Bedouin of the London Evening (11 page)

In her case this was certainly the right decision. The subject carries for most people dangerously airy-fairy overtones. Although paradoxically they also believe that this is what poetry is really about. Perhaps they dimly comprehend that human development is morally related to other words, other dimensions, which they only sense. We can only measure the importance of these strange influences by noting what happens when we are cut off from them; shut away in cities, locked into our own thoughts which harden like concrete, we become angry and ill. Whatever the case may be, they assisted Miss Garrigue to write a fine poem, ‘There Is a Dark River’, from an early book
The Monument Rose
. Between what is actually seen, and what is only felt, she is able to intimate an otherworldly aliveness collected under dark trees.

sets the scene, and although Yeats’s influence is soaked into her lines here:

due to the beauty of the expression, the poem manages to assert itself, and in the end holds its own.

In her last book she has made an effort to bring both sensibility and manner up to date; possibly she had at last woken up to the fact that her traditional poetic abilities were strangling her. The mixture is of old and new. But she begins to know herself well enough to hear her own voice. Here it is in this good opening of ‘The Grand Canyon’:

The poem goes on to describe the canyon throughout nine extremely long stanzas. Nevertheless, there is in general a much greater variety of line treatment, much firmer ground in the way of angular, dense description. She has been forced by the subject, a wholly American subject, to write a non-European poem. There is no precedent for gathering up the whole by intuition. The material defies it in any case. Thus she is thrown back on herself and writes an original poem. As a consequence, there is only one appearance of Yeats, a mere nod, a long-legged insect (never, even for Yeats, a successful image) worked into a context entirely foreign to it in the last stanza when invention was beginning to flag. The poem softens shortly afterward and closes on a conceit; and although this is welded on to the new-look verses so that the join can hardly be seen, it has in fact nothing to do with the poem’s primary conception and logic. In a natural desire to finish off by transcending gross matter, she loosens her grip and the old habits of mind reassert themselves:

Miss Garrigue’s line always sees further possibilities in itself, and the irrelevancies it produces, which are then carefully embedded in the poems, are usually the best part. In which case they
are
the poem, and the poem is the irrelevance. Here is one of her striking images: ‘the wind walked on the roof like a boy’ – not factually accurate, but carrying an original concept of a wind (with more of Jean Giono than Dylan Thomas to it) to which we can assent. At the end of the same poem (‘After Reading
The Country of the Pointed Firs
’), we get ‘As the wind threw itself about in the bushes and shouted / And another day fresh as a cedar started.’ This is aesthetically satisfying. The wind, which has been personalised,
now has a life of its own. The characteristics, borrowed from a boy, are amplified and add a dimension which is valid, and the poem is refreshed and lifted out of the commonplace by them.

Still, it is unwise to base a whole method of composition on a talent for phrase-making – that is a stock-in-trade merely. Now this poet has written a number of ballads and songs, and the form of these, for the above reason, is not on her side. It rejects utterly verbal fantastification and imprecise meaning. The surface of a ballad must be as tight as a drum; it is virtually plotless, the plot is one emotion. Burns goes in deeply with ‘My love is like a red red rose’, and continues to refine the same emotion to the core, so that what began by touching us on a physical level ends by moving us spiritually. He makes the work easy; but it’s a matter of temperament to be able to do so.

Two points should especially be mentioned with regard to Miss Garrigue’s last work. In taking her step forward the poet has uncovered a gift for quick portraits:

(which comes from ‘Free-Floating Report’), and for genuine insight. Although she had this in early days, it was often so badly placed that it might as well not have been there at all. The use of certain words, which inexorably draw after them other words of the same sort, obliterated it. Even now she does her best to destroy it by insipid diction, which is not the equal of the content in the following lines (from ‘For Jenny and Roger’):

These are worth all the struggles with an overweight baggage of derivative elegies, nocturnes, laments, soliloquies, dialogues, notes, and incantations.

We call her great, for her gift to us is not limited to the art of writing: it is the gift of a culture. I do not mean simply French culture and taste, but that she made certain discoveries with regard to the art of
being
which are indispensable to our lives, and which are regularly lost in the Western part of the world.

These discoveries came about as she got round the difficulties of her life. She became gradually the journalist of her own life, and in that journalism are strokes of genius that befit her to receive Nietzsche’s blessing. We can think of her as the prime exemplar of experiencing, who obtains truths which can only be got through the agency of things. She always found life new enough not to have to invent it; or we might put it another way, and say that she invented it by understanding it.

Because she teaches with her life, she is, fortunately, difficult to categorise, and belongs to philosophy as much as to literature. Her novels, which are brilliantly written, are as novels weak. By this I mean that when we read them we do not undergo a moral enlargement by reason of a vision whose effects are permanent, as we do with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, or Henry James. She did not formulate in the abstract characters powerful enough to carry out schemes of redemption and enlightenment. That was not her way; it might very likely have seemed to her not truthful enough to what was all around her. And there is the danger, in finding one’s ultimate reach in literature, of losing the original talent with which one set out. If it had cost her her seership, then that would have been a loss so much more terrible than any gain in re-sizing her art that it is better forgotten.

