Books: Animal Kingdom

SHORT NOVELS OF COLETTE (733 pp.]—Wifh an Introduction by Glenway Wes-cott—Dial ($5).

Henry Gauthier-Villars, known to all France at the turn of the century by his simple pseudonym, “Willy,” was regarded as the most prolific hack-writer of his day. His admirers marveled that one man could produce such a torrent of puff-pastry fiction, dramatizations, music and theater criticism, and racy personal history. Actually, Willy did nothing of the sort. He employed hacks to do his hacking; he was squire of an estate of sharecropping “ghosts.”

Willy was a cynical 34 when he married 20-year-old Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. She was the daughter of a Zouave father and . an octoroon mother, and to Willy she seemed as pure & simple as “any little Tahitian before the missionaries got there.” After hearing her recount stories of her childhood, Willy realized that she was also a literary gold mine. He locked her in a room, gave her pen & paper, and commanded her to write.

Cat & Mouse. Obediently, Colette wrote. Claudine at School, her first novel, appeared in 1900. Thereafter, every year saw a new (and naughty) Claudine book —Claudine stepping out, Claudine painting Paris red, Claudine in the arms of a husband (her own). When Claudine was worn to the bone, Colette started the series all over again with a new heroine named Minne. The French public was fascinated and delighted by Willy’s virtuosity. For Willy, of course, signed his name to all his wife’s books.

Today, 78-year-old Colette’s innumerable admirers (most of whom would agree with Glenway Wescott that she is “the greatest living French fiction writer”) wonder how on earth their “national great lady” ever bowed to such servitude. Colette herself, now a distinguished member of the French Academy, wonders too. True, she says, Willy actually kepi her under lock & key. But why did she not escape by the window? Was it because he always guessed so cunningly when she was on the verge of flight—and gave her a raise in salary? Or was it, rather, that under Willy’s brutal, profiteering tutelage young Colette learned how to write? Explained Colette years later: “Perhaps even a mouse finds time, between one wound and the next, to appreciate the softness of the cat’s paw.”

When at last Colette abandoned Willy, she went on the stage. Faded photographs, says Wescott, still exist of Colette as a vaudeville queen—”a black cat in woolly tights with inked-on whiskers,” a seductive charmer making a grand entry “with what appears to be a real peacock tail.” Colette left the stage to marry a distinguished politician and journalist, Henri de Jouvenel. They were divorced, and in 1935 she married her present husband, a journalist named Maurice Goudeket. But she never stopped writing. By 1919, Marcel Proust himself was shedding tears over her love story of World War I, Mitsou. In 1920 the great Gide breathlessly read Chert at a sitting, declared it had “not one weakness, not one redundancy, nothing commonplace.”

Blackbird Plumage. The world of a Colette novel is like no other world in contemporary fiction. It contains no murderers, no politicians, no proletariat, no religion, no problems of intellect or ideals. All that matters in a Colette novel is what happens when, as Wescott puts it, “unimpeachable male supremacy” comes to grips with “absolute female desirability.”

Cheri (the best of the six in this volume) and its sequel, The Last of Cheri, are about a middle-aged courtesan named Lea and her young lover, Cheri. Lea’s only capital (which has borne heavy interest in its heyday) is a “great white body tinted with pink, gifted with long limbs and the flat back which one sees on the nymphs of Italian fountains.” Lea adores her body almost as much as Cheri adores his own, with its chest that is “hard and curved like a shield,” its hair “like the plumage of a blackbird.”

Colette is not the first French writer to bestow upon whores and gigolos the sentimental tenderness that Anglo-Saxon writers reserve for dogs and horses. But she is the first to examine human relations purely in terms of animal magnetism. The chief question in the lives of Cheri and Lea is how soon Cheri will exchange her for a younger, fresher animal.

Bring on the Snails. Sharply and per-spicaciously, Colette explores every last corner of “the soul” of the flesh, and hides nothing that sheds light on the role it plays in human relations. The trouble with her creatures of passion is that the reader’s interest inevitably flags.

Again & again, “the stiff girdle, the daring drawers and the soft, silent slip . . . come fluttering down”—and more & more the figures resemble lots in a sale of livestock. When at last even the characters tire, and take to sitting in bars, “washing down snails with a glass of wine,” it is hard not to wish that the snails had come along sooner.