1977–1978
I have seen on the sand
an empty seashell.
I have seen on the waves
the trembling birds.
—Marguerite Yourcenar
WAITING ON THE KITCHEN TABLE when the couple returned to Petite Plaisance from their Alaskan adventure was a letter from the Académie française. On June 15, 1977, while they were away, that learned body had unanimously chosen to give Marguerite Yourcenar its Grand Prix de littérature. The prize, created in 1911 and entailing a cash value of fifty thousand French francs, crowned the entirety of an author’s oeuvre. Congratulations had already arrived by telegram from old friends Élie Grekoff and Pierre de Monteret—“WE ARE HAPPY FOR YOU BOTH”—and more would soon flow in.1 Archives du Nord would come out to wide acclaim later that summer. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Yourcenar joining the academy, an honor never granted to a woman—not Madame de Staël, not George Sand, not Colette, and certainly not Simone de Beauvoir—in the three-and-a-half-century history of France’s preeminent institution.
Jean Dausset of the Académie des sciences, a friend of the Académie française’s perpetual secretary, came to Petite Plaisance with his wife urging Yourcenar to consider a three-month annual residence in France to enhance her eligibility.2 Jean d’Ormesson, the youngest “Immortal,” had already broached the topic with his colleagues. Claude Gallimard telephoned to pass along what by January 1978 would become, according to Frick’s daybook, the “further insistence” of the academy that Yourcenar present her candidacy.3 Thérèse de St. Phalle of Librairie Flammarion wrote to tell the author how eager academy members were to receive her into their illustrious company and to express her own arguments in favor of that possibility:
Perhaps in considering the idea, you could tell yourself that all the women who have written since the beginning of time would be entering along with you. You are our first chance. No one would dare vote against you out of misogyny. If you were to say that you might be able to come spend three months a year in Paris, for example, I am sure their doors would open, to you and to all the women writers you would represent, whose standard bearer you would be!4
Yourcenar’s reaction to that letter can be gauged by how thickly she underlined the phrase “come spend three months a year in Paris” in turquoise Flair pen. Which is not to say that she failed to make her feelings plain in responding to similar pleas. There would be no question of her making courtesy calls on sitting academy members to solicit their votes or of her spending several months a year in Paris. She was not even willing to commit to coming frequently to France. By her lights, moreover, the possibility of admitting a woman to the academy was generating altogether too much commotion.5 To make matters worse, as she reported to Jean d’Ormesson, she had let her French citizenship drop when she became an American.6 Only citizens of France could join the Académie française at that time.
Yourcenar also mentioned to d’Ormesson the “personal circumstances” that, along with her literary work, had kept her away from Europe longer than might otherwise have been the case. But Frick’s health had improved quite dramatically since April 1977. Dr. Parrot called her progress on tamoxifen “fantastic.” She had gained weight, her tumors had shrunk, her cough had disappeared.7 Finally realizing her dream of taking Marguerite to the Pacific Northwest had also given Grace a big lift. By November of that year, for the first time since the spring of 1974, Frick was on only one medication. Incredibly, she was coming back to life.
In mid-November Yourcenar wrote to Jeanne Carayon about a possible return to France in the spring, though fearful of the demands it would bring. Of life at Petite Plaisance she went on to say that Grace was back working in the garden. She had
completed the abundant apple harvest by herself, one of my bouts of laryngitis accompanied by a touch of bronchitis having kept me indoors for the past ten days. Earlier, we picked the plums from our lone plum tree (they are small, but I counted almost two hundred of them). And we found time, which is very rare, to take two shore walks on nearby properties, storing up all the gold of autumn; then another walk along the rocky coast of the island, where we caught a glimpse of a beautiful blue heron and watched the wheeling flight of a mother seagull and her child, who was learning to fly; the little one, all wobbly, would come back now and then to his mother, literally, to kiss her.
