Novella: "Alexis" by Marguerite Yourcenar

Novella: "Alexis" by Marguerite Yourcenar

A friend recently gave me the first novel(la), "Alexis," by his favorite writer, Marguerite Yourcenar, and at just over one hundred pages, it was easy to read through in a day. Not a sitting, at least not for me; I can get impatient with stream-of-consciousness, which I think is the dominant style of this vaguely epistolary work. In summary, it is a young gay man's letter-of-leave to his young wife, with whom he had only just had a child. One hundred pages of a single letter is not my ideal entertainment, but I had to keep in mind the time and context in which the piece was written: Europe in the 1920's (the time captured in the letter is noted specifically: August 31, 1927 - September 17, 1928).

The restrictive mores that the letter's author felt pressing in on him created a frustrating composition of propriety, vagueness, and allusion. Vocabulary that would point directly to homosexuality is absent, at least in this translation. He doesn't even specify his sexual yearning as directed at men, but rather buries it in artful evasion: "I neither knew how nor dared to tell you what ardent adoration made it possible for me to experience the beauty and the mystery of bodies, nor how each of them, when it offered itself, seemed to bestow on me a fragment of human youth." So I am left to assume that the exclusion of a gendered pronoun implies the author's sexual attraction toward a member of his own gender. I expect that this strategy is not universal, even during the time period of "Alexis," and so I resist taking it for granted. I think one could even employ the tenants of queer theory in this work to argue for the author's heterosexuality!

That argument, however, would find tension with the emotional tone of much of the letter. The neuroses, self-hatred, fear and desire of illness, and stalled love all suggest that the letter's author was profoundly unhappy and at odds with the sexual conventions of the world around him, which he found soul-wiltingly repressive. At the very end of his letter, he allows himself some liberation: "I much prefer sin (if that is what it is) to a denial of self which leads to self-destruction. Life has made me what I am, the prisoner if you will of instincts which I did not choose but to which I resign myself; and this acquiescence will, I hope, procure me, if not happiness, at least peace," and, "Not having known how to live according to common morality, I endeavor at least to be in harmony with my own..."

I wish that Alexis would have delved even deeper into himself; I felt like I was being told a lot, almost hurriedly, or in passing, while there always seemed to be a barrier that Alexis would not cross. Why? For fear of hurting his wife, whom he is leaving, even further? Fear of reproach? Shame? He mentions suffering and happiness in brush strokes covering his lifetime, without ever retracing the stroke or shaping it beyond the brush's first pass. I wanted to see him cry out or break down, but he has built enough walls to keep Monique, his wife, and the reader out.

I've also started reading, "Journey into the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880 - 1918," chronicling the life of a homosexual cosmopolitan aristocrat living in roughly the same period as Yourcenar's Alexis. I'm curious to see how he explores his sexuality, among the rest of his measured, witty, and poignant observations.