The Collected Stories of Colette
Phelps, Robert
ficial line, which leads to selfcontempt. As Dovlatov himself said at a recent conference of em~gre writers: "I still have many problems, individual and professional, yet for the first...
...And I know only too well to whom I should be thankful, because the sole aim of my emigration was freedom...
...Therein lies the key to Colette...
...Colette...
...It is a glorious profusion o f stories, ranging from delicious miniatures to a lengthy novelette, many of which appear in English for the first time...
...From what...
...They've given men every reason to run away, to cheat, to hate, to change...
...On its unnaturalness, she evokes a parental dispute remembered from childhood in which her mother had stormed at Captain Colette, " I forbid you to speak to me that way: you're not even related to C o l e t t e was a scandal...
...They suddenly fall silent, pacified by some unknown spell . . . . In spite of their gaping wraps, of their high-pitched knees, of the insolent rouge still blossoming on their cheeks, they have the chaste attitude and bent backs of sedate seamstresses...
...Ever since the world began, they've been inflicting men, behind the bed curtains, with a creature inferior to the one he desired...
...On its horrid secrets, she records the troubled thoughts of a woman anticipating her daughter's marriage: Madame Grey shuddered and stood up...
...Biographer Yvonne Mitchell said in 1975 that Colette was "perhaps the most truly liberated woman of this century...
...In the end, Colette was honored by her countrymen (she was "Grand Officier de la Legion d'honneur" and president of the Academie Goncourt) and paid tribute by her country (she was the first woman in France to be given a state funeral...
...Liberated...
...She belonged to no sisterhood, to no sympathetic alliance of the afflicted...
...Too happy to sleep," the bride lies awake and gazes fondly on her slumbering husband...
...Creamer said he wanted to "go beyond the gentle inaccuracies and omissions" of earlier accounts, and "present all the facts and myths, the statistical details and personal exuberance, the obvious and subtle things" behind the legend...
...As Dovlatov himself said at a recent conference of em~gre writers: "I still have many problems, individual and professional, yet for the first time in my life, I am happy...
...She appreciated the number of naturally occurring masquerades, and had no patience with deliberate hypocrisy...
...And during this half hour they allow themselves, as a respite, the candid illusion of being cloistered young women who sew...
...Robert W. Creamer comes to much the same conclusion...
...We also have an extended analysis o f the problem of Soviet economic reform which includes a sensational Soviet document - the leaked Novosibirsk Report...
...She could write brutally about the effects of aging on women ( " I saw you just as Alexis Trallard had seen you...
...Women have no excuses," she said in one story...
...She could see in her memory a young man in his shirttails, bare feet on a mosaic bathroom floor, standing in front of an absolutely astounded young woman...
...In this issue of SURVEY we scrutinize Andropov's 15 months in power and analyse what Chernenko's succession may signal...
...a young man in the midst of confessing, with horrible, unconscious candor, that he couldr~'t sleep if the fringes on the Turkish towels hung on the rack to dry were not lined up with each o t h e r . . . "But I can't tell Claudie that," thought Madame Grey agitatedly . . . . "I could never talk to her about towel fringe, or about the thumbnail going back and forth across his lip a hundred t i m e s . . , small, terrible things, the mold that grows on married l i f e . . . " So transitory is first love and its blessed blindness that Colette is able to write of a new wife's adoration turning to horror overnight...
...However " interim " a leader Chernenko may turn out to be, neither the problems o f the " real " succession, nor the problems o f the Soviet economy can be swept under the carpet...
...Unlike so many who have tried so hard to achieve liberated status, Colette qualifies simply because she barely tried at all...
...For years she submitted to the philandering whims of two husbands-going so far as to distract one husband's mistress while he entertained himself with another...
...After this, he invented the New York Mets, an example, if there ever was one, of a man's reach exceeding his grasp...
...it would seem that it is " socialist funerealism " that prevails in Soviet life...
...Whitey Herzog, who knows something about baseball and managing, once summed up Casey Stengeh "Casey was the best public relations man who ever lived...
...In bondage she had found freedom, and in life's uncertainty she found security...
...He knew exactly what he was doing all the time...
...He invented The Baseball Manager...
...None won more fame, or did it with more gusto, than the old Case...
...They rob him with effrontery nowadays, when reinforced hair and rigged corsets turn any ugly, saucy little woman into a 'striking little lady.' " Despite all this, Colette was a liberated woman--or at least what a liberated woman should be...
...His hand, contorted by a dreaminspired reflex, suddenly looks to her to be "vile, apelike...
...The statement is in a sense absurd...
...As Sinyavsky said at the same conference: "Probably many of us-I have in mind recent emigrants--have a perceptual experience of the West that is very diverse, vivid, even exceptional in its acuteness, while at the same time it is quite confused, impressionistic, and not quite thought o u t . " Perhaps many will continue Aksyonov's experiment in The Island of Crimea, turning their acute if confused impressions to good account by writing works of fantastic realism that describe the way we live now in the West...
...Her haven was her "little ground-floor room" with its "scraps of salvaged f u r n i t u r e . . , b o o k s . . . [and] the smell of green leaves that sometimes drifted in from the Bois...
...There were other managers in the game longer, and there were managers of more illustrious teams, and there were managers with better winning percentages, but you never hear about them, and few people outside the game and its chroniclers recognize their names...
...Colette became a writer against her will, locked in a room for four hours a day by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-ViUars ( " W i l l y " ) , who forced her to record her Burgundian i childhood...
...01-836 4194) The Colette of the music hall--so bold and infamous--was in significant part a contented, conventional, domestic creature...
...She could endure her bad reputation, and enjoy the company of the disreputable, for she knew neither she nor they deserved censure...
