Colette

1

IT WAS the first sunny day I had known in Paris since June, 1940; a beautiful, glittering autumn day, whose quality added, disproportionately, to the incredulity with which I stared round the room. On the mantelpiece was a set of crystal balls, evoking waterfalls in unfrequented woods; in the glass cabinet were paperweights filled with colors as rich as those of the windows left in Notre Dame; along the bookshelves were the cream-colored paper bindings that mean French books; and among the pictures was a fifty-year-old one of the head and shoulders of a young girl. She was in profile, her complexion and her long, slender throat green-sallow with the pallor then fashionable, her profuse dark hair drawn loosely back into a chignon, to the base of which was fixed a scarlet flower; her dress, square-necked and puffsleeved, silver gray traced with black, suggested tapestry, and she was holding her pointed chin low, drawn in towards her throat in the classic attitude of youthful shyness.

Everything around me was lovely in form and color and had been procured for this room by objects like those Maurice Goudeket had just handed to me: a pile of school exercise books as old as the portrait. Turning the covers—pink, blue, and green, with unfilled-in spaces for the name of pupil and school — I saw page after page of pre-fountainpen handwriting whose neatness was canceled by scratchings-out. These made up the original manuscript of Claudine à l’École, the first novel of one of the greatest writers France has produced. And France is not a country unprodigal of great writers.

Much moved, I got up and crossed to one of the room’s two tall windows. Outside were the gardens of the Palais Royal, exquisite in symmetry and color, preserving, despite their late aristocratic connections, a provincial, an almost rustic, air. On the weatherbeaten metal chairs sat students whose reading appeared to be undisturbed by the children whose voices floated up, each sound isolated as is sound that has come across empty fields. Among the upper branches of the trees, sparrows were going about their business with noisy neatness, now and again taking time off to perch outside our windows and look in, their heads on one side, their stance the epitome of impudence. “Ils sont terr-r-ibles, ces oiseaux,” said an ironic voice on which a Burgundian accent lay like the bloom on a grape. I turned and smiled at the woman on the divan drawn up alongside the other window: Colette, the only begetter of the writing in the exercise books I was clutching.

It is necessary to mention that she was the only begetter of this book, since its authorship was for many years the subject of some extremely curious dubiety. To explain this circumstance, one has to go back to her early years. After a childhood spent in a small village and with a loving and intelligent family — from which environment she acquired a foundation of good health, an apprehension of the nature of happiness, and the habit of exercising all her faculties — twenty-year-old Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette married a Parisian whose real name was Henri Gautier-Villars, but who was better known then, and is almost exclusively known now, as Monsieur Willy.

He was considerably older than his unsophisticated wife, and his mustaches and imperial, his silk hat and his embonpoint, together with the figure he appears from memoirs and contemporary novels to have cut in Paris society, are not unreminiscent of Edward VII. Persons who had dealings with him have told me, with a curiously apologetic air, that he had a lively intelligence and a beautiful voice — two qualities that do less to explain the extreme fear he inspired in those made dependent on him by affection than does the fact, apparent from his writing, that he had, and cultivated, a specific talent for impropriety.

In this unsuitable company young Colette exchanged her country home for a small, ill-ventilated flat on the Left Bank which, together with an unsupervised diet, — left to herself she ate bananas and sweets and then supposed she had had a meal, — soon undermined the health that unhappiness was weakening. This unhappiness was not due to caprice. Her husband spent a great deal of time away from her. He did not habitually spend it alone. Eventually a serious illness committed her to months of convalescence in bed. She had fabulously long hair, in two plaits, and there is a touching picture of her lying, limp as a stalk of forced asparagus, against her pillows, the shape of her pointed face and the size of her amazingly luminous eyes emphasized by illness, while beside her are Marcel Schwob, the brilliant young Jewish writer who did not live long enough to fulfill his promise, and his wife, the actress Marguerite Moreno, who in those days resembled Holman Hunt’s picture of John the Baptist as a child.

2

AMONG the twisted qualities that composed Monsieur Willy’s character was that of a writer manque. In Mes Apprentissages Colette has described with unmalicious accuracy the anxiety to write and the impotence — partly intellectual, partly calligraphical — that drove her husband to spend more time making suggestions to the clever but needy young writers whose work he signed than should have been needed to write an equal number of books himself. This being one of his major preoccupations, it was not long before he asked his wife if she would write some recollections of her school days. Colette had never thought of becoming a writer — her adolescence was unmarked by scribbled poems hidden in a school desk, or tragedy-fraught stories shown to a best friend — and she was not, consciously, stimulated by the suggestion. But it would give her something to occupy her often lonely convalescence; and she had acquired the habit of obedience to her husband. So she unearthed some empty exercise books saved from her schooldays, and began what was to be Claudine a l’École.

When Monsieur Willy read the finished manuscript he shook his head, said disappointedly that after all it would be no use to him, and threw it into a drawer. A year later, in the course of a grand tidying, he found it again, glanced through it, read it, cursed himself extensively, and took the manuscript to the publisher Ollendorf. It was published in 1900 — under the signature of Monsieur Willy.

