In The Shackle, Renée is four years older, now retired from the stage, even more unhappily experienced, and even more openly at loose ends. What is there to do but fall into an affair with Jean, a man she could describe much as she did Max, except that now the association is nakedly sexual, and thus unavoidably instructive: “Our honest bodies have clung together with a mutual thrill of delight they will remember the next time they touch, while our souls will withdraw again behind the barrier of the same dishonest but expedient silence … We had learnt already that embracing gives us the illusion of being united and silence makes us believe we are at peace.” But when the fog of sexual attraction lifts, and they lie there, face-to-face, the same strangers they were before they took off their clothes, for the first time she becomes thoughtful: “I have insulted this lover … by giving him my body and supposing that this was enough. He has returned the insult … for nothing is exchanged in the sexual act … our love which had begun in silence and the sexual act was ending in the sexual act and silence.”
In this passage Colette lays out the anxiety of infatuation inflicted on all who suspect that (marvelously, terrifyingly) they are only a catalyst for another’s desire. This anxiety is the thing Colette knows through and through—the shrewdness at the heart of all her fame—and clearly the source of her narrator’s obsessive preoccupation with aging.
In the earliest pages of The Vagabond Renée stares pitilessly into the mirror. She is thirty-three years old, and the dreaded decline is already eating at her. At the end of the novel when Max finally proposes marriage, promising lifelong security, she breaks off the affair with a letter of explanation very nearly unequaled in world fiction:
I am no longer a young woman … Imagine me [in a few years’ time], still beautiful but desperate, frantic in my armor of corset and frock, under my make-up and powder … beautiful as a full-blown rose which one must not touch. A glance of yours, resting on a young woman, will be enough to lengthen the sad crease that smiling has engraved on my cheek, but a happy night in your arms will cost my fading beauty dearer still … What this letter lacks is … all the thoughts I am hiding from you, the thoughts that have been poisoning me for so long … Ah! How young you are. Your hell is limited to not possessing what you desire, a thing which some people have to put up with all their lives. But to possess what one loves and every minute to feel one’s sole treasure disintegrating, melting, and slipping away like gold dust between one’s fingers! And not to have the dreadful courage to open one’s hand and let the whole treasure go, but to clench one’s fingers ever tighter, and to cry and beg to keep … what? a precious little trace of gold in the hollow of one’s palm.
Who but Colette could have etched this portrait—acid on zinc—of a woman staring into the hell reserved for women alone. And who but Colette could have failed so entirely to unpack it. Why, I found myself saying to her, have you not made larger sense of things? Yes, I have from you the incomparable feel of an intelligent woman in the grip of romantic obsession, and that is strong stuff. But today sexual passion alone is only a situation, not a metaphor; as a story that begins and ends with itself, it no longer signifies. Let me put it this way: What young woman today could read Colette as I read her when I was young? The question answers itself.
Once and once only did Colette come close to using erotic love as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and then, oddly enough, it was through the remarkable figure of the androgynous Chéri, who, upon my re-reading of the Chéri books, came to seem emblematic of that which I now suspected formed the subtext that lay, untransformed, beneath the surface of what Colette had ever been writing about.
The story is simplicity itself. The place is Paris, the time the turn of the twentieth century. Léa, rich and beautiful, a retired courtesan of forty-nine, is living with Chéri, a boy-man of twenty-five. Léa’s wealth derives entirely from the men whose mistress she has been over the many years of her phenomenally successful career. The only world she knows is that of other women like herself, confined to the society of one another because no other society is open to them. Chéri is the beautiful, petulant, emotionally arrested son of one of these aging courtesans: as vain, sensual, and materialistic as his mother. Léa has known him all his life. When he was nineteen and she forty-three, sexual attraction had flared between them, and Léa had taken Chéri to live with her. All these years they have suited each other down to the ground. For each, the world beyond immediate desire does not exist.
As the story opens, however, Chéri—who has now lived with Léa for six years—is about to agree to an arranged marriage between himself and the daughter of one of his mother’s very rich friends (another retired courtesan), which means that he and Léa are facing the breakup of their arrangement. He pleads with her to understand: much as he adores being with her, he cannot remain her sex toy all his life. Of course, she replies, of course. Go, you must go.
Chéri does marry, whereupon both he and Léa fall into a bout of suffering neither could have imagined themselves capable of; in the event, each had fallen in love for the first and only time in their vacuous lives. After a year of separation, Chéri appears in Léa’s bedroom at midnight, declaring himself unable to live without her. They fall into each other’s arms, make passionate love … and then comes the dawn. While Léa is happily planning to take up their old life together, Chéri suddenly sees that he is in bed with an old woman. Then she sees what he sees. Twenty extraordinary pages follow—the pacing is literary perfection—that trace the time over the space of a morning wherein both characters realize they must part for good.
