To say that Colette's life was flamboyant is the most massive of understatements. Three marriages; numerous affairs with men and women; a career that included acting, lecturing, and running a beauty business -- as well as writing, of course. So much writing... Not only novels, stories, plays, and film-scripts, but also newspaper articles, reviews, and advertising copy.

Judith Thurman, therefore, whose 1999 biography, entitled Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, I have just finished listening to, had her work cut out for her.

Incidentally, I don't recommend biographies as audiobooks... Inevitably, they involve a huge cast of characters, and you really do feel the need to stop occasionally to do some checking -- who was that again? -- which, of course, you can't very easily undertake with a recording. Also, the narrator of my version murdered French names and words in a truly distressing fashion... Nevertheless, Thurman writes so well -- the whole thing was like listening to an extremely well-researched novel -- that it was still a very good experience.


My photos are from Brittany, 1990-91. Over a period of 14 years Colette spent time at Roz Ven, a house near the Plage de la Touesse, Saint-Coulomb, Brittany. She was in St Malo when France mobilized for the First World War

Throughout most of the extraordinary twists and turns of the story, you find yourself cheering Colette on as she blazes trails, punches through the conventions of her day, and scandalizes conservatives right and left.

And where you can't exactly cheer her on, you are aware that she was operating in a different era, with different constraints, and with her own burdens to carry.

As Terry Castle points out, this is "a deeply sympathetic and engaged portrait of its subject... [in which] Colette's contradictions are acknowledged, but always with a sense of the exorbitant creative gift they made possible".

Examples:

Colette is regularly portrayed as a less than attentive parent to her one daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, also known as Bel-Gazou. Instructed by Thurman, though, we definitely see how Colette's ambivalent relationship with her own mother, Sido, factored into her treatment of her daughter. Sido, for all her fine qualities, Thurman suggests, could also be neglectful, jealous, domineering, and sometimes brutal. Colette felt the desire to escape from her. And such confusion, if unprocessed, inevitably gets handed on. As Thurman sees it: "For Sido's daughter and Willy's child-wife, there was no middle ground between her terror of abandonment and her fear of being consumed... The lack of a sympathetic imagination tends to reproduce itself in the next generation, and Colette was a tyrant to her own child." Nothing consumes you, after all, as much as your offspring... So, no excuses are offered, but we at least understand a little better. (And I have to wonder, too, whether we would even be discussing this if Colette had been a man...)



Also understandable, to some degree, is her somewhat stilted reportage on the First World War. She wrote columns for Le Matin, and it's true that there is much that makes us uncomfortable: both specifics, such as her celebration of the aesthetics of air battles; and generalities, such as her ultra-resolute patriotism and positivity, and the absence of any discussion of the hellish carnage that this conflict brought with it. Yet, as Marc Fournier points out, Colette was not only conscious of the need to play a morale-sustaining role, but she also remained essentially true to her position of observer. She helped out in a hospital, but she never experienced the fighting. She was in Verdun, but she wasn't at the front. So she confines herself to what she directly sees and knows: the changing role of women, the difficulties faced by children, and civilian war-time life.



More complex is the question of the degree to which she can be described as collaborating with the Nazi occupation during the Second World War. The counsel for the prosecution might cite her contributions to publications that voiced anti-Semitic ideas and/or were connected with German propaganda; her association with a publishing house helmed by a protege of the Germans; a novel (Julie de Carneilhan) that includes a nasty anti-Semitic portrait; and her failure to publish anything in the resistance press. It is true that her work primarily aimed to distract and entertain; it was not overtly political. Yet Elizabeth Brunazzi aptly questions, "Is it entirely persuasive to refer to the content of Colette's wartime publishing as 'non-political,' when a 'non-political' article attributed to a writer of established reputation, prominently placed in the highly political, repressive environment of the collaborationist papers, was congruent with and supportive of Nazi propaganda tactics in occupied countries?" The counsel for the defence might protest that there are no hard lines on the spectrum between accommodation and collaboration; that Colette was absolutely not alone in the artistic approach she chose; and -- surely most tellingly -- that her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, was a Jew (he was interned for seven weeks in the winter of 1941-42, and although Colette managed to use her connections to have him released, they spent the rest of the war anxious that he would be taken again). I find it hard to judge these cases. I often wonder what I would have done myself.

Most difficult for me to stomach, out of the whole amazing saga of Colette's life, was her affair, when she was 47, with her 16-year-old stepson... She was still married to his father at the time. We certainly wouldn't condone this if the genders were reversed, and it seems equally icky this way round too.



Alongside all these controversies, what interested me throughout was the slippage between what Colette presents of her life (in memoirs and novels) and what Thurman and other biographers manage to uncover. 

The gap is apparent not only in the relationship with her mother but also in her relationship with Willy, her first husband. 

Brooke Allen, drawing on Thurman and on a two-volume biography by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, puts it like this:

"The story of Colette's early life is famous: the pastoral childhood; the innocent young girl taken from the country to Paris by her much older husband, a debauched satyr; the husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (known as Willy) locking her into a room and forcing her to write stories that he published under his own name; his infidelities; his final desertion, leaving the rejected girl to support herself as a music hall actress.

