1974–1976
And make your chronicle as rich with praise
As is the owse and bottom of the sea
With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
—William Shakespeare
BY THE FRIGID, STORMY MIDDLE of January 1974, Frick was confronted with yet another malignancy, this one a small uterine tumor. While she was hospitalized for the removal of that organ, Marguerite took over the engagement calendar. Every day from eleven o’clock until six she spent at Grace’s bedside in Bar Harbor; every night, fearful without her companion, she slept at home attended by a succession of local helpers, some of them nurses. Only once in eleven days, when it was five below zero and a snowstorm made the twelve-mile trip to the hospital too risky, did she fail to spend the day with Grace.1 Six months later, on July 3, Dr. Cooper would excise another cancerous lump from one of Frick’s upper ribs. But as in the early years of Grace’s illness, the two women almost always found a way to make an outing of a doctor’s appointment in Bar Harbor, often visiting Acadia’s wildflower garden on the way home.2
At Petite Plaisance they had their own wood garden strewn with lady’s slipper, wild lilies, and jack-in-the-pulpit, among other native plants. Both women were committed to conscientious environmental stewardship writ large and small. As Yourcenar wrote to Jeanne Carayon that August,
we use no chemical products in our yard here, except for the least offensive fertilizers. It is a matter of protecting not only people but also our nonhuman friends, the little woodland creatures, the birds, the bees, Zoé and the dogs who come to visit. . . . The lawn and the little woods are marvelously green, and the (Montmorency) cherry harvest has been a benediction. Grace Frick up on the ladder, and me helping delicately to bend the branches overloaded with fruit with a long bamboo pole—the kind of moment one will never forget, no matter what happens.
As the latter phrase suggests, Frick was increasingly unwell. “And, yes, I am worried about Grace’s health, which requires constant monitoring,” Yourcenar went on to acknowledge.3
Though wary of hormone treatments, Grace began taking diethylstilbestrol in late September 1974.4 She would continue to do so for the next fifteen months. The goal was to slow or stop the spread of nodules on her chest. Although some lumps did shrink, others grew slowly larger. Her mastectomy scar began opening in spots over her rib cage where radiation therapy had thinned the tissue. None of which stopped Frick from being “priestess of the orchard,” as Yourcenar once called her.5 She continued to engage in her usual activities, but they took an increasing toll on her body. A long day spent working in the garden or hauling firewood by hand could now trigger several days of pain and tingling in her swollen left arm.6
Yourcenar began keeping her own gloomy record of Frick’s worsening health in 1974. The first entry evokes Frick’s strong connection to Memoirs of Hadrian:
Today, Tuesday, July 10 (it’s the one thousand seven hundred thirty-sixth anniversary of Hadrian’s death at Baiae), Grace has received from Dr. Cooper what seems indeed to be the news that the end toward which we all are headed is in sight for her (a new cancerous induration at the base of her sternum). The long Way of the Cross that began around June 6, 1958, along which we have been granted many temporary halts, sometimes moments of sweet respite, now seems to be nearing its final stations. Dr. Coffin, who has since retired but who treated her during the first years of her illness, told me back on March 30, when he brought the arbutus seedlings that we were going to plant in the garden: “She’s a goner.” I suppose he hears things from his former colleagues at the hospital. “What do you mean?” I cried out. “Such a statement means nothing without a measure of time? One year, two years, six months?” “I have no idea,” he replied.7
Adding to the gloom, Yourcenar got word on December 11, 1974, that her trusted friend of twenty-three years Charles Orengo had died in Paris. Orengo, who had published Hadrian at Plon and helped her win the battle for L’Œuvre au Noir, had called her earlier that year to read a stunning review in Le Monde of Souvenirs pieux.8 “Something ends for me with his death,” wrote Yourcenar in her journal. “And what’s more, the bad news finally comes at a moment when I’m trembling for Grace. Everything is slipping away.”9
In the fall of 1975, the poet Nicolas Calas told Yourcenar that André Embiricos had died of lung cancer in Greece.10 In responding, Yourcenar told “Nico” how fond she had been of Embiricos, whom she had not seen since 1939, adding that “since then, he seems to have refused all contact, immersed as he was in his own writings and dreams.”11
On December 8, 1975, Yourcenar wrote in her journal that the oncologist Dr. Parrot had discontinued Frick’s diethylstilbestrol that day. Grace had distrusted the drug from the beginning, and Marguerite believed it had made her more ill. “Parrot noticed another very small induration in her right armpit. Another, more visible one was already noticed by us three centimeters from the old scar (the one that’s getting bigger). Lower, near her ribs.” Something had to be done.12
In late 1975 Frick would have her first and only break, for three weeks, from any form of medication before beginning a new chemotherapy regime called the Bonadonna protocol. It consisted of three drugs: Cytoxan, fluorouracil, and methotrexate. Very effective against recurring cancers, it became available at precisely the moment when Grace Frick’s doctors would otherwise have had little to offer her. Frick had already outlived ninety-nine of her Wellesley classmates despite both creeping cancer and the assault on her body of the treatments that she had endured. But she was not well enough to attend her fiftieth reunion in May 1975. Part of the reunion came to her that June, however, in the form of Betsy Lunn, her Wellesley roommate; Rusty Corkran, her class president; and Rusty’s husband, David.13 Phyllis Bartlett’s spirit cannot have been far away.
