Ilse’s Reviews > Marguerite Yourcenar > Status Update

So it was that in one month , just barely , Yourcenar wrote the initial version of a short novel — a hundred pages or so — that she would finish in Sorrento in August of the same year : Coup de Grâce , Even her fiercest detractors or perhaps especially they— " rescue " this little text , a dry and violent one, from an œuvre they judge in the main to be "pompous” and "overdone”.

The young woman that Yourcenar was when she wrote Pindare made some astonishingly premonitory remarks .Through Pindar, she sketched something of a self-portrait of the old woman she would become: It is toward the end , in the formless writing on the final pagespages ,that intimate tastes and torments are revealed. Regret : that remembrance of desire.

We find many more traces in Pindare of what was to be Yourcenar's universe , her thought , and even her style . We can glean a few aphorisms from Pindare that Yourcenar would be attached to all her life : "He was reaching the age where egoism is as much a virtue as it is a necessity“.

Y often expressed this need not to abandon her characters, to invent a future for them,a more rounded-out destiny.I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved,I have Hadrian say, speaking of his loves.Nor have I ever believed that I could have enough of any character I had created.I am not yet through watching them live.They will have surprises in store until the end of my days

Her father and Yourcenar were always careful to avoid the chatty intimacy that both parties would probably have deemed unseemly. Shared secrets were out of the question. She claimed to know the emperor Hadrian ‘about whom we have a great deal of documented information’ better than her own father and challenged ‘the misbelief of people who always think that the family is something one is excessively close to’.

Regarding Le Jardin des Chimères', she would confide to a correspondent, ‘it has surprised me to discover to what an extent the themes that would concern me later on and still concern me today are to be found there. One develops, let us hope so at least, but what is deep down does not change'.

One cannot fail to notice Yourcenar’s pronounced pedagogical streak in her correspondence with young authors:'Learn to think; educate yourself. One can never read too much, see too much, or give too much thought to things. Devise for yourself an extensive and disinterested reading program (without any immediate intention of putting your reading to use as a writer). Let one work lead to, and inform, the next'.