My first visit to the United States I hitchhiked from San Francisco to Clairmont near Los Angeles to give a reading. After my reading a man, a lecturer at the college, gave me a poem he said he’d gotten from a Hungarian children’s writer he’d once encountered in a forest in Mexico. After that I had an appointment to meet a runaway from Ireland, a girl. The venue was a mauve-painted wooden house high above Point Lobos where Robert Louis Stevenson had sojourned. By coincidence, this was the home of the Hungarian the academic had met in the Mexican forest. The old man, a disciple of Gurdjïeff, black beret on his head and a Santa Claus beard which sprouted out over a crisp red checked shirt and under eyes that seemed to stare out from an enmeshment of thoughts, had left Hungary when he was twenty-six. He’d brought with him to America a collection of poems by the Hungarian poet Endre Ady and it was one of these poems he’d translated which had been the gift, the almost ritualistic gift by all accounts, in the Mexican forest.
I am as everyman, Majesty, North Pole.
Mystery, Strangeness.
Eerie distant light.
Eerie distant light.
And reading Marguerite Yourcenar, another escapee from Europe, who lived for fifty years by the ocean on the other side of America, I continually recalled those lines which had been infused for me by the experience of Point Lobos – lighthouses, the Pacific with its baskets of surf rhythmically rolling in and, if you get close, seals always rising in the water. Yes, her intimate, her almost conniving sympathy with animals was part of it. ‘A hare which my young hunter had tamed with great effort was caught and torn by the hounds, sole woe of shadowless days.’ In another book a hare is sent back to his late medieval roaming ground where the air is mellifluously cadenced by ‘the woodpecker’s drill and the jay’s cry’ rather than be cooked for dinner; lions who mangle criminals in ancient Rome incommodiously weep for the dog who lived with them and has been taken away from them. A young white Russian girl spits in the face of the sexually withheld young man she is in love with under a critical object – a motheaten squirrel in a vest and Tyrolese hat.
Marguerite Yourcenar elevates the vulnerability of all living things and vouches over and over again, painfully, with austerity, for the majesty of everyman, be he philosopher or labourer, against a world which has violence on all sides of it, a world, for all its occasional lushness, she finally admitted she felt was ‘without a future’.
As with John Berger, history for Marguerite Yourcenar is always contemporary, always in parallel with our own lives, but for her it has a more mystical sense to it. For her all history lives deep within us so that by those secret areas touched, those areas activated by a brew of will-power and divine intervention, we can journey back randomly, can treat ourselves to diorama-views of other ages. By invoking scenes of history she endeavours to decipher our present age ‘without a future’ and perhaps by so doing, by the chiaroscuro graft upon graft of historical parallel, she gives it a chance of rescue.
In The Abyss (1968) religious frenzy and zeal are shown disintegrating into madness, the Anabaptists who have taken over the city of Munster having elected a leader who is ghoulish, mardi-gras and greedy in a way we would recognize all too readily now. There’s a familar showmanship in his greed.
The first official mourning was for the death of Jan Matthyjs, killed while leading thirty men (and a host of angels) in a sortie attempted against the Bishop’s army. Immediately after this disaster, Hans Bockhold was proclaimed Prophet King; wearing a royal crown and mounted on a horse irreverently caparisoned with a chasuble, he took office on the open space before the church. Soon a platform was erected where the new David sat enthroned each morning, rendering decisions without appeal on matters both terrestrial and celestial. A few felicitous excursions, which had overturned the Bishop’s kitchen tents and produced a booty of pigs and hens, were occasion for a feast on this platform, accompanied by the music of fifes; when the enemy’s kitchen boys, taken prisoner, were forced to prepare the viands and then were killed by the pommeling and kicking of the crowd, Hilzonda laughed with the rest of the company.
In Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) the Emperor Hadrian watches Antinous, his boy lover, being buried, the pompous incarceration underground. The seeming passivity of death is meditated upon and wrested with, by the force and even the mania of the meditation thus challenged, a challenge which reverberates, which ricochets with almost one voice, with one quest, through the whole of Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction.
The youth from Claudiopolis was descending into the tomb like a Pharaoh, or a Ptolemy. There we left him, alone. He was entering upon that endless tenure, without air, without light, without change of season, compared with which every life seems short; such was the stability to which he had attained, such perhaps was the peace. Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact he had been.
Hadrian, like Marguerite Yourcenar, is a mixture of races, Spanish by birth, Roman by parentage, Greek by inclination. He scours the known world, fretting from landscape to landscape, from one hue to another, always approximating, knowing one apparently decisive landscape is inveigled by three or four other landscapes, that national blood is always linked with that of three or four other nationalities.
