Creating Colette: From Ingenue to Libertine 1873-1913

Rating:
Summary: Not perfect, but a delicious read.
Review: I read this literary biography in just a few days, testament to its engrossing information. The book paints a parade of colorful personalities in Belle Epoche France. Colette's story is the tale of "Gigi" before and after. Her development was influenced by her talented parents: Sido, a mother with strong opinions that included freedom for her children and scorn for ritual--Catholicism, Father Christmas, and the constraints of bourgeois marriage; and Jules Colette, the extroverted and literary father who trained 8-year-old Gabri (Colette) to make speeches for him on the political stump. Her "drop of negro blood," which the authors take chapters to describe, seems overemphasized; little information is given about her paternal forbears. This volume's most sympathetic figure is Colette's first husband Willy, portrayed as mentor for Colette's literary career. Written by two French authors (no translator listed), some parts of the book are are clogged with non sequiturs, but the majority of the volume offers a lovely and pungent narrative. Colette's first year of marriage to Willy is delicately and evocatively described. Absorbing and readable, the biography nevertheless creates in the reader a yearning for a biographer who might capture Colette's inner life. Linda Donelson, author of "Out of Isak Dinesen: Karen Blixen's untold story"

Rating:
Summary: But what was Colette really like?
Review: This is a two-volume biography, and this review covers both volumes.

I believe the authors' purpose in _Creating Colette_ is at least partly to show how Colette carefully crafted her own image, and (unlike some biographers) to describe the "real" Colette. Colette was brought up in the country, but by a very unconventional and hardly provincial mother, who had moved in intellectual circles prior to her first marriage. Colette married the celebrated journalist "Willy" and joined Paris's bohemian inner circle. Its colorful members indulged in flashy costumes; unconventional behavior; the creation of avant-garde literature, music, and art; wild parties; drink; drugs; copious sex with members of both genders; and general "decadence." Colette and Willy were deeply in love for many years, and he nurtured her as a writer--only later did they quarrel, divorce, and begin to damage each others' public images. When Colette married her second husband, the politician Henry de Jouvenal, she began to clean up her image, suppressing information about herself and asking her friends to comply. In old age, she finalized her image to that of the warm, earthy, frank Colette described by other biographers from Colette's own writings.

However, I did not finish this biography with any strong sense of Colette as a personality, but rather with an accumulation of many fragmentary and at times contradictory details. This is partly because of the sheer quantity of facts given about Colette's enormous number of acquaintances. Most of her acquaintances were colorful and the authors seem determined to provide all colorful anecdotes, whether particularly relevant to Colette or not. Though this gives some idea of the social atmosphere she moved in, particularly during her first marriage, it obscures information about Colette herself. I seldom knew what her relationship was to any of these people--which person was a lover, which a friend, which a professional associate, which a casual acquaintance. Aside from there being too much peripheral information, it is not well edited. The authors assume by causal references that the reader already has background information about all these people that I, in fact, often did not have. People are mentioned and then introduced to the reader as if for the first time several chapters later.

Although some extremely interesting facts are revealed, the authors fail to analyze them or draw conclusions. For example, they feel Colette's illness early in her marriage was syphilis because it was treated by a leading syphilis specialist with his standard "cure," hot baths. But this information is then dropped, with no indication of what effect the disease had on her many subsequent sexual partners or her health in later life. (...) Colette disliked and neglected her daughter, letting other people bring her up. Yet this, her one pregnancy, occurred soon before she married Henry de Jouvenal, which she very much wanted to do. Why did she get pregnant--perhaps to engineer the marriage? The authors fail to discuss this. The authors describe how Colette's mother, during her last year of life and ill with breast cancer, wrote frequent,...letters begging Colette to visit her--which Colette refused to do, being too absorbed in a new romance. But I gained no sense as to whether there was any reason for this other than Colette's self-centeredness. The authors describe early on how favorable reviews of Colette's books and her performances as an actress were engineered by pressuring friends to write them, even Willy writing them under one of his pen names. Yet later in the book--which becomes a paean to Colette's success and acclaim, however achieved--the authors accept reviews of her work at face value.

This could have been an excellent biography if it had managed to clearly describe and separate the different images of Colette as publicity (first the bohemian, then the Earth mother), Colette as a writer, and Colette as a person. And if it had a stronger novelistic sense--who is a main character in this story (aside from Colette) and who is not? What is the plot (as opposed to a collection of anecdotes and quotes)? Unfortunately, it does neither. But people interested in a partial debunking of Colette's oft-repeated images as an exploited young bride and later, an Earth mother will find it worth reading.