The great and prolific French author Colette (1873-1954) could have been a character in one of her own novels or short stories. Born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Burgundy, she at different times was an actress, dancer, music hall entertainer, beauty-shop owner, and advice columnist.
She married three times and had affairs with women, including American hostess Natalie Clifford Barney and Mathilde de Morney, Marquise de Belbeuf, with whom she performed on stage and lived with for five years. Among her male lovers was Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio. She and her second husband had a daughter, but the marriage ended in divorce and she had an affair with her former stepson. In 1935, she wed Maurice Goudeket, whom she called "a saint." He cared for her during her final, wheelchair-bound years.
She found literary success with the Claudine novels, which featured lesbian schoolgirl crushes, and which were initially published under her first husband's name. In 1920, Cheri appeared. Regarded as her masterpiece, it's a tale of a callow young man's affair with an ageing courtesan, Lea, a relationship initially encouraged by his mother, also a former courtesan. The novel upends gender roles �" Cheri is the sex-symbol, Lea's boy-toy. The sequel, La Fin de Cheri (1926), shows Lea's strength and Cheri's weakness as their affair ends.
In America, Colette is best remembered for Gigi (1945), adapted as a play in 1951 starring (at Colette's insistence) the almost unknown Audrey Hepburn �" and again into the celebrated, Oscar-winning Lerner and Lowe 1958 musical. In all, she published 50 novels, many short stories, essays, and articles.
It has been 50 years since anything new by Colette has appeared in English, but happily, that drought is over with the publication of Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems, translated from the French by Zack Rogow and Renee Morel (Excelsior Editions, SUNY Press, $24.95). This wide-ranging selection of Colette's writings shows her surgically-precise insights, wit, warmth, and wisdom. The collection, augmented by brief introductions, also captures her remarkable personality.
The title piece is a witty and ironic short story about an actress and her platonic friend, Hamond, a portrait painter. He had been abandoned by his younger wife, she by the "cause of my suffering." At first they were miserable. But then they realized how happy they were without their former lovers. They kept the secret to themselves, however, and accepted ongoing condolences from sympathetic friends. Then, one day, on a traffic island in front of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris, Hamond encounters his ex-wife, with unexpected consequences.
Set during the Belle Epoque, Masked Ball on the Riviera: Cyclamen and Buttercup, or the Costume Ball of the Feet is a thinly disguised roman a clef featuring the openly gay writer and dandy Jean Lorrain, and exposing the tawdry pretentiousness of the entertainments of the demimonde.
Her pen-portrait of her contemporary, Marcel Proust, published in 1949, 27 years after the great gay novelist's death, is revealing �" about him and her. They met often during the 1920s, and she found his excessive politeness off-putting to the point of not seeing him anymore. After reading Swann's Way, however, she was filled with unconditional admiration for his genius. The last time she saw him, he was clearly ill. Her recollections of him are candid, compassionate, and touching.
Her 1942 memoir of actor/singer Maurice Chevalier, who would play Honore Lachaille in the musical version of Gigi, sympathetically reveals the anxiety and stress behind the jovial, cheerful mask he wore when performing. Having been onstage herself, she understood how much work it took to create a character alien from oneself.
Her film criticism is fascinating. A 1939 article published in Marie Claire, "Why I Love Bette Davis" is one of the best contemporary accounts of the impact the Hollywood star had on women. Her contrasting Davis with Greta Garbo shows Colette's keen intelligence and her ability to analyze the effect that performers can have on audiences.
The text of a 1937 radio broadcast, "On Women Growing Older" is refreshingly unsentimental and painfully accurate, yet not depressing.
During World War II, Colette remained in Paris, helping her Jewish friends and hiding her husband in the attic of her home. In January 1940, before the collapse of France and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she made a remarkable radio broadcast to Americans, hoping they would come to France's aid. Eventually, they did. In "Colette Speaks to Americans," she demonstrates a painful knowledge of war and its effect on soldiers. "But war is a huge torrent �" unfortunately tainted with precious young blood �" an enormous wave that drowns all the bad jokes made out of embarrassment and that drowns petty pride. In wartime, a man who's been a husband for many years no longer hesitates to write to his wife the letters of a passionate lover, and doesn't hesitate to risk his life to save a comrade he didn't know the day before."
Translation is an art, and Colette has been well served by Rogow of the Creative Writing Department of the University of Alaska and native Parisian Morel, an expert on French culture and an instructor in French and Linguistics at City College of San Francisco. Together, they have captured the extraordinary range and power of one of the 20th century's most important writers.