On the the genito-urinary system and other systems – Joanna Biggs in LRB:

“When asked in the 1980s for women worth writing about, Yourcenar mentioned Florence Nightingale, Mary Magdalene and Antigone – none of whom you can imagine stalking her ex-lover’s new girlfriend.”

(…)

“As Ernaux detected, Yourcenar was not the heroine the times demanded. Feminism seemed like a fad to her, to be criticised in particular for its conformism. Who needed more success-obsessed bureaucrats, this time in skirt suits?”

(…)

“Why, a Paris Review interviewer asked her in 1987, hadn’t she talked openly about her sexual orientation? She had lived with a woman, the Ohio-born Grace Frick, for forty years. Yourcenar answered in a way that destroyed the categories behind the question. ‘Why give so much importance to the genito-urinary system of people? It does not define a whole being, and it is not even erotically true.’ What is love anyway, she asks, that ‘species of ardour, of warmth, that propels one inexorably toward another being?’ It is an eternal question, and perhaps unanswerable. But there’s nothing wrong with being more interested in eternal questions than faddish ones.”

(…)

“When Michel travelled to see the women he loved in Paris, Provence, London and Rome he took Marguerite with him. It was on that first trip to London that she saw a statue of Hadrian at the British Museum, and it was on her first trip to Rome that she saw the Villa Adriana at Tivoli. When she completed a collection of poetry at sixteen, he paid to have it printed. In the last year of his life, she began reading her first novel, Alexis, to him. He responded to this tale of a disillusioned new husband by digging up a draft of a story he had written about his honeymoon with her mother, and proposed she rework and publish it. It was a curious idea: in some ways, he was exploiting his daughter’s talent to fulfil a dream of his own; in other ways, he was offering up what he had to help her achieve what she wanted. He died when she was 24, with much of her psychic and intellectual life already established.”

(…)

“There is a picture of Yourcenar from 1936, hair short, expression neutral and collar turned up. Her eyes are still, her eyebrows bushy; her lips are held together but the bottom one is plump, available. She had started to throw her heart around a bit: she had an affair with a married mother called Lucy Kyriakos (Yourcenar would mark St Lucy’s Day in her diary long after Kyriakos died) and fell in hopeless, futureless love with André Fraigneau, who was gay, and dismissive, bordering on cruel to her. In the early 1990s Fraigneau was still telling Yourcenar’s biographer Josyane Savigneau that ‘physically, I found her rather ugly’ – I can’t wait until the 1930s papers are unsealed and we can find out what she really thought of him. Her reaction to being thrown over by Fraigneau was a time-tested one: she wrote a book.”

(…)

“Though she did not experience the war in Europe, 1941 and 1942 were some of Yourcenar’s hardest years. A foreigner in a new country, her cultural patrimoine distant, she stopped writing. The Crayencour inheritance had run out, so she took a job at Sarah Lawrence College, getting up at 4 a.m. on a Monday to catch a train to Bronxville, New York. She hated teaching, spoke to her class only in French, and set her course’s pass mark very high. In 1942, she and Frick began spending their summers on Mount Desert Island in Maine, eventually buying a house there called Petite Plaisance. The island is the site of Acadia National Park, and is, coincidentally, where Willa Cather also came to summer with her partner, Edith Lewis. Yourcenar and Frick’s white clapboard house with black shutters was surrounded by trees and filled with old things, such as Delft tiles and Indonesian tapestry, as well as hundreds of books arranged by century. From 1951 it was Yourcenar’s permanent home.”

(…)

“Yourcenar, perhaps remembering the role Edmond Jaloux had in her early career, writes to thank reviewers for their engagement with her novel more often than I expected, often going into depth about points they had made. But there is very little sense of her life outside of her books: only a dog, Valentine, who’s a hit with TV crews, and the weather, never as dry as she would like. You long for the boxes in Harvard’s Houghton Library to reveal the writer we nearly know. Even when it comes to the événements of May 1968, she says rather wanly that of course reforms are needed.”

(…)

“Perhaps predictably, her relationship with Jerry became strained: he was often silent in the presence of ‘Madame’, particularly if the conversation went over his head, as it must often have done. On a trip to India in January 1985, Jerry insisted they bring along a man he’d met called Daniel, who made frequent requests for money. In Goa, Jerry became ill. He died a year later in Paris of Aids; the following spring Yourcenar visited the Hôpital Laennec to see the room he had died in. In November 1987 she had a stroke. Her housekeeper was with her for her last breath in the hospital on Mount Desert Island; Yourcenar opened her eyes, she reported, and they remained open, as blue as ever. ‘Let us try, if we can,’ reads the last line of Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘to enter into death with open eyes.’”

(…)

“As of today, Yourcenar’s life has been useful, which is all she wished it to be.”

Read the article here.

Perhaps, usefulness is all one can ask for.

What’s meaning without usefulness?

And what’s more useful than destroying categories? An important part of the philosophical tradition is just that.