reissued works Rendre à César, Denier du rêve, Théâtre I, and Discours de réception, a published version of the speeches given at Yourcenar’s Royal Academy reception. Both Yourcenar and Frick scoured first and second proofs of each title with meticulous application. Not surprisingly, no progress seems to have been made on either Frick’s translation work or Yourcenar’s family memoir over the course of this European sojourn.

On May 5, 1971, the women left for a twelve-day Botel cruise in Holland that took them from Amsterdam to Arnhem, Dordrecht, Gouda, Leyden, and back to Amsterdam. En route to the Dutch capital from Bruges they visited a nature reserve on the North Sea at Zwin which, with its sand dunes, sea lavender, and richly varied population of owls, herons, storks, ducks, and geese, was a revelation for these lovers of birds and the sea. They then spent three and a half weeks in Paris, during which Yourcenar was finally appointed to the French Legion of Honor, a national tribute for which Natalie Barney had campaigned as far back as the 1950s.29 Barney had been forced to leave her beloved pavillon and Temple of Friendship on the rue Jacob in 1970 after living there for sixty years. The property, which she rented, had been purchased by a former official in Charles de Gaulle’s government who wished to renovate the building. Natalie would stay at the luxurious Hôtel Meurice while waiting to return to her home.³⁰

On November 17 that year Barney had written to Marguerite and Grace to say how much she looked forward to seeing her friends: “I hope soon to have news of your return to Paris—dog and all!”³¹ The couple made a point of visiting Barney the following June in her suite a few doors down from the Saint-James. They would never see her again. Barney died in early 1972 at the age of ninety-five without ever returning to rue Jacob. As Yourcenar wrote to Jean Chalon about her and Frick’s last visit with their friend, Natalie had already seemed at that time to be “a light and charming ghost who was lingering among us. Now she has entered her realm once and for all, her legend already begun.”³²

On June 12, 1971, Frick and Yourcenar left Paris for Le Havre, where they would board the SS Alexander Pushkin for the trip home. They were delighted when the purser upgraded them to a larger cabin on the ship’s top deck. It would be easier to walk the exuberant Valentine. The extra space also turned out to be useful for another reason. Exercising Valentine after dinner that first night, Grace tripped over a guy wire and ruptured a tendon in her left knee. The ship’s Russian surgeon stabilized the injured joint with a loose cast and ordered complete bed rest. Both women took all of their meals for the rest of the trip in their stateroom.³³ Frick recovered quickly, but being confined to a cabin for an eight-day ocean crossing was not easy. The accident also prevented Grace, as she wrote to her niece, from seeing “every beam and timber of the vessel.”³⁴ It was her last crossing.

Back home there were no immediate alerts on the health front for either Yourcenar or Frick. They both went to the Bar Harbor Hospital for various tests on July 30, 1971, with no report of bad results. A humorous incident that occurred a few weeks later suggests that despite their health challenges, both women still had plenty of spunk.

Ann (Fullan) Gilkes, whose family began summering up the street from Petite Plaisance in 1965, told this story in 2010 when she was a vigorous ninety-one years old. Frick, as was her habit, had welcomed the Gilkeses to the neighborhood when they arrived in Northeast, and a friendship involving both parents and children ensued. Frick and Yourcenar were fond of syllabub in the mid-1960s, an old English dessert of thickened cream harking back to the Tudor dynasty, and they treated Ann and young Jane Gilkes to the concoction in the garden of Petite Plaisance shortly after the Gilkeses moved in.35 Visits back and forth between the two houses, whether for tea, cocktails, or the occasional meal, became part of summer life. Ann Gilkes never forgot what Grace had told her early on about meeting Marguerite in Paris: “She was in the dining room or the salon of her hotel, and ‘I saw this magnificent woman with sparkling blue eyes, and I was fascinated. So I went up and introduced myself to her. She knew more about Keats and Shelley than I did!’”³⁶ Grace never tired of recounting how intensely she was drawn to Marguerite the first time she laid eyes on her.

As it happens, Ann Gilkes had a sister who had the same effect on people. In September of 1971 Amelia Mohan came to Northeast Harbor for a visit. Charming, worldly, and adventurous, Mohan was a lovely fifty-seven years old. Ann Gilkes brought her over to Petite Plaisance on the afternoon of an open-house Sunday.³⁷ Amelia liked to stir things up. “She got Grace and Marguerite’s number,” Ann recalled, “the minute she walked in”—and she decided to have a little fun. Amelia sat down next to Grace and started chatting away with her flirtatiously. Grace was undoubtedly flattered. She wasn’t used to being sought out by newcomers. Ann took a seat next to Marguerite. After a minute or two, Amelia felt a pair of eyes boring down on her with fierce intensity. If looks could kill! Well aware she was the target of Marguerite’s displeasure, Amelia poured the charm on even thicker, going so far as to stroke Grace’s knee. Grace did not protest. This was more than Marguerite was willing to put up with. She rose from her chair and marched across the room to assert her place. Grace was obviously not displeased with Amelia’s attentions. Whether Marguerite knew it or not, she dropped by the Gilkeses’ Blanchard Cottage several times while Amelia was in town.³⁸

Amelia Mohan was living at that time in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Despite her playful high jinks that September Sunday in 1971, she had traveled north to see the Gilkeses because she had throat cancer. She could have submitted to a procedure that would have left her with an artificial voice box, but she didn’t want to go through life that way. So she had come to say goodbye. Six weeks later, back home in North Carolina, she died.