A passionate professional
Peter Quennell
Letters from Colette Selected and translated by Robert Phelps (Virago £6,95)
amous women novelists are seldom as
communicative as we had hoped they might be. Virginia Woolf, for example, Made a strange and romantic impression; but her attitude towards a newcomer was always slightly guarded; and the searching queries she sometimes fired off were more inquisitorial than sympathetic. Madame Colette, on the other hand, was a magnifi- cent exception; she radiated good humour, friendly interest in her surroundings and a genial love of life. I met her only once, at a luncheon-party in Paris in about 1946, When she was 73 years old and half- criPpIed. Yet the face I remembered from her portraits, with its sharp nose and high cheek-bones beneath a nimbus of grey hair, had still a youthfully energetic look, and I could see that she enjoyed talking. She had a deep, sonorous voice and a rich Burgun- dian accent.`Vows verrez,' said our host before she arrived, 'que c'est une femme tres savoureuse'; and, as soon as she ap- peared, I understood the phrase. She had indeed something of the warmth and charm of her fruitful native province. No author talks exactly as he or she has learned to write; but in the great woman's conversation that afternoon I thought I noticed certain traces of the sensuous, evocative quality we distinguish in her Prose-style; and she showed the same affec- tion for a telling detail. Asked if she had ever visited England, she answered that she had spent two or three days there — the date, I discovered, was 1900 — and had
galley, at a pleasant chateau in the Thames ‘
alley, where 'une asset aimable petite riviere' wound sinuously across the park, and a house-maid, 'qui, comme toutes les femmes de chambre anglaises, &aft vetue en rose', having encountered the family ghost one night, was found inanimate next morn- ing just outside Colette's bedroom door.
These memories came back to me while I was reading Letters from Colette, selected and translated by Robert Phelps, which, although itself a somewhat unsatisfactory book, throws many agreeable lights upon her character. The French edition of Col- ette's correspondence, when her American translator used it as his main source, had already reached the fifth volume; but it did not yet include her letters to her three husbands, to her daughter Colette de Jouvenel, or the marquise de Belbeuf, her beloved companion and fellow music-hall performer, once she had broken with the tyrannous M. Willy. Mr Phelps's choice was therefore limited; and the portrait he has done his best to provide is necessarily incomplete. It is made even more fragmen- tary by his rigorous editorial methods. Rows of three dots spatter every page, and, here and there, enclose a whole paragraph. Colette's exuberant personality, never- theless, triumphs over such excisions. We are reminded again and again how boldly she lived, how hard and cheerfully she worked, and how multitudinous her oc- cupations were, whether she was finishing a It's awful. Never judge a book by its cover.
new book, meeting a journalistic deadline, cultivating her garden, cherishing her in- imitable dog and cat, travelling abroad to report on a murder trial, criticising a play, launching a beauty salon (which proved singularly unsuccessful), or helping and counselling a ybung writer.
Above all else, she was a woman at home in the world; and, re-reading her novels and essays, I often remember the eloquent tribute that William Hazlitt paid Falstaff a character, he said, whose 'body is like a good estate to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure'. The joy that Colette derived from the physical life constantly quickened her imagination; and she seems to have escaped all the restlessness and nostalgia, complicated by touches of inherited puritanism, that colour so much 19th and 20th-century writing.
Undoubtedly, the most valuable book so far published about her career and private personality is Pres de Colette, her third hus- band's affectionate, but lucid and unsen- timental, account of the happy years they passed together. Maurice Goudeket's nar- rative is particularly illuminating on the subject of her style and on her personal views of authorship. Questioned by a literary beginner, who frankly declared that she, the beginner, did not quite know what she ought to put into a story, Colette replied: 'Ne peins que ce que to as vu. Regarde longuement ce qui te fait plaisir, plus longuement ce qui te fait de la peine. Tdche d'être fidele a ton impression premiere. Ne crois pas au "mot rare" ...'
Elsewhere, Goudeket describes her definition of style as shown in her sayings and her practice. She frequently employed the word, but never to signify a manner of writing: 'Elle parlait du style d'un homme, d'une bete, d'une chose pour designer par quoi cet homme, cette bete, cette chose, dans son rnouvement, son maintien, se con- formait a une espece.' Equally modest was Colette's estimate of her metier, the laborious profession that she exercised: 'II n'y avait pour elle d'occupation superieure ou irzferieure Ecrire n'etait pas plus no- ble que, par exemple, fabriquer des sabots'. She was content to pursue her chosen trade to the best of her ability. 'Elle a ere' (Goudeket adds) 'comme un luthier de pro- vince qui, a son insu, fabriquerait des stradivarius' .
She remained, in fact, all her writing life a passionate professional; and it was her professionalism that especially appealed to Paul Valery, who, seated beside her at the dinner table, would quietly discuss the pro- blems of diction that absorbed them both. Among her other keen admirers were Gide, Proust, Montherlant and Cocteau; for she was a popular novelist who delighted a huge public and commanded handsome fees, yet was a recognised member of the literary elect. True, her novels vary in quality; and some, like La Chatte, the tale of an ex- quisitely attractive cat that destroys a hopeful marriage, suggest that here she is 'doing a Colette' and, perhaps a little too
obviously, following her own footsteps.
Elsewhere, as in Le Ble en herbe, her romantic-erotic study of young love, based on Longinus's Daphnis and Chloe, and Cheri, published two years earlier, a picture of the relationship between an ageing demi- mondaine and the parasitic youth she loves and spoils, she is completely individual, down to the smallest details of the nar- rative, which Colette alone, one thinks, could have inserted, so exactly do they suit her theme. 'When we close Cheri,' wrote Henry de Montherlant, 'all we can observe
is "C'est — "that's that — that is precisely how it must have beenl" ' No fur- ther commentary or criticism is required. Those two syllables are the only form of praise we need give the finished story.
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