Last month
marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who
assumed the mononym Colette after her second divorce. Married at 20, she was
coerced by her first husband to write books under his name, as depicted in the
2018 biopic starring Keira Knightley and Dominic West. The Claudine series
proved a sensation, rapturously relaying a young girl’s coming-of-age and her
search for sexual freedom; the modern French teenager had arrived. Once
separated, Colette immersed herself in “pleasures so lightly called physical”,
and expressed them in her novellas with poetic intensity and a joyous savoir
faire. Simone de Beauvoir called her “the only great woman writer in France”,
but Colette also flourished as a dancer, screenwriter, librettist, journalist
and the hands-on owner of a beauty chain. She loved women, married men three
times, and, aged 40, gave birth to a daughter. She was awarded four ranks of
the Légion d’honneur, became the first female president of the Académie
Goncourt, and was the first woman to receive a state funeral in France upon her
death in 1954. For those new to this astonishing author’s work, writer and
Colette fan James Hopkin suggests some good places to start.
The entry point
If you
don’t fancy the gorgeously frenetic prose of the Claudine series (translated by
Antonia White), then you should start with The Vagabond (1910) translated by
Enid McLeod. It’s here that Colette finds her voice in the measured sensuality,
melancholy and humour of a woman determined to move on. Thirty-three-year-old
Renée Néré (Renée means “reborn”) is treading the boards after escaping an
oppressive marriage. When Renée succumbs to the “voluptuous pleasure” of an
admirer, she flees on tour. Colette was writing her own life. She composed the
book while a performing artiste on a 32-city tour of France, her makeup case
across her knees as a desk. Each page is marked by tender insight and painterly
detail as Colette urges us to feel the beauty and bravery of the wandering life,
and to challenge the conventions of love. Angela Carter declared the novel “one
of the most truthful expositions of the dilemma of a free woman in a
male-dominated society”.
The one to read in the garden
Loathing
the fuss around death, Colette did not attend the funeral of the mother she
adored. But 10 years later, she published La Maison de Claudine (1922),
translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid McLeod, and issued as My
Mother’s House. In this memoir of her idyllic childhood in Burgundy, the author
resurrected an Earth goddess. Sido roamed her gardens at dawn, trailing a scent
of lemon verbena leaves as she tended her “roses, lychnis, hydrangeas”.
Dispensing maternal instruction alongside shrewd country wisdom and wordplay,
she was generous to her children and to all living creatures. Colette wants us
to adore her, and we do. The gently rhapsodic prose is an elegy, sung not just
to her mother but to the vanished pastoral of the late 19th century.
Flower-lovers take note: Colette writes ravishingly about plants and their
soul-repairing powers, from pink juneberries to the Cuisse-de-Nymphe émue rose.
If you want to explore sexual freedom
Colette
enjoyed many relationships with women, the longest with Mathilde de Morny,
known as “Max” or “Missy”. The couple caused an uproar with an onstage kiss in
1907. Ever the provocateur, Colette regularly performed in near-naked revues
such as Flesh. Detractors, and there were many, called her “Culotte” (meaning
“knickers”). As a woman living and writing her passions at the beginning of the
20th century, a time of rampant misogyny, Colette was radical, self-disciplined
and courageous. She wasn’t trying to write like a man; she had created a new
style. She was also a prolific journalist. Look at Earthly Paradise for examples.
Or try The Pure and the Impure (1932/41; translated by Herma Briffault) and
follow an older Colette as she visits lesbian clubs and opium dens. Calling
herself a “mental hermaphrodite”, she nevertheless makes it clear where her
sympathies lie: “We can never bring enough twilight, silence and gravity to
surround the embrace of two women.”
If you’re short of time
Gigi (1944)
made the writer’s name in English (translated by Roger Senhouse), and launched
the career of a young actor whom Colette chose for the stage adaptation after
spotting her in a Monte Carlo hotel. Her name? Audrey Hepburn. Colette had an
uncanny ability to read a face, a landscape, a longing. She uses this gift to
great effect as the narrator-investigator of her short stories, probing beneath
the masquerade of the Belle Époque to reveal truths laced with poison as well
as pleasure. You’ll love the ‘‘shipwrecked’’ souls from demimonde to beau monde
alike with their fruity gossip and daily despair. And you won’t escape the
narrator’s beady eye or insolent wit. Yet her tone is often soothing. In The
Sémiramis Bar, frequented by “hard-ups in weird jackets”, she feels at home
with the tough-talking female owner. In the controlled menace of The Rainy
Moon, a betrayed wife seeks revenge through witchcraft. And in Bella-Vista, two
women running a guesthouse try to conceal their relationship. Read the novella
The Cat. No one writes about animals quite like Madame Colette.
The masterpiece
Chéri
(1920, new translation by Paul Eprile) is a fable set in 1912 about a
voluptuous courtesan, Léa, and her handsome “almost filial” fop, Fred/Chéri, 25
years her junior (Colette herself later seduced her 16-year-old stepson during
her second marriage). Léa feeds her “nursling” culinary and bodily pleasures,
which would make you gag if you weren’t already intoxicated by Colette’s
sensual survey of the spoilt pair. She never shirked from writing her body,
often mercilessly. The End of Chéri (1926) is a brilliantly bleak follow-up,
lamenting the end of innocence after the first world war, while celebrating an
older woman who regains her authority. Colette wrote repeatedly of the need to
rejuvenate yourself, especially after “one of the great banalities of
existence, love”.
“Look
around you,” she said in an interview, “soak up the atmosphere of things,
that’s the purpose of life.” And you should soak up Colette. With her guidance
you’ll soon be strong enough to welcome again “from every source the fleeting
benediction of joy”.
Where to
start with: Colette. By James Hopkin. The Guardian, February 23, 2023.
Walking
past the Moulin Rouge on the evening of January 3, 1907, passers-by encountered
riots bleeding onto the streets of Paris. The cause of this unrest: an onstage
kiss between French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and her lover Mathilde de
Morny, an aristocrat otherwise known as “Missy.” Opening night proved to be the
only performance of Egyptian Dream, as police promptly shut the production
down.
The writer
at the center of this scandal—a woman who used the patronymic Colette to
command respect—was a trailblazer of French literature. She published more than
30 books, reported on the front lines of World War I, received a Nobel Prize
nomination and served as the first woman president of the prestigious Académie
Goncourt literary organization. Known for her depictions of female sexuality
and astute yet lighthearted social commentary on the everyday lives of young
women, Colette was a figure ahead of her time.
“Unlike
many other women writers in all countries, she never campaigned, never attacked
or defended any cause of public interest,” wrote biographer Margaret Crosland
in 1973. “Her aggressive strength was used in describing the varying tensions
in personal relationships, evoking the material world as she saw it, adding the
descant of her memory, perfecting an instrument of style, resisting any attempt
to make moral judgments.”
Born in the
village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy on January 28, 1873, Colette
spent much of her early life close to home. Raised by a mother on whom she was
overly dependent and a father she felt she never truly knew, Colette attended
“a secular public school as part of the first generation of girls formed by the
secular instructional revolution of the 1870s,” says Patricia Tilburg, a
historian at Davidson College and the author of Colette’s Republic: Work,
Gender and Popular Culture in France, 1870-1914. Comparatively, most of the
writer’s literary contemporaries attended private Catholic schools.
Tilburg
adds, “[Colette’s] literature from the first decade of the 20th century spoke
to that new generation of French women.”
In 1893,
Colette moved to Paris, where she would eventually form a freer, more
androgynous identity. The change in venue wasn’t entirely her choice. To help
solve her family’s financial troubles, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars,
a writer 14 years her senior better known by the pen name Willy. His literary
talents were largely a facade, with ghostwriters producing much of the content
attributed to him.
As early as
1894 or 1895, financial instability led Willy to recruit his new wife as one of
these ghostwriters. “You should put some memories about the primary school on
paper,” he reportedly told her. “Don’t be afraid of piquant details, I might
perhaps be able to make something of them.” While initially dismissive of
Colette’s drafts, Willy later rediscovered the journals she had written and
took them to a publisher. These manuscripts became Colette’s first novel,
Claudine at School. Published in 1900, the book was an immediate hit, winning
accolades for its realistic portrayal of a schoolgirl in the throes of puberty.