Born Belgian, of a French father, Marguerite Yourcenar adventurously travelled Europe between the wars, probably in ‘a third class seat in those carriages reserved since time immemorial for prophets, for the poor, for soldiers on leave, for messiahs’. Just before the war she left for the United States where she settled on an island off Maine, finding special empathy in her new country with the Blacks of the Southern States, an eloquent, keening people. Likewise Zeno, the Reformation scientist hero of The Abyss, determinedly travels Europe from north to south, dipping into the Orient which provides him with an all-important whiff of Sufi philosophy, coming as it does from the Dervish Derazi, a dissident like Zeno, in his case a Muslim dissident, a refraction in the way Marguerite Yourcenar peoples the world with refractions, sometimes even, at heightened moments of flight, the one person breaking down into a kaleidoscope of refractions, the journey invoking multiples of people within the one journey-crazed person, giving an epic dimension, beloved of the kind of historian Marguerite Yourcenar is, to the one frail being.
An object brought from Italy was hanging on the wall of the small antechamber, a Florentine mirror in a tortoise-shell frame, formed from a combination of some twenty little convex mirrors hexagonal in shape, like the cells of a beehive, and each mirror enclosed, in its turn, by a narrow border which had once been the shell of a living creature. Zeno looked at himself there in the grey light of a Parisian dawn. What he saw was twenty figures compressed and reduced by the laws of optics, twenty images of a man in a fur bonnet, of haggard and sallow complexion, with gleaming eyes which were themselves mirrors. The man in flight, enclosed within a world of his own, separated from others like himself who were also in flight in worlds parallel to his, recalled to him the hypothesis of the Greek Democritus, about an infinite series of identical universes in each of which lives and dies imprisoned a series of philosophers.
At one point in Zeno’s journeys, as if in retort to Hadrian’s meditations on death, he accompanies an old monk who searches through the charcoaled remains of a Jew burned to death, for the ‘luz’, the bone which cannot be consumed, the axiom of the resurrection, the seed which makes the individual what is for the moment ‘the inaccesible fire of the stars’.
The stars play a dynamic part in the fiction of Marguerite Yourcenar. One can imagine that when she made her home on Mount Desert Island, terrain which reeked of mysterious Indian civilizations, the Micmac and Abenaki who would once appear there during the fishing season, she must have had spectacular views of the stars, views which one would never have got in Europe and which would have inspired passages in Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss – the stars as pulverizers of time, outlying vistas of them cohering the perspective of the centuries, making the moment to hand diamond, riveting in its possibilities.
Here at the Villa I have built an observatory, but I can no longer climb its steps. Once in my life I did a rarer thing. I made a sacrifice to the constellations of an entire night. It was after my visit to Osroes, coming back through the Syrian desert: lying on my back, wide awake but abandoning for some hours every human concern, I gave myself up from nightfall to dawn to this world of crystal and flame. That was the most glorious of all my voyages. (Memoirs of Hadrian.)
At other times the stars are magical but misleading in their allure – those who are unduly fascinated by them are those who don’t know their own heart and will betray you.
All that winter, high up between the lake’s frozen plains and the cold sky, peering from the recess of a tall window, the philosopher would compute the positions of such stars as might bring good or bad fortune to the house of Vasa. He was aided in this task by the heir to the throne, young Prince Eric, for whom these dangerous sciences held an unwholesome attraction. In vain did Zeno remind him that the stars, though they influence our destinies, do not determine them: and that our lives are regulated by the heart, that fiery star palpitating in the dark of our bodies, suspended there in its cage of flesh and bone, as strong and mysterious as the stars above, and obeying laws more complicated than the laws we make ourselves. ( The Abyss)
Sex – settling in beside someone (‘with the tranquillity of a spouse’), ‘the sound of a cry’ in love-making, the ‘ardent love of the human body’ – can be a foothold to an experience of the eternal, can annihilate for moments our apparent imprisonment in time. But of all areas in Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction the area of sex is the most changeable, the meditation on it the most quixotic. For Hadrian sensuality is religion.
I have sometimes thought of constructing a system of human knowledge which would be based on eroticism, a theory of contact wherein the mysterious value of each being is to offer to us just that point of perspective which another world affords. In such a philosophy pleasure would be a more complete but also specialized form of approach to the other, one more technique of getting to know what is not ourselves. In the least sensual encounters it is still in our contacts that emotion begins, or ends; the somewhat repugnant hand of the old woman who presents me her petition, the moist brow of my father in death’s agony, the wound I wash for an injured soldier.
