THE ART OF FICTION NO.

103

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

I had an appointment with Marguerite Yourcenar on Saturday,

November 14, 1987, at her hotel in Amsterdam. I was told that
she had not arrived, that several people had been looking for her,
including her driver, and that no one knew where she was. Further
telephone calls to her home in Maine and to her publishers in Paris
revealed that she had had a slight stroke and was recovering, and
that there was no cause for concern. She did not recover, and died
on December 18. She was eighty-four.
I had first interviewed her on April 11 in London and later
sent her the typescript for corrections. It had come back with a
good deal of amendment, carefully written on the text and on sep-
arate sheets of paper. I was grateful that she had taken so much
trouble over it, but she was still not quite satisfied and wanted to
see me again, go through it with me and make sure that everything
was exactly as she intended. I was happily anticipating our meet-
ing in Amsterdam, but it was not to be. The following introduc-
tion was written after our meeting in London. I have left it in the
present tense.
Marguerite Yourcenar has the ardent imagination and clear,
intense blue eyes of her Flemish ancestors. The rich, many colored
subtlety of her great novels—Memoirs of Hadrian, The Abyss,
Alexis, Coup de Grace, and others—is reminiscent of their intri-
cate tapestries, while her sublime mystical appreciation of nature
and its beauty evokes the golden age of landscape painting in the
low countries. For years she has been considered one of France’s
most distinguished and original writers; yet it was not until 1981,
when she was the first woman ever to “join the Immortals” and be
elected to the French Academy in the four hundred years of its
existence, that she was discovered by the general public.
Marguerite Yourcenar was born in 1903 into a patrician
Franco-Belgian family. (Yourcenar is an anagram of her real name
à particule, de Crayencour.) Her mother died of puerperal fever
shortly after her birth, and she was brought up by her father, a
great reader and traveler, who taught her Latin and Greek and read
the French classics with her. They lived in various European coun-
tries, and she learned English and Italian as well.
She published two volumes of poetry in her teens, “which are
frankly oeuvres de jeunesse and never to be republished.” Her two
novellas, Alexis and Coup de Grâce, appeared in 1929 and 1939
respectively (during which time she lived mostly in Greece) and
won her critical acclaim. In 1938 she met Grace Frick in Paris,
who later “admirably translated” three of her major books. When
the war came in 1939 and she could not return to Greece, she was
offered hospitality in the U.S. by Grace Frick, “since she had not
the means of living in Paris.” To support herself, she took a teach-
ing job at Sarah Lawrence College. She also began to write her
masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian, which was published in 1954.
In 1950 Yourcenar and Frick bought a house in Mount Desert
Island, off the coast of Maine, where they lived between long jour-
neys abroad. Grace Frick died in 1979 after a long illness, but
Marguerite Yourcenar still lives there, though she continues to
travel extensively.
Her latest book, Two Lives and a Dream, was published
recently in England, and she is now working on Le Labyrinthe du
monde, completing the autobiographical triptych that began with

2 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Souvenirs pieux and Archives du nord. She has just written a long
essay on Borges—a lecture given recently at Harvard.
Marguerite Yourcenar’s intellectual vigor and curiosity are still
prodigious, despite age and an open-heart operation two years
ago. She has just translated James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner and
Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern No Plays into French from the orig-
inal Engish and Japanese, helped for the latter by her friend
J. M. Shisagi, Mishima’s executor. She was in London briefly for
the publication of Two Lives and a Dream, and this interview took
place at her hotel in Chelsea. She was elegantly dressed in black
and white and spoke an exquisite French, with a markedly patri-
cian accent, in a deep, mellifluous tone.
—Shusha Guppy, 1988

INTERVIEWER
You have just spent the day in Richmond; was it just to walk
in the beautiful park there or for some other reason?

