Celia recommends Fires by Marguerite Yourcenar:

The first line of Fires is, “I hope this book will never be read.” This isn’t an accident—in her introduction to the novel’s English translation, Marguerite Yourcenar reaffirms her desire that no one should read it, and acknowledges that writing an introduction under such circumstances seems preposterous. Why should you read this book that wasn’t intended to be read, then? Because it’s the deeply personal account of a doomed love affair, in which Yourcenar weaves the ancient past and the troubled present of Europe deftly together. Because it’s a love story about falling out of love, and going on with life. Because it’s an incredibly impassioned, complex vision not just of a single unhappy love affair, but also of the relationships between men and women, between women who love one another, between the past and the present, and between the individual and her destiny. Because I am obsessed with Marguerite Yourcenar, and I’m fairly sure that you, dear reader, ought to be as well.

Marguerite Yourcenar is best known for her erudite and layered historical novels, Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss. These books reconstruct the ancient world so thoroughly that, reading them, it seems that Yourcenar has a direct line into the past, which allows her characters to speak through her. And, indeed, Yourcenar very much conceptualized her relationship with her characters this way. She told one story in which, having taken Zeno, the hero of The Abyss, into a bakery with her, she accidentally lost him and had to return later to pick him up.

Fires, however, is an early novel that has the seeds of these later books, but also uses history in a way that is all its own. Written in 1936, under the shadow of the Second World War, Fires is ostensibly the chronicle of a doomed love affair, a kind of psychomachea, in which Yourcenar, embodying various characters from classical history and myth—Phaedra, Achilles, Clytemnestra, Sappho—examines the various facets of love, desire, and despair. It is a book that asks us to think deeply into the past, and particularly into the stories of classical women, and bring them into conversation with the present. Over the Trojan War looms the impending shadow of the Second World War, the receding shadow of the First. The story of Antigone becomes a very modern story of civil war. And Phaedra, descending into Hades, finds it transformed into the modern day hell of the subway system.

As much as each story is a record of a particular moment in a love affair, they are also an exploration of the difficulty of establishing oneself in a gendered world. So, for instance, Achilles, pictured disguised among the women of Skyros before the Trojan War, is torn between his love for his companion, Deidama, and a passion for the newly arrived Patroclus. The violent conclusion of this love triangle is also a crisis of gender: will Achilles remain among the women, disguised as one of them—will he become a woman—or will he depart for the Trojan War and become a man? This isn’t only a question of gender identity in the strict sense, but of the role he will play in society. When one of his female companions leads him out of the palace on Skyros, she contemplates, momentarily, taking his place: “since,” Yourcenar writes, “the most discerning of gods or butchers could not have distinguished this man’s heart from her own.” But ultimately, she does not go. She remains a prisoner, buried, Yourcenar says, alive.

I tend to suspect that Yourcenar found the constraints of her gender equally restrictive. In her personal life, she was a bisexual woman who had a reputation for falling passionately in love with gay men (Fires is said to be inspired by her break with her editor in France, who admired her work deeply, but, to her distress, was not interested in women, and by the beginning of her relationship with Grace Flick, an American academic who would become both Yourcenar’s translator and her long-term partner). As a novelist, she developed a reputation as a “masculine” writer, a woman who captured the voices of men so well that, critics wrote, one could forget her gender entirely, so uninterested did she seem in the domestic lives of women. But in Fires, as in much of her early work, she is intimately concerned with what it is to be a woman dying to escape the constraints of gender—to love another woman, to be a hero, to stand on equal footing with men and be accepted by them, to stand against the workings of an unjust government.

It would be a mistake if I managed to end this review without including at least a little bit of Yourcenar’s extremely beautiful prose. Here is Sappho, transformed, in Yourcenar’s telling, from a poet into an acrobat, performing along the Mediterranean between the two World Wars:

With one pull, she brings herself to the last support her will to die will allow: the trapeze bar swinging in midair transforms this creature, tired of being only half woman, into a bird; she glides, sea gull of her own abyss, hanging by one foot, under the gaze of a public which does not believe in tragedy. Her skill goes against her; no matter how she tries, she can’t lose her balance; shady equestrian, Death has her vault the next trapeze. She climbs at last higher than the spotlights: spectators can no longer applaud her, since now they can’t see her. Hanging onto the ropes that pull the canopy painted with stars, she can only continue to surpass herself by bursting through her sky.