But for the next of Marguerite Yourcenar’s great heroes, Zeno, sex, like Eric the son of the King of Sweden, is a betrayer.
For he continued to consider love’s burning mysteries as the only means of access for many of us to that fiery realm of which we are perhaps the infinitesimal sparks. But the sublime ascent of such experience is of brief duration, and he wondered whether an act so subject to material routines, and so dependent upon the instruments of physical generation, is not a thing for the philosopher to try, but then to renounce thereafter. Chastity, which he had once viewed as a superstition to be fought, now appeared to him as one aspect of his serenity: that detached understanding which one has of others when one no longer desires them was greatly to his liking.
When Zeno finds tranquillity, in anonymity, in Bruges, helping the poor through his profession as a doctor it is the world of eroticism which betrays his tranquillity, a world his young monk-helper becomes absorbed in – the interpretation is Gnostic, the experience is rapturous, the methods are fascinating but they lead to death, to downfall, the shattering of a prolonged serenity.
… a fair damsel enters a fountain’s basin to bathe, accompanied by her lovers; two other lovers, revealed only by the position of their bare feet, are embracing behind a curtain. A youth tenderly parts the knees of a beloved object who resembles him like a brother. From the mouth and private orifice of a boy, prostrate on hands and knees, branch delicate flowers, growing up towards the heavens. A Moorish maiden carries a gigantic red raspberry on a tray.
The young musician in Alexis (1929) sees the denial of sex as sin; during his genteel upbringing in Austria he thought a less lonely existence would be more pure. But for a similiar hero of an early novel, the young Prussian officer afloat among White Russians in Coup de Grâce (1939), his own strangeness is less a love of boys than a love of solitude. Throughout these early novels, whether in sex or in solitude, one is aware in these characters of what Frederick Prokosch calls ‘deep, unshatterable innocence’. Later it is more complicated, the attitude to sex is shirty. ‘Names (like sodomite) bear no relation to facts; they stand only for what the herd imagines.’ (The Abyss) And at possibly the overall moment of crescendo in the fiction of Marguerite Yourcenar, the death of the simple, labouring, seventeenth-century man Nathaniel in An Obscure Man (1982), there is what seems like testimony, concessions to sexuality but acknowledgement of androgyny as wisdom.
He had, rarely it is true, known the carnal brootherhood other men had shared with him; he didn’t feel less a man for that. People falsify everything, it seemed to him, in taking such little account of the flexibility and resources of the human being, so like the plant which seeks out the sun or water and nourishes itself fairly well from whatever earth the wind has sown in it. Custom more than nature seemed to him to dictate the differences set up between classes of men, the habits and knowledge acquired from infancy, or the ways of praying to what is called God. Ages, sex, or even species seemed to him closer one to another than each generally assumed about the other: child or old man, man or woman, animal or biped who speaks and works with his hands, all came together in the misery and sweetness of existence.
Just as Marguerite Yourcenar says of Cavafy’s Antony, that he was in love with Alexandria more than with Cleopatra, so it very often seems that Hadrian is more in love with the landscapes in which his affair is happening rather than with the person himself. And it is to a landscape much like Mount Desert Island, in a Das Lied von der Erde accumulation of atmosphere, that the penultimate of Marguerite Yourcenar’s heroes comes to die, a death as total in its description as the death of J.T. Malone in Carson McCullers’s Clock Without Hands, which is prefigured by an ever greater emphasis on the physical, the ‘egg in the milkshake’ for instance. ‘The death of each man is like him,’ Chekhov says. What Nathaniel’s death tells us, maybe, is that it’s best to live simply, to make simple, everyday things our mainstay, that art, as Bruce Chatwin finally reminded us, ‘always lets you down’.
‘Dear God, when shall I die?’ Right from the outset of Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction there’s this obsession with death, with lying down. In the tumult of Nathaniel’s approaching death words, vocabulary, books, the idea of them, are discarded.
But it seemed to him now that the books he had managed to read (should one judge all books by them?) had given him very little, less perhaps than the enthusiasm or thought he had brought to them; in any case, he considered it would be wrong not to concentrate on the world he had in front of him, now and for so little time to come, and which had, as it were, fallen to him by chance. To read books was like swigging brandy: it was a way of numbing oneself into not being there.
Sometimes reservations are set aside and words are the most rapturous of human creative possibilities.
Magic, above all, is the virulent force of words, which are always stronger than the things for which they stand: their power justifies what is said about them in Sepher Yetsira, not to mention between us the Gospel According to Saint John.