Five years pass during which the Great War has taken place, and the world that sheltered their cynical innocence has turned to ash. Now, unexpectedly, Léa retreats into the background, and it is Chéri who takes center stage. He has returned from the trenches emptied out: a walking dead man. Nothing and no one can rouse a grain of feeling in him or gain a moment of sustained attention. His old appetite for cars, clothes, and women now holds no appeal for him. He lives with his wife, but instead of looking at her he looks through her. He no longer drinks wine, water alone will do. Every day he dresses, eats breakfast, and leaves the house as though with a destination, only to drift through the streets of the city. Eventually, he becomes an opium addict and, in short order, a suicide.
Behind the vacancy in Chéri’s eyes lies a depth of emotional disconnect that, as Colette depicts it, suddenly seems shockingly old; not just old, ancient. It’s as though the war has made manifest what had been there from birth on, not only in Chéri but in humanity itself. Thirty years down the road, after another world war, Chéri will morph into Camus’s stranger. For now, in 1922, he is marking existential time.
When The Vagabond was published in 1910, André Gide sent Colette a letter of extravagant admiration, declaring it a perfect book. For the next forty years her work would be received in the same spirit by every leading literary light throughout Europe and America. She was beloved not only for her mastery of the French language but also because her books persuaded her readers that she was naming something fundamental and immutable in the human makeup that had not before been named—and to a certain extent she was. But now, well into the twenty-first century, readers like me came to feel that she had not properly identified the malaise central to her work. Upon re-reading the Chéri books I now realized that the anomie in Chéri himself is at the heart of Colette’s concerns. Anomie is behind the intensity of Love with a capital L. Anomie is why her characters have all buried themselves in eroticism. It is out of anomie that the relation to sensual feeling becomes so all-enveloping it leads Colette to label the shudder of orgasm “the little death.”
Anomie and desire: a specialty in French literature that can be traced back at least as far as the 1792 publication of Les Liasons Dangereuses and carried forward at least as far as the mid-twentieth-century work of Marguerite Duras. For, after all, what is the work of Marguerite Duras if not an ongoing study of desire linked intimatel
y to self-estrangement? With one important complication: as Duras is writing well into the Freudian century, it was impossible for her to not trace the origins of emotional disconnect to the family romance gone viciously wrong.
THREE
Very early in my life it was too late. It was already too late when I was eighteen. Between eighteen and twenty-five my face took off in a new direction. I grew old at eighteen … But instead of being dismayed I watched this process with … interest … The people who knew me at seventeen, when I went to France, were surprised when they saw me again two years later, at nineteen. And I’ve kept it ever since, the new face I had then. It has been my face … It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.
The narrator in Duras’s novel The Lover could easily have encountered Chéri in the Paris flat where he regularly took opium and at last committed suicide: they are two of a kind. I, however, could never have understood this before I myself became old enough to re-read first Colette and then, in turn, Duras, in the light of insight only years of living could have supplied.
When I was eight years old, my mother cut a piece out of a dress I had been longing to wear to a friend’s birthday party. She grabbed a pair of sewing scissors and sliced the part of the dress that would have covered my heart if, as she said, I had had one. “You’re killing me,” she always howled, eyes squeezed shut, fists clenched, when I disobeyed her or demanded an explanation she couldn’t supply or nagged for something she wasn’t going to give me. “Any minute now I’ll be dead on the floor,” she screamed that day, “you’re so heartless.” Needless to say, I did not go to the party. Instead I cried for a week and grieved over the incident for fifty years.
“How could you do that to a child?” I asked in later years, once when I was eighteen, again when I was thirty, yet again when I was forty-eight.
The odd thing was that each time I raised the incident my mother would say, “That never happened.” I’d look at her then, more scornfully each time, and let her know in no uncertain terms that I was going to go on reminding her of this crime against childhood until one of us was dead.
As the years passed and I regularly brought up the memory of the dress cutting, she just as regularly denied its veracity. So we went on, with me not believing her, and not believing her, and not believing her. Then one day, quite suddenly, I did. On a cold spring afternoon in my late fifties, on my way to see her, I stepped off the Twenty-Third Street crosstown bus in New York, and as my foot hit the pavement I realized that whatever it was that had happened that day more than half a century ago it wasn’t at all as I remembered it.