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Well, it had to do with the book I am writing at the moment,
which is a book built entirely of memories, and in the present
chapter I evoke the fourteen months I spent in England when I was
twelve and we lived in Richmond. But where exactly I can’t recall.
I saw dozens of little houses in as many streets, all looking alike,
with tiny gardens, but I couldn’t tell which one was ours. It was
during the first and second years of World War I, which, unlike the
Second World War, did not drop from the sky in England—there
were no bomb alerts or blitzes. I used to go for long walks in Rich-
mond Park on fine days and to museums in London when it
rained. I saw the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and went to
the Victoria and Albert frequently. I used to drop my sweet wrap-
pings in a porcelain dragon there—I bet they’re still there!

THE PARIS REVIEW 3

INTERVIEWER
What is your new book to be called?

YOURCENAR
The French title is Quoi? L’Eternité, which is from a poem of
Rimbaud’s—“Quoi? L’Eternité, elle est retrouvée.” The book is the
third volume of my memoirs. The other two are being translated
into Engish at the moment. There are certain words one can’t
translate literally, and one has to change them. For example the
first volume is called Souvenirs pieux in French, and I have trans-
lated it as Dear Departed, which conveys the same nuance of
irony. The second volume is called Archives du nord, but “the
north” in another language evokes a different image—in England
“the north” refers to Manchester, or even Scotland; in Holland it
is the Fresian Isles, which has nothing to do with the north of
France. So I have changed it completely, and taken the first line of
a Bob Dylan song—“Blowin’ in the Wind.” I quote the song inside
as an epigraph, “How many roads must a man walk down /
Before you can call him a man?” It is very beautiful, don’t you
think? At least it defines well my father’s life, and many lives. But
to come to the present volume, I don’t think “Quoi? L’Eternité”
would work in English, and we will have to find another title.
Among the Elizabethan poets there must be quantities of quota-
tions about eternity, so I think I might find something there.

INTERVIEWER
Let’s go back to the beginning. You were very close to your
father. He encouraged you to write and he published your first
poems. It was a limited edition, and I believe is now unobtainable.
What do you think of them in retrospect?

YOURCENAR
My father had them published at his own expense—a sort of
compliment from him. He shouldn’t have done it—they were not
much good. I was only sixteen. I liked writing, but I had no liter-

4 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
ary ambitions. I had all these characters and stories in me, but I
had hardly any knowledge of history and none of life to do any-
thing with them. I could say that all my books were conceived by
the time I was twenty, although they were not to be written for
another thirty or forty years. But perhaps this is true of most writ-
ers—the emotional storage is done very early on.

INTERVIEWER
This relates to what you once said, that “books are not life,
only its ashes.” Do you still believe that?

YOURCENAR
Yes, but books are also a way of learning to feel more acutely.
Writing is a way of going to the depth of Being.

INTERVIEWER
From your father’s death, in 1929, to 1939 you only published
two novellas, Alexis and Coup de Grâce, which you said were
based on people you knew. Who were they?

YOURCENAR
My father loved an extraordinary woman, exceedingly free in
her private life, yet of an almost heroic morality. She chose to
remain with her husband though her real attraction was for a man
who was Alexis. As for Coup de Grâce, I can now tell you that
Sophie is very close to me at twenty, and Eric, the young man
ardently attached to her own brother whom she falls in love with,
was someone I knew, but political problems separated us. Of
course one never knows how close fictional characters are to real
people. At the beginning of my memoirs I say, “L’être que j’appelle
moi”—the person I call myself—which means that I don’t know
who I am. Does one ever?

INTERVIEWER
Next came Memoirs of Hadrian, which was immediately

THE PARIS REVIEW 5

hailed as a masterpiece and became a best-seller all over the world.
Why did you choose the historical novel as a genre?

