Fires
Fowlie, Wallace
FIRES Marguerite Yourcenar Translated by Dori Katz Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $10.95, 89 pp. Wallace Fowlie LAST YEAR Marguerite Yourcenar was elected to the Academie Fran-paise. She was the...
...At a moment when feminine literature in France is being carefully examined and assessed, she occupies an eminent pjace with Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Colette, and, from an earlier age, with Mme de Sta'el and George Sand...
...the lover wills to be burned with more fires...
...Phaedra or despair...
...In a brief preface, written in 1975 expressly for this translation, the writer explains the genesis of Fires as being a love crisis and describes the mannerism of the writing as more ornate, more "precious" than the later style of Hadrian...
...As a young girl she read the classics, encouraged by her father who brought her up and who was himself a free spirit and an intellectual...
...She had always been fascinated by the letter Y which she claimed resembles a tree...
...Midway between her first book, A lexis (1929), and Les Memoires d'Hadrien, she published in 1936 a set of nine monologues to which she gave the title Feux and which today appears for the first time in English as Fires...
...Yourcenar's career was fairly obscure until the publication in 1951 of Les Memoires d'Hadrien (published in Eng-' lish in 1954 as Memoirs of Hadrian...
...But always, as the center of all the scenes and in the heart of each protagonist, we read of the complexity and the passion of an emotion...
...For the publication of her first book the father and daughter devised the anagram "Yourcenar" based on their name Crayencour...
...Achilles and Patroclus are both in Homer but they are also In painters and sculptors and other poets of all the ages, and here too in Yourcenar's second and third monologues,'' Achilles or the lie," is Achilles dressed as a girl, whereas ' 'Patroclus or destiny'' is the dead friend of Achilles for whom fate appeared in theatrical disguises...
...During the latter part of her life she became an American citizen and lives today on an island off the coast of Maine...
...History and legend are the background, but the past of these legends is recast in modern versions...
...For the one non-Greek figure, "Mary Magdalene or salvation," Yourcenar resurrects a tradition going back to The Golden Legend and apocryphal gospels in which Mary Magdalene was be-throthed to Saint John, who abandoned her to follow Christ...
...Whatever the scene is, whatever words or allusions are said, the same confession repeats itself: to know happiness would be tedium and dullness...
...She was the first woman since its creation in the seventeenth century to be thus honored as one of the "forty immortals" of France...
...Each text is preceded by a few guiding aphorisms more bare and more direct than the monologue itself, pensees almost, although one thinks of La Rochefoucauld more than of Pascal...
...is the opening monologue and one of the most powerful in the collection...
...They have been admirably and sensitively translated by Dori Katz with the collaboration of Mme...
...The book is appropriately dedicated to Hermes, and we remember that Hermes was both the god of eloquence and the messenger of the gods...
...Even in English these prose poems seem French in tone and style and genre...
...To each of the nine names is added, on the title page, an abstract noun that presumably designates the lesson of that particular "fire...
...This impeccably documented imaginary memoir of Emperor Hadrian brought her considerable fame...
...Composed in 1935 when Yourcenar was thirty-two years old, each of the monologues (six are spoken by women and three by men) reveals the feelings of the speaker who is suffering from absolute love and the circumstances that surround that tragic experience...
...with more fires...
...The mystical property of "nine" incites a reader to look upon these literary exercises, where classical and contemporary allusions vie with one another, as exorcisms performed for the alleviation of suffering as well as for the understanding of suffering...
...The book is made up of a series of rich scenes: Athenian gardens, acrobatic tight-rope dances, Peter's denial of Christ, Socrates enjoying the smile of Alcibiades, the adolescence of Aegisthus coinciding with the widowhood of Clytemnestra...
...But the French word means "rails" as well as "oars," and Phaedra is also moving along the Metro's underground corridors...
...In order to go to Hell, she takes "oars" as if she will be moving through those waters presided over by Charon...
...In her own very original way, and for her own purposes, Yourcenar uses the masks of Phaedra and Achilles, of Antigone and Phaedo, and of the five others, and through them speaks to us of total love for one person and its fated tragedy...
...She appears therefore as the woman who knew nothing but adoration and debauchery...
...the beloved is the keystone of the universe...
...All of the characters whom we hear speak their confession, with one exception, that of Mary Magdalene, come from ancient Greece...
...She is both passion and crime...
...When these fires of love were being written by Yourcenar, the French stage, at approximately the same time, was being invaded by heroes and heroines of Greece speaking in modern French with a knowledge of modern history and especially with the knowledge of our modern wars: Giraudoux (La Guerre de Troie ri aura pas lieu), Cocteau (La Machine infernale), Sartre (Les Mouches), Anouilh (Antigone...
...As might be imagined, Racine is more present in Yourcenar's Phedre than Euripides...
...She had already written a study of Pindar (1932) and translated works of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, as well as the Greek poet Cavafy...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 19