The apprehension of sensual or magical situations is her province, enveloped alive in their own detail. Her supreme moment is the Annunciation; having learned to listen, she can hear when invisible forces announce their presences in mortal things. Should this sound too abstract for rational minds, we need only remind them of the grand pattern of evolutionary and spiritual behaviour, and the humbler rhythms within the human body, and thereafter of the unseen, illogical, wholly real struggle between good and evil in the world, in order to regain their attention.

Given this basis for her writing, it will be seen that the more fresh life she lived, the stronger her work became. Life did not distract her from her thoughts; on the contrary, her
real
thoughts – the thoughts which were given to her – were outside, engrossed in life, and synonymous with it. She was never a mere clerk to her ego.

There were three marriages, a primordial mother, a daughter, a connection with the theatre as an actress and dramatist, travels, a beautician interlude, books, and success.

The irony of the story is that everything is in that first marriage to the despised Willy, the literary man about town. The first marriage made necessary, and contained, the second, which was physical. And it made possible the third, which she could have missed by not having become quite herself, and which was a natural unhasty interlocking. Willy might have been a disaster for her, but she turned the whole thing to advantage, by going along with it, and investing in it, to try to see what it meant. In his favour is the fact that he imprisoned her in the heart of the right
sort
of cloud cuckoo-land. The other dusty cages contained Proust, Anatole France, Gide, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Schwob, Hérédia, Jarry; yesterday’s broken visionaries were only just off the pavements, Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Gautier, Mallarmé. None of this would have been so immediately possible without Willy; he educated her and appreciated her, he stood between her and the literary businessmen who would have stolen her time from her as surely as he stole her books, and the money she needed to buy a life of her own.

It is worthwhile analysing how a writing style of such beauty, and capacity, came into being; and how it was underpinned by psychological growth.

In a provincial schoolroom, the schoolgirl Colette wrote a note to a friend: ‘I scribbled down everything I could for her on a bit of tracing paper and launched the ball’ (trans. Antonia White). If we were able to unwrap that piece of tracing paper, we would find there stubs, particles, spotlessly clean, of the idiom of
Claudine à l’école
. It’s the primitive idiom of a little tomboy filled with joy and derision, whose manner of expression is kept pure by all the short cuts of laziness and illiteracy. Rimbaud’s early syntax is akin to it, but more carbolic. He cuts to ribbons, jams in a stone of a word – and it sends a sheet of light at you. The pages are made insufferable, invincible, by this kind of youth. But every additional year is dangerous to it, the blows soften the mind, and Colette was about twenty-five when she wrote the first
Claudine
book.

She had read a great deal of poetry by then. Baudelaire’s forest which vibrates like an organ appears two-thirds of the way through
Claudine à l’école
. She began, in general, to acquire the tone of the Symbolist poets.

The selection and treatment of descriptive detail, and the velocity of all action in this book, also suggest a reading of the masterly
Poil de Carotte
by Jules Renard, which had been published three years previously. A year before its publication, Jules Renard made a note in his diary about Colette, seen at the first night of a play with a long plait. The schoolboy
Poil de Carotte
spends most of his time at home; his quick-witted, hard-as-nails existence is aimed at us in a series of bulletins, anecdotes, and country images which are so exact that they appear harmless, when they are nothing less than implacable. A good example is the following description of a river: ‘It laps with a sound of teeth chattering, and exhales a stale smell’ (trans. G.W. Stonier). Colette was almost equal to this and wrote, ‘Claire let off a laugh like a gas-escape’ (Antonia White). She arranged her material in much the same way as Renard. Her sentencework was careful; verbs were already chosen with particular
regard to the qualifying atmosphere they incorporated, their sense effect. Thus objects were ‘launched’, faces ‘grimaced’, and so on.

She was literary to the core, and her effects were calculated, as it was proper they should be. The calculation of her husband was of a different order when he asked her to put in ‘some patois, lots of local words, some naughtiness, you see what I mean?’ Nevertheless, without his original suggestion, his conception of the book that might emerge if she set down some of her school memories, there would have been no book. He first had the idea of writing it himself, after lunching at her old school. Then in addition, without his efforts to make it scandalous, it would never have had the enormous worldly success which it had. Finally, he ‘arranged all the propaganda he could by all the means he could possibly think of’; he was a very great literary agent. As is well known, he published the book under his own name; having called it into being, he stole it away from Colette.

Margaret Crosland tells us that Colette’s signature was added to the contract with Willy’s; a significant fact. Colette knew, and her friends knew, who had written
Claudine à l’école
.

The deep psychological benefit to Colette of what followed must have been extraordinary. From that moment no matter what happened, underground, in the darkness, the place of fear and trembling, the gain had been registered – and that is where life truly begins. Despite an everyday existence of unchanged and indifferent quality, everything suddenly became possible, it came within reach. In the material world, it is extremely useful to become lucky before you can become unlucky. Your contemporaries get into the habit of liking you: and you are able to retain your daring.