YOURCENAR
I have never written a historical novel in my life. I dislike most
historical novels. I wrote a monologue about Hadrian’s life, as it
could have been seen by himself. I can point out that this treatise-
monologue was a common literary genre of the period and that
others besides Hadrian had done it. Hadrian is a very intelligent
man, enriched by all the traditions of his time, while Zenon, the
protagonist of The Abyss [L’Oeuvre au noir] is also very intelligent
and in advance of his time—indeed of all other epochs too—and is
defeated at the end. Nathanaël, the hero of the third panel, Two
Lives and a Dream, is by contrast a simple, nearly uneducated man
who dies at twenty-eight of tuberculosis. He is a sailor at first who
becomes shipwrecked off the coast of Maine in America, marries a
girl who dies of TB, travels back to England and Holland, marries
a second time a woman who turns out to be a thief and a prosti-
tute, and is finally taken up by a wealthy Dutch family. For the first
time he comes into contact with culture—listens to music, looks at
paintings, lives in luxury. But he keeps a clear head and sharp eyes,
because he knows that while he is listening to music in the hospi-
tal, opposite his house, men and women are suffering and dying of
disease. Eventually he is sent away to an island in the north and
dies in peace, surrounded by wild animals and nature. The ques-
tion is how far can one go without accepting any culture. The
answer is, for Nathanaël, very far, through lucidity of mind and
humility of heart.

INTERVIEWER
You met Grace Frick, who later translated Hadrian, in 1938.
Did you move to the States straight away?

YOURCENAR
At first only for a few months. I was living in Greece then, in

6 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Athens. I came to Paris for a visit and the war broke out. I could
not go back to Greece and had no money to live in Paris. Grace,
with infinite kindness, asked me to come to America for a while. I
thought it would be for six months, but there I still am!

INTERVIEWER
What made you choose Mount Desert Island?

YOURCENAR
We had a friend who was a professor of theology at Yale. In
1940 he took a house in Maine while he was on sabbatical, and
asked his friends to come and stay. Grace and I went to visit him,
and thought that it would be nice to have a house in this still, then,
peaceful island. Grace went all over the villages on horseback and
became known as “the lady who is looking for a house”! There
were luxury houses, sort of chalets for millionnaires, or village
houses with no facilities, and nothing in between. We finally
bought a simple house and modernized it, putting in central heat-
ing and a few other amenities. Did you know that Mount Desert
was discovered by the French sailor and explorer Champlain? His
ship developed some trouble and he had to stay there for a while
to have it repaired. He named it Mount Desert, but alas it is now
anything but deserted, and in summer boatloads of tourists pour
in from everywhere.

INTERVIEWER
One striking aspect of your work is that nearly all your pro-
tagonists have been male homosexuals—Alexis, Eric, Hadrian,
Zenon, Mishima. Why is it that you have never created a woman
who would be an example of female sexual deviance?

YOURCENAR
I do not like the word homosexual, which I think is danger-
ous—for it enhances prejudice—and absurd. Say “gay” if you
must. Anyway, homosexuality, as you call it, is not the same phe-

THE PARIS REVIEW 7

nomenon in a man as in a woman. Love for women in a woman is
different from love for men in a man. I know a number of “gay”
men, but relatively few openly “gay” women. But let us go back to
a passage in Hadrian where he says that a man who thinks, who is
engaged upon a philosophical problem or devising a theorem, is
neither a man nor a woman, nor even human. He is something
else. It is very rare that one could say that about a woman. It does
happen, but very seldom; for example, the woman whom my
father loved was very sensuous and also, in terms of her times, an
“intellectual,” but the greatest element of her life was love, espe-
cially love for her husband. Even without reaching the high level
of someone like Hadrian, one is in the same mental space, and it is
unimportant whether one is a man or a woman. Can I say also that
love between women interests me less, because I have never met
with a great example of it.

INTERVIEWER
But there are writers, like Gertrude Stein and Colette, who
have tried to illuminate female homosexuality.

