World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  In any case, there are no silly schoolgirls anymore, and if the public nowadays wants to know what young girls think, they are served a stronger brew than Daisy Miller or What Maisie Knew. Wedding nights are still disappointments, but scarcely surprises; the war between the sexes has never been noisier, meaner, or emptier of sense, adultery more snoozily middle-class, or homosexuality more sordid—no, and trivial commonplace lives, for Colette a specialty, have never been more blandly Cream-o’-Wheat, more catsup leaked on steak, reaching stale middling heights; nor has the production of vapid conversation or cretinous creature comforts, shimmering baubles and other visual distractions—football, films—fallen off, on the contrary, or the use of the carnal drug; and loneliness is as large as it ever was: paper napkins snuffed in plastic glasses testify to it, the floor of every closet cries out “love me!,” wadded towels too, windows on which the images of waiting faces have been fixed, long halls like highways, and on kitchen counters, where waxy cartons speak of it to knives smeared with crumbs and purple jelly; so that the fascination we now find in these novels about Claudine, and it is certainly there, is due solely to the ever-fresh charm—the instinctive grace—the greatness of Colette, which is certainly immense.

  Colette was not the sort of natural genius whose eventual vocation appears spelled out on baby’s Beethovian brow. Her intelligence, her curiosity, would not allow her to remain safely at home where she really wanted to be, but let her be taken in by Willy’s worldliness and sophistication, as so many were—perhaps by his masterful gaze, his sexy voice—and carried out of her little Burgundian town, where indeed hard times were another incentive, to the great city, no doubt the way captives were once brought to Rome for amusing display. She must almost immediately have felt as Rilke’s hero, Malte, did: surprise that people came there to live when the place seemed best fitted to sustain physical distress, loneliness, and fear, and supplied only the facilities for dying. In any event, it was this paunchy old publicist, who picked brains better than crows clean carrion, who introduced Colette to the smoky world of men, and he did it with a thoroughness to inspire praise and discourage imitation.

  The recognitions began immediately, if the wedding night is immediate enough, but only gradually did the full measure of her mistake stretch the dressmaker’s tape to its tip. By and by (fine words for what it emotionally meant), her toes growing cold in the too-big bed, she was twisted by jealousy like a wet towel until she wept, and was compelled to admit that her husband did a good bit more than neglect her like a friendless pet. She was in fact left alone all day in a small cold flat with a poisonous stove where she dined on nuts and fruit like a monkey and nibbled candy like someone kept. Then fell evening when she was led through salons like a fox terrier on a chain, as Cocteau said, and thence to musicales which Willy might review but at which, in any case, he must be seen, and finally to cafés full of smirk and innuendo and late hours—what was there to say? to these polished and brittle homosexuals? to these softly jowled fat Don Juans? by a girl from the country? with a thick Burgundian burr? especially since they were none of them red and golden pheasants or even geese come down on a smooth deep lake.

  Willy’s jaded sexual interests were limited to her innocence, which stimulated him the way new snow invites small boys to trample it, and he had at once begun to cheat, as Colette discovered one day when, by unforgivably demeaning herself, she followed and discovered him with a foul-tongued, back-bumped dwarf, little Lotte Kinceler, whom Colette could only pity, and who later blew her mouth apart like glass, committing suicide with a symbolic substitute for what had murdered her already. Willy eventually brought his other cocottes to Colette’s apartment where they would finger her things and speak smut. He also carted his collection of pornography with them when they traveled to the country, either to visit and vacation or to escape creditors. And he clung to the skirts of bankruptcy like a bewildered boy.

