A few months before Colette's death in 1954, she recorded a message for the première of Claude Autant-Lara's film of her novel of adolescent love, The Ripening Seed . "Throughout my existence," she said, "I have studied flowering more than any other manifestation of life. It is there, for me, that the essential drama resides, and not in death, which is just a banal defeat." In her 80 volumes of fiction, plays, and essays, and her seven volumes of correspondence, Colette had indeed been the French feminine laureate of flowering and ripening, the superb stylist of seduction and initiation. For Colette, even her cat's loss of virginity was a significant rite of passage: " elle connait la vie ."
Colette's sensuality and modernity have ensured her popularity throughout the century; she has never been out of style. Simone de Beauvoir called her "the only great woman writer in France" and confessed that "as a girl I was a bit in love with her through her books". (I felt the same way, and named my only daughter "Vinca" after the young heroine of The Ripening Seed. ) Julia Kristeva, who is writing about Colette in her study of "feminine genius," compares her to Proust. She has been the subject of numerous biographies, including a recent two-volume study in France.
Judith Thurman's splendid biography, which has just been nominated for the National Book Award for non-fiction in the United States, brings to the subject of Colette's life, writing, and times an original combination of the passionately admiring and the coolly worldly-wise. Colette was no feminist martyr exhorting women, like Virginia Woolf, to labour in poverty and obscurity in the interests of the great woman artist of the future. Woolf's vision of a room of one's own and an income of £500 a year was not for Colette, Thurman points out; she wanted a £50,000 a year, a villa of her own, and a pretty boy (or girl) of her own for company. "Be an egotist!" she advised. "Egotists don't get exploited."
And she followed her own advice. After an unhappy start as a dominated and exploited child- bride, Colette freed herself through literature and divorce, shamelessly putting herself first and fighting the voluptuous attractions of domesticity, maternity, and love. Although she adored food and wine, and was an early opponent of fashionable thinness and anorexia, Colette built a home gym where she worked out every day because she hated anything mushy and flabby in the female body. When she had her only child at the age of 40, she continued to lead her normal life, including acting, during the pregnancy, depending on her toned gymnast's body to carry off the disguise. It was, she boasted, "a man's pregnancy. A champion's pregnancy."
When her daughter Bel-Gazou was born, Colette avoided "the maternal yoke" by having her raised by a nanny, sending her away to school at the age of eight, and then farming her out to various friends. She chose her lovers without regard for their age, position, or sex; at 47, she seduced her 16-year-old stepson Bertrand; and, according to one of his mistresses, Martha Gellhorn, he never stopped loving her. She had a series of affairs with women, and saw one of the motives for lesbianism as a "yearning for equality". But she also tended to prefer the frank, aggressive desires of homosexual men to what she saw as the "consolatory, maternal" aspects of lesbianism.
While Thurman is unflinching about Colette's selfishness and sense of entitlement, she does not wallow in sexual sensationalism or psychoanalytic perversity. Colette's brother Leo, for example, marinated and roasted the family puppy when he was a child (the marinade is the irresistibly French detail), but Thurman simply tells the story while other biographers milk it for every lurid drop. She is seriously interested in Colette's paradoxical celebration of sadomasochism in romantic and literary relationships, but views Colette's obsession with power from a philosophical rather than a pornographic point of view.
Thurman also examines Colette's passive collaboration with the Vichy government, her willingness to stay on good terms with the winning side, and her generic anti-semitism, despite her adoration for and dependence on her Jewish third husband, Maurice Goudeket. She used her social contacts at the German Embassy to get Goudeket's release from a detention camp, and then took him with her to tea at the embassy two months before the mass deportation of French Jews. After the war, she was much more outraged by the purge trials of collaborators than she had ever been by the Occupation. She was also hostile to feminism as a movement and declared that the suffragettes deserved "the whip and the harem".
Nevertheless, Thurman locates Colette in the Parisian artistic demi-monde of homosexuals, New Women and Jews at the turn of the century and argues that this milieu provided her with her most radical "theatre of resistance". Colette's views on gender, if not politics, were subversive, and threatened to transgress the strict boundaries of national identity. Like her friend Jean Cocteau, she both played at being an enfant terrible and accepted the emotional consequences of her acts.
Colette was no saint, but Thurman makes a convincing case for her courage and importance. She began her career by ghostwriting spicy novels about teenage eroticism for her husband Willy; she went on (through two more marriages and many affairs with both men and women) to describe women at various stages of their lives, from the gamine to the grande dame . Indeed, she extended our understanding of female desire to encompass the whole trajectory of women's lives. Thurman notes that the restless Balzacian femme de trente ans was almost 40 in Colette's day and is almost 50 now.
At 50, Colette herself had a face-lift, and got her hair permed and tinted mauve. Traditionally, Thurman writes, "the half-century marks an occasion for retirement, mourning, spiritual conversions, even suicide," and it may be so for "the beauties in Colette's essays and fiction". But Colette saw no occasion to abdicate her power as a woman. Her "late fifties were probably the happiest and certainly the most fecund period of her life". In her sixties, still vigorous and entrepreneurial she opened a beauty salon where she sold her own beauty products. Dressed in a white lab coat, she did wicked makeovers that made other women look twice as old.
