Volume 39, Number 1 & 2 · January 16, 1992
Twilight in Flanders
By John Weightman
Dear Departed
by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Maria Louise Ascher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 346 pp., $25.00
Most people, when they come to write their memoirs in later years, naturally place themselves at the center of the story: how I rose from rags to riches, how I discovered the true faith, how my views were correct, although events may seem to have proved me wrong. Dear Departed, the first of Marguerite Yourcenar's three autobiographical volumes, is not at all like this. The author, rejecting the self-centered approach, sets out to describe the hereditary influences and the social milieu which contributed to her personal identity. For the purposes of the literary life, she rechristened herself Yourcenar (a near anagram of her real name, Crayencour) and became the world-famous author of Les Mémoires d'Hadrien and of other richly imaginative historical novels, thanks to which she was also the first woman ever to be elected to the Académie Française, yet she claims to see herself not as an all-important subjectivity, but as no more than a provisional, contingent phenomenon in the ever changing play of natural and historical forces—a genetic and cultural nodal point, as it were, only to be defined in relation to the multifarious past from which she sprang. Consequently, all three of these memorial volumes—Souvenirs pieux, Archives du nord, and Quoi L'éternité—purport to deal with her family and her background rather than with herself.
Review, 4099 words
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