  This wit and bon vivant and raconteur, moreover, this powerful journalist and man-about-town, signed his name to books he hadn’t written, claimed ideas he hadn’t had, professed tastes he’d never formed. Willy consumed talent like a pimp, and Colette slowly realized that she’d become his latest literary whore in addition to her other duties; that the true sensitivity, intelligence, and taste, furthermore, were on her side; that grace was hers, and honest animal sensuality, the clear uncluttered eye, even good character, industry, and decent ambition, were hers rather than his; that nevertheless she had no vocation, no real role, no independence, a rudimentary education, no polish, no funds; and so she must do her stint and wait at the window and furnish his life, when he chose to share it, with slippers and prattle and pie; that she must be obedient and willing and patient and pretty, cheerful and faithful on top of it, like dung decorated with whipped cream and a cherry, though now she was braidless and ill and bruised, unfresh and scrambled as crawled-over snow; still she was supposed to be grateful, and eager to unbutton his vest and remove his tie, to clasp his fat back in amorous arms, and closely regard, even admire, that thick neck swollen with blood and exertion which rose from his trunk on those occasions like a peeled raw root, while her own body went through the sorrowful motions of love to a conclusion which had from the first time to the last to be a burning and shameful, embittering lie.

  Colette could not write to her mother of her misery—not just yet—and later the Claudines, those ostensible fictions, gave her a chance at the truth, while her warm and optimistic letters home to Sido, by virtue of what they left out, were in effect made up. Memoirs mixed with fiction, fictions compounded of fact: these were to remain the poles of her work, and the journalism she eventually produced—made of impressionistic, on-the-spot responses—was like a switch engine shunted between these principal stops. Colette was clearly not a novelist by nature as her beloved Balzac was. She wrote her early novels on demand; the key was turned in the lock. Her plays were also a response to pressing necessities, and she toured in them eventually, and bared her bosom too, and struck eloquent attitudes like one of those seductive figures who advertise perfumes: in order to live, to escape being cast forever in the role of a little girl or superfluous femme; although there can be scarcely any doubt that a large part of her yearned to be fed sweets—comforted, cosseted, ruled.

  Writing was furthermore a means of shading her mother’s eyes. It earned Willy’s parsimonious praise and shifted slowly the direction of dependency between them. As time and her success reduced these complex causes to simple considerations, Colette turned more and more openly to autobiography, to that sort of reposeful meditation which was to make her great: the evocation of nature and the celebration of the senses, the beautiful rewording and recovery of her life.

  But in Paris Colette found herself strangely imprisoned in an open ruin—a marriage destroyed because of jealousy, mistrust, infidelity, a series of explosive truths—with physique and spirit weakened by her sense of the futility of everything, aching loneliness, the worn-out view out her window, her empty odd hours and odder diet. So she fell ill—what else was there to do? sickened by fumes from a salamander stove, by the little cruelties of daily life, the slick wig of evil tongues and stupid wag of amorous pastimes, but especially by lies both large and immensely petty. She was burning—that was it—consumed by a nostalgia which became a happy characteristic of her consciousness, when she was well, the way her breasts continued to gladden her body. Yet among all those innumerable disappointments which close over a soul grown small and tender as a snail to be swallowed, there was the persistent reappearance of reality like a hard shell or bitter pit. Always that. And every dream dead of the truth. The future, too—dead of it.

  Sido had to be summoned at last. That resilient will which was to be the core of Claudine’s charm and the center of Colette’s strength during a difficult life had become as loose and limp in her body as the bedclothes on her bed, and slid away whenever she rose. Recovery was slow, but her illness won her a few more trips into the country, a little respite
from the gentleman in the black hat.

  Second

  PhotoThe second photo shows us Willy, pen in hand, forcefully facing the photographer. He is seated at another table, also berugged, another mantel behind him, other paintings, further glass glint, smears of image and reflection, amply figured in an ample darkness.2 He could well be wearing the same suit. There is a spread of papers signifying industry, a penholder, silver tray, a book or two, perhaps a magnifying glass. To his left Colette sits with her fingers holding down a passage on its page as if it could wiggle away. No doubt Willy wants this important section marked, held for him like a seat at a play. The hands are patient. They serve his needs. While Willy and the camera are tête-à-tête, Colette’s gaze, as if she’d carried it between the two pictures like a brimming bowl, slips weakly over the edge of the table and disappears into the void. Her expression is one of quiet but profound sadness. The far side of her face is as white as her blouse, though barely there, and a tie covered with bursts of light falls from a high tight collar like a crack of dark sky between clouds.