YOURCENAR
I do not happen to like Colette and Gertrude Stein. The latter is
completely foreign to me; Colette, in matters of eroticism, often falls
to the level of a Parisian concierge. You look for an example of a
woman who is in love with another woman, but how is she in love?
Is it an ardent passion of a few months? Or a bond of friendship over
a long period? Or something in between? When you are in love
you’re in love—the sex of the beloved does not matter very much.
What matters is the feelings, emotions, relationships between people.

INTERVIEWER
Nonetheless, having portrayed Hadrian so eloquently, could
you have done something similar on, say, Sappho? And you have
been very discreet about your own life—with Grace Frick
for example.

8 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
A manuscript page from Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel A Coin in Nine Hands.
YOURCENAR
We must set Sappho aside, since we know next to nothing
about her. As for my own life—there are times when one must
reveal certain things, because otherwise things could not be said
with verisimilitude. For example, as I said, Sophie’s story in Coup
de Grâce is based on a true incident. But I was always, as they say,
“more intellectually oriented” than Sophie. And I was not raped
by a Lithuanian sergeant, nor lodged in a ruined castle! As for my
relationship with Grace Frick, I met her when we were both
women of a certain age, and it went through different stages; first
passionate friendship, then the usual story of two people living and
traveling together for the sake of convenience and because they
have common literary interests. During the last ten years of her life
she was very ill. For the last eight years she couldn’t travel and
that’s why I stayed in Maine during those winters. I tried to help
her till the end, but she was no longer the center of my existence,
and perhaps had never been. The same is true reciprocally, of
course. But what is love? This species of ardor, of warmth, that
propels one inexorably toward another being? Why give so much
importance to the genitourinary system of people? It does not
define a whole being, and it is not even erotically true. What mat-
ters, as I said, concerns emotions, relationships. But whom you fall
in love with depends largely on chance.

INTERVIEWER
Do you think the emphasis on the physical, sexual aspect of
love is due partly to psychoanalysis? Perhaps this is what Anna
Akhmatova meant when she said “Freud ruined literature.”

YOURCENAR
Freud turns sexuality into a sort of metaphor, and a metaphor
not quite worked out. It seems that he was a great innovator, being
the first to speak of sexuality with frankness. But that does not
make his theories acceptable. But he did not ruin literature—it was
not in his power to do so, since literature is a very great thing. And

10 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
then no one thinks of Freud in terms of his time and circumstances.
He came from a poor, orthodox Jewish family, living in a little
provincial town. Naturally, as a young professor, he was struck by
examples of pleasure in Vienna. As a result he saw the world from
this double perspective.

INTERVIEWER
It is not so much his pioneering work as a doctor one ques-
tions now, but his philosophic-psychological extrapolations.

YOURCENAR
Quite so. He makes a number of extravagant extrapolations,
starting from very limited, restricted, and small premises. Hence its
attraction for the modern world. But he was the first man to speak
about sexuality with sincerity and frankness, when it was still
taboo. So everyone was fascinated. But we can now say to him:
Thank you for your pioneering effort, but to us it is not a new ven-
ture, nor a total discovery. As a great psychologist I prefer Jung.
He was sometimes strange, but there was genius in his madness.
He was more a poet and had a larger perception of human nature.
In his memoirs [Memories, Dreams and Reflections] you are often
confronted with the mystery of life itself. For example, his mother
hatred, so strong that a table breaks itself in two when they are
together! A stunning parapsychological episode or a beautiful sym-
bol?

INTERVIEWER
Is it because beyond a certain level the male-female dichotomy
is irrelevant to you that you have not been interested in feminism?
What has been your relationship to the feminist movement of the
last few decades?

YOURCENAR
It does not interest me. I have a horror of such movements,
because I think that an intelligent woman is worth an intelligent

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man—if you can find any—and that a stupid woman is every bit
as boring as her male counterpart. Human wickedness is almost
equally distributed between the two sexes.

INTERVIEWER
Is that why you did not wish to be published by Virago Press
in England?

