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     ALEXIS  

Copyright

Translation copyright © 1984 by Walter Kaiser 

Originally published in French under the title 

Alexis ou le traite du vain combat

© 1929 by Au Sans Pareil; © 1971 by Editions Gallirnard 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published in Canada by Collins Publishers Toronto 

Third printing, 1986 

Designed by Cynthia Krupat

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 

Yourcenar, Marguerite. / Alexis.

Translation of: Alexis. /. Title.

PQ2649.08A751) 1984 84V.912 84-6009

Dedication

For him    

Preface

Preface (1963)  

Alexis, or  The Treatise of Vain Struggle, appeared in 1929; it belongs to a certain moment in literature and in morals when a subject which up to then had been deemed forbidden received for the first time in centuries its full written expression. Almost thirty-five years have passed since its publication: during that time, the ideas, the social customs, and the reactions of the public have altered, even if less so than is commonly believed; what is more, certain opinions of the author have changed, or could have changed. It was therefore not without a certain anxiety that I returned to Alexis after this long interval: I expected to have to make a number of alterations in the text to make it consonant with a world that had itself altered.

And yet, after thinking it over, such changes seemed to me unnecessary, if not downright damaging; hence except in matters concerning a few infelicities of style, this little book has been left as it was. There are two reasons for this, which at first glance may seem contradictory: one is the highly personal character of a confession strictly limited to a milieu, a time, and a land now vanished from maps; a confession, moreover, impregnated with the old-fashioned atmosphere of Central (and essentially French) Europe, in which the slightest detail could not have been changed without transforming the acoustics of the book. The second reason, in contrast, is the fact that this story, judging from the reactions it continues to provoke, seems to possess a sort of relevance, and even usefulness, for some people.

Even though this subject, formerly considered illicit, has now been amply treated and even exploited by literature in our time, thus acquiring a sort of legitimacy, it would nonetheless appear that Alexis’s intimate problem is hardly less anguishing or secret today than it was formerly, nor would it appear that the relative ease (so different from true freedom) wdth which this subject is discussed in certain tightly restricted circles has done anything more than create in the public at large an increased misunderstanding or wariness. It is enough to look around attentively to perceive that the drama of Alexis and Monique continues to be lived out and doubtless will go on being lived out so long as the world of sexual realities remains shackled with prohibitions, perhaps the most dangerous of which are those of language, which bristles with obstacles most people easily avoid or work their way around but upon which the scrupulous and the pure in heart are almost inevitably impaled. Morals, whatever one may say, have changed too little for the central subject of this novel to have become very outdated.

It has perhaps not been adequately observed that the problem of sexual freedom in all its forms is, in large part, a problem of freedom of expression. It seems clear that, from generation to generation, the tendencies and the acts themselves vary little; on the contrary, what changes is the extent of the zone of silence or the weight of the layers of lies surrounding them. It is over the innermost realities of marriage itself, the sexual relations between spouses, that verbal superstition has imposed itself most tyrannically. The writer who endeavors to present the story of Alexis honestly, eliminating from his language formulae which are supposedly decorous but in reality are the semi-timorous or semi-licentious formulae of cheap literature, has little choice except between two or three modes of expression more or less inadequate and often unacceptable. The scientific terminology recently formulated and doomed to become outmoded with the theories that support it, worn away by an excessive popularization which quickly takes from it its virtue of precision, is valid only for the specialized works for which it has been created. Its labels go against the chief aim of literature, which is individuality of expression. Obscenity, a literary mode which has always had its adherents, is a defensible shock treatment if one has to force a prudish or indifferent public to face what it does not want to look at or what, as the result of too prolonged a habit, it can no longer see. Thus, the use of obscenity can correspond to a sort of cleaning up of words, to an attempt to give a kind of clean, peaceful innocence to a vocabulary essentially neutral but soiled and dishonored by usage. Yet such a brutal solution remains an external solution: the hypocritical reader tends to accept the unseemly word as a form of the picturesque, almost as a form of exoticism, a little the way the passing tourist in a strange city allows himself a visit to the slums. Obscenity is soon exhausted, forcing the author who relies on it into excesses which are even more threatening to truth than the understatements of past times. The brutality of language conceals the banality of thought and, with certain major exceptions, is indistinguishable from a kind of conformism.