Yourcenar nonetheless knew that Frick’s remission might not last, as Dr. Parrot had made clear: “We are living somewhat in the moment, like seagulls on the crest of a swell.”8
Grace was enjoying every minute of her remarkable reprieve. Her Wellesley roommate Betsy Lunn spent three days at Petite Plaisance in mid-July.9 Ruth and Lucy Hall came for four days in August. From the top of Mount Cadillac to Ocean Drive to the island’s quiet side, sights were seen and shown. Now that Grace had regained her taste for food, there was also Jordan Pond House, The Moorings, Abel’s Lobster Pound.10
In December the couple decided to take a leaf from Natalie Barney’s book and start making some monetary gifts to certain friends while they were still living. Inside their Christmas card to Paul and Gladys Minear, who were flying off to a family reunion, was a sizable check and a note:
Do not be baffled, in the present rush, by the enclosed check. Simply endorse and deposit it by mail. It comes as a result of our decision to begin some bequests now, gradually, after talks with our lawyer, Ruth Hall, who was here on a visit from Kansas City this summer. Once, you know, we wanted to will you our house, but your joint establishments in Vermont seem so much better suited to your needs that a property this far away in Maine would only be an encumbrance, we realize. Besides, this is a year in which you could surely use some extra cash, and I think that you should use this check right now, and not travel too economically for your comfort and health. . . .
Much love from both of us to all of you,
Grace11
The improvement in Frick’s health that had allowed her to resume the work she so enjoyed around the grounds of Petite Plaisance was also showing up in the form of energy devoted to literary work. During the first few months of 1978, Frick was hand-correcting the manuscript and later the proofs of a new edition of Sous bénéfice d’inventaire, tracking the successive publications of the Selma Lagerlöf essay, and helping Yourcenar with professional correspondence.12 She was also making advance arrangements for a growing number of media personalities, and hosting them during their sessions at Petite Plaisance.
Among the latter, most momentously, was the first trip to Northeast Harbor of the French television host Maurice Dumay with a crew that included Dumay’s “friend,” Jerry Wilson. It was on April 30, 1978, that Grace Frick wrote in the daybook, “First week in May, May 3–6, French Television coming to Northeast Harbor FR3, Paris: Producteur, Maurice Dumay (friend, Jerry Wilson =) Photographer.” Late in her life, Yourcenar reread the daybooks and put three big crosses in the slot for April 30. On May 1 she wrote, “Maurice Jerry.”13 Dumay would return to Petite Plaisance the following November with Jerry, to do a bit more filming and recording.14
Speaking of Jerry years later, Yourcenar would say that he had spent his early years in Louisiana, where his family owned a fifteen-hundred-acre farm along the Mississippi River. The farm was sold when Wilson’s grandparents died, and the family then moved to Arkansas. At the age of twenty-two, Jerry went to Paris, knowing not a word of French, to become a tennis instructor. He subsequently met Jean-Marie Grénier, a videographer for Air France, thanks to whom he became a professional photographer. Since his youth he had had a passion for American black music of all kinds.15
Grace Frick and Jerry Wilson became immediate friends, a fact often ascribed to their common Southern heritage.16 But Frick was not a Southerner. What she and Jerry shared was their love of music, their sympathetic respect for African Americans, and their opposition to racial injustice. Grace had always been a lover of young people and a tireless if occasionally overzealous promoter of their intellectual development. Jerry was a handsome, soft-spoken twenty-nine-year-old when he first came to Northeast Harbor that May. Frick likely saw him as someone whose future she could help to shape.