The Claudine character represented a new, subversive form of femininity; as Wash Westmoreland, director of the 2018 biopic Colette, told History Extra in 2019, she was “really the first sort of feisty, female teenage voice in literature.” By the publication of the fourth Claudine novel in 1903, many critics presumed that Colette, who was familiar to the public as Willy’s wife, was the author of the series due to its semi-autobiographical tone. One such critic, Rachilde (a friend of Colette’s), made subtle references to this suspicion in a review of Claudine, writing, “Here is a true book. … Claudine is not a novel, not a thesis, not a diary. … She is the total woman screaming at the top of her voice about her puberty, her desires, her will and, yes, her crimes.”
According
to Crosland, Willy’s main contribution to the four Claudine novels was to
“soften and ‘feminize’ what his wife had written.” Yet the series was published
under his name, giving him the profits and rights to Colette’s creation.
Somewhat ironically, Tilburg points out in her book, “in 1907, the same year
that Colette’s husband sold all rights to the Claudine novels without her
consent, a law was passed in France giving married women control of their
earnings.” (Colette successfully sued to reclaim sole authorship of the
Claudine series after Willy’s death in 1931, but following her own death in
1954, Willy’s son with another woman, Jacques Gauthier-Villars, petitioned to
restore his father’s name to the books’ title pages.)
As
Claudine’s popularity grew, Willy placed increasing pressure on Colette,
supposedly locking her in a room until she had written the next installment. He
also launched an extensive range of Claudine-themed products, from perfume to
lingerie to cigarettes.
Colette
herself, says Kathleen Antonioli, a scholar of French literature at Kansas
State University, was a “marketing genius.” She became a semi-celebrity, “very
aware of the power of reputation,” able to market Claudine through exploits
like walking the streets of Paris while dressed as the character.
Antonioli
adds that Colette “biographically and politically distanced herself very
explicitly from feminism,” maintaining her popularity among the literary elite,
“even within right-wing publications,” and ensuring her work “sold well [to]
readers across a political spectrum in France.”
As Tilburg
explains, “[Colette] wrote for ‘New Women’ at the turn of the century—not by
promoting feminist political action and suffrage, which she actually
demonstrated some disdain for, but [by presenting] a new vision of what women’s
lives, particularly middle-class women’s lives, could be in France in this
period.” (The New Woman was an independent, free-spirited and sexually
adventurous ideal that emerged at the end of the 19th century.)
Willy’s
exploitation of Colette, combined with extramarital affairs on both their
parts, took its toll on their marriage. The pair separated in 1906, prompting
Colette—who received no royalties for the Claudine books—to pursue a career on
the stage as a way of asserting her financial independence.
Around the
time of the separation, Colette embarked on a passionate affair with Missy, a
niece of Napoleon III and perhaps the illegitimate granddaughter of Nicholas I
of Russia. Like Colette, who included an openly lesbian relationship between a
school headmistress and her assistant in the Claudine novels, Missy defied
societal conventions, dressing as a man and “very much [embracing] masculinity”
as an identity, Westmoreland told History Extra.
Missy’s aristocratic status protected the couple, who managed to live together in relative peace despite the stigma associated with same-sex relationships during the early 20th century. It was only after their kiss at the Moulin Rouge that Missy and Colette were forced into secrecy.
While
Colette continued writing during this period, her main focus was theater,
particularly the art of mime. In November 1907, she starred in The Flesh, a
pantomime in which she bared her left breast on stage, prompting her mother to
ask, “How do you dare pose practically naked?” Blending both of her creative
passions, Colette wrote stories set behind the scenes of music halls, “giving a
voice to the underpaid women performers who featured so often from a male
perspective in paintings and novels of the time,” noted Diana Holmes, an expert
on French women writers at the University of Leeds in England, in an essay for
the Conversation in 2019.
Colette and Willy officially divorced in 1910. That same year, the writer published her first novel under her own name, The Vagabond. Colette’s relationship with Missy ended in 1911. She went on to wed twice more, first in 1912 to Henry de Jouvenel, editor of the newspaper Le Matin, and then in 1935 to Maurice Goudeket, a businessman and writer whom she remained married to until her death in 1954
.
It was in the 1920s that Colette was first recognized as a significant figure in the French literary canon. As Antonioli says, “People always liked and admired Colette, but after [World War I], with this need to consolidate French identity, Colette really becomes a classique,” or classic.
The 1920s
and ’30s were the “most prolific and innovative” of Colette’s career, writes
Bethany Ladimer in Colette, Beauvoir and Duras: Age and Women Writers. Her 1920
novel Chéri, which sold 30,000 copies by the fall of its first year in print,
centered on Léa de Lonval, a courtesan in a sexual relationship with a man
almost half her age. In a clear example of art mirroring life, the book came
out around the same time as Colette’s affair with her 16-year-old stepson,
Bertrand de Jouvenel.
According
to Tilburg’s book, “Colette’s life and work in this period … made claims for
sexual, financial and social autonomy that harmonized with the demands of the
New Woman.”
Colette’s
second marriage ended in 1924, in part due to her affair with de Jouvenel’s
son. She began writing for a variety of newspapers, magazines and journals,
publishing over 1,200 articles, the majority between the 1920s and ’40s. During
World War II, she attracted criticism for collaborating with the Nazi-installed
Vichy regime and publishing a novel filled with anti-Semitic slurs.
The war
years also saw Colette publish perhaps her best-known work, the 1944 novella
Gigi, which follows a Parisian girl training to become a courtesan while
embarking on a relationship with a wealthy man named Gaston.
Gigi became
especially popular after its adaptation for the stage in 1951, with Audrey
Hepburn in the title role. A 1958 film adaptation featuring Leslie Caron as
Gigi went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Reflecting the frank
manner in which Colette wrote about relationships and sexuality, the movie finds
Gigi unashamedly asking Gaston, “Do you make love all the time?”
It is Chéri and Gigi that perhaps capture the adult Colette best. In these novels, she explores the everyday issues that women face, from their relationships with men to their fears about aging and isolation. Discussions of female desire, whether it be for men, sex, financial independence or general autonomy, are a staple of her literature, as is the presence of fully fleshed-out female characters. Describing Chéri’s mother, for instance, she writes:
“For a
moment, in the eyes of her son, Madame Peloux took on her true character, which
is to say that he judged her at her worth, appreciated her as she was, fiery,
devouring, calculating and reckless all at once, like a great financier,
capable of taking delight in her cruelty like a humorist.”
Colette
died on August 3, 1954, at age 81. While the Catholic Church refused to mark
her death on account of her status as a two-time divorcee, she became the first
woman author in France to receive a state funeral. Goudeket, for his part,
honored his late wife with a plaque at her home that reads, “Here lived, here
died Colette, whose work is a window wide open on life.”
While
Colette never personally identified as a feminist, even going so far as to say
that suffragists deserved “the whip and the harem,” she owes much of her
contemporary fame—particularly in the United States—to the feminist movement.
Her focus on women’s issues and everyday struggles ensured her inclusion in
feminist anthologies. The English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal
1949 book, The Second Sex, mentions Colette 21 times, making her the most-cited
writer in the text. As Antonioli argues, “Colette doesn’t get to decide if she
was a feminist or not.”
Colette’s
legacy has endured well into the 21st century. Rue Colette, a street in her
hometown of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, features her signature on a sign. Her
childhood home opened to the public in 2016 after an extensive renovation. Most
recently, Keira Knightley portrayed the writer in the 2018 film Colette, which
co-starred Dominic West as Willy and Denise Gough as Missy. Antonioli goes so
far as to suggest that “Colette is better known [today] than many of her male
contemporaries,” particularly in the U.S. She adds, “In the last year alone,
there have been two new translations of Chéri and La Fin de Chéri.”
It is
Colette’s 1907 performance with Missy that is “an iconic moment” for Tilburg,
capturing her years on the stage, during which “she [was] really living a life
with radical import.”