A third solution may offer itself to the writer: the use of that spare, almost abstract language, both circumspect and precise, which in France has for centuries served preachers, moralists, and often novelists in the classical period as well, as a vehicle for discussing what was termed at that time “the aberrations of the senses.” This traditional style for the examination of conscience lends itself so well to the formulation of innumerable nuances of judgment on a subject which is by its nature as complex as life itself that a Bourdaloue or a Massillon resorted to it for the expression of indignation or censure, and a Laclos for licentiousness or voluptuousness. By its very discretion, this decanted language has seemed to me especially appropriate for the pensive, scrupulous deliberations of Alexis, for his patient effort to free himself strand by strand—unknotting rather than breaking them—from the web of uncertainties and constraints in which he finds himself caught, for his modesty which includes a respect for sensuality itself, and for his firm desire to reconcile with dignity the spirit and the flesh.

Like every story written in the first person, Alexis is the portrait of a voice. It was necessary to let this voice have its own register, its own timbre, to remove from it, for example, none of the courtly inflections which seem somehow out of another age and already seemed so thirty-five years ago, nor to remove from it any of those virtually suppliant accents of tenderness which perhaps, in the end, say more about the relations between Alexis and his young wife than his confession itself. It was also necessary to permit this character certain opinions which today seem rather doubtful to the author but which retain their value for characterization. Alexis explains his penchants as the effect of a puritanical childhood completely dominated by women, possibly an accurate opinion so far as he is concerned and very important for him from the moment he accepts it, but one which (even if I believed it at the time, and I no longer recall whether I did or not) now seems to me the sort of explanation that tries artificially to place within the psychological methodology of our age deeds which probably go beyond that type of motivation. In the same way, Alexis’s preference for sexual pleasure enjoyed independently from love, his wariness of any prolonged attachment, is characteristic of a period in reaction against a whole century of romantic exaggeration: this point of view has been one of the most widespread in our day, whatever the sexual tastes have been of those who express it. One might respond to Alexis by observing that sexual pleasure isolated in this way runs the risk of turning into a dreary routine; even more, that there is a puritanical essence in this attempt to separate pleasure from the rest of human emotions, as if it were not worthy of belonging to them.

As he leaves his wife, Alexis offers as the motive for his departure the quest for a more complete sexual liberty unblemished with falsehood; and certainly this reason remains the most decisive one. Yet it is probable that other motivations are involved which are even more difficult for the departing person to admit, such as a longing to escape from a prefabricated comfort and respectability, of which Monique had become, despite herself, the living symbol. Alexis adorns his young wife with every virtue, as if by thus increasing the distance between her and himself he would find it easier to justify his leave-taking. I have sometimes thought of composing a response from Monique, which, without in the least contradicting the confession of Alexis, would clarify certain aspects of this experience and give us a less idealized but more complete image of this young woman. But for now I have abandoned that project. Nothing is more secret than a woman’s existence. The tale of Monique would probably be much more difficult to write than the admissions of Alexis.

For those who may have forgotten the Latin of their schooldays, I should note that the name of the principal character, and hence the title of the book, is borrowed from the Second Eclogue of Virgil, “Alexis,” from which, and for the same reasons, Gide took the Corydon of his controversial essay. In addition, the subtitle, The Treatise of Vain Struggle, echoes The Treatise of Vain Desire, that rather pallid work of Andre Gide’s youth. Despite this allusion, there was not much influence of Gide on Alexis: the quasi-Protestant atmosphere and the attempt to reexamine a sexual problem both come from elsewhere. What, on the contrary, I find once again on more than one page (perhaps excessively so) is the influence of the profound, moving work of Rilke, which a happy chance brought to my attention early on. In general, we tend to forget too easily the existence of a sort of “law of delayed diffusion,” which explains why educated young people around 1860 read Chateaubriand rather than Baudelaire and those at the end of the century Musset rather than Rimbaud. Although I don’t consider myself in any way typical, I myself passed the years of my youth in a relative indifference to contemporary literature, partly as the result of my study of the past (and thus a work on Pindar, really quite clumsy, precedes this book on Alexis in what might be called my oeuvre), partly as the result of an instinctive distaste for what one might call modish values. Most of the great books of Gide in which my subject had at last been discussed openly were as yet known to me only by hearsay; their effect on Alexis is much less the result of their contents than of the fuss made about them, of the sort of public discussion which focused on a problem up to then examined only behind closed doors, and which certainly made it easier for me to approach the same theme without excessive hesitation. It was above all from the point of view of form that my reading of Gide’s early books was valuable to me, demonstrating as they do that it was still possible to employ the purely classical form of the novella, which otherwise would probably have seemed both precious and outmoded to me, and preventing me from falling into the trap of a real novel, the composition of which demands of its author a variety of human and literary experience which I did not at that time possess. All this is certainly not intended to reduce the importance of the work of a great author who was also a great moralist, even less to separate Alexis, written in isolation from the fashion by a twenty-four-year-old young woman, from other contemporary works with more or less similar intentions; on the contrary, it is intended to lend them the support of a spontaneous confession and an authentic testimony. Certain subjects are in the air at certain moments; they are also in the fabric of a life.

