2023-12-20 17:24:02
Zéno, dark Zénon – Correspondence 1968-1970
by Marguerite Yourcenar
Gallimard, 944 p., 42 €
At the beginning of 1968, in her corner of America on the edge of the Atlantic, Marguerite Yourcenar watched like milk on the fire the publication scheduled for April of The Work in Black at Gallimard, after the writer tore herself away, not without difficulty, from the Plon house. She defends French-style copyright, with a rather Yankee harshness in business – yet it is, over there, the reign of copyright.
Imperious, abusing the comminatory “I beg you to be kind”the woman of letters gives her orders to Léone Nora, head of the press service of the editions at her service, sorting out among those who will have the sagacity to report on her novel – Gabriel Marcel is solicited with a censer, while that the traitor André Fraigneau sees himself barred with passion.
Critics who have failed in their task, in the novelist’s keen eyes, will then be castigated in suavely scathing missives – Claude Mettra pays the price. As for Patrick de Rosbo, knighted, he loses nothing by waiting and his descent into hell will accompany the book of interviews published in 1972 with Marguerite Yourcenar who treats him as a scoundrel unfit to climb to the appropriate spiritual heights.
Seize the elusive
Such a mixture of chicane and elevation – by virtue of “accuracy”ce “more humble name” of the truth – occupies a fascinating part of the correspondence of a lady, convinced that literature is too serious a matter to entrust it to subcontractors that leave something to be desired. This stiffness, however, gives way to a fine understanding – without the slightest trace of demagoguery – of the events of May 68, which nevertheless tarnished the release of the book; while the author had agreed to travel to the French capital. In a letter to Jean Guéhenno dated July 22, 1968, once he returned to his thebaid in Maine, sixteen words were enough for him to say everything about a situation that escaped de Gaulle and most people: “So many just hopes were mixed with so much madness and faced with so much inertia. »
Marguerite Yourcenar deploys this ability to grasp the elusive when she senses a correspondent who matches her, like the Croatian poet and critic Ljerka Mifka (1943-2002). To the questionnaire that she sent her, the writer responded, on August 1, 1970, in long, detailed pages, with firm intelligence and luminous generosity, which in themselves are worth reading.
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