Despite Frick’s worsening health, the summer of 1975 was an active one. In addition to the postreunion delegation from Wellesley, Gage Frick came to check on his sister in July.14 Frick and Yourcenar attended almost all the chamber music concerts in the village, and Frick admonished the writer and actor Gunnar Hansen at one of them for playing the deranged killer Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The R-rated film had come out the previous fall and made a lot of money, but its blood and gore went beyond what many moviegoers could tolerate. According to Hansen himself, Frick had this to say about his role in the notorious film: “Twelve people were murdered in New York City yesterday, and it’s your fault!”15 There were no hard feelings, though, as both Frick and Yourcenar agreed to read one of Hansen’s first short stories, “An American Parlor,” which they felt showed him to be a real writer.
Frick and Yourcenar both loved being near the sea. One of their favorite recreations, as Grace once told Gertrude Fay, was to take “two hours just plain free, to watch the surf on Ocean Drive.”16 Typically, Frick wanted to share their passion with young people. Both women were early supporters of a fledgling venture whose goal was to bring youth to Mount Desert Island to learn about the ocean and its creatures.
The Acadia Institute of Oceanography, a marine biology camp, hosted its first students in 1975. Jean Hazelton had introduced Frick and Yourcenar to the institute’s founders, George and Esther Hahn, in the early 1970s. Esther Hahn reminisced about the couple and their support of the AIO in a 1994 letter to Hazelton:
They were both environmentalists; Grace especially was interested in our camp. She was instrumental in getting someone to write about us in the Bar Harbor Times and Ellsworth American. She invited our first-year group to Petite Plaisance for a lawn party. (A mime group performed for us.) Mme. Yourcenar served the punch. Grace explained in her usual manner that one bowl of punch was for the student-campers and the other for the adults. We enjoyed her forthrightness and so did the kids.17
Grace Frick knew a thing or two about developing a school from the ground up, and the Hahns were grateful to her. “We bought the house across from the school when it became available and named it the Grace House in her honor,” Hahn remembered. “We had a Grace Frick scholarship for Maine students. That was established after her death. We told Marguerite about it. She was delighted and wrote us a nice letter about how much it would have pleased Grace.”18 Helping the Hahns get their school up and running was clearly a reminder for Frick of the life she’d left behind more than three decades ago. It meant a lot to her to be able to contribute to the future of the island she loved.
In the summer of 1975 Frick may have been more focused on the Acadia Institute of Oceanography than she was on translating The Abyss. She also did not perform her usual meticulous reading of Archives du Nord before the first half of that manuscript went to Jeanne Carayon in France for proofreading. As Yourcenar notes in the letter she wrote to accompany that mailing, “This is the first time that Grace Frick, who is too busy, has not read a manuscript of mine from one end to the other before it leaves the house. I am therefore counting more on you.” Not only did Frick fail to scour the current work in progress, but she wasn’t translating, either. “Here things are ‘okay,’” said Yourcenar to Carayon, “and I feel stronger than I did last year. The translation of L’Œuvre au Noir into English, which is practically finished (all that remains is a revision), has come to a halt, which is a nerve-racking situation for me because it has been six years now since the contract was signed, and I feel, with despondency, as if before a past-due debt. But one can do only what one can.”19 It seems that Frick, for once, was making something other than her partner’s career her top priority. Yourcenar’s resigned “one can do only what one can” suggests a kind of powerlessness in the face of this unusual circumstance. Not until six months later could Yourcenar finally tell Carayon that “the proofs of the English translation of L’Œuvre au Noir (The Abyss) are in our hands, and I am trying to keep myself available to help Grace Frick with her translator’s corrections, although she is the one who must make the final decision regarding English usage.”20
Yourcenar had been working on Archives du Nord since June of 1974. Her progress on that second volume of her family chronicle slowed when she agreed, in September of 1975, to preface a collection of Selma Lagerlöf’s novels in translation.21 It was a way to pay homage to the literary culture of Sweden, a country that had meant so much to her and Grace during the heyday of their European travels.
