Beginning a run through some Colette books - "I will dance nude or dressed, for the sole pleasure of dancing"

Since the Zola novel was dragging on so long, I thought, why not mix in a French book that is light and elegant and short and easy?  Some Colette, for example?  Light, elegant, short, but honestly just as difficult as the Zola, with lots of slang, regionalisms, and advanced vocabulary.  But shorter, I remembered that part correctly.

A few years ago there was a craze for autofiction, mostly British as I remember, both the craze and the books.  I read a number of professional reviews of who knows which books which made a number of claims about the innovations of the current books, all of which, every time, made me think “Have you not read Colette?  She was doing that a hundred years ago.”  More people should read Colette. 

My impression is that those who do read Colette agree with me, whether they prefer her or her sentences.  She wrote memoiristic fiction and fictionalized memoir, so her personality is everywhere in her work.  I am more interested in her insight into animals, including the human type, and her poetry, those surprising words that make her more difficult than she first seems.  But she makes a good imaginary friend, the kind who might be hard to take in large doses but is wonderful to meet once in a while.  She does all the talking.  She has been doing such interesting things.  Her actual life was preposterously eventful.

I’ve read quite a lot of Colette since I started studying French seriously, and thought it would be a good idea to write some kind of overview.  This and subsequent posts are the shallow version of that idea.  Let me load up Colette’s French Wikipedia entry.

The Claudine books come first, Claudine at School (1900) and three more.  I have not read these.  They were published under the name of Willy, Colette’s odious but seductive husband, the greatest hack of turn-of-the-century French literature.  They somehow seem compromised to me, and their subject is certainly soapy stuff, a roman fleuve of marriages and affairs and so on.  Or so I understand.  They’re likely better than I think.

Retreat from Love (1907), now this I have read a couple of times in English.  It is the last Claudine novel, and Colette’s declaration of independence from Willy, dumped and divorced, her reclamation of the characters.  The book is quite close to plotless and full of the kind of thing I call “lovely” writing, especially all of the extraordinary descriptions of animals.  I wrote a piece about Retreat from Love four years ago, and wrote a bit about its animals long before that.  I apparently had more to say about Colette before I had read many of her books than I do now.

Seven Dialogues of the Beasts (1904, Barks and Purrs in an old translation), expanded to Twelve Dialogues and arranged in other ways.  The stories are literally dialogues between Colette’s Chartreux cat Kiki and brindle bulldog Toby.  The animals weather a storm, meet a puppy, meet a turtle, and cope with a late dinner.  Toby is a bundle of anxiety; Kiki is an ironist. 

The dialogues are as charming, or twee, as they sound.  I read them in a school edition, collège (junior high) level – what lucky students to have this book forced on them – visible here.  What I loved about the edition – about French literary education generally – is that it has an entire section on the literary tradition of talking animals {“Words of the beasts” / “Paroles de bêtes”), with texts from Aesop and Perrault and so on.  Then it has another section about dialogue as a stylistic device.  The French teach literature by surrounding it with more literature.

One of the dialogues, “Toby-dog Speaks,” from a bit later (1908), post-Willy, turns out to be a key Colette text.  Anxious Toby reports to Kiki a monologue Colette directed at him.  The story is really a Colettian manifesto for a new life, written in the form of a dialogue between a cat and a dog.

“You hear me,” She cried, “you hear me, brindled toad, big-hearted little bull! I will not go to the premieres any more – except on the other side of the ramp.  Because I will yet dance in the scene, I will dance nude or dressed, for the sole pleasure of dancing, adapting my gestures to the rhythm of the music, turning, burned by the light, blinded like a fly in a sunbeam… I will dance, I will invent beautiful slow dances where the veil sometimes covers me, sometimes envelops me like a spiral of smoke, and sometimes stretches behind me like the sail of a ship…  I will be the statue, the living vase, the leaping beast, the balanced tree, the drunken slave…”  (translation, such as it is, mine; all ellipses in original)

And that is just what Colette did, or was doing.  Is this ever autofiction.  The dog-cat dialogue turns out to be a flexible form.

Tomorrow, Colette in the music hall.