To
summarize Colette’s appeal in another way, as journalist and author Janet
Flanner did in the introduction to Crosland’s 1973 biography:
“Colette
wrote only about what she knew. When she began, what she knew was in truth only
her own life. So that is what she almost exclusively wrote about. … Her
imagination was used in the creation of her style of writing what she wrote,
which was her fortunate limitation and the definition of what eventually became
her recognized and singular authentic literary genius.”
Colette
Revolutionized French Literature With Her Depictions of Female Desire. By Colette
Fountain. Smithsonian Magazine, January 27, 2023.
"How
long Colette has lived, even after her death!" wrote the journalist Janet
Flanner in 1967. More than half a century later, Colette lives on still, and
this week sees the 150th anniversary of her birth. To mark the occasion, NYRB
Classics has published a new translation of her twin masterpieces, Chéri (1920)
and The End of Chéri (1926), translated by Paul Eprile – and this seems like a
good opportunity to explore the life and work of this uniquely beloved of
French writers.
Colette's
fame extends to being probably the only female writer known by her mononym –
she is always and only Colette, though in fact this most feminine of names was
her surname: she was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette on 28 January 1873 in the
French village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye.
Her work –
mostly at novella length, short and sharp – survives because her chief subject
is one that never goes out of fashion. "Love, the bread and butter of my
pen," she wrote, though she put it more bluntly in her book The Pure and
the Impure (1932): "The flesh, always the flesh, the mysteries and betrayals
and frustrations and surprises of the flesh." André Gide, that great
connection point for 20th-Century French literature, agreed, praising Chéri for
its "intelligence, mastery and understanding of the least-admitted secrets
of the flesh".
The story
of Colette and her work is one of the most astonishing in modern literature.
She was a pioneer of the French school of autofiction (autobiographical
fiction), writing about women's lives in ways that broke new ground. Her books
were simultaneously popular and acclaimed – read by critics and the public
alike – not to mention scandalous. And she made of her life a project just as
fascinating as her books. But to understand her – her fertile productivity, her
showiness, her expertise in the mysteries of the human heart, and her appetite
for including herself in her books, disguised either lightly or not at all – we
must first understand that she almost didn’t become famous in the first place.
A runaway success
Her first
four books were the chronicles of fictional French schoolgirl Claudine –
Claudine at School (1900), Claudine in Paris (1901), Claudine Married (1902)
and Claudine and Annie (1903) – which she wrote at the behest of her first
husband Henry Gauthier-Villars, a journalist and editor known by the less
elegant pen-name of Willy. Once she wrote them – at times locked in a room to
spur her to completion – and they were garnished with a few editorial
suggestions by Willy ("Some girlish high jinks… you see what I
mean?"), Willy had them published under his own name and kept the
copyright and royalties.
In reports
about Colette's life, the usual word to describe Willy is
"deplorable", and so he was, but he did give Colette a taste for
Parisian cultural life – she met Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy
and more – and did his bit to boost the sales of "his" books, which
were slow until he arranged for three of his friends to write favourable
reviews. Soon Claudine at School took off, and by the time the series was
complete, the books were so popular they spawned stage productions and a range
of merchandise, including Claudine cigarettes.
The books
are apprentice work by definition – Colette wrote them in her twenties, under
duress – but for a writer who started reading Balzac at the age of seven, that
is no criticism. Claudine became what Colette's biographer Judith Thurman
called "the century's first teenager", with her sponge-like
absorption of adult behaviour, and in the books we see the development of
Colette's mastery of sensuous description, as well as her first ransackings of
her own life for material (which can make reading the wedding night scene in
Claudine Married a somewhat voyeuristic experience). It was in these books,
too, that we saw Colette's first handling of love in fiction – although
Claudine in Paris is probably the last book where Colette would write about
love uncritically, romantically, without the power dynamics and ambiguity that
made her later work so piquant. ("Men are terrible," she once wrote,
adding, "Women, too.")
Colette and
Willy separated in 1906, and the following year she published (under the name
Colette Willy) Retreat from Love, which continued the story of Claudine and
Annie, and which she prefaced with the declaration: "For reasons which
have nothing to do with literature, I have ceased to collaborate with
Willy." She was free at last.
However,
with Willy still retaining the royalties from the Claudine books, Colette was
penniless, and to earn money she became a music hall performer. This appealed
to her sense of performance and enabled her to play with gender roles: one
minute dressed in drag as a besuited man, the next posing with a bare breast in
the bodice-ripping pantomime The Flesh. Her experience in music hall inspired
her 1910 novel The Vagabond, the highly autobiographical story of performer Renée
Néré and a lover she calls "the Big Noodle", which asks modern
questions about the separation of love and sex, and how society seeks to
control both through the institution of marriage. (An institution about which,
of course, Colette and therefore Renée had great scepticism.) It was The
Vagabond that catapulted Colette to literary acclaim for the first time, and
the book won three votes for the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
Writing 'immoral' books
Colette's
time in music hall might have galvanised her interest in putting herself
centre-stage in her fiction. One of her finest examples of this is the late
novel Chance Acquaintances (1940), in which Colette the narrator visits a
health resort where wealthy women (with fashionably bobbed hair) undergo
dubious cures: "nasal douches, steam rooms, flushing the kidneys".
There she meets a husband and wife, the Haumes. Mme Haume is unwell, while M
Haume has the appearance of "someone with very few thoughts in his
head". Colette discovers, however, that M Haume is having an affair and
that his lover, back in Paris, has gone silent on him. Naturally, this is
Colette's ideal territory, and she agrees to visit his lover in Paris to find
out the true story. The plot shows Colette's appetite for mischief, as well as
her enduring interest in the vagaries of the human heart, while M Haume finds
that "when intrigue is called into play, a woman never forgets that
feminine instinct is the older in guile."
After
Willy, Colette's second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, could only be an improvement,
and as editor of leading newspaper Le Matin, he was also able to publish his
wife’s work. But even this came unstuck, as he was forced to abandon the
serialised publication of a new book, Ripening Seed (1923), due to the shock it
caused readers, and he asked her why she could not write novels that were not
immoral.
Ripening
Seed was the novel that extended Colette's interest in love, power and
sexuality to the crimson red period of adolescence, through teenage friends
Philip (impatient to be older) and Vinca (with her eyes of "white and
periwinkle blue"). They have been “15 years together as pure and loving
twins" and seem likely to develop their friendship, though Philip will
find that "possession is a miracle not so speedily accomplished." But
their simple relationship is complicated when Philip is seduced by an older
woman: and this too came from life, as at the age of 47 Colette had a
relationship with her 16-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. Ripening Seed
is a highly sensual novel, revelling in not just bodily pleasures ("ripe
lips like fruit scorched by the heat of the day"), but in the smells and
sights of the seaside landscape on the Brittany coast.
Ripening Seed was published between Colette's greatest artistic achievements, Chéri and The End of Chéri. The first book tells of an ageing courtesan, Léa de Lonval, and Chéri, the "very beautiful, very young" man with "hair like the plumage of a blackbird" and "firmly muscled chest" whom she has been educating in the field of love for a number of years. The complications, as ever, arise when Léa decides that it is time for her Chéri to move on. The novelist Amy Bloom called Chéri a "book about the importance of love, the failure of love [and] the way people in love often manage to fail themselves as well as their beloveds". In the closing lines of Chéri, our hero is "filling his lungs with air like an escapee". But he is not done with her yet: the companion piece, The End of Chéri, warns us of its ambiguity from the opening lines as Chéri leaves his home, having not thought about Léa for years ("'Ah! It's nice out'. He changed his mind at once. 'No it's not.'"). And when he enters a society apartment, finding an overweight old woman with "upper arms as fat as thighs", he recognises her laugh – and we know that all will not end well this time.