YOURCENAR
I did not want to be published by them—what a name!—
because they publish only women. It reminds one of ladies’ com-
partments in nineteenth-century trains, or of a ghetto, or simply
of those basements of restaurants where one is confronted by
a door marked Women and another marked Men. But of course
there are social differences, and geographical ones. The Muslim
woman is somewhat more restricted. But even there, I have just
spent the winter in Morocco, and when I saw women walking
arm in arm, going to the hammam [public baths]—a place which
is not at all like the Turkish baths one imagines through Ingres’s
pictures, and where any minute one risks one’s neck, so slippery
it is—well, those women often seem happier than their Parisian
or New Yorker sisters. They get a lot out of their friendships.
There was a Moghul princess called Jahanara, the daughter of
Sultan Jahan, an admirable poet. I have found too little informa-
tion concerning her, but she was initiated to Sufism by her
brother, the admirable Prince Dara, assassinated in his thirties by
his brother, the fanatic Aurangzarb. So you see even Muslim
women could achieve eminence despite their circumstances, if
they had it in them.

INTERVIEWER
Because Sufism liberates them from the rigid confines of ortho-
dox Islam. There is another Sufi poetess, Rabe’a. She wrote most
of her surviving poems with her blood when they opened her veins
in a warm bath until she bled to death. At least that’s the story. It

12 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
was a common punishment for heretics then, and Sufis were, on
and off, considered heretical.

YOURCENAR
Jahanara was not murdered, but the Sufi master who had ini-
tiated her and her brother Dara was finally put to death.

INTERVIEWER
Going back to your work, your book Fires is a series of mono-
logues written from the point of view of women . . .

YOURCENAR
The impersonal narrator, who writes the small linking sen-
tences, is also evidently a woman, but her reflections on love are
genderless. There are three monologues that concern men—
Achilles, Petroclus, and Phedros—and with them we are in the
world of Alexis. On the other hand Phedre, Antigone, Clytemnes-
tra, Sappho, Lena, are women, ranging from supreme greatness,
Antigone, to vulgarity, Clytemnestra.

INTERVIEWER
You mentioned once that what you wished to do through your
work was to revive le sense du sacré. It is a common complaint
that today we have lost the sense of the sacred—even those who
have greatly contributed to this state of affairs complain about it!
Will you expand on it a bit more, in relation to your work?

YOURCENAR
The sacred is the very essence of life. To be aware of the sacred
even as I am holding this glass is therefore essential. I mean this
glass has a form, which is very beautiful, and which evokes the
great mystery of void and plenitude that has haunted the Chinese
for centuries. Inside, the glass can serve as a receptacle, for
ambrosia or poison. What matters to the Taoists is the void. And
glass was invented by someone we don’t know. As I say in The

THE PARIS REVIEW 13

Abyss, when Zenon is lying down in his monk’s cell, “the dead are
far away and we can’t reach them, nor even the living.” Who made
this table? If we tried to find out how every object around us came
into being we would spend our lives doing it. Everything is too far
away in the past, or mysteriously too close.

INTERVIEWER
To what do you attribute this loss of the sacred? Is it due, as
some maintain, to the development of capitalism and its corollary,
consumerism?

YOURCENAR
Certainly consumerism has a lot to answer for. One lives in a
commercialized society against which one must struggle. But it is
not easy. As soon as one is dealing with the media one becomes
their victim. But have we really lost the sense of the sacred? I won-
der! Because unfortunately in the past the sacred was intricately
mixed with superstition, and people came to consider superstitious
even that which was not. For example, peasants believed that it
was better to sow the grain at full moon. But they were quite right;
that is the moment when the sap rises, drawn by gravitation. What
is frightening is the loss of the sacred in human, particularly sex-
ual, relationships, because then no true union is possible.

INTERVIEWER
Perhaps this feeling for the sacred is the reason why you are
particularly interested in ecology and conservation?