One way or another, Frick and young Wilson grew warmly attached to each another. Jerry later told a friend that between Frick and Yourcenar, Grace was “the kinder of the two.”17 He even made the long trip to Northeast Harbor in August or September of 1979 solely to call on Frick when she was gravely ill.18 Jerry Wilson may have been the last in a long line of young people, going back to Norah Tapley at Hartford Junior College and including Larry, Richard, and Anita Minear, David Peckham, and Julia and Hall Willkie, among others, with whom Grace formed strong bonds of mutual affection over the years. I have already mentioned Yourcenar’s memory of Grace and Jerry standing side by side in a halo of light, their affection for each other spilling over onto her.19 Sometime in 1981 she told a friend that “Grace and Jerry were one of the most beautiful harmonies of my life.”20
Nine days after Dumay and Wilson finished their assignment in Northeast Harbor and flew back to Paris, Frick’s by that time yearlong spell of exceptional well-being came to an end. On May 15, 1978, Grace was on the south porch of Petite Plaisance when a high wind sent the kitchen door flying and knocked her to the ground.21 She had broken the humerus in her left arm. After four days in a cast at the Bar Harbor Hospital, she was transferred to the orthopedic unit of the Eastern Maine Medical Center. There they fit her with an arm sling and swath to immobilize her shoulder, itself broken eighteen years earlier in another bad fall.22
What might have been simply an unfortunate accident for someone whose underlying health was stronger dealt Frick a major blow. On June 20 Grace began doing pendulum exercises for her shoulder, which increased the swelling of her already bloated left arm.23 We can judge how devastating her injury was by the importance it acquired in the daybook and by how long it remained prominent there. Every Monday for four straight months, until September 4, 1978, Frick noted how many weeks it had been since the accident. Between August 6 and December 8, she reported a total of fifty sessions of physical therapy at the Mount Desert Island Hospital in addition to the exercises she had done during the first two months after she fell. But, as always, Grace was determined to recover; when the couple’s friend and neighbor Maria Giulia Vitelli broke her hip on June 21, Grace was at her house the next day—and for the next three days in a row—doing everything she could to help.24
Nor did Frick’s compromised state keep her from following through with a plan she and Yourcenar had made to see the “Pompeian exhibit” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a reminder of the years spent bringing Hadrian into the world. Pompeii AD 79 featured artifacts from the day in August 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic lava and ash. Mary Jordan, owner with her husband of Northeast Harbor’s Pine Tree Market, drove the couple to Boston on July 7, an extremely hot and humid day. They stayed at the Copley Plaza. After exploring the exhibit for five hours that afternoon and evening, the women dined in the Plaza Bar and Dining Room, with its rich oak paneling and walls lined with books. The next morning they were back at the museum for several more hours—of Japanese, Chinese, and Egyptian art this time. Since they had a willing chauffeur in Mrs. Jordan, they stopped on the way home at the Portland Museum of Art to see early French and American impressionists. They even made a detour to coastal Wiscasset to have dinner with the Hazeltons.25 When Marguerite reread the daybooks late in her life, she put five large crosses next to Frick’s description of this trip, the largest number of these symbols of pleasure ever used all at once anywhere in the engagement calendars.
By mid-July it had been two months since Frick’s fall—and twenty years, as she noted in the daybook, since her mastectomy.26 Nurses had begun coming three times a week to help Frick exercise by holding her heavy left arm away from her body. Eventually, they would fit her with a Jobst sleeve in an effort to counteract the swelling. Sometime during that same year, in what one hopes was a very private location, Yourcenar added some current remarks to a sheaf of notes she had composed about The Abyss between 1965 and 1968. They would eventually be published in a second, posthumous Pléiade edition of her fictional works. Comparing herself to Zeno, and alluding to the titles of the second and third major parts of that novel, she wrote,
My immobility dates back almost ten years. (1978)
In certain respects, “prison” rather than “immobility,” since it is no longer up to me to walk through the open door.
Obsession with illness observed in another.27
Whether Frick ever read these comments we don’t know, but they suggest, among other things, the kind of atmosphere that reigned at Petite Plaisance when Frick was overwhelmed by the challenges with which she had no choice but to contend.
It was likely in the summer of 1978 that an incident occurred which may show how bad things could get. John Olin stopped by Petite Plaisance one day, as he had many times over the years since Frick and Yourcenar had befriended him in the mid-1960s. This time, as he would later recall, things took a startling turn:
Here’s what happened, and this has always been . . . one of the unresolved questions of my life. I came back . . . for my summer visit, and I had a wonderful talk with Madame, I thought. She was warm as ever. And I guess Grace was there, she was bringing the tea things and here and there, but I remember mostly Madame. Um . . . And then when I left, I walked out the kitchen. And I . . . I was on the little porch, on the step landing, and Grace turned to me, and almost turned on me and said . . . she said some terrible things to me. I . . . I was totally taken by surprise.