  To write about school in a copybook—to continue the little themes indefinitely into life—what could be more natural? but fate had to conspire almost constantly to bring it about. She and Willy stayed at her old school for a few days while on vacation one July (she writes about this “return” in Claudine en ménage), and back in Paris that fall Willy suggests that she write down and spice up the best of what she remembers of those carefree girlish times. This idea, coming from Willy, was not so surprising, since Willy was used to hiring out such work, and he doubtless expected her scribblings to come to nothing. It was a therapeutic occupation like needlepoint and tatting; perhaps it would provide some private titillation, little more, and direct her chatter from his ear to the no-longer-listening and indifferent page. Indeed, Willy found only dull trivia when he later examined the six exercise books Colette had filled. There was nothing he could use. Too bad, but no matter.

  Having nibbled on the pen, Colette did not suddenly become insatiable. When Willy tossed her work deep into his black desk, she was content, as regards that, to return to her candy and her cat; yet she continued to write long letters as she had always done, not understanding how they reflected her true and early love of language, her real vocation. Chance again put these notebooks back in Willy’s hands. Two years later he happens on them while cleaning out the rear of a drawer.3 He finds them interesting—useful—this time, though publishers are not easily convinced, and refuse more than once to issue Willy’s saucy little novel about a pack of odd, though ordinary, kids, a pair of overly fast friends, some childish high jinks, and one long worrisome exam; and they continue to refuse even after Willy has had its actual author bend a few relationships toward the piquant and perverse. Claudine à l’école was not published until 1900, some six years after its very circumstantial composition. Then twenty-seven, Colette had been married from her twentieth year to the Monsieur Willy who signed the volume and composed its preface, one which put much of the truth inside a joke: that the book had been written by a schoolgirl—Claudine herself.

  Sales began slowly, but with favorable reviews and word of mouth, the novel became a sensation. Willy redoubled his visits to the photographer, and set Colette to work on a second confection—a briefer, poorer book, but an even greater success. Soon hats and collars, ice creams, lotions, perfumes carried Claudine’s name. Then there was the play, and more Claudines, each shorter, more ambiguous, less resolutely cheerful. Meanwhile Colette kept herself trim in her little private gym, and began to choose her future—a future open to a woman of her present class and condition—the stage.4

  Nearly unnoticed amidst the schoolgirl gush of the Claudine books, the amorous titivations, the mounting references to immediate Parisian social life—all calculated to entice—was Colette’s angry exposure of the condition of young women in rural France. What was a Burgundian girl to do? In Claudine at School, for instance, appears this sudden paragraph of social commentary. The girls are readying themselves for a spelling test:

  There was a great hush of concentration. No wonder! Five-sixths of these little girls had their whole future at stake. And to think that all of those would become school-mistresses, that they would toil from seven in the morning till five in the afternoon and tremble before a Headmistress who would be unkind most of the time, to earn seventy-five francs a month! Out of those sixty girls, forty-five were the daughters of peasants or manual labourers; in order not to work in the fields or at the loom, they had preferred to make their skins yellow and their chests hollow and deform their right shoulders. They were bravely preparing to spend three years at a Training College, getting up at five a.m. and going to bed at eight-thirty p.m. and having two hours recreation out of the twenty-four and ruining their digestions, since few stomachs survived three years of the college refectory. But at least they would wear hats and would not make clothes for other people or look after animals or draw buckets from the well, and they would despise their parents.

  Claudine is not in school to come to this. Nor has she been reluctantly badgered there by a mother who wishes her daughter to escape, as one of the girls who fails explains to Claudine:

  Mother sent me to boarding-school, father he didn’t want it, he said I’d do best looking after the house like my sisters, and doing the washing and digging the garden. Mother, she didn’t want it—it was her as they listened to. They made me ill, trying to make me learn—and you see how I come over today.

  Although Colette will carry on a lifelong romance with little villages and country gardens, in her less reminiscent moods she will realize that despite her attachment to her mother, her beloved Sido, she could never have stayed put.

