COLETTE'S LIST

Brief Reviews Writ Loud

by Colette Bancroft

A Scandal In Paris

A YOUNG GIRL FROM THE HINTERLANDS moves to the big city and transforms herself into a media goddess. Her writing, her performances, her persona so capture the public imagination that she becomes known by a single name. Her erotic fashion sense and her scandalously unfettered private life, a carnival of affairs with both men and women, many of them nearly as famous as she, are as breathlessly covered in the press as her experimental artistic endeavors, and each turns up the heat of the other.

Madonna in New York in the 1980s?

Mais non.

Try Colette in Paris at the last turn of the century.

Creating Colette is the fascinating first volume of a new biography of the icon of French literature by two Frenchwomen. Whether you already know Colette's prodigious and wide-ranging body of work or have heard of her only as the author of some naughty novels about the sex lives of schoolgirls, this book offers a revealing look at her childhood and at the first marriage that in so many ways shaped her life and writing. It also creates a rich and wild portrait of the literary and artistic society of Paris in the decades just before and after 1900, a world in which Colette played a starring role.

By the time she died in 1954 at age 81, Colette was practically a national monument -- she was the first French woman writer ever given a state funeral. She was revered as a novelist, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, actor, dancer and film producer; her collected works were published after her death in 16 volumes.

In Creating Colette, Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, who also have co-written biographies of Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir, focus on the first 40 years of Colette's life and on the two people who had the most profound influence on her in those years: her mother and her first husband.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was born in 1873 in Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye, a tiny town in "the poor Burgundy." She was the youngest daughter of Adele Sidonie Landoy Robineau-Duclos Colette and her second husband, Captain Jules Colette, a one-legged war hero.

Sido, as Colette's mother was known, was hardly a typical provincial housewife. Her grandfather was a wealthy half-black merchant from Martinique; her father was also a merchant, and her brothers were accomplished journalists. Sido was raised largely in the cosmopolitan city of Brussels and was educated and well-read, an atheist, a free-love proponent and a disciple of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier.

Sido's first marriage, to a wealthy but alcoholic and retarded landowner in Saint-Saveur, was strictly a financial transaction, not a love match. She inherited lands and considerable wealth when Jules Robineau-Duclos died eight years later, and Sido soon married the lover with whom she already had one son, Captain Colette (she had had a daughter with Robineau-Duclos). They had another son and then Sidonie Gabrielle, called Gabri.

In later years, Colette wrote often of her mother, calling her "the leading character of my whole life." The Sido of Colette's books is an expansive, sensual, affectionate earth mother; according to this biography, the real Sido was rather more complex. She raised her children by Fourierist principals, allowing them unusual freedom and speaking to them with, for the times, shocking frankness about sex, which created some uproars in a town of less than 2,000 in the French countryside in the 1800s. She was also demanding, opinionated and self-absorbed, and Gabri felt sometimes like "a queen of the world" and other times like a mouse caught by a beautiful but cruel cat.

Sido's insistence on education and her own wide-ranging interests led to her daughter's passionate interest in the arts. Sido's practical side led to Gabri's more or less arranged marriage at age 20 to family friend Henry Gauthier-Villars. Known as Willy, he was 33, the scion of a publishing family, a popular, influential music and drama critic, and a darling of avant-garde Paris artistic circles.

He christened his new wife Colette, and, although the marriage had been engineered by Sido, the pair were soon in love. When Colette arrived in Paris, she had a provincial accent and hair in braids that tickled her ankles. With dizzying speed, she found herself frequenting salons and cafés in the company of the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec, Debussy, Degas, Proust, Valéry, Jarry and Gide, not to mention the can-can girls from the Moulin Rouge. She lived largely on chocolates and Champagne and within a year was writing music reviews for some of the Paris papers.

Because Willy was a star, Colette became one too, at first by association and because she and Willy created a sensational pubic image by exaggerating their age difference -- she wore girlish frocks with big muslin collars; he had gone bald early and dressed to look older than he was. Beyond her "fin-de-siécle Lolita" image, though, were Colette's quick intelligence, independent nature and strong opinions, which soon began to earn her a reputation of her own.

Francis and Gontier present a very different picture of Colette and Willy's marriage than that found in some previous biographies, which depicted him as an exploitative, even abusive man who forced his much younger, naive wife to write dirty books and then signed his own name to them.

According to this biography, Willy did indeed encourage Colette to write about her days in a girls' school in Saint-Saveur, as he encouraged her writing in general. And it's undisputed that Colette's first novel, Claudine in School, and its sequels were published under Willy's name. But Francis and Gontier point out not only that he did so because Colette did not want her name on the book, which would have embarrassed her family, but that her authorship was an open secret in Paris, one that gained her a whole new kind of attention.

Claudine and its sequels were immensely successful, as was a stage version starring the popular actress Polaire. Soon Parisians were buying Claudine schoolgirl fashions, Claudine perfume, Claudine postcards, even Claudine prostitutes in the brothels -- Colette's sexy, satiric stories were all the rage. Colette and Polaire became lovers; Colette cut her hair short, like Polaire's, and they were photographed around chic Paris in matching Claudine outfits, escorted by Willy.

Despite Willy's name on the books, Colette's career was launched. The evidence in Creating Colette suggests that although Willy and Colette were sometimes competitors, especially after their divorce in 1910, he was the most significant mentor and supporter of her writing, as well as of her career as an actress and dancer.

Theirs was certainly not a conventional marriage -- both had myriad affairs, in some cases with the same woman; within a year of their marriage, he had given her a case of syphilis that nearly killed her; they spent money lavishly, far more than they had; they erased the lines between their public and private lives in both fiction and journalism. But in many other ways it was the source of enormous creativity for them both, and to posit Colette as a passive victim is at odds with the facts of her life.

This is a well-researched and compelling biography, clearly translated by the authors. The first third of the book, on Colette's background and childhood, is sometimes a bit cluttered by the French preoccupation with making the finest of distinctions about the economic status and social class of every member of Colette's family, their neighbors, their associates and their third cousins, but that rigidity was part of the culture Colette escaped in Paris.

The Parisian milieu of the latter part of the book is vividly rendered. Its only difficulty for American readers might be the authors' assumption that readers will be familiar with all of the French artistic and literary figures in Colette's world, some of whom are not well known in this country nearly a century later. But that's a minor quibble; all in all, this portion of the book simply made me wish I were there.

As a namesake of Colette's, I've always found her a fascinating figure. With its elegant mix of sober research and racy dish, Creating Colette captures the story of the first half of her life with style.

Creating Colette: Volume 1, From Ingenue to Libertine, by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier. Steerforth Press, 1998.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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