Realizing belatedly that there was financial profit to be obtained from Colette’s talent, her husband obliged her to continue to write. She found this neither easy nor agreeable, but it was made inevitable by Monsieur Willy’s habit of locking her in a room from which she was released only when she had completed a set number of pages. It is possible that to 1945 this sounds too ogre-and-the-princess to carry conviction. But it did not happen in 1945. In 1900 it was difficult for any French wife to leave her husband, and particularly so for a young girl whose strongest impulse was to prevent her unhappiness becoming apparent to her adored mother. And I doubt if later generations will cast retrospectively minatory glances at Monsieur Willy for having forced Colette to cultivate the vocation of which she was, and still is, unaware. Many writers would be glad to have someone capable of brutalizing them in this way. It would appear to have been the most useful action of Monsieur Willy’s life.

Claudine a Paris appeared in 1901, Claudine en Menage in 1902, Claudine s’en va in 1903. Each was immensely successful; each was signed by Willy; for none did Colette receive payment. Years later, when Colette and Willy were divorced, the Claudines appeared in editions labeled the results of the collaboration between husband and wife. This is one of the earliest examples I know where the word “collaboration” was used with the same connotations as in 1945.

One of the most interesting aspects of these books, whose heroine Claudine has created a durable type, is the contrast between the circumstances of the author and the spirit they exhale. Colette was then very young, very serious, very unhappy, very unwell; Claudine had the sensuous gayety, veined with melancholy, of a piece by Mozart. Yet none of the four books is entirely non-autobiographical. It is a subject one would like to have had William James investigate.

When her marriage came to an end and she found herself obliged to earn her living, it did not at first occur to Colette to continue writing with this object. Lack of any sense of vocation had once made writing indifferent to her; association with her married life now made it repulsive. A charming appearance and an ability to work hard made it possible for her to become a music-hall artist. She cut off her long hair, and her Da Vinci curls made a sensation bordering on scandal. The strenuous traveling — these were the days of the Baret tours covering thirty-four towns in thirty-three days — and the opportunities for making acquaintances and eschewing intimacies not only helped her survive a period in which her natural savagery was being accentuated by misery, but gave her an insight into backstage life, about which little had then been written. When she wrote La Vagabonde, in 1910, it contained pictures of stage life in which verisimilitude and poetry are fused as they are in comparable chapters of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

3

COLETTE’S second marriage, with the diplomat Henri de Jouvenel, in 1910, took her from the stage and restored her to writing. And it gave her a beautiful and intelligent daughter, who appears in many of her later books as the child Bel-Gazou. To persons long familiar with Colette’s writing, it is curious to realize that the blonde, straight-fringed child in the scarlet bathing suit is the same person as the young woman who during the last four years refused tempting offers from Vichy, succored the persecuted, and ran a hospital for the Maquis. But when one remembers that child’s sapience, it is less curious.

During one of the worst periods of the First World War, Colette was at Verdun. She arrived illegally, laden with gifts for her husband’s mess — including butter she said, rolling her r’s as if to make a piece of that precious substance materialize — and she was for some time the only woman there.

“How did you manage to stay?” I asked. “Was it allowed?”

She lifted her head and gave me a look in comparison with which the look in the eyes of the beautiful cat in the photograph behind her was mild, devoid of humor, human. “C’etait defendu,” she said, and for the first time I understood the meaning of the word “relish.”

There were no women war correspondents in those days, but Colette saw enough to enable her to write Les Heures Longues. She also, during the war years, wrote La Paix chez les Bêtes and L’Entrave, and began Mitsou. While I was looking at an early edition of that book, Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s present husband, handed me a letter. It was on pale gray-blue paper and dated over twenty-five years ago. It was full of subtle, impassioned praise of Mitsou and I wished I had written it. When I turned the last page I saw the signature: Marcel Proust.

In 1920 Colette published Chéri, a book many competent persons consider her masterpiece; and in 1922 the entrancing Maison de Claudine. Since this book is admittedly autobiographical, its title acknowledges Claudine to have contained a part of Colette; but in its pages the figure of the enfant terrible with her little-boy’s curls melts, like a figure in a film, into the more seriously delectable figure of the young Colette in whom passion and irony were mixed in so rare a manner, who was as remarkable for intellectual probity as for simply expressed sensuality. And it was into this book’s unforcedly pastoral scenes that she first introduced her mother, to whom she was eight years later to devote one of her most superb books, Sido.

Ever since La Vagabonde, her public had expected excellence from Colette, and unlike the man who asked for bread and was given a stone, it asked for bread and was given a baker’s shop. There are in France at present — as in most moments in French history — an impressively large number of writers capable of producing intelligent, intellectual, painstaking, elegant, or purposefully eccentric prose; but I do not know any other writer whose prose has such beautiful bones beneath its wholesome flesh.