  Come over here little girl and let me show you something, wheedles the dirty old world, and sweet ignorant Claudine—well—all tiptoes, she does want to be wheedled; she does want to see. Weary of innocence, she does desire to know what the sexual fuss is all about. She is a tight string eager to sound yet fearful of the music; and since she wants to take risks while retaining her safety, she will pass from one school to another, one teacher to another, one parent to another, in every case learning the unforeseen and unexpected, insecure on one leg because, mistrustful of the ground, she cannot chance having both put firmly down together.

  So curiosity … not your window-shoppers’ sort, those strollers whose eyes in muggy weather light like nervous flies on crumbs and sweets yet leave without lessening their prize or fattening themselves; but the curiosity that bites the peach to the pit and allows the mouth to fill with juice like a basin; that licks hard and listens, that fingers and sniffs and above all looks, regards—watches, stares, peers—that observes, receives, as an infant explores its world, all drool and smear, as if the world were a fistful of thumbs … such curiosity consumes both Colette and Claudine, and unties them from their homes, and lets them for a time believe that certain dashing older gentlemen will open the earth for them, expose life as they expect to be exposed, and give them the only kind of experience that counts: carnal knowledge of all things.

  These Claudines, then … they want to know because they believe they already do know, the way one who loves fruit knows, when offered a mango from the moon, what to expect; and they expect the loyal tender teasing affection of the schoolgirl crush to continue: the close and confiding companionship, the pleasure of the undemanding caress, the cuddle which consummates only closeness; yet in addition they want motherly putting right, fatherly forgiveness and almost papal indulgence; they expect that the sights and sounds, the glorious affairs of the world which their husbands will now bring before them gleaming like bolts of silk, will belong to the same happy activities as catching toads, peeling back tree bark, or powdering the cheeks with dandelions and oranging the nose; that music will ravish the ear the way the trill of the blackbird does; that literature will hold the mind in sweet suspense the way fairy tales once did; that paintings will crowd the eye with the delights of a colorful
garden, and the city streets will be filled with the same cool dew-moist country morning air they fed on as children. But they shall not receive what they expect; the tongue will be about other business; one will hear in masterpieces only pride and bitter contention; buildings will have grandeur but no flowerpots or chickens; and these Claudines will exchange the flushed cheek for the swollen vein, and instead of companionship, they will get sex and absurd games composed of pinch, leer, and giggle—that’s what will happen to “let’s pretend.”

  The great male will disappear into the jungle like the back of an elusive ape, and Claudine shall see little of his strength again, his intelligence or industry, his heroics on the Bourse like Horatio at the bridge (didn’t Colette see Henri de Jouvenel, editor and diplomat and duelist and hero of the war, away to work each day, and didn’t he often bring his mistress home with him, as Willy had when he was husband number one?); the great affairs of the world will turn into tawdry liaisons, important meetings into assignations, deals into vulgar dealings, and the en famille hero will be weary and whining and weak, reminding her of all those dumb boys she knew as a child, selfish, full of fat and vanity like patrons waiting to be served and humored, admired and not observed.

  Is the occasional orgasm sufficient compensation? Is it the prize of pure surrender, what’s gained from all that giving up? There’ll be silk stockings and velvet sofas maybe, the customary caviar, tasting at first of frog water but later of money and the secretions of sex, then divine champagne, the supreme soda, and rubber-tired rides through the Bois de Boulogne; perhaps there’ll be rich ugly friends, ritzy at-homes, a few young men with whom one may flirt, a homosexual confidant with long fingers, soft skin, and a beautiful cravat, perfumes and powders of an unimaginable subtlety with which to dust and wet the body, many deep baths, bonbons filled with sweet liqueurs, a procession of mildly salacious and sentimental books by Paul de Kock and company—good heavens, what’s the problem?—new uses for the limbs, a tantalizing glimpse of the abyss, the latest sins, envy certainly, a little spite, jealousy like a vaginal itch, and perfect boredom.