Yourcenar would later say that she lacked the necessary experience of politics and couldn’t at the time find the right perspective to frame Antinous; she also moved away from dialogue completely, as seen in her remarks to Hively. Her Antinous of the 1920s was reportedly a creature of aestheticised mysticism, closely linked to the idea of the Genius of Hadrian and the Orphic tradition. She later wrote, again to Nicolaou: ‘I fear in equal measure fake Greek, fake Roman and fake modern’. Yourcenar was no Pessoa (she read his poem, but probably much later) and so encumbered as she was in the 1920s by an outmoded poetics, it was difficult to escape the stereotype of Antinous as beautiful boy, as he had appeared to writers before Yourcenar. Balzac engaged with this problem in various texts, including his short story ‘Sarrasine’. In his commentary on the story Roland Barthes refers to the impasse of the reference to Antinous as a marker of beauty. First Balzac: ‘Filippo, Marianina’s brother, shared with his sister in the Countess’s marvelous beauty. To be brief, this young man was a living image of Antinous, even more slender.’ Barthes comments: ‘Young Filippo exists only as a copy of two models: his mother and Antinous: the biological, chromosomatic Book, and the Book of statuary (without which it would be impossible to speak of beauty: Antinous, whose mention Balzac preceeds with ‘to be brief, he was the living image of A’: but what else is to be said about Filippo? and what then is to be said about Antinous?).
We have an extraordinary story – we need to bear in mind that it is a story – of the genesis of Memoirs of Hadrian in Yourcenar’s ‘Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian’, published in November 1952 and expanded in 1958. We learn that the text emerged after an alchemical process involving the destruction, displacement and recovery of manuscripts in the 1920s and 30s, during which period Yourcenar made many journeys around Europe, writing novels, stories and essays, including a study of Pindar, on her way. When she left Europe for America in October 1939, Yourcenar had therefore been working on her Antinous and Hadrian project for nearly two decades, but she crossed the Atlantic armed only with some notes made at Yale in 1937, a map of the Roman Empire at Trajan’s death and a postcard bought in 1926 of the bronze head of Antinous in the Archaeological Museum in Florence. Wartime and adjustment to life in America, including the need to work to earn money, largely interrupted the project.
After the war she destroyed the notes from Yale, but the following year, in December 1948, Yourcenar received a trunk of personal effects from Switzerland. She threw out old letters to people whose names she sometimes didn’t recognise and eventually came across a typed letter beginning ‘My dear Mark’ – ‘mon cher Marc’ – and after a few moments realised that it was Marcus Aurelius: this is of course the beginning of Memoirs of Hadrian, which takes the form of a long valedictory letter to Marcus Aurelius, whom Hadrian named as his next successor after Antoninus. On finding this four-page typescript Yourcenar felt obliged to complete her book. We note this important aspect of Yourcenar’s work on Antinous and Hadrian: for a writer intent on reviving the past for the present, it was necessary to visit all the museums but also partially to loosen the hold of scholarly details on her imagination. In an often quoted remark in the ‘Reflections’, Yourcenar said that she proceeded with ‘one foot in scholarship, the other (...) in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul’ (RC, 328-9). Intensive reading, research and writing occupied the years 1949-1951.