"Full of life and laughter"
When she
published The End of Chéri, Colette was 53 years old, with great works still to
come. The Pure and the Impure, which she considered would one day be regarded
as her best book, was a work of reminiscence on a theme of gender and
sexuality: Colette had relationships with women as well as men, including
Mathilde de Morny, the niece of Napoleon. The book explores relations between
men and women, women and women, and covers transvestism as well as
homosexuality (or, as Colette puts it in her description of her friend Pauline
Tarn, "this poet who never ceased claiming kinship with Lesbos").
But the
work she became best known for in the English-speaking world was Gigi (1944),
which had familiar elements – the story of a young woman and an older man (the
reverse of Chéri), with the young woman being trained as a courtesan. It was
one of the last books she wrote, aged 70 and crippled with arthritis, and as a
reaction to her circumstances she made it lighter, less cynical and more
optimistic than much of her earlier work. (It is perhaps these qualities that
have made it so popular.) Gigi became a celebrated stage musical and film; the
stage production made a star of Audrey Hepburn, who was personally chosen by
Colette for the role.
Colette's
acclaim in France was not always, at the time, matched abroad. Time magazine in
1934 referred to Colette as a "below-the-belt" writer, having
previously written that she was a "purveyor to those who like mild
aphrodisiacs in print" (while acknowledging that this category included
"99.44% of all readers"). Nonetheless, astute readers adored her,
including Truman Capote, who puckishly told their mutual friend Jean Cocteau
that Colette was the living French writer he most admired (including, that is,
Cocteau). Cocteau gallantly set up a meeting in 1947, though Capote – who
described the encounter in his essay The White Rose – was so starstruck that he
spent much of his time with Colette admiring her collection of antique crystal
paperweights.
Back home
in France, Colette was a star. She was the second woman to be made a grand
officer of the Legion of Honour, and the first to be given a state funeral,
following her death in 1954 at the age of 81. Her work did not trouble the
reader with politics or world affairs. Her canvas was what Tolstoy called
"man's most tormenting tragedy – the tragedy of the bedroom". She
explored her field without exhausting it or repeating herself, varying her
approach as she grew older and more experienced, the perspective shifting like
a shadow as the day draws on. Intense and sensuous, her fiction is full of life
and laughter, as she proceeded to tell the story of a woman’s life, from
childhood into age. That is why, 150 years after her birth, Colette lives on.
Colette:
The most beloved French writer of all time. By John Self. BBC, January 26, 2023
‘Think
pink!’ Kay Thompson exhorted, playing a singing Diana Vreeland in Funny Face
(1957), one of several Hollywood movies of the postwar period set in a
pasteboard advent-calendar Paris, with Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn as the
elegant, monstrously innocent gamine. ‘Pink for shoes! Pink for hose! Pink for
gloves and chapeaus!’ The song, disappointingly, fails to mention the special status
of Pompadour pink, formulated at Sèvres in 1757 to please Louis XV’s favourite
mistress and adviser. Both courtly and whorish connotations suffuse Colette’s
Chéri novels of the 1920s – the French word rose is warmer, deeper, more
ambiguous, in the way of floral perfumes, ‘corrompus, riches et triomphants’.
The next
American-in-Paris project was Gigi (1958) – with Maurice Chevalier in a boater
singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’ – adapted from Colette’s novella of
1944. Anita Loos’s Broadway version had already made a star of Hepburn,
discovered – so the story goes – by Colette herself in a hotel lobby at Monte
Carlo. The Hollywood Gigi, however, was Caron. Colette tells an implausibly
happy story, in which a retired courtesan grooms her teenage granddaughter to
follow in the trade – scorning opals, eating songbirds, avoiding almonds (‘They
add weight to the breasts’). It was first published in a pro-Vichy
collaborationist journal, not long after Colette’s third husband, Maurice
Goudeket, who was Jewish, had been arrested and held by the Nazis for seven
weeks. ‘One can’t overlook Colette’s complacence, not simply toward politics,
but toward the more fundamental forms of ethical maturity,’ Judith Thurman
wrote in her 1999 biography. Colette neglected her only daughter, born in 1913,
when she was married to her second husband, Henry de Jouvenel, though she had
plenty of time for Henry’s son from his first marriage, Bertrand, whom she
seduced in 1920, when he was sixteen.
Is Gigi the
reason English-speaking readers don’t much bother with Colette? Lydia Davis
suggests it might be, in her introduction to Rachel Careau’s new Chéri. Another
reason may be the quality of some of the translations of her work: Roger
Senhouse’s widely used version from 1951, as Careau points out, has phrases
like ‘Oh, my sainted aunt’, not to mention ‘a Chinee’. In her introduction to
Eprile’s rendition, Thurman blames a generational narcissism which blocks
readers from seeing the ‘dangerous heretic’ hiding in plain sight: ‘I’m always
disheartened when a cool French girl enamoured with Georges Bataille recalls
Colette as someone whom Nana read sous le bonnet – under the hairdryer. Or when
an old actor who once emoted Phèdre natters on about her cats.’
‘What is
the heart, madame?’ Colette once reported that a woman had asked her – a woman
she had just heard pretending to sob, ‘like the notes of the nightingale’, to
gratify a much younger lover in a glass-roofed opium den in Paris. ‘It’s quite
accommodating. It accepts anything ... But the body ... Ha! That’s something
else again!’ The Pure and the Impure (1932) is Colette’s memoir of her years as
a young woman in the Paris of the Belle Époque: sex, drag, public performance,
nudity (but never opium, cocaine or ether – she was a fitness freak when she
was young). Why Colette, why now, doesn’t seem to be the question, or why it’s
the Chéri books that are being retranslated first. Why only two, why not an
infinity of Chéri and Gigi, Minne and Mitsou, Renée, Claudine?
Chéri
(1920) opens in the boudoir of Léa de Lonval (née Vallon), a beautiful, clever
and charming courtesan who is nearing fifty (Colette was fifty and ‘eating like
a monster’ when she took the part in the stage play in the 1920s; Michelle
Pfeiffer, also fifty, was, as ever, Michelle Pfeiffer in Stephen Frears’s film
version of 2009). The curtains are pink, as are the paper shades on the
electric sconces and the ‘ravishing’ flesh of the nymphet in the painting on
the wall. And Léa’s dressing-gown, and her underwear, and the strawberries she
eats for lunch, with a glass of dry Vouvray, from ‘a faience dish the colour of
a wet green frog’. And the lustre, at least in some lights, of the 49 pearls on
her necklace – ‘the pitted pearl, the slightly ovoid pearl and the biggest
pearl’, the ‘matchless shade’ of which ‘stood out’.
In the
reader’s first glimpse of him, Chéri is dancing in front of the rose-coloured
curtains, ‘all black, like a graceful devil’, the pink light making a pink
spark play on his teeth and eyes. He’s grabbed the pearls and is parading in
front of the full-length mirror, ‘a very beautiful, very young man, neither
tall nor short, his hair tinged with blue like the plumage of a blackbird’ – a
young man as imagined by an ‘erotic militant’ who has decided what she likes. As
the child bride of the much older, ‘heavy-cheeked’ and ‘bulbous’ ‘Monsieur
Willy’, the pen name of Henry Gauthier-Villars, Colette had received ‘a number
of pearls for her bridal necklace’: one for each of the bestselling
naughty-schoolgirl novels she had written for her husband’s ‘factory’,
published and marketed under the ‘Willy’ imprint. You can see the pearls
sometimes, in the early photographs, around the time Monsieur Willy got her to
cut her hair.
Chéri and
The End of Chéri are usually reckoned Colette’s masterpieces. She published
them in 1920 and 1926, turning fifty in between. The characters first appeared
in her weekly column in Le Matin: the once great beauty, dashed against the
‘barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible’, of her ageing body; the
staggeringly beautiful, abysmally lost young man. Both novels are exquisite in
structure, sparse and lacy, every detail in a web of other details, merciless,
precise; the timeline is a bit shaky, but the symmetry doesn’t fail. The first
book is set in 1912, a cloud of pink with a rather dashing blackish squiggle;
the second in the Great War’s aftermath, a spreading black blot. In the first
book, the point of view is most often that of Léa, and tells how she came to
seduce this ‘bratty nursling’, almost by accident, when she was in her early
forties and he was just nineteen; the second looks at things as Chéri sees
them. ‘When other people say: “There was the war,” I can say: “There was Léa.”’