Olin could not recall Frick’s exact words, but he remembered her calling him selfish and telling him not to come back.28
What caused Frick to attack John Olin that day we will doubtless never know. The man I met at Petite Plaisance some thirty years later was a warm, thoughtful, and considerate person. He was also a writer whose connection with an author like Marguerite Yourcenar had meant a lot to him. As a result of Frick’s remarks, that connection was severed. Olin himself had the idea after learning from a Yourcenar biography how much Frick suffered in the last years of her life, that “perhaps she was not well toward the end of the seventies and maybe was concerned about who would be in Madame’s life after her.”29 Indeed, in Jerry Wilson, she may already have anointed her successor. It is also possible that John became the unwitting target of anger that had nothing to do with him. We have already seen Yourcenar speak of the mental “short-circuits” and unusual irritability to which her companion was subject as early as mid-1976. It was incredibly frustrating for Frick, after enduring for years a treatment regime that kept her alive but in nearly unrelenting distress, to have finally regained a measure of her customary vigor only to be laid low again for months on end. Frick had been walloped by her own back door in the midst of a miraculous reprieve from her illness. Olin may have been collateral damage.
Almost thirty years later an old friend of Jerry Wilson’s who once traveled with Yourcenar late in her life would propose another theory. “Perhaps out of jealousy,” asserted Jean-Marie Grénier, “Grace had for a long time driven away visitors who struck her as troublesome. Especially if a certain friendship might be born of the encounter. Jerry continued that tradition; he even created new taboos to protect the great lady. The frequent meals she had at my place occurred in the strictest privacy: on those rare occasions when there were guests, their names had to be submitted for his approval.”30
If in fact the gregarious Frick was in the business of fending people off at that time of her life, she wasn’t doing a very good job of it. Old friends and new acquaintances were constantly coming to Petite Plaisance that summer and fall. One Sunday in August, eleven adults and three children came to call between noon and nine at night. The person the couple saw the most of that summer, though, was Gertrude Fay, the octogenarian world traveler who unfailingly brought Frick and Yourcenar a gift she knew would please them. This time it was an English translation of François Villon’s Poems.31 Gertrude came to Petite Plaisance for tea or supper with her friends at least once a week well into the fall of 1978. For Gertrude’s ninetieth birthday, Grace, perhaps inspired by Villon, composed a poem in Fay’s honor, “Portrait of a Non-Jamesian Lady”:
Who wears a weary air
And yields to dull despair
When “tout reste à faire”?
Not Gertrude!
Who is it that has said,
“The book’s too long to be read.
This poem’s over my head”?
Not Gertrude!
Who minds the plane’s confines,
Or fellow tourists’ whines,
Or lack of food or wines?
Never Gertrude!
* * *
Who never takes her ease
The best chair for to seize?
Emits nor cough nor sneeze
(Not even in the Hebrides)?
’Tis Gertrude.
Who is that lady fair,
With smooth, undistraught hair,
Sniffing the desert air
To track the lion to his lair?
Behold, ’tis Gertrude!
Who may this paragon be,
Of virtues rare to see,
This spirit of sheer energy?
’Tis none but GERTRUDE!!!32
Gertrude Fay turned ninety on November 24, 1978. On that same date Grace Frick stopped taking tamoxifen.33 Had the drug stopped working, as Dr. Parrot once warned her it might? No explanation is given in the daybook. As Grace wrote to Gladys Minear that month, she and Marguerite were planning to keep “very quiet for both of the coming holidays,” though the president of Harvard University and his wife would be coming by on Thanksgiving afternoon to meet Marguerite. Realizing perhaps at some level that her prospects for the future might be dimming, Grace signed off from this friend of nearly fifty years on a rare note of wistfulness: “Now goodnight, until 1979, with love from your New Haven, Whitney Avenue, acquaintance. It never seems very long ago to me, the calendar notwithstanding.”34
It had been a custom for a few years now that Frick and Yourcenar shared Christmas dinner with island friends Mary Louise and Robert Garrity. The author later told Matthieu Galey about the Christmas of 1978 by way of illustrating that one encountered indifference and hostility in a Maine village “somewhat less often” than in New York or Paris. Though Frick “‘went out’ very little” at that time in her life, Yourcenar said,
it was agreed that the four of us would have dinner together and that no other guests would be invited, in order to avoid tiring our ailing companion. On Christmas morning I picked up the telephone and heard the sound of Mrs. G’s voice. “In the village this morning,” she said, “I ran into the man who sweeps the streets. It’s no secret that his wife has just left him and their fourteen-year-old son. I invited both of them. I hope you won’t mind and hope that Grace won’t find them too tiring.” Of course we didn’t mind, and that night all six of us shared a fine Christmas dinner in front of the fireplace, enjoying a warm feeling of friendship.35
It was Grace Frick’s last Christmas.