YOURCENAR
It is most important. The Dutch have kindly elected me to
their academy, the Erasmus Institute for the Arts and Letters.
Unlike its French counterpart it includes a substantial prize, half of
which one has to donate to a charity. I gave mine to the World
Wildlife Organization. They protested at first, saying that the insti-
tute was for the promotion of the arts and letters, not lions and

14 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
birds! But I said that I would have to refuse the prize unless I could
make my gift, and they accepted. How sincere are the Green and
Ecology parties, and how much of it is political posturing, I simply
do not know. But something has to be done before it is too late. It
is almost too late already, with the acid rain destroying Europe’s
forests and the defoliation of the tropical forests in South America.

INTERVIEWER
Talking about the academy, you were the first woman in four
hundred years to be elected to the French academy. How did it
happen? I ask this because traditionally one must make an appli-
cation and go canvassing with other members. One reads heart-
wrenching letters from past candidates, notably Baudelaire, beg-
ging the members to vote for them.

YOURCENAR
Poor Baudelaire! He had greatly suffered from the condemna-
tion of some of his poems, Les Fleurs du mal, and membership in
the academy for him could have been revenge. In my case Jean
d’Ormesson wrote asking me if I would object to being nominated,
without any visit or other effort on my part. I said no, finding it
discourteous to refuse. I was wrong. There are a few serious and
interesting academicians; there are also, and always have been,
more mediocre choices. Furthermore, the academy, like the Figaro,
where most academicians do write, represents now a more or less
strongly rightist group. I am myself neither rightist nor leftist. I did
refuse to wear the academy’s uniform—my long black velvet skirt
and cape were designed by St. Laurent. And of course I refused the
customary gift of the sword. But I received a Hadrian coin from
voluntary contributors.

INTERVIEWER
Since your election to the academy you have become much
better known to the general public and lionized by the literary
world. Do you mix with the Parisian literary society?

THE PARIS REVIEW 15

YOURCENAR
I do not know what “being lionized” means, and I dislike all
literary worlds, because they represent false values. A few great
works and a few great books are important. They are aside and
apart from any “world” or “society.”

INTERVIEWER
I would like to go back again to the early days and talk about
your influences. You have been compared to Gide by many people.
Was he an influence? For example, they say that Nathanaël, the
hero of your Two Lives and a Dream, is named after the one in
Gide’s Les Nourritures terrestres. Is that true?

YOURCENAR
I don’t like Gide very much. I find him dry and sometimes
superficial. I chose Nathanaël because it is a Puritan name, and he
is a young Dutch sailor from a Puritan family. Other members of
the family are called Lazarus or Eli for the same reason. They are
Biblical names and have no connection with Gide’s book. We are
very far from the state of happy inebriation presented by Gide in
the Nourritures, and which is no longer possible in our time, in the
face of so much madness and chaos.

INTERVIEWER
But Alexis has the form of a Gidian récit . . .

YOURCENAR
A récit in the form of a letter is an old literary French form. I
have said that the gratitude young writers felt for Gide was, to a
large extent, because of his use of classical prose forms. But why
choose any one in particular? There are hundreds of great books
in different languages by which we all are or should be influenced.

INTERVIEWER
Of course, but there are always certain affinities with various

16 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
writers. Who are they in your case? Baudelaire, Racine,
the romantics?

YOURCENAR
Baudelaire certainly; and some of the romantics. The French
middle ages much more, and certain poets of the seventeenth cen-
tury, such as Ménard, “La Belle Vieille,” and many, many other
poets, French and non-French. Racine up to a point, but he is such
a unique case that no one can be compared to him.

INTERVIEWER
Except for Britanicus all his protagonists were women: Phedre,
Berenice, Nathalie, Roxane, etcetera . . .