Colette could not do anything about her success. She appears to have been a very young twenty-seven, with slight grasp of externals. She was in any case separated from reality by Willy. Evidently she found it extremely hard to credit things for what they were; she stuck fast, dreaming out her dream – and writing it down. In this condition she produced further
Claudine
books for Willy, and
silently took an immense step forward.
Her writing started to be very good. Twentieth-century Paris read her refreshing pages, pages of light temper, witty and clean-running; Willy, the taskmaster, struck in certain musicianly comments, and the books were all equally successful.

The drama behind her silent progression had been as follows. Her childish idea of herself had run on unchecked after marriage, and Willy had fostered it; in fact it was
all she had
. Suddenly she found out that he was unfaithful. The shock to her ego was more than it could bear; there was nothing inside capable of withstanding the blow, her personality was fragmented, and she collapsed into a nervous breakdown. At that moment she lost her childhood, and no longer knew who she was. Sido, her mother, came to Paris to nurse her, and helped her to pick up the thread of her own story again – and this is the very thread by which life hangs. When it was all over, and as soon as she began to write the first
Claudine
, she found herself, and could repair her identity. But this time a new self was in charge. It prescribed physical exercises for her body, and undertook the task of learning how to think, and
be
; the spirit stopped still and listened – an Oriental skill.

This mature work went on for eight years. From twenty-five until she was thirty-three, her thoughts wrote thoughtful letters to themselves. The mind restocked itself with itself. There was eventually so much life inside that she began mentally to live without her husband. And at the end of that time she had enough strength to move away from him
physically
. She had formed herself, and woken up. She was also capable of being alone if it was necessary.

Knowing how to be alone is a part of the wisdom of wild animals. Colette had never broken her bond with nature, and this includes the inanimate. The secret is commitment, detail, and alertness. Nature mystics would explain that you make friends with what is there; an animal, a plant, an object. Colette possessed herself of this knowledge and used it consciously throughout her life and in all her writings. Thus she arrived at the end of her time with
Willy with a certain incomprehensible strength, and he was anxious to be rid of her.

Colette emerged as Pierrette, and with Willy’s help went on the stage. In the first book published as her own while still married, she wrote, ‘I mean to go on dancing in the theatre.’ It was called
Dialogues de bêtes
, a new genre. There was a rapport with Rudyard Kipling. The idea of animal conversations came most probably from his stories (which she mentions in
Claudine à l’école
), with their nicknames which described the characteristics of the animals, Stickly-Prickly and Bi-Coloured-Pythons-Rock-Snake.

The next development is profoundly instructive. Colette took her animals on the stage with her. She acted out of herself certain creatures, pure instincts, which had been locked up in a den inside for thirteen years. She personalised the animals of her subconscious, and
drew its sting.
All her natural desires, all her rage, instead of eating her internally – and one thinks of the expression ‘eating her heart out’ – ceased to be harmful to her.

Becoming what she was in deeper levels of her mind brought about a physiological renewal. Her flesh was transformed by her psyche’s good health. Albert Flament described her later in life, for the process continued, ‘luscious arms – combing rapidly her short, thick hair, surrounding herself with a chestnut foam…. Eyes
made
for the stage, slanting upwards, and between their thick lashes, a look of youth, of
joie de vivre
, a spark of light so brilliant that it looks artificial….’

The years from thirty-three were those of the great test of strength. ‘Missy’, the Marquise de Belboeuf, was photographed standing with protective kindness behind Colette; one observes a somewhat sloping coastline, silk dressing-gown lapels, and the face of a manly, strong-minded nanny rabbit. Exactly what was needed. Colette was now playing George Sand, succubus and incubus, and although she would get into bed with Missy, she does not appear ever to have been deeply in love with a woman, which is an entirely different matter. She and Missy amused themselves immensely, and started scandals effective enough for fresh waves of publicity.

Colette continued her journalism, and contributed to
Le Matin
. In 1911 this great reporter and
pierrette
published
La Vagabonde
. It was a triumph. The book proceeds by scenes, dramatic reveries, and letters to plot through a love affair, nothing more, and in this case that is nothing less than everything. Motives and scruples are scanned familiarly by the inner eye. The quality of the sensibility is a lesson in itself; the needle quivers under the slightest vibration. Here is the parting between the heroine, Renée Néré, and her lover, Max. (Fossette is Renée’s dog.)

It is the homeliness and exactitude of the emotion that tells. It comes from a real life, cannot be got anywhere else, and is as fine as George Eliot’s humble drawn-thread work.

The following year Sido died. Colette lost so much of herself with this death that she spent the rest of her life writing about her. A second fundamental change took place. The spirit changes its condition of being, so to speak, it perceives there is another kind of life. After the baptism by death, Colette the wise woman was born, a person in authority.