...Colette could look unflinchingly at marriage, admit its nightmarishness, fail at it twice, and eventually find herself a perfect mate...
...And the leathery, furrowed neck, the red patches on the skin below the ears, the chin Victoria Sackett is associate editor of Public Opinion...
...Born in 1890 in Kansas City, Casey broke into the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1914, and had enough confidence in his own talent to renegotiate his contracts on a regular basis...
...The theater dressing room-peopled with the ill-bred, the wayward, and the disreputable--becomes during intermission a sewing circle: Off fly bicolored tights and Neapolitan skirts, to be replaced by spongy dressing gowns or cotton kimonos, mottled with the stains of cosmetics...
...Mature, successful, happy, she sought to change no one, and did as she chose...
...Chernenko, in his role as ideological controller, has been promoting " socialist realism " in the Soviet arts and literature...
...Annual subscription: UK s US $39 Elsewhere s Single copies: UKs US $10 SURVEY Editorial Office: Ilford House, 133 Oxford Street, London W1R 1TD, England (Tel...
...Her disgust proves far more substantial than the diaphanous adulation she had felt before...
...And through all of them runs the unruffled voice of their author's calm prose...
...A child's compliant silence conceals the thoughts that take her " a d v e n t u r i n g . . . along a road of risks and temptations...
...Her favorite companion, of "good and bad moments," was a tabby cat...
...My contemptuous eyes took in the slack breasts and the slipped shoulder straps of the crumpled chemise...
...This turned into the charming, successful "Claudine" series of books, to which Willy signed his own name...
...left to its own devices and long past h o p e...
...And it is from the lips of little Garcin, naked in her beaded-net pants, that a childish little song, keeping time with her busy needle, involuntarily finds its way...
...band's self-aggrandizing theft, wrote resignedly, and developed the habits and the talent that later brought her a reputation of her own...
...Creamer, came in 1921 when he was traded to the famed New York Giants...
...biography of the slugger, Mr...
...What Stengel was doing, of course, was adding to the American cast of characters...
...Colette silently endured her husTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 43 me...
...She displeased many, but was beloved and revered by more...
...Colette's experience under Willy's lock and key opened her eyes to the flimsiness of first observations--a preoccupation in her writing...
...I would like to finish all my speeches in America with this wonderful word...
...I learned more from McGraw than anybody," he once said...
...She would not have understood the tense, self-conscious, sometimes badtempered seeking after freedom that the status connotes today...
...Indecency, libertinism, exhibitionism-these are the most illusory of all, the public faces worn by a more provincial private domesticity...
...Indeed, he went on to tie McGraw's record ten pennants, and surpassed his three 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984...
...How does a woman who sees everything changing at a moment's notice, who believes nothing is what it seems to be, find stability...
...Andropov and Chernenko Whither Big Brother...
...In an erratic world, she had no one to depend upon but herself, the one person she knew and liked best...
...01-734 0592) SURVEY Subscription Office: 59 St...
...a recipient of unrequited love is the unfortunate one ( " I ' m the v i c t i m . . . I envy everything he has, everything I can't have, since he's the one who's in love...
...She married too often, and for six or so years after her first marriage ended spent her time rather conspicuously in the company of Paris's most aristocratic lesbians...
...she might have asked...
...Repugnance, and the toil required to conceal it, replace permanently a much more effortless, much shorter-lived ardor...
...She displayed too much of her flesh on the music hall stage and too much of her sensual soul in print...
...The objects of love are rarely what they seem to be, so that marriage becomes an unnatural state, preserved only by deceit...
...Colette writes most convincingly-with an unsettling omniscience--of love in marriage...
...What will happen to these ~migr~ writers--out of touch with their own country and, as many of them admit, not quite in touch with their ~dopted country...
...She never thought herself enslaved, even though at one point in her life she actually was...
...Having found liberation in captivity, she had to admit that no condition, and no person, is what it appears, at least not for long...
...His biggest break, "the most rewarding part of his life," according to Mr...
...It was not a bad way to spend a life...
...Colette saw in those who outraged society her same wholesome, homely virtues...
...a modish friend's determined efforts to be fashionable make her look like " a little maid...
...In Stengel he does the same for Charles Dillon Stengel...
...But what he learned while sitting on the bench more than outweighed whatever stats he garnered in the twilight of his career...
...Liberated...
...The following morning begins "her life of duplicity, of resignation, and of a lowly, delicate diplomacy...
...Her accomplishments thrust her into public view--as did some of her private a c t i v i t i e s - - b u t she was relentlessly unpolitical...
...He played harder, and hit better, .349 (as opposed to his career .284), for John McGraw than for anybody else, and won two games of the 1923 World Series with home runs...
...Colette was a woman who did what she wanted, and got away with it...
...She took her refuge in being someone her critics failed to see...
...Robert Phelps's fine collection of one hundred Colette stories is replete with these themes...
...She did not reveal WiUy's unsavory part in her literary beginnings until five years after his death (although she did manage to claim authorship before then...
...This is the woman who performed without her clothes on, long before Broadway made that gesture a political statement...
...In the 1974 biography, Babe, which was esteemed as the first adult Ruppert Mundy is a writer living in New York City...
...This half hour is theirs...
...Bare feet, unexpectedly bashful, groped under the makeup table for shapeless old slippers, while hands, pale or red, suddenly become cautious in unrolling lengths of linen and bits of imitation lace . . . . The five of them, now seated on their high rush stools, are busy and quiet, as if they had at last reached their goal at the end of the day...
...Martin's Lane, London WC2N 4JS, England (Tel...
...These are the marks of true maturity and selfassuredness, the things that make of a scandalous woman, a grande dame...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
