talent with which one set out. If it had cost her her seership, then that would have been a loss so much more terrible than any gain in re-sizing her art that it is better forgotten.
The apprehension of sensual or magical situations is her province, enveloped alive in their own detail. Her supreme moment is the Annunciation; having learned to listen, she can hear when invisible forces announce their presences in mortal things. Should this sound too abstract for rational minds, we need only remind them of the grand pattern of evolutionary and spiritual behaviour, and the humbler rhythms within the human body, and thereafter of the unseen, illogical, wholly real struggle between good and evil in the world, in order to regain their attention.
Given this basis for her writing, it will be seen that the more fresh life she lived, the stronger her work became. Life did not distract her from her thoughts; on the contrary, her
real
thoughts – the thoughts which were given to her – were outside, engrossed in life, and synonymous with it. She was never a mere clerk to her ego.
There were three marriages, a primordial mother, a daughter, a connection with the theatre as an actress and dramatist, travels, a beautician interlude, books, and success.
The irony of the story is that everything is in that first marriage to the despised Willy, the literary man about town. The first marriage made necessary, and contained, the second, which was physical. And it made possible the third, which she could have missed by not having become quite herself, and which was a natural unhasty interlocking. Willy might have been a disaster for her, but she turned the whole thing to advantage, by going along with it, and investing in it, to try to see what it meant. In his favour is the fact that he imprisoned her in the heart of the right
sort
of cloud cuckoo-land. The other dusty cages contained Proust, Anatole France, Gide, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Schwob, Hérédia, Jarry; yesterday’s broken visionaries were only just off the pavements, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Mallarmé. None of this would have been so immediately possible without Willy; he educated her and appreciated her, he stood between her and the literary businessmen who would have stolen her time from her as surely as he stole her books, and the money she needed to buy a life of her own.
It is worthwhile analysing how a writing style of such beauty, and capacity, came into being; and how it was underpinned by psychological growth.
In a provincial schoolroom, the schoolgirl Colette wrote a note to a friend: ‘I scribbled down everything I could for her on a bit of tracing paper and launched the ball’ (trans. Antonia White). If we were able to unwrap that piece of tracing paper, we would find there stubs, particles, spotlessly clean, of the idiom of
Claudine à l’école
. It’s the primitive idiom of a little tomboy filled with joy and derision, whose manner of expression is kept pure by all the short cuts of laziness and illiteracy. Rimbaud’s early syntax is akin to it, but more carbolic. He cuts to ribbons, jams in a stone of a word – and it sends a sheet of light at you. The pages are made insufferable, invincible, by this kind of youth. But every additional year is dangerous to it, the blows soften the mind, and Colette was about twenty-five when she wrote the first
Claudine
book.
She had read a great deal of poetry by then. Baudelaire’s forest which vibrates like an organ appears two-thirds of the way through
Claudine à l’école
. She began, in general, to acquire the tone of the Symbolist poets.
The selection and treatment of descriptive detail, and the velocity of all action in this book, also suggest a reading of the masterly
Poil de Carotte
by Jules Renard, which had been published three years previously. A year before its publication, Jules Renard made a note in his diary about Colette, seen at the first night of a play with a long plait. The schoolboy
Poil
The apprehension of sensual or magical situations is her province, enveloped alive in their own detail. Her supreme moment is the Annunciation; having learned to listen, she can hear when invisible forces announce their presences in mortal things. Should this sound too abstract for rational minds, we need only remind them of the grand pattern of evolutionary and spiritual behaviour, and the humbler rhythms within the human body, and thereafter of the unseen, illogical, wholly real struggle between good and evil in the world, in order to regain their attention.
Given this basis for her writing, it will be seen that the more fresh life she lived, the stronger her work became. Life did not distract her from her thoughts; on the contrary, her
real
thoughts – the thoughts which were given to her – were outside, engrossed in life, and synonymous with it. She was never a mere clerk to her ego.
There were three marriages, a primordial mother, a daughter, a connection with the theatre as an actress and dramatist, travels, a beautician interlude, books, and success.
The irony of the story is that everything is in that first marriage to the despised Willy, the literary man about town. The first marriage made necessary, and contained, the second, which was physical. And it made possible the third, which she could have missed by not having become quite herself, and which was a natural unhasty interlocking. Willy might have been a disaster for her, but she turned the whole thing to advantage, by going along with it, and investing in it, to try to see what it meant. In his favour is the fact that he imprisoned her in the heart of the right
sort
of cloud cuckoo-land. The other dusty cages contained Proust, Anatole France, Gide, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Schwob, Hérédia, Jarry; yesterday’s broken visionaries were only just off the pavements, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Mallarmé. None of this would have been so immediately possible without Willy; he educated her and appreciated her, he stood between her and the literary businessmen who would have stolen her time from her as surely as he stole her books, and the money she needed to buy a life of her own.
It is worthwhile analysing how a writing style of such beauty, and capacity, came into being; and how it was underpinned by psychological growth.
In a provincial schoolroom, the schoolgirl Colette wrote a note to a friend: ‘I scribbled down everything I could for her on a bit of tracing paper and launched the ball’ (trans. Antonia White). If we were able to unwrap that piece of tracing paper, we would find there stubs, particles, spotlessly clean, of the idiom of
Claudine à l’école
. It’s the primitive idiom of a little tomboy filled with joy and derision, whose manner of expression is kept pure by all the short cuts of laziness and illiteracy. Rimbaud’s early syntax is akin to it, but more carbolic. He cuts to ribbons, jams in a stone of a word – and it sends a sheet of light at you. The pages are made insufferable, invincible, by this kind of youth. But every additional year is dangerous to it, the blows soften the mind, and Colette was about twenty-five when she wrote the first
Claudine
book.
She had read a great deal of poetry by then. Baudelaire’s forest which vibrates like an organ appears two-thirds of the way through
Claudine à l’école
. She began, in general, to acquire the tone of the Symbolist poets.
The selection and treatment of descriptive detail, and the velocity of all action in this book, also suggest a reading of the masterly
Poil de Carotte
by Jules Renard, which had been published three years previously. A year before its publication, Jules Renard made a note in his diary about Colette, seen at the first night of a play with a long plait. The schoolboy
Poil
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