YOURCENAR
Proust had this idea that Racine’s Phedre could be indentified
with a man as well as a woman. But Racine’s Phedre is much more
French than Greek—you will see it at once if you compare her to
the Greek Phedre. Her passionate jealousy is a typical theme of
French literature, just as it is in Proust. That is why even in Phe-
dre, Racine had to find her a rival, Aricie, who is an insignificant
character, like a bridal from a popular dress shop. In other words,
love as possession, against someone. And that is prodigiously
French. Spanish jealousy is quite different—it is real hatred, the
despair of someone who has been deprived of his or her food. As
for the Anglo-Saxon love, well, there is nothing more beautiful
than Shakespeare’s sonnets, while German love has produced some
wonderful poetry too.

INTERVIEWER
I have this theory that the French do not understand Baude-
laire and never have. They speak of his rhetoric, yet he is the least
rhetorical of poets. He writes like an Oriental poet—dare I say like
a Persian poet?

THE PARIS REVIEW 17

YOURCENAR
Baudelaire is a sublime poet. But the French don’t even under-
stand Hugo, who is also a sublime poet. I have—as Malraux also
did—taken titles from Hugo’s verses, Le Cerveau noir de piranèse
and others. Whenever I am passing by Place Vendôme in Paris I recall
Hugo’s poem in which he is thinking of Napoleon, wondering if he
should prefer “la courbe d’Hannibal et l’angle d’Alexandre au carré
de César.” A whole strategy contained in one line of alexandrine! Of
course there are times when Hugo is bad and rhetorical—even great
poets have their off days—but nonetheless he is prodigious.

INTERVIEWER
Is this what Gide meant when he said, “Victor Hugo, hélas”?

YOURCENAR
To have said hélas is proof of a certain smallness in Gide.

INTERVIEWER
He also rejected Proust’s manuscript of Swann’s Way, saying,
“Here is the story of a little boy who can’t go to sleep”!

YOURCENAR
We were talking about jealousy: Maybe Gide was jealous of
Proust; or perhaps he honestly could not like the long and subjec-
tive beginning of the Temps perdu. He was not, as we are, cog-
nizant of Proust’s whole work.

INTERVIEWER
So who was a decisive influence on you in youth?

YOURCENAR
As I said in the preface to Alexis, at the time it was Rilke. But
this business of influence is a tricky one. One reads thousands of
books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of
people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

18 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned modern poets. Which ones for example?

YOURCENAR
There is a Swedish poet whom I have never succeeded in intro-
ducing to my French friends, Gunnard Ekelof. He has written three
little books called Divans, I suppose influenced by Persian poetry.
And, of course, Borges, and some of Lorca’s poems, and Pessoa,
Apollinaire.

INTERVIEWER
Talking about Borges, what about other South American writ-
ers, the whole school of magical realism?

YOURCENAR
I don’t like them—they are like factory products.

INTERVIEWER
What about the literature of your adopted country, the
United States?

YOURCENAR
I’m afraid I haven’t read much. I have read a lot of things
unconnected with Western literature. At the moment I am reading
a huge book by a Moroccan Sufi poet, books on ecology, sagas
from Iceland, and so on.

INTERVIEWER
But surely you must have read writers like Henry James,
Faulkner, Hemingway, Edith Wharton?

YOURCENAR
Some. There are great moments in Hemingway, for example
“The Battler” or, even better, “The Killers,” which is a masterpiece
of the American short story. It is a tale of revenge in the under-

THE PARIS REVIEW 19

world, and it is excellent. Edith Wharton’s short stories seem to me
much better than her novels. Ethan Frome, for example, is the
story of a peasant of New England. In it the protagonist, a woman
of the world, puts herself in his place and describes the life of these
people in winter, when all the roads are frozen, isolated. It is short
and very beautiful. Faulkner brings with him the true horror of the
South, the illiteracy and racism of poor whites. As for Henry
James, the best definition is the one by Somerset Maugham, when
he said that Henry James was an alpinist, equipped to conquer the
Himalayas, and walked up Beaker Street! Henry James was
crushed by his stifling milieu—his sister, his mother, even his
brother who was a genius but of a more philosophical and profes-
sorial kind. James never told his own truth.