"This is the tale that Colette invented and polished in the autobiographical works she wrote in middle age... These narratives contain a series of shady half-truths, drastically edited events, and downright lies..."

So, while the film we watched is faithful to Colette's own depiction of her early years as an author, it's not necessarily faithful to what actually happened. What a fascinating extra dimension could have been added by the incorporation of this alternative narrative...

Allen goes on to explain that Colette's biographers "believe that it was Gabri [Colette] and her family who forced the match upon a passive Willy... As Thurman says, the age difference 'was essential to their scenario as a couple, an exchange to which she brought the vitality and he the prestige.'... Two lifelong exhibitionists, at this stage they very consciously acted out the roles of Beauty and the Beast...

"When the manuscript of Claudine at School was finished (and contrary to what Colette would later have the world believe, it was improved and refined by her husband), Willy shopped it around to several publishers, none of whom wanted anything to do with it. It then went, indeed, into a cupboard, but emerged... because his flair for timing told him that the public was ready for the raunchy, definitely modern Claudine... Claudine at School was published... under Willy's name, not so much because he sought to steal her glory but because they both thought it best: Achille Colette had just married into the aristocracy, and something as risque as Claudine would not have gone down well with his in-laws. There was not much initial interest in the novel, but it took off after Willy urged some well-placed friends to write about it."



As Thurman depicts it, the whole relationship with Willy was extraordinarily complex. They fought, and neither could cope with being faithful, but they seemed to still love each other, and maintain a pronounced symbiosis.

I'm drawing on Allen again here (as I can't remember the dates from the audiobook), but it seems that in 1905, the couple agreed on a legal division of property, which would normally be a preliminary to divorce. But they continued to live together for another year, maintain relations for another two years after that, and collaborate for longer still. It seems this was more a "divorce of convenience", allowing money to be channelled to the debt-ridden Willy. Even when they finally were in the midst of a very public and acrimonious divorce, they holidayed (with their new partners du jour) next door to each other.

According to Allen, it is when Willy unilaterally sold the copyrights to the Claudines in 1907 that Colette really revolts -- "though, contrary to what she led the world to believe, she quickly negotiated an agreement with the publishers and continued to receive royalties for the books; she also succeeded in having her name put on them". From this point on, Colette launches attacks on his reputation, starting with The Vagabond in 1910, and culminating, a few years after his death in 1931, with My Apprenticeships. Willy retaliated with his own works, including one entitled Sidonie, or The Perverted Peasant...

Seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up.



If Willy is demonized in Colette's work, and her mother is mythologized, then Saint-Sauveur, her home village, is alternately pilloried and rehabilitated. This interesting account documents the author's mercurial feelings towards her erstwhile home. Claudine at School is waspish about "a population of bandits", and creates a cast of characters easily identifiable to the village people themselves, and far from flattering to them. Why so acidic? Well, there was the influence of Willy, who wanted something saleable; there was a kind of resentment against the villagers, who had never wholly accepted her parents; and there was a hidden hostility to the schoolteacher, Olympe Terrain, who was the protegee (mistress?) of the man who had thwarted the political ambitions of Colette's father.

In Claudine's House (1922), on the other hand, "Colette brings back to life the village of her childhood, this time without contempt or malice. The inhabitants of Saint-Sauveur enliven the village around the family: exchanges from garden to garden, visits to neighborhoods, conversation at the end of mass, weddings of servants... We are far from the population of bandits that Claudine spoke of."

Nonetheless, when June 1925 saw a proposal to instal a plaque on the house where Colette was born, there were objections from the villagers, including Olympe Terrain. Colette visited Saint-Sauveur, but didn't get out of her car for long, "fearing insults from the inhabitants". In 1928, at the start of La naissance du jour (Break of Day), she hits back, designating Saint-Sauveur "a shameful, miserly, and narrow little country".

I don't think Colette is the only one who has had contradictory and evolving responses to her place of origin. Most of us don't go public with our flipflopping, though...

I've not read enough to know what her final opinion on Saint-Sauveur was. But in the late 1920s, around the time of the publication of Sido, Colette starts to recognize the irresponsibility of her hatchet jobs on the people of her past, and attempts to rebuild relations with Olympe Terrain, who responds quite graciously. And by 1936, in My Apprenticeships, she is able to say: "I blame myself that, by allusions, features that are caricatured but recognizable, and plausible fables, these Claudines reveal a disregard for doing harm."



Allen comes away from the biographies of Colette with the feeling that "it is hard to like her much". But, partly because of this heart-on-her-sleeve approach, I found myself liking her enormously. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed her company exactly, or found her to be a comfortable companion, but her tenacity, inventiveness, capacity for observation, and sheer talent I find wholly engaging. Even her duplicity is carried off with panache.

And her journey from scandal to the heights of respectability is quite extraordinary. She was the first female president of the Goncourt Academy. In 1953, she became the second woman to be made a grand officer of the Legion d'honneur. When she died in 1954, aged 81, she was the first French woman to be given a state funeral.

Thousands came to pay their respects.