Marguerite Yourcenar

Alexis

ALEXIS  

This letter, my dear, will be very long. I am not very fond of writing. I have often read that words falsify thought, but it seems to me that written words falsify it even more: you know how little is left of a text after two successive translations. Then too, I do not know how to go about it. Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords. A letter, even the longest, is obliged to simplify what should not have been simplified: one is always so much less clear the minute one tries to be complete. I should like to make here an effort not only of sincerity but also of precision: hence, these pages will contain many erasures; they do already. What I would ask of you (the only thing that I still can ask of you) is not to skip over any of these lines which will have cost me so much. For if it is difficult to live, it is even more difficult to explain one’s life.

Perhaps it would have been better if I had not gone away without saying anything—as if I were ashamed, or as if you had understood. It would have been better for me to have explained myself quietly, slowly, in the intimacy of our room, at that hour of dusk when one sees so little that one dares admit almost everything. But I know you, my dear. You are a very kind person. In this sort of account, there is something pitiable which can cause the hearer to be moved; and because you would have felt sorry for me, you would have believed you had understood me. I know you. You would have wished to spare me the humiliation of so lengthy an explanation; you would have interrupted me too soon; and I would have been weak enough to hope that I would be interrupted at each phrase. You have another quality as well—a defect perhaps—which I shall speak of presently and which I do not wish to abuse any longer. I am too culpable toward you not to force myself to place a distance between me and your pity.

It is not a question of my art. You do not read the newspapers, but mutual friends will have told you that I enjoy what is called success—which is to say nothing more than that many people praise me without having heard me and some without having understood me. It is not a question of that: it is rather a question of something not really more intimate (for what is more intimate to me than my work?) but which seems more intimate because I have kept it hidden. Above all, more wretched. But, you see, I am hesitating; every word I write takes me a little further away from what I wanted to express at the very outset. That merely confirms that I lack the courage. I also lack the simplicity. I have always lacked that. Yet life is not simple, and that is hardly my fault. The only thing that persuades me to go on is the certainty that you are unhappy. We have lied so much, and suffered so much from lying, that there really is no great risk in seeing now if sincerity will not restore us.

My youth, or rather my adolescence, was absolutely pure—or what is called pure. I am aware that such a claim always provokes a smile, because it generally indicates either a lack of perspicacity or a lack of candor. Yet I do not believe I am deceiving myself, and I am confident I am not lying. I really am sure of that, Monique. At sixteen, I was what you doubtless hope Daniel will become when he reaches that age, but let me tell you, you are wrong to hope such a thing. I am persuaded that it is a mistake to force oneself to consign all the perfection one is capable of to the memories of one’s most distant past. The child that I was, the child of Woroïno, no longer exists, and all our existence is characterized by infidelity to ourselves. It is dangerous for the first of our illusions to be the best, the dearest, the most mourned. My childhood is as distant from me as those nervous expectations one has on the eve of holidays or the torpor of lengthy afternoons when one lies about without doing anything, hoping that something will happen. How can I hope to find that peace again, which I did not even know a name for then? I have renounced it completely, realizing that it never wholly belonged to me. But let me confess at once that I am not even sure I always regret that ignorance we call peace.

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