by
Anatole Broyard
Colette's grandfather on the maternal side was nicknamed ''The Gorilla.'' Her father was known in Burgundy, where she was born, as ''The Savage.'' Henry de Jouvenel, the grand passion of Colette's long amatory career, had already earned the title of ''The Tiger'' before she met him. It would seem that France's most famous female writer was born to be earthy and unconventional. As Jean Cocteau observed in assessing her tastes, ''she refused none of the fruitful putrefactions of life.''
In ''Colette,'' Joanna Richardson tells us everything about her scandalous subject, but without making a scandal of her biography. The author of books about Theophile Gautier, Paul Verlaine and Emile Zola, she approaches the author of ''Cheri'' with something like Colette's own cosmopolitanism. She is as tactful as she is thorough, giving us the facts dispassionately, usually in someone else's words. Because almost every writer in Paris seems to have commented on Colette before she died in 1954 at the age of 81, Miss Richardson's book is a ripe and witty anthology of contemporary French criticism.
When she was 20 years old, Colette married Henri Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, a literary handyman in Paris, who locked her in a room and ordered her to write. He published the result, ''Claudine a l'Ecole,'' under his own name in 1900, and it was an immediate success. In the first flush of their prosperity, Willy moved Colette into an apartment on the Rue Jacob where the walls were papered with multicolored confetti. He gave her a bicycle without brakes or mud guards, and after two more successful Claudine books he provided her with a gymnasium, complete with a trapeze, rings, ladders and parallel bars.
In 1906, Colette left Willy and her ''squirrel cage'' to live with a lesbian marquise who dressed in mechanic's overalls. In his memoirs, Renaud de Jouvenel, the eldest son of Colette's second husband, offered an interesting explanation of her bisexuality. Her father had lost a leg in the army and, according to Renaud, Colette's sensibility was affected by the thought of her mother's making love with a one-legged man. Her own version of her liaisons with women was rather literary, evoking ''the melancholy, touching picture of two weaknesses, taking refuge perhaps in each other's arms to sleep there, weep there, to escape man who was often bad, and to enjoy, more than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, and insignificant, and forgotten.'' Between 1906 and 1911, while she continued to turn out well-received books, Colette appeared on the stage as a dancer, actress and mime. As Miss Richardson unsentimentally puts it, she owed whatever success she had in the theater to ''her half- nakedness, to the crude charm of her gestures, the authority of her inviting eyes.''
In 1913, Henry (The Tiger) de Jouvenel became Colette's second husband. With a fine French elan, he said: ''I am the only man in Paris capable of marrying that woman.'' They were very happy for awhile, enjoying what Colette called in ''Cheri,'' her most famous book, ''The Tumultuous Brutality of Love.'' But it grew too brutal or tumultuous for The Tiger when he learned that Colette was also sleeping with Bertrand, his younger son, who was virtually a schoolboy. To her own daughter, who was born when Colette was 40, she was rather distant, advising her in a letter to ''struggle a little with yourself, it's the best form of gymnastics.''
With ''Cheri,'' a love story of a young man and an older woman that appeared in 1920, Colette offered the French an image of themselves as tragic sensualists that they found irresistible. Reviewing a second volume, ''La Fin de Cheri,'' a critic wrote that, though Colette was ''indifferent to the loftier preoccupations of humanity, here she attains the salvation of anxiety.'' Another critic said, ''We owe it to Madame Colette to lose all our illusions about love.'' The Times of London observed that, ''She enobled sensualism into grandeur.'' If Colette was sometimes overpraised, this may have been the greatest tribute of all in a notoriously parsimonious country.
During her later years, Colette became a national pet as literary honors were showered on her. In her apartment overlooking the gardens of the Palais Royal, she became cosy - the sensuality of old age - and wrote ''Paris de Ma Fen^etre'' and books about plants and animals. She was wonderfully looked after by her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, and all Paris sent her presents or came to see her. When she died in 1954, Jean Cocteau wrote, ''It was not a question of funeral rites, but rather of gardeners digging, of passing from one reign to another, of earth and flesh in collaboration.''
In ''Colette,'' Joanna Richardson has a great subject, and she has not wasted a single nuance. One can imagine Colette herself reading this book with her ''undeceivable eyes'' and saying, ''Oui, c'est moi. C'etait comme, ca.''
No comments:
Post a Comment