Despite her near-legendary status in France – the most important French historical novelist of the 20th century, the first woman elected to the Académie française – Marguerite Yourcenar remains a lesser-known figure in the Anglophone world. While her best-known book, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), is a Penguin Classic, her second masterpiece, The Abyss (1968), has not graced a major list in English since 1994, and her other works are nearly impossible to find. With this in mind, the appearance of A Dream of Stone as part of David Zwirner’s ekphrasis series is extremely welcome – even if only as a reminder of how much more should be on our shelves.
While A Dream of Stone is not going to catapult Yourcenar – Belgian by birth, American by naturalisation and French in every other possible way – back into prominence, the five texts gathered here act as an engaging, if restricted, snapshot of a remarkable writer’s capacities. The collection goes some way to demonstrating the breadth of Yourcenar’s mind; and some way, too, to demonstrating her particular gift for summoning the past out of itself. The two major texts here – ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi’ (1962) and ‘Tone and Language in the Historical Novel’ (1972) – act as bookends for three shorter pieces that cover the full span of Yourcenar’s career, ‘Sistine’ (1931), ‘That Mighty Sculptor, Time’ (1954) and ‘On a Dream of Dürer’s’ (1977). Together, in their different ways, what they show most of all is Yourcenar’s gift for what one might term analytical lyricism: an approach to her subjects that is simultaneously investigative and inventive, elaborated and precise.
Nowhere is this clearer than in ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi’, which uses a slight misquotation from Victor Hugo as the jumping-off point for a detailed reflection on the career of a figure who counts, quite clearly, as a kindred spirit for Yourcenar herself. Piranesi is, under her eyes, ‘a tragic poet of architecture’, whose prints make their subjects elements in a drama played out across ages. It is a metaphor that allows a brilliant sideways insight into the essay’s central subject, the Carceri d’invenzione: ‘The major protagonist of the Antiquities is Time; the hero of Prisons is Space’. This then is what leads to this ‘perpetual chiaroscuro [that] excludes the very notion of the hour, and the dreadful solidity [that …] defies the erosion of the centuries’, and welcomes in, instead, the dizzying sense of unfolding enormity, ‘total exposure’ and ‘total insecurity’ that so struck viewers such as Hugo and De Quincey.
If ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi’ offers insight, it also gives the simple pleasure of watching a virtuoso at work. While Yourcenar was a ruthless self-editor – to the extent of tallying deleted words at the bottom of each redrafted page – it was in the service of sentences that simply take off weightlessly into the ether of their objects. Piranesi’s drawings of Paestum show one of the ruined temples as ‘not merely a wreck on the sea of forms’ but nature itself: ‘its shafts are the equivalent of a sacred wood; its rhythms of projection and recession are a melody in the Dorian mode; its wreckage remains a precept, an admonition, an order of things’. Before it, at the end of his career, Piranesi works in ‘ecstasy of serenity’.
Not all the pieces here are equally essential. Though a fascinating insight into the toil of the historical imagination, ‘Tone and Language in the Historical Novel’ is more a feat of intimidation than anything else. Yourcenar was unabashedly learned and indefatigably patrician – a writer who once accused her publishers of ‘insolent carelessness’ for failing to maintain a list that was sufficiently literary to accommodate her books. If you ever experience the urge to write a historical novel, this essay might well be the cure. Never, for instance, will you check your work by translating it into ancient Greek and seeing if it remains natural and plausible speech for a second-century philhellenist emperor. In contrast, ‘On a Dream of Dürer’s’ feels, despite its density, somewhat slender. Despite Yourcenar’s close scrutiny, the mysterious ‘dream vision’ from Dürer’s journal refuses to give up its mystery.
There are, too, the usual cavils to be made. As is often the case with ‘lost classics’ publishing, the texts here are quick reprints of old translations, and though the sensitive introduction by John Knight is a welcome addition, they bear their old flaws. Richard Howard’s 1980 translation of ‘The Dark Brain of Piranesi’ comes off as somewhat flat and inelegant compared to the rest of the volume, all translated by Walter Kaiser. Attentive editing would also have spotted that Ingres never painted a piece called Stronice – an error carried over from the original editions of Howard’s translations – but did paint Stratonice (or Antiochus and Stratonice). And, for this reader at least, original dates of publication would have been a welcome addition.
None of this, though, dulls the pleasure of Yourcenar’s prose – which shines through particularly well in Kaiser’s renderings. It is a thrill to read her. In ‘That Mighty Sculptor, Time’ (another Hugo quotation, from the poem ‘L’Arc de Triomphe’, which also lends the phrase ‘Rêve en pierre’), she writes of the ways in which her subject adds an extra, ‘involuntary’ beauty to the intentions of artists, epochs, and societies. ‘Statues so thoroughly shattered that out of the debris a new work of art is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the footrace; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it’. The list goes on, new things born of old, and yet all of them containing the trace of the first artist’s ‘intelligent collaboration with the universe, his struggle against it, and that final defeat in which the mind and the matter which supported him perish almost at the same time. What he intended affirms itself forever in the ruin of things.’ The essay makes, and needs to make, no point beyond this affirmation of change, ‘this loss without death […] this survival without resurrection’ that comes to ‘all matter freed to obey its own laws’. If, as a collection, A Dream of Stone sometimes feels somewhat like a fragment out of time, perhaps that is no bad thing.
A Dream of Stone by Marguerite Yourcenar is published by David Zwirner Books.