Frick later wrote to the Minears about the Lagerlöf project, informing them that Le Monde had published most of the preface in a full-page spread, and that “Marguerite is pleased that the extract evoked much comment about a writer to whom she felt that she herself owed a great debt.” She then addressed her companion’s ambivalent attitude toward feminism:
This Lägerloff [sic] will probably also be her only, and indirect, contribution to the feminist movement, feeling as she does that there is no difference between basic intellectual capacity in male or female, only a long-standing difference of opportunity for expression of that capacity. She has indignantly turned down offers to write, or allow reprints of her work, for this or that collection in which the word feminine is the distinguishing factor, though she is constantly aware of the strong pleas against injustice to women in many roles of life. She did write a brief diatribe recently against women as exploiters of their “femininity,” allowing themselves to be shown in advertisements as objects of luxury in order to sell sports cars, extravagant gowns, jewelry, and fur coats, thus continuing the old trade of prostitution in a more blatant, less personal form. I forget how the matter came up, but she was trying to suggest the many ways in which she thought that women could work toward true liberation by being less subservient to fashion and to their own domination by masculine convention.22
When the long-awaited American edition of The Abyss was finally released in June 1976, the summer of the U.S. Bicentennial celebration, the reviews ranged from the dismissive to the dithyrambic. The all-important New York Times published what Yourcenar herself described to Jeanne Carayon as a “stupid” article “engaging only with the shell of the subject (but no stupider, after all, than Cabanis’s article in Le Monde, which had the same defect, when it came out in France).”23 Of course, the book was repeatedly compared with Memoirs of Hadrian, a far more optimistic look at human prospects as seen through the eyes of a compelling historical figure. In declaring The Abyss “unfortunately . . . not level with her earlier achievement,” the Times complains that the novel is “unevenly weighted” and that it “moves with deliberateness and machination, coincidence being too coincidental and surprise almost wholly absent.” It finds nothing compelling about the novel’s protagonist: “All this would be supportable if Zeno were moving to us and we felt obliged by the authority of his presence to care for him and his destiny.”24 But he isn’t, and we don’t.
Other critics also found Zeno unlikable. Frank Kermode saluted Frick’s “exceptionally fine” translation of the work in the New York Review of Books but, echoing Britton, called Zeno “a barely credible amalgam of the philosophical interests of the period.”25
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement waited four months before mentioning the English Abyss on its pages.26 That citadel of British literary taste had already criticized the book, with special emphasis on Zeno, when it came out in the original French in 1968:
[Yourcenar’s] primary interest in her hero . . . is intellectual: thus we do not see him develop as a human being. He is denied warmth and fallibility. We do not see other characters or events through his eyes; rather he remains a distant figure for whom scenes and family ties are constructed in order to allow him an entrance so that the discourse may begin. Zénon reminds us more of those flat, clearly outlined and carefully painted figures that emerge towards the forefront of a crowded Flemish painting of the period.27
It’s enough to make one wonder whether this anonymous reviewer actually read the book through to the end before submitting his article, since Zeno’s evolution from arrogant youth to near secular sainthood is a major thrust of the novel. That first British article ends with a backhanded flourish citing one of “the most vivid passages” from L’Œuvre au Noir. Central to it is the description of a curly-haired hunting dog relieving himself.