Migod, I thought, palm clapped to forehead, it’s as though I was born to manufacture my own grievance. But why? And hold on to it for dear life. Again, why? When my hand came away from my forehead, I said to myself, So old and still with so little information.
* * *
“I’VE WRITTEN A GOOD DEAL about the members of my family,” Duras tells us early in The Lover, “but then they were still alive, my mother and my brothers. And I skirted around them, skirted around all these things without really tackling them … What I’m doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I’m talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried.”
For years this was Duras’s mesmerizing subject, inscribed repeatedly in those small, tight abstractions she called novels, and written in an associative prose that knifed steadily down through the outer layers of being to the part of oneself forever intent on animal retreat into the primal, where the desire to be at once overtaken by and freed of formative memory is all-enveloping; in fact, etherizing.
The time in The Lover is the early 1930s, the place Indochina. A fifteen-year-old French girl stands alone on the deck of a ferry crossing the Mekong River from Sadec, a working-class suburb, into downtown Saigon. She is dressed provocatively in a tattered silk dress held together with a boy’s leather belt, gold lamé high-heeled shoes, and a man’s fedora, brownish pink with a broad black band running round the base of the brim. On the deck behind her stands a limousine with a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese man, thin and elegant, sitting in the back, watching the girl. He gets out of the car, comes over to her, begins a conversation, trembles as he lights a cigarette, and offers to drive her wherever she is going. She agrees at once and climbs into the car. The man will fall into an amazing passion for the girl, for her thin, white, child-woman’s body. The girl’s absorption in her own responsiveness will become as rapt as his passion—more so. An affair begins that ends when she is sent to France at seventeen, in possession of the face she will bear for the rest of her life.
What the girl learns during this affair is not only that she is a catalyst for desire but that she herself is aroused by her own powers of arousal. It’s a talent: one around which to organize a life. She listens hard when her Chinese lover tells her she will never be faithful to any man. She can feel the rightness of what he says, knows already that it’s only the power of desire, not any particular person, that will ever hold her: desire that overwhelms and then ravishes; desire that blossoms through a woman’s body, is realized through a man’s penetration, and burns them both into oblivion.
Beneath the heat that the girl both generates and shares in, a cold, marvelous detachment is crystallizing. Desire, she can see, is the hunger through which she will come to understand the instrumental nature of human relations. That understanding, she also sees, will become her ticket out. The year and a half with the Chinese lover is the crucible in which this knowledge is fired.
Duras worked this material for thirty years in one fictional abstraction after another. A life in service to desire only confirmed what she had learned in the shuttered room in the Chinese quarter in Saigon in 1932: that she was alone, alone was what she was, and never more so than in pursuit of the pleasure unto death. The irony—disconnect drives one to pleasure; pleasure acts on one like a drug; to be drugged is to feel the disconnect even more acutely—struck her as existentially profound. Consequently, her skill at entering into the complicated addictiveness of erotic love, and drawing the reader inside with her, proved immense. The narrating voice in The Lover actually replicates the narcotic lull of desire itself—a thing even Colette could not manage—at the same time that somewhere inside that voice can also be heard the sorrowing sound of one who is using desire to avoid rather than to illuminate. But now, thirty years after the book’s publication, it was to this sound—the sound of avoidance—that I found myself resonating.
Repeatedly, in the pages of The Lover, the reader is beckoned toward and then deflected from that primitive brutishness Duras called her family: the mother a widowed schoolteacher drowning in depression, the younger brother a sweet slow-witted boy, the older a murderous bully. Regularly, this unfortunate group of misfits, locked together only by ties of blood, retreats into the bitter inexpressiveness of those who experience themselves as permanently marginal:
Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It’s a family of stone, petrified so deeply it’s impenetrable. Every day we try to kill one another, to kill. Not only do we not talk to one another, we don’t even look at one another. Looking is always demeaning. We’re united in a fundamental shame at having to live. It’s here we are at the heart of our common fate, the fact that all three of us are our mother’s children.
The emotionally absent mother with whom the narrator is more than half in love, the gangster-ish older brother she fears and loathes, the softly helpless younger one by whom she is erotically moved—to this constellation the reader’s attention is repeatedly drawn, and from it just as repeatedly torn away. We feel the narrator’s acute loneliness in its midst, but this is a condition she cannot address directly. Instead she indicates, through an interlude here and there, the mad joy that overwhelm
s her when, on occasion, the mother emerges from her soul-destroying depression, and the girl is penetrated through by a vision of the what-might-have-been:
I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was [only] sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune—those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed. I had that good fortune—those nights, that mother.
Unfinished Business Page 4