How Many Years
By Marguerite Yourcenar
Translated by Maria Louise Ascher
Farrar Straus Giroux, 346 pages, $25
One reads Marguerite Yourcenar as though she lived far away in time and distance, and thus it comes as a little shock to realize that although she was born in Brussels and wrote in French, she spent over half her life in the United States and most of that time in a house on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Yourcenar is well known as the author of the “Memoirs of Hadrian” and “The Abyss,” two novels that have endured the passage of time. How recent they actually are (1951 and 1968), also may be a surprise, for they seem much older. Or perhaps that is the influence of the Yourcenar magic, which allows us entry into times long thought to be gone.
Toward the end of her long life (1903-1987) Yourcenar turned to memoir and autobiography. The general title of her 2-volume memoir is “Le labyrinthe du monde” (“The Labyrinth of the World”). This has been dropped from the English version, which author and translator have chosen to publish under its separate subtitles, “Dear Departed” (“Souvenirs pieux”), which appeared in English in 1991, and now “How Many Years” (“Archives du Nord”).
Maurice Blanchot’s definition of the memoir aptly describes what Yourcenar has accomplished: “As for memoirs, we know what they are: deliberate, methodical reconstitutions, works of reflection, sometimes of art and science. Existence here (even if it is a question of a private existence) is history because it is historic. It is presented as having always been, with that dignity and solemnity that it owes to the monumental presence of a past over which the author himself no longer has any right.”
“Dear Departed” dealt mainly with Yourcenar’s mother and her mother’s family. “How Many Years” concerns itself with her father and his family. Yourcenar’s mother died as a result of Yourcenar’s birth, and her daughter’s intent in “Dear Departed” seems to have been to strip us of the illusion that we will live forever and that each of us is at the center of the world.
That volume began with Marguerite’s birth; this one ends with it. Thus the two books are neatly joined together, and we are provided with a portrait of the two families that, with the coming together in the persons of her father, Michel de Crayencour and Fernande de C de Marchienne, produced Marguerite Yourcenar. (Her pen name is an anagram of the family name.)
Speaking of herself in the third person, this is how Yourcenar sees her life: “She has never–at least up until the moment I am writing these lines–experienced cold or hunger; she has never, at least so far, had to endure torture; she has never, except for seven or eight years at the most, had to `earn a living’ in the monotonous and everyday sense of the term; she has never, like millions of people in her time, been interned in a concentration camp or, like other millions who believe themselves free, been placed in the service of machines that turn out unending streams of useless or destructive objects, gadgets or armaments. . . . She will take tumbles now and then, and will raise herself on her scraped knees; she will learn, not without effort, to make use of her own eyes, and then, like a diver, to keep them wide open. She will try to make her way somehow out of what her forebears called `the century’ and what people today call `the times,’ the only times that count for them, an agitated surface under which lie hidden the immobile ocean and the currents that traverse it.”
“How Many Years” begins with a splendid overture in which Yourcenar plunges the reader back before the dawn of time in the area that will become Belgium, back before the moment for “human anecdotes,” back when the stars “shimmer, in more or less the positions they occupy today, but (are) not yet linked together by the human imagination into squares, polygons, and triangles and not yet bearing the names of gods, and monsters that are of no concern to them.”
Quickly the reader is taken through time to a minor figure at the beginning of the 16th Century, from which Yourcenar then will drive us through 13 generations. Gradually we come to her grandfather, a brilliant law student in Paris who escaped without serious injury a terrifying crash on one of the first railroad routes established in France. The description of that wreck is one of the great set pieces in literature, composed from both contemporary testimony and her grandfather’s memoirs. Here is one of its many unforgettable details: “A young woman, screaming, reaches out through a broken window; at the risk of his life, a man comes close enough to grasp her hand and pulls, the arm comes away and falls like a burning stick.”
The rest of her grandfather’s life will be conventional: married to a cold, calculating woman but living in the memory of a sole youthful journey to Italy and the letters he wrote there to his mother, which he will recopy in his old age so as to pass on the memory to his son and his granddaughter.
Yourcenar does a magnificent job of recounting her father’s first marriage, which will end in his wife’s death at the hands of an incompetent doctor. Having noted the tattoo on the inside of her father’s left arm, “ANANKE” (fate, necessity), she writes, “One can imagine him carefully writing those Greek letters on a piece of paper, to make a pattern for the artisan, and holding out his left arm. Ananke. . . . There where a simple man would put a tattoo of a flower, a bird, a tricolour flag, a temporarily cherished name, or a pleasing feminine form, Michael had chosen to put those six letters that look like a convict’s prison number. We would know him better if we knew what judgement on his own life they presented. But this isn’t a novel.”
How to account for the wondrous quality of these memoirs in which nothing really extraordinary happens? It has something to do with the choice of words (which comes across even in translation), with a sense of classical style and taste, with Yourcenar’s detached passion and the way her imagination is grounded in the particular. All of this can be seen in this passage, which recounts some details she came upon while researching the life of a relative who had supervised a heretic’s decapitation:
“His execution, according to the figures carefully inscribed on the official register, will cost the authorities ten livres and ten deniers: the state, as we have seen, will recoup that sum. An execution by fire would have been more expensive: for one heretic who was also something of a brigand, nineteen livres and thirteen sous was the rate recorded at that time and more over, the bookkeeper had crossed off the nineteen sous for the torch furnished by the executioner, arguing that the stake could just as well be set afire with the aid of a coal pan. It takes a bit longer with coals, that’s all.”