Chéri’s
world is the world of the much later Gigi, the demi-monde of dancers, actresses
and prostitutes who made for themselves one of the few livings available to
women in the Paris of the early 20th century, indulging the fantasies of rich
men. It was a world Colette knew well from the years she had spent on the arm
of M. Willy, and even better after she left him and took to the boards herself.
The matriarchs of the Chéri books have made great successes of their sex work,
and of their subsequent investments – the pink diamond and the sugar-cane
plantation, the petroleum shares and cunning loan hedging – and live in luxury,
with hairdressers and manicurists and masseurs, aged brandy, fine wines. Their
pasts, however, render them unacceptable to polite society, which means they
have been stuck with one another, bored and mutually resentful, for decades of
dreary luncheon parties and bridge parties and bezique parties, ‘their usual
malice and idle chitchat ... financial papers in the morning, exchanging
spiteful gossip in the afternoon’.
Chéri’s
mother, Charlotte, is a former child dancer, now ‘a pudgy little canine’, who
hosts a seemingly endless Mad Hatter’s tea party in her hideous Neuilly mansion
for a small and shrinking social circle. Chéri never stood a chance, it is
suggested, ‘by turns neglected and adored’ by his mother, her servants, the
kindly ladies who offer ‘all the joys of a debauched childhood’, treating him
like a baby one minute, a gigolo the next. He has a mean wit and can be handy
with an account book, but has never learned the habit of reading and can barely
write. Mother and son share a campy-bitch routine that is not unaffectionate,
but not exactly loving either: ‘Why not one of those rubber dolls they make for
sailors?’ is Charlotte’s suggestion at the height of Chéri’s desperation. ‘He
approved of this ... coming from a professional,’ is Chéri’s laconic, desolate
response.
In the
first book, the rosy-fingered idyll is interrupted by Charlotte’s plan to marry
her son to Edmée, the beautiful, rich young daughter of the scheming
Marie-Laure. Edmée is sensitive and astute: ‘He knows nothing,’ she thinks,
‘about plants or animals. And sometimes it seems like he doesn’t even know what
it means to be human.’ So Chéri can’t stand her, and takes to wandering around
his childhood haunts by night: cafés, brasseries, an opium den where he sits
enraptured by the fake pearl necklace worn by La Copine, an exhausted dope
fiend.
Léa,
meanwhile, organises her linen cupboard, travels to Biarritz, dallies with a
man or two, considers starting a restaurant with her savings, then decides it
sounds like too much work. ‘Let’s go buy some playing cards, some fine wine,
some score sheets for bridge, some knitting needles, all the baubles it takes
to fill a big hole, everything you need to conceal that monster: the old woman.’
Or, this is what she’s thinking until the night Chéri comes back to her, and
her bedroom is again ‘richly coloured like the inside of a melon’. She has
lived to nag him again, just like in the old days, about his coated tongue and
his rhubarb laxatives. But he watches her, in the light of morning; he has
already seen her ‘double chin and ravaged neck’.
Chéri is
back with Edmée in the sequel. She is running a hospital for veterans with war
wounds, and sleeping with the chief of staff. ‘You look like a badly frosted
cake!’ she says to her pink and white and blue-tinged husband. ‘A cake that
looks unwell.’ Charlotte has moved into black-market import-export, and has a
plan to develop the thermal baths at Passy. At a loss with her ailing son, she
offers to set him up with Léa – the first time the two have met since the end
of Chéri. And the postwar Léa de Lonval, Chéri finds, is ‘a serene disaster’.
Her hair is grey, no longer hennaed, and cut like Charlotte’s. She has jowls,
she wears a loose long coat and jabot: ‘In short: a healthy, mature woman ...
liberated from struts and stays.’ She’s with a friend, some princess or other,
and they talk about men as if they were ‘horseflesh’ – ‘Connoisseurs of meat on
the hoof’. ‘I loved you. And loved you well,’ Léa says to Chéri, unaffectedly.
‘It’s nice that you’ve remained good friends,’ the princess says.
Léa advises
Chéri to get his urine tested. Maybe it’s his kidneys, or maybe he just needs a
decent dinner: she can take him to a bistro on the Gobelins. She smacks her
lips at the thought. ‘Romanticism, nervous breakdowns, disgust with life: it’s
in the stomach. All of this: it’s the stomach. Even love!’ ‘I wonder how many
times she put her corset on, took it off, then bravely put it on again?’ Chéri
is thinking as he stares at her. ‘How many mornings did she change the shade of
her face powder, rub her cheeks with a new kind of rouge, massage her neck with
cold cream and a chunk of ice wrapped in a handkerchief, before she resigned
herself to having her cheeks shine like patent leather?’ He can see how she’s
straining to hold in her solid belly. He notices how she’s fiddling with her
string of heavy pearls. ‘What must you think of me?’ he asks, to stop himself
falling on his knees and howling. ‘Right now, you strike me as the type that
leaves a box of cakes on the hall table on his way in ... and picks it up again
on his way out.’ And that, pretty much, is the end of Chéri and Léa, though the
novel has still to sink through another fifty graceful yet mournful marble steps.
Colette – the lone patronymic was her idea; she had been calling herself Colette since school – was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, an unglamorous village in Burgundy, in 1873. Her mother, Sido, came from a family of chocolate traders – not all of them white – and had been married off to a dissolute local landowner by her older brothers. Jules-Joseph Colette, known as ‘the captain’, was her second husband, and had been made a district tax collector in compensation for the loss of a leg while fighting for Napoleon III. He pottered and dabbled in local politics and natural history and did a bad job of managing the family finances. He died, still meaning to start on his memoirs, in 1905.
Sido-Gabri,
also called Minet-Chéri, ‘used to scamper about like a little rabbit’ with her
older brothers – a half-sister, Juliette, would kill herself in 1908 – and had
the run of her parents’ library: ‘Voltaire in marbled boards, Balzac in black’.
She was never sent away for an education, in part because by that time her
parents had lost their money. The progressive anti-clericalism of the Third
Republic, which the Colettes enthusiastically supported, had in any case led to
the establishment of free and secular universal primary education across the
provinces. Sido-Gabri, like her heroine Claudine, joined ‘the daughters of
grocers, farmers, policemen and, for the most part, of labourers’ to struggle
with square roots, similar triangles and Dangerous Liaisons levels of sexual
intrigue.
‘Like
having my skull opened with a tin-opener,’ Carter said about reading Baudelaire
as a teenager. Discovering the Claudine books, even at my age and with my
Bataille phase far behind me, I recognised what she meant. What is known and
not known, shameful or not shameful, permissible and impermissible: it’s all
done differently in Colette. She was reading Balzac from the age of seven –
‘Balzac was for her a world whose streets and houses were all familiar,’ as her
third husband put it – so she would obviously need to move to Paris. Was
marrying her off at twenty to a sleazy purveyor of pornographic postcards
really the only way to manage this? Willy, fourteen years her senior, was a
compulsive financial risk-taker and equally unrestrained in his womanising,
with, his wife noticed, a particular interest in le vice paternel (Thurman
thinks he also gave her gonorrhoea). ‘It is true that, at first, ridden by
youth and ignorance, I had known intoxication – a guilty rapture, an atrocious,
impure, adolescent impulse. There are many scarcely nubile girls who dream of
becoming the show, the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some
middle-aged man.’
It was, she
always said, his idea that she start writing. He suggested she write down her
school stories – ‘Don’t be shy of the spicy bits’ – which he then embellished
with Naughty Nineties sexploitation. And yet, the first Claudine book runs like
the clearest water. Here she is, our heroine, motherless and sweet fifteen, the
only daughter of her kindly, oblivious malacologist Papa; very proud of her
long, curly chestnut hair – it gets the chop in Claudine in Paris – and the
contrast it makes, ‘by no means unattractively’, with her eyes. Her main
collaborator, ‘the lanky Anaïs’, is a ‘vicious ... toady’, who eats the
stationery, ‘pencil stubs, filthy black India rubber, charcoal and pink
blotting paper’; Dr Dutertre, the wolfishly handsome district superintendent,
pats and strokes and threatens worse. Claudine, however, has eyes only for
‘that charming little bird’, Mademoiselle Aimée, the assistant teacher, who has
been seduced already by Mademoiselle Sergent, the plain-but-stylish
headmistress. Exams are sat, green woods and hills are rhapsodised, an
exhibition of needlework features a surprising quantity of chemises and
beribboned knickers. The candour, the curiosity, the wit, the bubbling prose,
are a joy.
