The feminine feminist
Anita Brookner
Colette: A Biography Michele Sarde, translated by Roger Miller (Michael Joseph OP. 479, £12.95) The frizzy hair, the watchful eyes, the tutelary cats, the state funeral: these are the attributes that everyone remembers. But Perhaps more significant is the fact that While her body lay in state in the gardens of the Palais Royal, scores of ordinary women filed past to drop a flower on to the catafalque. They were women who had no access to literary scholarship or even to literary gossip; quite simply, they had read her books, had loved and understood them. From this fact Michele Sarde constructs her excellent and sympathetic biography, concentrating on the strange history of Colette's life, using her novels as evidence and testimony, ignoring questions of literary merit, or demerit, and intoning the Obligatory feminist canticles to some effect, as she tells the story of a woman forced from her original path to become a writer, of a woman, in fact, who hated writing but Who needed the exercise of fiction or confession in order to supply both the public and herself with an edited version of her OW n experience.
This supremely healthy and rational Woman possessed a mysterious inner world. It Was a world in which she cherished the exclusive and inspired love of her extraordinary mother, and, by a strange irony, her ecstatic childhood left her unfit for the amorous deceptions and compromises that were to be her lot in adult life. The cult of her mother — both in life and in her later fiction — precluded her from supplanting that first idyllic family with anything of similar quality or substance. She failed to attend her mother's funeral; she lost interest in her daughter when that daughter ceased to be a child. With almost infantile Obstinacy, she regarded physical separation as betrayal. She rarely discussed her mother °I' her daughter, although she was extravagant in her other female associations and alliances; she preferred to keep them at the emotional distance required for good writing, and few would guess that the ra diant evocations of motherhood contained in Sido and La Naissance du Jour are not only cunningly altered but are, in addition, celebrations of earliest memory, the memory of the intact child or the woman who has not yet been betrayed.
For there is another, adult, side to Colette which is no less interesting, although it gives rise to quite another form of fiction. In spite of her emotional closeness to women, Colette preferred men, and the men she preferred (pace Mlle. Sarde) had no trace of the feminine in their make-up: they were compulsive philanderers, men about town, men on the make. The first of her three husbands, the notorious Willy, locked her in her room and made her write reminiscences of her happy schooldays, which he enlivened with a salaciousness entirely native to himself. The second, Henri de Jouvenel, editor of Le MatM, turned her into a journalist. These activities, which were quite foreign to her active nature and her disposition for animal closeness, were undertaken in order to give pleasure and were continued, grimly, in order to earn money. She learned to endure the humiliation of having to consort with her first husband's mistresses, and from this immense hurt she concocted La Vagabonde, that airy primer for the woman on her own, relishing her 'freedom', her 'independence', fantasising the lover she rejects and the marriage she spurns because she sets so high a value on her 'autonomy'. It is beautifully done. Thirteen years of marriage to Willy, 13 years of his infidelities, and his advertisement of those infidelities, destroyed not only her sexual confidence but her sexual identity. She became a lesbian, a transvestite, a music hall performer of dubious quality, a chronicler ' of opium addiction and homosexual love affairs. The beautiful face in the honeymoon photograph hardens into the triangular vixen's mask, the eyes wary, never again able to trust. This hard-headed, hard-working, ardent and humiliated woman created the stereotype female who presides over her own emotional life, and who appeals to those who desire to do the same. This woman is idle and devious, langorous and cunning; she is deeply immersed in her own performance, and she colludes with her rival. The descriptions of this woman (in La Seconde or Le Toutounier) are never less than limpid and affectionate, for the irony of the situation is that there is no difficulty in the writing, — none, that is to say, compared with the difficulty of living.
Only at one moment did the two experiences coalesce, before her marriage to Henri de Jouvenel, and the novel that chronicles her hesitation, her abandonment, her re-education in patience, and the sometimes necessary passivity, is L'Entrave, the most naked, the most poignant of them all. It is the novel which must have appealed to those ordinary women filing past the coffin. It would be interesting to know how it appeals today, for contemporary manners do not allow of such heightened descriptions of feeling, and with the disappearance of such writing a whole sentimental education has been lost.
It is perhaps significant that during the six years of her happiness she wrote no fiction. It is perhaps also significant that the pleasant companionship of her third and only successful marriage produced the most perfectly crafted and written of her stories, Bella Vista and Chambre d'HoteL And yet it is fitting that she should end with Gigi, that weightless and charming reversion to the Claudine stories, taking place in some long lost Belle Epoque, and marrying perfectly her gift for reminiscence with her ineradicable fondness for the moment before the corruption of innocence.
From her pages there emerges a world of women who are in fact all herself, for she is the most rigorously personal of writers. She is also very brave, because she is lighthearted, or pretends to be. It is the elegance of the position she created for herself that is so unusual when compared with present day feminist writing, where all is dolour and blame, unpurged guilt and fruitless recrimination. With Colette, the function of writing, whatever its exigencies, is presented almost as one of ces plaisirs qu ' on nomme, a la legere, physiques. Mlle. Sarde's respect for her is heartening and healthy; the very few instances in which she feels called upon to protest on Colette's behalf do not alter the sly dignity of her subject.
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