Colette’s technique is exquisite; her vocabulary immense — I have heard competent judges say it is larger than that of any other French writer since the eighteenth century, and this without pyrotechnics; and everything she writes gives the effect of effortlessness. In that good book The Summing Up, Somerset Maugham says that in his opinion Colette writes better than any other living French author, that the felicity of her style convinced him she was that freak a born writer, able to express herself easily, without crossings-out and painful rewriting — but that when he asked her if this were so, she told him that she often spent a day on half a page.

Colette’s first specifically original contribution to literature was her treatment of the human senses; this, and the fact that she treated them without the fanfare that might have been expected from a writer of her period, but with accuracy, good taste, and warmth. The magnitude of this contribution has been kept from English-speaking readers — those dependent upon translation — by the circumstance that these translations, being less good than one could wish, have deforming proprieties. Imprisoned in them, like Ariel in the hollow tree, Colette’s books have acquired a pornographic label. This is extremely inappropriate.

It is true that Colette has devoted much of her talent to expositions of love — the love of a child for its mother, the passion of a young girl for her lover, the devotion of a woman to her husband, the adoration of an elderly woman for a boy, among other forms — but auscultation is only part of her equipment. And human reactions to food, climate, scent and sound, to animals, forests, and rivers have an even more remarkable place in the sensual inventory to whose compilation she has devoted a formidable intellect. The English author she most resembles in literary stature is Rebecca West. Alike in their power to juxtapose passion and wit, and their gastronomical use of words, they both possess a chronic inability to write anything but the truth — a trait as rare as a squint and even more disturbing.

Rereading Ces Plaisirs I was reminded of a label I saw not long ago on the door of a room in an American Army Salvage Depot somewhere in France: Reclamation, Repair, Assembly. Experience has enabled Colette to reclaim a great deal of information of the kind that mediocre persons repudiate because they know it to be true; imagination, directed by intellect, has enabled her to repair the gaps in her knowledge; and the fact that she is a born, if unwilling, writer has enabled her to assemble her acquisitions in books with more than enough entertainment value to blind puritans to their importance. Reclamation, Repair, Assembly: the function of great literature.

Two of the books Colette wrote during this war — Julie de Carneilhan and Chambre d’Hotel — were sold in Canada. Their lack of topicality explains their immunity from German persecution. Lack of topicality, in the superficial sense, has always been characteristic of her books; it accounts for their immunity from deformation. That she herself was not persecuted appears to have been due to the fact that she was old and deservedly famous and that the Germans, despite their genius for tactlessness, realized that to ill-treat great artists is to supply propaganda against themselves. They never attempted to imprison Picasso, whose antagonism to them was as unmistakable as it was unchanging. But with a daughter in the Resistance and a husband who was arrested and sent to an extremely ill-conditioned concentration camp, Colette had her share of the general anguish.

With the artful artlessness that habitually informs her conversation, Colette presently forced me to bypass the subject that interested me — herself— and stop at wartime cooking. At the mention of “le dried egg” her eyes became demoniac with interest — this was more like rational conversation — and she shouted “Maurice!” with the gratified air of a spoiled child that knows it is going to be allowed to stay up illegally late. Although he was on my side on principle, her husband removed her manuscripts and extricated from the desk a bulging envelope in which there were, she alleged, some really interesting recipes. We never found them, but we did find a handsome collection of photographs of her cats. The glee and alacrity with which she displayed these reminded me of the remark made to her by Henri de Jouvenel: that whenever he came into a room in which she was alone with her cats and dogs, he had the impression that he was being indiscreet.

Colette’s vitality and amazing charm, whose troubling quality is undiminished by age or illness, reminded me of the answer made by Vial in La Naissance du Jour to her observation that she was growing old: “ the ashes of your arm would be warmer than anyone else’s living flesh.” I am inclined to think he spoke without exaggeration. When she began a grumble, clearly as much a matter of routine as GI grumbling, about the bad leg that kept her on the divan, I reminded her of Vial’s remark. It was no use. Having remarked commiseratingly that it was a pity I had nothing better to do than to learn her books by heart, she began to ask me about what I had seen at the front, to tease me affectionately about my uniform, and to introduce me, to some friends who had just arrived, as “le petit lieutenant.”

Remembering how anxious we had been for her during the last four years, I felt all at once somnolent with contentment. I sat down and stared at the crystal balls, the glass paperweights, the French books, and the portrait of the young Colette with a scarlet flower in her chignon. This time I also noticed a beautiful gold and blue globe, and a bunch of anemones in a glass vase so darkly purple as to be almost opaque. The children had stopped playing in the gardens of the Palais Royal, and Colette, reaching up with her square, capable hand, turned on the light just above her head. Its shade was made from two pieces of her fine blue foolscap, pinned together. With the light shining on the becoming fuzz of short hair whose style was so scandalous forty years ago, and on the pen-and-pencil-strewed writing table spread across her knees, she looked gratifyingly like the portrait of a famous author.