It’s true
that bits of all the Claudine books are silly, contrived, unsavoury, even
rancid – particularly the character of Renaud, the much older ‘cousin-uncle’
whom Claudine pashes on, then marries, then shares, for a while, with a woman
called Rézi, an episode based on a real-life intrigue that caused enormous
real-life scandal and distress. It’s a relief for everybody when the maturing
young author gains the confidence, by the fifth book, to kill off her ageing
cousin-uncle-husband: ‘His death gave me the feeling of having attained a kind
of literary puberty, a foretaste of those delights allowed to the praying
mantis.’
In 1901,
Willy spent some of the Claudine money on a country house in the Franche-Comté,
which Colette adored and where she spent her summers, on her own, mostly, with
Kiki-la-Doucette, her angora cat, and Toby-Chien, her little dog. The story
that Willy would lock her in until she had written her daily pages seems
unlikely: he was usually in Paris, for one thing, being seen at all the right
places, developing his other Willy projects with his other writers, creating
Claudine stage plays, Claudine soap and lotions, Claudine ice cream,
cigarettes. Polaire popularised an easy-to-copy Claudine look – chopped hair,
dark dress, little boots, big white collar – and Willy had wife and star
photographed together in Claudine garb, with him and his jowls and stick and
top hat in the middle. Every brothel, according to Thurman, had at least one
Claudine for client delectation. Willy was deluged by ‘sinister adolescents’,
desperate to perform for him – Claudines, every one.
Colette, in
the meantime, was becoming aware ‘of a new strength ... growing in me that had
no connection with literature’. She built herself a gym – bars, rings, a
trapeze, a knotted rope – and took dance and mime lessons. ‘It had seemed to me
that I was exercising my body in much the way that prisoners, though they have
no clear idea of flight, tear up their sheets and plait the strands together.’
In 1905 she performed in public for the first time, at one of Natalie Barney’s
Paris-Lesbos garden parties. It was through Barney that she met the lover who
offered her an escape hatch from her marriage, Mathilde de Morny, marquise de
Belbeuf, known sometimes as ‘Max’ but usually referred to in biographies as
‘Missy’. It’s impossible to know how Missy would have chosen to be identified,
had a choice been on offer. Biographers call her ‘she’ and ‘lesbian’ and
‘transvestite’, but this could be because they are unaware of transness, in its
many modulations, then and now. Colette, in any case, luxuriated in her
new-found queerness, wearing men’s suits, like Missy did, and a bracelet
proclaiming Missy as her owner. Her mother was far more enthusiastic about this
relationship than she was about her daughter’s other beaux.
‘A woman of
letters who has turned out badly’ is the way Renée, the heroine, describes
herself in The Vagabond (1910), Colette’s novel of her years as a music-hall
artiste. She was already a pariah, thanks to the Claudine scandals and the
association with Willy. She was divorced from him now, running around with
‘inverts’ and dancing with very few clothes on, pretending to be a faun. Renée
remembers ‘the voluptuous pleasure of writing, the patient struggling with a
phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed
animal’. It’s clear, then, that she misses it. ‘The only real things are
dancing, light, freedom and music,’ she thinks a little later, while
performing. ‘Nothing is real except making rhythm of one’s thought ... The
beauty of a perfected gesture, the rightness of an expression of horror or
desire.’
Colette
used Missy as a model for the character of Margot, ‘the younger sister of my
ex-husband’, in The Vagabond: ‘At least Margot loves me in her own way, her
discouraged and discouraging way, though prophesying that I shall come to a
wretched end,’ by which she means another man, just as bad as the last one.
Sure enough, Colette ran off the minute she met the man who would become her
second husband, without a backward glance. ‘The melancholy and touching image
of two weak creatures,’ she writes in The Vagabond about the very thought of ‘two
women enlaced’. They ‘have perhaps sought shelter in each other’s arms, there
to sleep and weep, safe from man who is so often cruel, and there to taste,
better than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin’.
Colette
returned to Missy twenty years later in The Pure and the Impure, in the guise
of La Chevalière: ‘Anxious and veiled, never exposed to the light of day, the
androgynous creature wanders, wonders, and implores in a whisper ... If jovial,
the androgynous creature is a monster. But it trails irrevocably among us its
seraphic suffering, its glimmering tears.’ Is this a reparation of some sort,
or merely another round of exploitation? In Colette’s work, it was so often
both. And yet, La Chevalière is also ‘the person who has no counterpart
anywhere’ and whose smile is ‘so difficult to depict, so difficult to forget’.
‘An
exquisite or troubling dehumanisation, like vibrations of the cosmos’: this is
Julia Kristeva on Colette. ‘Tendrils of the vine,’ she elaborates, after a
piece Colette wrote in 1905, when she was still with Willy. ‘A genre she has
made her own.’ ‘The Tendrils of the Vine’ is an Oscar Wilde-ish just-so story
about how the nightingale found its voice: to save itself from death by
suffocation from the plants that would grow all over it if it were ever to
stop. The prose itself is ‘hooked’, as Kristeva puts it, sprouting out all
over. And through and around the entire oeuvre, ‘a hallucinatory, Art Nouveau
life-form’, in the words of Terry Castle, proliferates ‘new vinous shoots,
brusque outgrowths and curling tendrils for more than five decades’.
Colette
seems barely to have noticed when her mother died in 1912. But she returned to
‘the presence of her who, instead of receding far from me through the gates of
death, has revealed herself more vividly to me as I grow older’ in My Mother’s
House (1922) and Sido (1929), the memoirs that gave rise to the legend of Sido
as what Thurman calls ‘a Burgundian Martha Stewart’. They are beautiful and
classical and probably less orotund if you read them in French.
Colette was
by this time living with Goudeket, her third and final husband, who would take
care of her and push her wheelchair and hold her on her deathbed in 1954 in her
flat in the Palais-Royal. He said once that Chéri was for Colette ‘a chrysalis,
representing her constant attempt to bridge the gulf between animals and
humans’. ‘Monstrosity begins where there arises connivance with animals,’ as
Break of Day has it, at its most aphoristic. ‘Any man who remains on the side
of men has reason to shrink from a creature who opts for beasts.’
‘She was a
terrible woman,’ Martha Gellhorn said in the 1990s. ‘Absolute, utter hell. She
hated me at first sight, that was obvious.’ This would have been in the 1930s,
when Colette was first married to Goudeket, and Gellhorn was in love with a now
respectably-in-his-twenties Bertrand de Jouvenel. ‘She was lying on a chaise
longue ... with green shadow on her cat’s eyes and a mean, bitter little mouth
... And Bertrand just adored her all his life. He never understood when he was
in the presence of evil.’ She ‘looked me over maliciously’, Gellhorn continued,
then ‘insisted’ Gellhorn pencil her eyebrows in a thick black line. The
Goudekets had just tried and failed to establish a beauty salon business,
selling Colette-branded soaps and face powders, as Willy had with Claudine.
Colette thought she could make her own potions from recipes she’d learned from
Sido, and that her speed and skill at slapping on a Little Faun face, or a sexy
Ancient Evenings, qualified her to do makeovers. But she must have been aware
that her sort of beauty was not at all what the modern woman wanted, that the only
sure anti-ageing treatment is the one accepted, finally, by Chéri.
