“When I was twenty,” Marguerite Yourcenar once told an interviewer, “I sketched out the plan of a vast historical novel, which would have incorporated all the generations of my family, albeit in a manner highly transformed by my imagination.” The novel was never written, but the preparatory study for one of its episodes led, decades later, to The Abyss (1968), that remarkable re-creation of the world of Renaissance Flanders which, together with the earlier Memoirs of Hadrian, proved the summit of Yourcenar’s achievement. Composition of The Abyss occupied most of the author’s middle age; upon its publication she found herself in a valedictory mood, ever more fascinated with the documents of her family history and again contemplating an hommage to her forebears. “When we are allowed the time,” Yourcenar wrote, “there always comes a moment when we want to sum up our accounts, a moment when we all ask what it is we owe to various ancestors known or unknown, to various incidents or accidents long since forgotten”—that is, a moment when we begin to seek “the sources of the self.” From this moment sprung the last of Yourcenar’s major works, the trilogy she called Le Labyrinthe du monde, whose final volume was completed in 1987, the year of her death at the age of eighty-four.
The first of these volumes, Souveniers pieux, was published in France in 1974; it now appears in an austerely beautiful translation under Yourcenar’s choice of an English title, Dear Departed. Its opening sentence echoes that of countless conventional autobiographies: “The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels.” But this is no conventional autobiography, no conventional book of any kind. Instead of moving her story forward from her birth—first memories, first books, first loves—Yourcenar moves it backward, offering us a series of portraits of her mother and of others from several generations of her mother’s family. (The story of her father and his family is told in a sequel, the yet-to-be-translated Archives du Nord.) Her mother is rediscovered in grainy photographs from her girlhood, in disastrous report cards from the Brussels School of the Sacred Heart, in tender letters to her husband-to-be, and in the doctor’s report of her death: she died at the age of thirty-two, eleven days after giving birth to her only child, the author, Marguerite. Here, too, in their seemingly infinite variety of circumstance and temperament, are her mother’s six brothers and sisters, their parents and aunts and uncles, their grandparents and great-grandparents. And here especially, in a tour-de-force double portrait, are her distinguished literary predecessor, cousin Octave Pirmez, an exquisite Belgian essayist of the later nineteenth century, and his brother Fernand, an idealist and pamphleteer, whose suicide at twenty-eight would haunt Octave to his own early grave.
“It goes without saying,” Yourcenar writes of her study of her mother’s family, “that I did not find the common denominators I sought between these people and me. The similarities I thought I discovered here and there unravel as soon as I try to define them precisely, ceasing to be anything other than likenesses such as those that link all creatures that have existed. I hasten to say, at this point, that the study of my father’s family has brought me scarcely anything more in this regard. What survives, as always, is the infinite pity for the little that we are and, contradictorily, respect and curiosity for these fragile and complex structures, poised as if on pilings at the brink of the abyss.” Another word for this, I believe, is “compassion,” which Yourcenar defines elsewhere in this book as “the knifelike pain” that can only be felt by those who possess “the horrible gift of looking the world full in the face and seeing it as it is.” Yourcenar’s own gift of compassion—her unique combination of historical imagination and human sympathy, and her ability to suffer for those who have suffered before her—was, as her two great novels show, extraordinary. It is again evident on every page of Dear Departed, which brings us closer not only to the moving particulars of her and her family’s past but to an understanding of something we all feel vaguely but only rarely apprehend: the presence of the whole of human history in the lives of each of us.