Six years later, in 1974, the English historical novelist Mary Renault’s glowing front-page survey of Yourcenar’s work in the same publication called Zeno “a dazzling evocation of North European Renaissance man” and lamented the poor treatment his French creator had received in Great Britain.28 Apparently by way of repetition compulsion, the Times Literary Supplement heralded The Abyss with a mere paragraph quoting from Renault’s earlier piece.29
The author told Jeanne Carayon that neither the bad nor the good reviews of The Abyss affected her much one way or the other:
in my eyes, the book has too real an existence for me to take much of an interest in those commentaries. I was very touched, though, by the letter I received from a philosophy student who had the impression he had found there an implementation of his own ideas and sustenance for his life; this kind of testimony, which occurs more frequently than one might dare hope, makes one feel that one’s time has not been completely wasted. But Grace remains rightly discouraged by the fact that the publisher did not wait for her final corrections and that he charged a considerable sum for the ones he included. What is worse, he made unauthorized, and stupid, corrections on the first proofs and did not eliminate them from the second proofs, as he should have done, contractually. She is not satisfied with the title The Abyss, either, which seems fine to me since it is the title of the central chapter, given the impossibility of translating the alchemical term used in the French title.30
Frick knew how important this novel was to her companion’s status as an author in the English-speaking world; naturally, she wanted everything about it to be perfect. She never got over her annoyance regarding the American title. In 1994 the Harvill Press of London issued an edition of the book under the less somber title Zeno of Bruges. Grace would have approved.
Despite a belief held by some Yourcenar scholars to the effect that The Abyss is not as well rendered into English as Memoirs of Hadrian, no professional reviewer had anything but praise for the translation. Even some who didn’t like the book itself complimented Frick’s work. The American critic and author Lewis Gannett may have said it best, with regard to a novel structured by the three-stage process of alchemical transformation, when he called the book “beautifully transmuted into English by Grace Frick.”31
One of the first reviewers to recognize both Frick’s achievement and Yourcenar’s was Peter S. Prescott in the popular weekly magazine Newsweek, of all places. Prescott salutes Frick’s translation and comments, in contrast to the disparagers of Zeno, that “to have chosen for a hero not a ruler or a warrior or a feckless adventuring youth, but a man who is credibly represented as one of the leading intellectuals of his time, was a daring undertaking that Yourcenar has brought off triumphantly.”32 He is not a lone voice. Naomi Bliven penned a detailed and admiring review in the New Yorker.33 Choice, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, calls The Abyss “a superb novel by the author of The Memoirs of Hadrian,” one whose “English version has the impact, unity of style and control of the original French.”34 Robert Taylor of the Boston Globe, citing Frick’s “meticulous” translation, dubs The Abyss an “extraordinary work, the finest historical fiction in years,” adding that “Mme. Yourcenar’s novel may well be one of the few in our time to merit the designation ‘classic.’”35 Stephen Koch’s superb analysis, “In a Circle of Flames,” for the Saturday Review zeroes in on the conclusion of the novel, Zeno’s taking of his own life to avoid being burned alive in the public square for his heretical writings: “This final passage must surely be accounted one of the most powerful and profound in the fiction of the last two decades.” Understanding, unlike several American critics, what was at issue for contemporary readers in Yourcenar’s depiction of a violently factionalized sixteenth-century Europe, Koch concludes passionately,
“Our worst century yet” has not been an age of humanism. Almost the whole of modern thought—to say nothing of modern experience—runs against the positions, and the forms, that Yourcenar defends. (It would be most instructive, for example, to contrast her archeology of knowledge with Foucault’s own very brilliant, but hardly humanistic, meditations.) Well, that doesn’t matter. The books exist, and the crucial faith they embody is alive and real in their pages. Our own abyss is becoming painfully familiar, but Mlle. Yourcenar has at least lit us a beacon—all facts and fire and light—there on her island off the coast of Maine.36
By the time The Abyss finally came out in mid-1976, its translator was entering a new stage of her illness. Certain changes in her physical, mental, and emotional state were beginning to suggest that Grace Frick would not withstand forever the ill effects of everything she had been through since 1958. Sometime in July 1976 an astrologer named Jean de Walque looked into Marguerite Yourcenar’s future using the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching. Marguerite reported the result in her journal: “Three years sitting beneath a dead tree, in a state of indigence.” Consulting the text herself, the author noted that it said, “more picturesquely, ‘bare-assed.’” She then added, “Do not forget: three years. Persevere.”37