‘Well, I
did it,’ Gellhorn says. ‘Why? Because she told me to. And it was three days
before some kind, candid friend said to me: “My dear, what dreadful thing have
you done with your face?”’ ‘The spotlight,’ Colette had written a few years
earlier, ‘always explores the same sector of a woman’s life, that sector
tortured by bliss and discord.’ But it’s not there that she keeps her really
‘important and obscure secrets’; it’s not there that she weaves her ‘darkest
plots’. ‘Solitary ... It’s a beautiful-looking word, with its capital S rearing
like a protective serpent.’ And off she goes again, with Maurice, probably,
carrying the bucket, searching for that ‘quilt of seaweed’ with which to mulch
her tangerines.
‘Chéri’
and ‘The End of Chéri’
by
Colette, translated by Paul Eprile.
NYRB,
236 pp., £13.99, November, 978 1 68137 670 7
‘Chéri’
and ‘The End of Chéri’
by
Colette, translated by Rachel Careau.
Norton,
336 pp., £21.99, May, 978 1 324 05205 0
In June of 1932, a beauty salon opened in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris. Its Art Deco interior evoked a medical clinic—albeit a very chic one—and its glass counters displayed a new line of lipsticks, perfumes, and creams. At the grand opening, the public encountered an extraordinary sight: the middle-aged beautician giving makeovers was widely considered the greatest prose stylist in France. The products bore her name, Colette. The fifty-nine-year-old author said that she was launching the line to save women from the ravages of time: “I know so well what one ought to spread upon a terrified female face, so full of hope in its decline.”
Physical
beauty was always important to Colette. She prized the body over the mind—as
suggested by the title of Judith Thurman’s excellent biography, “Secrets of the
Flesh”—and believed that focussing on the physical was essential to writing
“like a woman, without anything moralistic or theoretical.” Unusually for a
woman of her era, Colette adhered to a regular workout regimen, and she was an
early adopter of the face-lift, battling back each incursion of time. Her art
reflected the struggle. In two of her most famous books, “Chéri,” from 1920,
and “The End of Chéri,” from 1926—the pair of which are appearing this year in
two new single-volume English translations, by Rachel Careau and Paul
Eprile—time is the grand antagonist. Colette writes lines upon her characters’
skins to tell the story of their misfortune.
Born in
Burgundy in 1873, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette began styling herself by her last
name when still a child, in imitation of how men used patronyms to command
respect. Her father was a former military captain with an amputated leg; he had
a twelve-volume memoir bound and titled, but, after his death, it was discovered
to contain only blank pages. Colette’s mother was the real force in the family,
a forward-thinking woman who considered all husbands idiotic and tucked plays
into her missal at church, so that she’d have something good to read. By the
time she was fifteen, Colette was wearing her hair in long, whiplike braids.
She had a provincial girl’s intimacy with the natural world, a rootedness in
physicality that would later shape her style.
Shortly
after she arrived in Paris, in 1893, Colette chopped her hair short and began
dressing androgynously, sometimes in a sailor’s uniform. She married the
literary celebrity Henry Gauthier-Villars, a predatory Left Bank type
blissfully unaware that he was not the genius in the relationship. He employed
a team of ghostwriters who churned out novels, poetry, and reviews under many
names, including “Willy”; it was under this name that Colette, in 1900,
published “Claudine at School.” Disguised as the diary of a young woman, the
novel and its sequels secured Colette’s fame—partly thanks to the quality of
their writing and partly because the public, who had learned of the titles’
strange and beautiful author, assigned all of Claudine’s frank admissions to
her. Colette did little to disabuse them. She divorced Gauthier-Villars, lived
openly in a lesbian relationship, and worked as a stage actress, scandalously
baring her breast in a play titled “La Chair” (or, in English, “The Flesh”). In
1912, she was married again, this time to Henry de Jouvenel, the editor of Le
Matin, a daily newspaper.
Behind the
public spectacle, the artist was hard at work. In addition to producing novels,
Colette was a journalist, reporting from the front lines of the First World War
and serving as literary editor at Le Matin, where she gave many young writers
their first breaks. (Her advice to Georges Simenon after reading his early
stories: “You must not make literature. No literature! Suppress all the
literature and it will work.”) She wrote in ten-hour stretches, doggedly
reworking every line, and produced probably about fifty books. (Janet Flanner
counted seventy-three.)
The
character of Chéri first appeared in a series of stories that Colette
contributed to Le Matin in 1911 and 1912. In many of those pieces, he is
unattractive, uncertain, and unlovable—not ideal for a novel-length treatment.
But then Colette made him beautiful. In “Chéri,” each of his features is
beguiling, from “the exquisite arc of his upper lip” to his “satanic eyebrows.”
(I quote from Careau’s translation, which I slightly prefer to Eprile’s lean
and lucid version, if only because Careau seems more comfortable with Colette’s
syncopated rhythms and her occasionally archaic diction.) His given name, we
learn, is Fred Peloux. He was raised by his mother, a courtesan who amassed a
fortune before retiring from her sensual labors. “By turns forgotten and
adored,” Fred grew up in a milieu of “fifty-year-old beauties, electric
slimming belts, and wrinkle creams.” His knowledge of the outside world is
limited, but, like his author, he can read a face with expertise, registering
each line and appraising its contribution to the over-all effect.
Fred gets the name Chéri from his lover, Léa de Lonval, a forty-nine-year-old courtesan who has known him all his life and seduced him when he was around fourteen, after a brief season of grooming in Normandy, in which she stuffed him with strawberries and cream and made him take boxing lessons. Léa has the power of experience, Chéri has the power of youth, and their affair is a contest to see which is the more vital. (Even their first kiss is like combat, the two disengaging only to size “each other up like enemies.”) Like his mother, who undermines everyone she meets, Chéri is always ready with a withering remark. But Léa absorbs his comments with aplomb, and, when he senses the futility of his mockery, he becomes slavishly apologetic. That is how she likes him best: “rebellious, then submissive.” They both tell themselves that this endless competition is the extent of their affection.
At the
outset of “Chéri,” the lovers stand on the brink of change. It is 1912, and
Fred, now in his twenties, has become engaged. He is making a sensible marriage
to a young woman named Edmée, and so he and Léa must part. This sort of thing
has happened to Léa countless times, but something is different about Chéri. As
soon as he is gone, she feels a mysterious grief. Her first instinct is to
laugh it off like one of his insults: “Give me a dozen of these griefs, so that
I might lose two pounds!” It doesn’t work. Aghast at herself, she realizes that
she was truly in love with her “wicked infant.” The break proves equally
difficult for Chéri. Coddled first by his mother, and then by Léa, he is bored
by his inexperienced young wife and has nothing to offer her. He spends his
nights away from home, living the life of a bachelor and pining for his older
lover.
Léa leaves
Paris, pretending that a man is taking her away when in fact she travels alone.
Word reaches Chéri, who jealously awaits her return. Finally, the night comes,
but their reunion is a torment; Léa and Chéri never learned to be together as
true lovers, only as rivals, and though each of them has separately realized
their genuine love for the other, they cannot admit it, even to themselves.
There is something peculiarly painful about watching two people play their
parts perfectly when they should not be playing at all. Eventually, they
surrender to the “terrifying joy” of sex, and Léa is rejuvenated with dreams of
their future together; but, in the morning, something breaks. She becomes his
surrogate mother again, and Chéri tells her, with a jab that finally lands,
“With you . . . I would very likely remain twelve years old for half a
century.” Léa realizes that she has held on to him too long, like “a depraved
maman.” Summoning all her courage, and refusing to let him win the last round,
she orders him to go back to his wife. Our final sight of Chéri is of him
fleeing his older lover’s house, “like an escapee.”
“Chéri” sold thirty thousand copies by the
fall of its first year, and inspired André Gide to send Colette a letter of
praise. (“I will bet that the one rave you never expected to receive was mine,”
he wrote.) Between the serial publication of that novel and the publication of
its sequel, Colette, in an unsettling case of life imitating art, seduced her
sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand. “I invented Léa as a premonition,” she later
wrote. Just as Léa groomed the teen-age Chéri, so this depraved maman taught
Bertrand to swim, fed him hearty meals, and took his virginity.