INTERVIEWER
You have just translated The Amen Corner, and I know that
you admire James Baldwin and are a friend of his. What do you
think of his work now?

YOURCENAR
Baldwin has written some admirable pages, but he does not
have the courage to go to the end of his conclusions. He should
have hit much harder. His life has been hard. He was one of nine
children in Harlem, poor, a preacher at fifteen, a runaway at eigh-
teen, working as a laborer, first in the army during the war and
later in the street, earning barely enough to survive. Somehow he
gets to Paris where he manages to get himself incarcerated for the
crime of having no fixed address and no profession. He has a
drink problem now, but many American writers have had prob-
lems with drinking; perhaps it is due to the puritanism that has
reigned over the American soul for so long. But at the same time,
when the Americans are generous, cordial, intelligent, they are
somehow more so than the Europeans. I know at least five or six
Americans like that.

20 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
INTERVIEWER
You are also interested in Japanese literature and your book
on Mishima is considered one of the best essays on him. When did
you get involved with Japan?

YOURCENAR
My interest in Japanese literature goes back to when I was
about eighteen and first discovered it through certain books. I read
Mishima in French when he first appeared and found some of his
work very beautiful. Later I saw that a great deal of absurdities
were written about him and decided to write my book in order to
present a more genuine Mishima. Now they have even made a
detestable film of his life. Mrs. Mishima went to Hollywood and
tried to stop it, but in vain. Four years ago I started learning Japan-
ese, and after a while with the help of a Japanese friend translated
Mishima’s Five Modern No Plays into French. They are beautiful.

INTERVIEWER
Traveling extensively as you do, how do you manage
to write? Where do you find so much energy, and what is your
work routine?

YOURCENAR
I write everywhere. I could write here, as I am talking to you.
When in Maine or elsewhere, when I am traveling, I write wher-
ever I am or whenever I can. Writing doesn’t require too much
energy—it is a relaxation and a joy.

INTERVIEWER
Looking back on your life, do you feel that you have had a
“good” life, as the expression goes?

YOURCENAR
I don’t know what a good life is. But how can one not be sad
looking at the world around us at present? But there are also

THE PARIS REVIEW 21

moments when I feel—to use a military expression my father
liked—that “it is all counted as leave.” Tout ça compte dans le
congé! Happiness sometimes exists.

INTERVIEWER
You are also interested in Sufism, and are planning an essay on
Jahanara. What attracts you to it? I am particularly interested
because I come from that tradition.

YOURCENAR
It is a philosophy that deals with the divine as the essence of
perfection, which is the friend, and which the Buddhists seek
within themselves, knowing that it comes from themselves, that
liberation is from within. But I can’t say that I am a Buddhist or a
Sufi—or a socialist. I don’t belong to any doctrine in particular.
But there are spiritual affinities.

INTERVIEWER
It seems crass to ask of someone as remarkably youthful and
energetic as you are whether you ever think of death?

YOURCENAR
I think about it all the time. There are moments when I am
tempted to believe that there is at least a part of the personality
that survives, and others when I don’t think so at all. I am tempted
to see things as Honda does, in Mishima’s last book, the one he
finished the day he died. Honda, the principal character, realizes
that he has been lucky enough to have loved four people, but that
they were all the same person in different forms, in, if you like, suc-
cessive reincarnations. The fifth time he has made a mistake and
the error has cost him dearly. He realizes that the essence of these
people is somewhere in the universe and that some day, perhaps in
ten thousand years or more, he will find them again, in other
forms, without even recognizing them. Of course, reincarnation
here is only a word, one of the many possible words to stress a cer-

22 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
 tain continuity. Certainly all the physical evidence points to our
total annihilation, but if one also considers all the metaphysical
données, one is tempted to say that it is not as simple as that.

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