I spent part of the summer with Marguerite Yourcenar. COVID-19 encourages confinement. Between two coughs, I might as well grab his great novels from my library, Memoirs of Hadrian and The black work. In their wake, the writings on his family journey, including the unfinished What ? eternity, with sublime accents, kept me awake. As well as her bio by Josyane Savigneau and her fascinating collection of interviews with journalist Matthieu Galey, Open eyes.
Not convenient, the great writer who died in 1987, angry, but intrepid, ardent and enlightened. His erudition amazes, his intelligence stimulates, his quest for meaning is a call for air, his style is a blueprint, his eye, a radar.
The aristocrat raised in a bubble, to whom his father taught ancient Greek and Latin, had never been to school. Since then, she had read so much in several languages, traveled the world so much, lived so much here and there, this internationalist Frenchwoman born in Belgium, that her bubble literally burst. Caught up by the war, the armistice, exile in the United States, female or male loves, her social and ecological activism, the patient documentation of her books, but clinging to the French language tree. As much Hadrian, his powerful but fragile Roman emperor on the heart, as his Zeno of The black workmodern in its avid curiosity in a XVIe century of intolerance, bear witness to his psyche.
Three years ago, in his Petite Plaisance house on Mount Desert Island, in the heart of Maine, open to visitors in the summer, I discovered a somewhat outdated world, but one full of memories. In the garden, his love of nature and animals burst forth. I loved his cemetery for the dogs in his life, including Monsieur and Valentine, greeted from the cape before leaving to find their mistress’s grave further away, in Somesville. In vain. Not found. The writers we love always escape us a little.
She also sings
In Quebec, last weekend, I ran to the Palais Montcalm to see the opera dedicated to him, Yourcenar. An island of passions, now presented in the metropolis at the Pierre-Mercure room. Two great women of letters, the late Marie-Claire Blais and Hélène Dorion, composed her libretto. Music by Éric Champagne, staging by Angela Konrad. Add Les Violons du Roy and the Chorus of the Opéra de Montréal, all launched and co-produced by the Festival d’Opéra de Québec. True event, that a lyrical creation on an artist, even when the spectacle leaves partly on its hunger. I left that one touched and unsatisfied.
The libretto is beautiful, although too fragile, often literary, well voiced by the four main performers, including Stéphanie Pothier as Marguerite. The choirs give emotion to a demanding and sometimes captivating music, but lacking in spice.
In the opera in two acts, two loves of the writer are essential: Grace Frick, the translator of Yourcenar, loving and devoted lover, carried away by cancer (moving Kimy McLaren); then the young and sulphurous Jerry Wilson, homosexual, traveling companion, AIDS at the end of the race. With him, moments of harmony fade in favor of quarrels. We will hardly understand what deeply binds such ill-matched beings. “Let’s go back, you’ll forget this scene / which shook you so much / it only belongs to your book”, however, Jerry will sing to him in the beautiful voice of baritone Hugo Laporte, aware that he is above all embodying a hero of his imagination. Love, death and creation are the pillars of this tender and violent opera, which we would have preferred to be surreal and nourished by the heroine’s fascination with oriental spirituality.
After having read Yourcenar a lot, it seemed to me a pity that so much importance is given to the sentimental life of such a brilliant woman (fools also like it) to the detriment of her works. In the starkness of the decor, the images on the screen could have brought a visual fantasy evoking his literary worlds. Rather, photographs and videos that are not always relevant are paraded there, apart from a flock of birds at a key moment. An island of passions nevertheless reaches us by the grace of the violins, the voices and the text, then leads us astray. But the thrilling, petulant and almost burlesque scene of the swearing in of this first woman at the French Academy, under macho sneers, is in itself worth the detour.
In front of this creation which starts, one wonders what will be its path on the stages of the world and if it will make the public want to read the celebrated writer, without being able to decide. We remain haunted by this elegant and fragile opera, groping for the spirit of Yourcenar, who loves as always to escape us.