The affair
lasted about five years, at the end of which Colette began writing “The End of
Chéri.” When we pick up the action again, it is 1919, and Chéri has returned
from the war. His wife, Edmée, has evolved into an independent woman who runs a
hospital for wounded soldiers and is besotted with the head doctor. Chéri and
Edmée’s marriage is sexually arid, oriented around money and appearances. “I
have nothing to fear from her,” Chéri reflects, “not even love.” Afflicted by
nostalgia for the world of his youth, he feels at odds with peacetime society.
Energetic Parisians are building businesses by day and dancing into the night,
but Chéri is disgusted by “the young war widows who were clamoring for new
husbands, like burn victims for cool water.” He has become alienated even from
his own body. Gazing into a mirror, he wonders “why this image was no longer
strictly the image of a young man of twenty-four.”
Assailed by
change, he dwells upon one permanent image: Léa. She is about sixty now, a
number of years he finds “implausible”: “What was there in common between Léa
and sickness, Léa and change?” He soon finds out; the centerpiece of this
darker sequel is another excruciating reunion. Chéri finds Léa at home. He
notices her “broad back,” and “the grainy roll of flesh at the nape beneath
vigorous, thick gray hair,” and her arms, “like round thighs,” which hang “apart
from her hips, heaved up by their fleshy girth beneath her armpits.” If the Léa
of “Chéri” was terrified by aging, now she is the model of acquiescence: “I
love my past. I love my present. I’m not ashamed of what I had, I’m not sad
that I no longer have it.” Part of the brilliance of the scene is that we
perceive Léa both through Chéri’s horrified eyes, which regard her as having
abdicated femininity altogether, and through our own, which admit some
admiration for this contented woman, happily gossiping and frequenting
restaurants. She might be boring and bourgeois, but she is healthy and proud,
considerably more than seemed likely at the end of “Chéri.” It was her wicked
infant who was in danger all along. Léa’s withdrawal into “a sort of sexless
dignity” has closed down his last hope. Now the future is impossible, the
present is revolting, and the past has perished on Léa’s double chin. Almost
comatose with longing, Chéri spirals toward the title’s promised end.
Why has
Colette never been more popular with American readers? William H. Gass
suggested that this was because Americans, “though they know a bit about sex .
. . prefer not to know about sensuality.” Lydia Davis, in her introduction to
the Careau translation, wonders whether it has something to do with Colette’s
being a woman, and “one reputed to write mainly about love.” It also seems
possible that Colette’s scandalous life, which helped to make her famous in
France, doesn’t play as well here. She was a complicated and contradictory
figure, an icon of liberation who once said that the suffragettes deserved “the
whip and the harem,” and an ally of the marginalized who published in
collaborationist journals throughout the Vichy regime. Her affair with Bertrand
may inspire a kind of awe at her audacity and appetite, but it’s not
ahistorical to describe it as abusive, even if Bertrand, by all accounts,
looked back on it fondly. One of his later lovers, Martha Gellhorn, noted that
Bertrand “just adored her all his life,” adding, “He never understood when he
was in the presence of evil.” (Gellhorn seems also to have been thinking of the
friendly interview with Adolf Hitler that he published in 1936.)
In a blurb
for the Eprile translation, Edmund White says that Léa and Chéri “are the most
convincing arguments I know of against political correctness in fiction.”
Condemning the seduction of minors doesn’t strike me as political correctness,
but it is true that the world of these novels is not really an ethical or moral
one. It is a ruthlessly physical universe, bound by the senses. There, the bond
between the two lovers is, as Léa says, “the most honorable thing that we
possessed,” and it is finally wrecked by the one thing more powerful than
beauty, desire, and love—time. Even Colette was compelled to surrender. “I’m
entirely disgusted,” she told a friend, upon being diagnosed with rheumatoid
arthritis in her hips, the disease that would turn her into an invalid. The
elderly Colette was forced to accept the humiliations of age, but rearguard
victories were still possible. Before passing away on August 3, 1954, she gave
her maid some last instructions. “People mustn’t see me when I’ve died,” she
said, refusing her old enemy this final revenge. ♦
The
Brilliance of Colette, a Novelist Who Prized the Body Over the Mind. By Michael
LaPointe. The New Yorker, November 15,
2022
The French writer Colette was indifferent and even hostile to the feminist movement in the early 1900s. But both her writing and the way she lived her life represent a vibrant and radical feminism in tune with the #MeToo spirit of today.
Born in
rural Burgundy in 1873, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (the abbreviated pen name
came later) belonged to a middle class but unorthodox family. Raised by a
mother who was as sceptical of religion as she was of bourgeois respectability,
she was 20 when she married Henri Gauthiers-Villars (“Willy”), the 33-year-old
charming but dissolute writer son of a family friend.
The
marriage was both a good and a bad move for Colette. Willy introduced her to
the rich Bohemian culture of the Parisian demimonde, and launched her career by
insisting (despite her reluctance) that she write down memories of her
schooldays.
But his
serial infidelities distressed and depressed her. And as an unscrupulous
literary entrepreneur, Willy cheerfully sold his wife’s semi-autobiographical
“Claudine” novels under his own name.
The stories
of a spirited, tomboyish heroine rapidly became a publishing sensation, with
profitable sales of related merchandise including Claudine cigarette holders.
But the profits were all Willy’s.
When, in
her early 30s, Colette decided to leave the marriage, she had to find a way to
support herself. Energetic and resourceful, she began to publish under her own
name and took classes in dance and mime. She trained in the gym and went on
stage, becoming the only great French author (to my knowledge) to have
alternated writing with dancing semi-nude on stages all over France.
She
combined her careers, writing both fiction and non-fiction set behind the
scenes of the music hall, giving a voice to the underpaid women performers who
featured so often from a male perspective in paintings and novels of the time.
She also began a passionate affair with a cross-dressing lesbian aristocrat,
Missy, and scandalised the nation by sharing a passionate kiss with her on
stage.
Director
Wash Westmoreland’s recent film about Colette takes us to this point in her
colourful career. She would go on to write prolifically as a journalist,
novelist, essayist and innovator in the blended genre of “autofiction”.
She would
nurse in World War I, marry twice more, bear a daughter at the age of 40,
bolster her flagging finances by opening a beauty parlour – and finally become,
for the French, “our great Colette”. But a whiff of scandal was still attached
to her name, and acceptance of her as a great writer was slow.
The Catholic Church even refused to grant her a religious funeral (although she would have agreed with the Church, for religion formed no part of her passionate love of life.)
Sex and sensuality
Westmoreland’s
film, starring the British actor Keira Knightley, shines a deserved spotlight
on an important feminist figure. From the Claudine series on, Colette gives us
a serenely irreverent perspective on a patriarchal culture.
She
reverses the gaze of heterosexual desire to provide sensual, detailed
descriptions of male bodies, and writes with equal sensuality and precision of
same-sex desire. She writes movingly of romantic love and motherhood but
insists, in her novel Break of Day that both are also peripheral to a woman’s
life:
“Once we’ve
left them both behind, we find that all the rest is gay and varied, and that
there is plenty of it.”
In life, as
in writing, she places female friendship centre-stage, sometimes subverting the
eternal triangle by making its primary focus the relationship between a man’s
wife and his mistress. She often published in women’s magazines, right up to
her death in 1954 (Elle serialised her final books), and wrote comically and
caustically of trying to make her own robust, food-loving body fit into the
willowy fashions of the inter-war years.
In a very
public life, as in her fiction, she exemplified financial and social
independence and shame-free sexuality – what we would now call “gender
fluidity”. She possessed a generous optimism that went against the grain of the
angst and despondency which characterised so much male literature of the 20th
century.
She remained,
throughout, a popular writer. An author read for pleasure, for the sensuality
of her prose, the dry note of humour that peppers her eloquence, the lightness
of touch that means her seriousness is never heavy or self-important.
One of
France’s greatest – and certainly most unconventional – writers, she has been
translated – often brilliantly – into other languages. Her appearance on cinema
screens should bring her even more readers.
Colette:
writer, feminist, performer and #MeToo trail blazer. By Diana Holmes. The Conversation, January 16, 2019.
