Lesson in Self-Doubt
HOWE, FANNY
Lesson in Self-Doubt EARTHLY PARADISE: AN AUTBIOGRAPHY BY COLETTE Edited by Robert Phelps Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 505 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by FANNY HOWE Freelance critic Colette once...
...Her sketches of people she knew are so sensual and fragile...
...Rousseau, Montaigne, Thoreau have explored their souls in the way Colette has, but she may be the first woman to have assumed that terrifying luxury...
...Colette is like her own reader and we join her in her astonishment from the beginning to the end of her life...
...These last flashes of astonishment are what I cannot do without...
...It is a rough mirror...
...She was a stoic sensualist to the end of her life and never paused to defend herself...
...This refusal to be anything but ordinary prevails throughout her life and transforms her memory into genius...
...In one small scene she can bring a person to life...
...Colette lived according to her needs...
...A lack of money, if it be relative, and a lack of comfort can be endured if one is sustained by pride," she writes...
...Look...
...She participates in nature with moods of melancholy and elation in the way that a scientist participates in the germination of a culture...
...Those abrupt half-remembered moments, when a certain smell or color or gesture was miraculous in its purity and we became a part of its being, these are the moments that Colette reproduces...
...She prescribed nothing for other women in the way of liberation, but did what she wanted (divorced, made a tour with a music hall, consorted with homosexuals, wore sandals, married a man 20 years her junior, and of course wrote...
...Her femininity makes her less inquisitive about the motives of others than she is delighted by their habits: "No narration, for heaven's sake...
...When she discusses her culinary tastes, the mouth waters...
...She remains aloof from politics during the Wars and speaks for the women of those terrible times as an ordinary wife and mother would do, never as a public figure...
...She allows no outward signs of grief from herself or her reader, even at the end of her life when she writes, "There is a tired spirit deep inside of me that still continues its gourmet's quest for a better word, and then for a better one still...
...Just separate brush strokes and splashes, and there is no need for a conclusion...
...And she astounds...
...There is nothing sociological about her view of her own experience, no final statement to define her place in society as a woman...
...Reviewed by FANNY HOWE Freelance critic Colette once wondered, "What have I to teach, unless it be selfdoubt, to those who since early youth have become secretly selfinfatuated by self-love rather than by self-torture...
...Her portraits of them are tempered by distance, so that the original emotions have a role of their own: They are the judges in her mental courtroom, selecting what is significant from what is ultimately irrelevant...
...What one loves about her is her lack of torment...
...If she reacted with fear to men after her marriage to Willy, she still comes out feminine instead of feminist...
...The precision of the detail is the tragedy of the person described...
...We leave her with her tapestry work and her pen, wondering with Mauriac, "Where has she not burrowed her way in, this great honeybee...
...when she describes ice cracking or a curtain rustling, the inner ear pricks up...
...What she learned from Sido, as a child, she never forgets...
...Always detached, she is at the same time a willing victim of her environment...
...She stands out as unique in her own time as well as in ours...
...From the beginning Nature is her mirror and only her fastidious attention to flowers and animals corresponds to her self-love...
...She merges her public and private life, becomes a figure, by accident and instinct...
...She is always mature, fixed as an observer, and in this book we are first aware of her deep love for her mother Sido and her father the Captain...
...Being a lover of men and women, a loving daughter and mother, her writing contains sympathy rather than the sentimentality that is coldness concealed...
...She refused to give instruction or withold her feelings, being both proud of herself and humble before others...
...In this collection of her autobiographical writings, the translations are done by various people who keep Colette's own clear voice amazingly consistent...
...She makes us believe that good survives evil in the mind...
...Her writing is only her way of looking deep into the mirror and possessing again the first pure contacts with life: "The mere mention of them makes me hope that their savor may fill my mouth when my time comes, and that I may carry hence with me that imagined draught...
...Astound me, try your hardest...
...her tone is as complex with emotion as it is refined in detail...
...If she makes little mention of the men she loved, it seems to stem from that same remark, "A novel about love cannot be written while making love...
...But not the need to be astounded...
...It is no use comparing Colette with the feminine writers who have succeeded her...
...Whatever feminists might do in anger and revenge, she performed from curiosity and personal choice...
...She breaks the mirror and feels herself in all the stages of life, without transforming her position of mature observer once...
...In her collected autobiographical writings, her quality of self-love accompanied by continual honesty stands out...
...Many times she probes, in spite of her mother's warning, until she develops the sharp eye of a crow, the nose of a fox, and the delicate tread of a cat...
...The feminine mystique eludes her, because she has consented to the Freudian life remedy, "Love and work...
...Each sketch is poetry in prose...
...There is never a regression into self-pity or even regret, but only the toughest of actions: the grown self grappling with the pure self, lost forever...
...when she describes a garden, the olfactory nerves quiver...
...One view of Proust had him "with his top hat pushed back, a great lock of hair covering his brow, ceremonious and disheveled, he looked like a young and drunken wedding guest...
...Don't touch...
...Her descriptions of nature are precise and devotional...
...Only once does she preach what she is practicing: "Look long and hard at what pleases you, even longer and harder at what causes you pain...
...She refuses to suffer for any man without turning this decision into a weapon of revenge...
...In the richness of her descriptions, the reader finds himself...
...It is a passionate nostalgia for her childhood that drives her to search for the perfect word...
...And an image of Sido says that "on an autumn morning she was the only one to see herself reflected in the first disk of ephemeral ice in the well bucket, before her nail cracked it...
...A novel about love cannot be written while making love...
...Instead she is always autonomous and receptive, a friend and a lover...
Vol. 49 • July 1966 • No. 14