But even early on, in Alexis, words are found brutally inadequate to describe cataclysm. ‘Words serve so many people, Monique, that they are no longer useful to anyone.’ Even Zeno, sage, philospher, alchemist, doctor, tells us that he has ‘almost come to the point of distrusting words’. In one of his bids to escape his terrible destiny, to shake it off, he begins a journey on a country lane and in the strange calm that sometimes sets in at moments when circumstances seem to ask for disturbance he finds that words, concepts lift from him and that he is at peace.
For a moment he called to mind the alchemical concept of viriditas, of the innocent piercing through of Being from within the nature of things, a blade of life in its purest form; but then he ceased to pursue all such thoughts in order to give himself over entirely to the purity of the morning.
Paul Klee wrote of his art in similar terms.
In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me … I was listening … I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it … I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out.
The creation of the character of Zeno, the most weighty of Marguerite Yourcenar’s characterizations, was partly inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, and D. H. Lawrence’s partial opprobium for Leonardo comes to mind when I am confronted with some of Zeno’s self-wrangles.
There is, I think, this strain of cold dislike, or self-dislike, through much of the Renaissance art, and through all the later Shakespeare. In Shakespeare it is a kind of corruption in the flesh and a conscious revolt from this. A sense of corruption in the flesh makes Hamlet frenzied for he will never admit that it is his own flesh. Leonardo da Vinci is the same, but Leonardo loves the corruption maliciously. Michelangelo rejects any corruption, he stands by the flesh, the flesh only.1
Zeno is both a Leonardo and a Michelangelo; he savours both these opposite reactions and perhaps this is some of the clue to the English title The Abyss, the abyss between sensual totality and intellectual hesitance, as it is between thought and word, the route of identity Sophie in Coup de Grâce takes between White Russia and the Bolsheviks, between counterfeit, short-changed self and real, heroic self, for real self is always heroic for Marguerite Yourcenar as it was for Pasternak.
Never mind. That disjunction, that break in continuity, that ‘night of the soul’ which so many of us experienced at the time, each in his own way (and so often in far more tragic and final form than I did), was essential, perhaps in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from my true self.
Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction, taken as a visionary whole, scrupulously signposts the route through self-deceit, sabotaged potential, to luminous, to heroic, to majestic, although very often doomed, self.
Contemplating Etruscan effigies in Italy Lawrence, who elsewhere splenetically felt that we have many souls, was struck by this life force which exists from birth to death. ‘So within each man is the quick of him, when he is a baby, and when he is old, the same quick: some spark, some unborn and undying vivid life-electron.’1 From her own struggle against assaults on this life-electron Marguerite Yourcenar gives us talismans not just to protect it in ourselves but to reacquaint ourselves with it: the furrow of a river in a medieval landscape, the whiff of cherry brandy in the air, the resonance of eglantine placed between the pages of a book.
Hadrian saw our world as one always bound to self-destroy and be born again from chaos; art is the major regenerator and, with the epic view of her art as well as its personal one, Marguerite Yourcenar is a builder in Yeats’s sense, an almost naïve connotation of the word now.
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.
My first visit to the United States, shortly after an experience of Belfast and street killings there, I walked among beach nasturtiums on the Californian coast. The nasturtiums trembled with light. For moments I had escaped; the fire of the nasturtiums, the palpitations in them on a clear day, was a transcendence. Those seaboard nasturtiums, a snowy-bearded Hungarian with plaintive, almost tremulous cat’s eyes under a black beret, make me think now of Marguerite Yourcenar, someone who understood violence and not only went beyond it but created a force of beauty in that domain beyond it which might help to barter, in Dostoevsky’s sense of redemptive beauty, a world which is mostly horrible but still offers perspectives of the Pacific, the surf rolling in, dark verdure immortalized by Robert Louis Stevenson sloping down to it, and the odd seal lifting his head, in a kind of sympathy with us, above the surf.
Like Lawrence, like Faulkner, like Christ, ‘the man with hair infected by a vermin of stars’, whose teachings are ‘not unlike those of Orpheus’, by the intensity of her words she creates a beauty to combat the attacks of chaos and makes us understand the unity of all historical epochs, the ‘lilies of the field’, the ‘wild flower’ of every epoch; she penetrates the mysterious veil between time and eternity as Hadrian did for moments in Syria on a night of ‘crystal and flame’, as two boy lovers do, lying arms outstretched to create wings in the snow; she guides us to the precipice of a world an old Brahmin joined with when he threw himself into a fire, leaving the melancholy echo of a woman’s song in the desert night.