BOOK REVIEW : ‘Dear Departed’: Anger Shapes an Artist : DEAR DEPARTED<i> by Marguerite Yourcenar Translated by Maria Louise Ascher</i> Farrar, Straus, Giroux $25; 346 pages

By being born, Marguerite Yourcenar killed her mother. Fernande, childlike at 32; indolent, untidy, passionately attached to words and phrases and fearful of horses, boats, exercise and child bearing, died of puerperal fever six days after the delivery.

Of course, it was not that simple. The doctor, whom Marguerite’s cavalryman father threw out of the house with a shout of “Murderer!”, was no doubt responsible. So was Fernande’s dreamy estrangement from her own physical self. So were the circumstances of that estrangement: the suffocating climate of turn-of-the-century haute-bourgeois Belgium, where women “took care not to know too much about conception and parturition and would not have thought they could name the organs involved. Everything that touched on the center of the body was the province of husbands, midwives and physicians.”

“Dear Departed” is the painful record of a birth; in part, the violent birth of the infant Marguerite de Crayencour and, as a whole, that of the writer Marguerite would become. Yourcenar adopted an imperfect anagram of her family surname, as if art were the approximate reordering of the scrambled elements of human life. Published in France 17 years ago, it begins and ends with the brief marriage, playful and then tragic, of Yourcenar’s parents. In between, it follows the lineage of her mother’s family from the Middle Ages.

Its subject is roots. “Dear Departed”--the English in this fine translation by Maria Louise Ascher reflects the mockery of the French “Souvenirs Pieux”--hacks away at these roots even as it examines them. The book is a work of anger, but it is the shaping anger of an artist. Above all, it is the anger of an artist who, in such works as “Hadrian’s Memoirs,” brought out a thread of classical stoicism in the modern world.

The voice that Yourcenar devised seems cold indeed. “The being I refer to as me” is the way she introduces herself in “Dear Departed”; mostly, she refers to her parents as “Monsieur de C.” and “Fernande.” Yet the coldness is deceptive; it is like the General Winter that Russia called on to repel the feverish intrusion of Napoleon. Yourcenar drained heat from her pages, but it was so that the flame she then introduced would be hers alone.

The flame in this recalcitrant and beautiful book ignites with the image of the girl-child who could exist only by her mother’s death. But Fernande’s mother, Mathilde, also died in childbirth, after bearing 10 other children. Yourcenar roams fiercely back along the generations of this lineage that grew by extinguishing its women.

It is not a systematic history but a series of glimpses and illuminations. And what they light up is not simply women’s oppression but the broader theme of a civilization growing up to preserve its spark of genius and ending by crushing it.

She takes us back to the bloody struggles of Flanders, for centuries the hinge between the Holy Roman Empire and France. She tells of her maternal forebears fighting with the rising bourgeoisie against the aristocracy and, by the 19th Century, prevailing. She visits the ashes of their triumph: the blackened, factory-choked wastelands that nourished their pleasant estates and ended by blighting them.

The fighting energy of the bourgeoisie stiffened into a reactionary complacency that armored itself with exploitative investment--we think of the Belgian Congo--stiff collars and a narrow and sentimental Catholicism.

Yourcenar sketches Arthur, her maternal grandfather, whose children had to sit without moving in the evenings while he read his newspaper and write him a letter of gratitude each New Year’s. And she portrays his wife, Mathilde, whose only moment of freedom came when she got up at dawn and, avoiding the paved road, took a shortcut across the meadow to Mass. When her life of servitude ended, Arthur took her corpse to church along the paved road.

At the end, she comes back to her parents: Fernande, with her instinct for life but no ability to secure it for herself, and her French husband. Michel de Crayencour, an elusive and intriguing figure, was a former military man with an aristocratic spirit and money firmly controlled by his mother.

He loved his wife up to a point, and indulged her--the two spent the first years of their marriage on an extended Grand Tour--but was unable, and perhaps disinclined, to free or strengthen her.

Yourcenar’s relations with her father are only hinted at. As for Fernande, Yourcenar writes with coolness and understanding--the second would have been impossible without the first--until the very last line releases a glow of muted color.

Fernande, possibly just pregnant with the writer, is reclining on the terrace, “from which one sees, or thinks one sees, beyond the pale green expanse of the rolling plain, the distant gray line of the sea. Majestic clouds drift in the open sky, like those once sketched in this same region by painters of 17th-Century battles. Fernande spreads a lap robe over her knees, languidly opens a book and gives a caress to Trier, who is curled up by her feet. My face begins to take shape on the screen of time.”

Next: Christopher Goodrich reviews “Putting on the Ritz” by Joe Keenan (Viking).