The Perfumed Jungle

COLETTE: A PROVINCIAL IN PARIS (282 pp.)--Margaret Crosland--British Book Centre ($3.50).

When Henry Gauthier-Villars, known in Paris literary circles as plain "Willy," met little Gabrielle Colette in Chatillon-Coligny, he was "completely stunned" by the sight of her long, braided hair and "airy grace." At their wedding dinner in 1893, 20-year-old Colette drank too much champagne and fell fast asleep over the table. "As I woke up, I heard my husband's voice:

" 'She looks a bit like [the statue of] Beatrice Cenci in the Barberini Palace . . . '

" 'With her red carnations.' said [a wedding guest], 'she looks most of all like a dove with a dagger in its breast.' "

At which Mother Colette rounded on the men and barked: "Can't you do better than compare her to a decapitated woman or a wounded bird?"

For years, Gabrielle Colette justified both comparisons. Her husband refused to believe that his little woman had a head, and thought nothing of wounding her affections. Willy was the nearest thing to a factory ever known to literature: under his direction (and signature), teams of "obscure young writers and journalists who desperately needed money" churned out books and articles. Wife Colette was just a sort of combination kitchen maid and pretty showpiece. The acquisition of money and mistresses was Willy's chief interest in life, and Colette has described how one night, after being tipped off by an anonymous letter, she went to an actress' flat and caught her husband in the act of forwarding both aims.

"[They were] not in bed, but leaning over a book . . . of accounts. Monsieur Willy was holding a pencil. I could feel my heart beating in my throat, and the two lovers looked with astonishment at this young pale girl from the provinces . . . What could I say? The little dark woman . . . held her scissors in her hand and waited for a word, a gesture, before she leapt at my face . . ."

The Flight from the Factory. This new biography--appearing less than two weeks after Colette's death in Paris at 81 --has its limitations as a book. Biographer Crosland lacks two important qualities:

1) a thorough knowledge of French, and

2) a full critical grasp of Colette's work. Author Crosland is so devoted to her subject that the book is full of clumsy curtsies--as when Colette's perceptiveness as a movie critic is illustrated with the un fortunate statement: "She . . . knew that the name of Mickey Rooney would be heard again." Nonetheless, the book is a timely and handsome reminder of an extraordinary career.

One day when Husband Willy's production line was flagging, he said to his wife, who was sprawled on the divan with the cat: "You ought to put your school memories onto paper. Don't be frightened of piquant details . . . Funds are low." Ever obedient, Colette bought school exercise books and jotted down neatly her adolescent story. Claudine at School (signed "Willy") appeared in 1900, sold 50,000 copies in the first year and is still selling in 1954. Almost as successful was the first sequel, in which Heroine Claudine "[receives her] first lessons in seduction, meets her perverted second cousin and marries his father."

"Be quick, little one!" Willy would cry, as Colette chased her pen through Claudine upon Claudine. If Colette was lazy or restive, Willy locked her in her room. Every page she wrote passed under Willy's practiced editorial eye ("Have I married the last of the lyric poets?" he would snarl, if the prose was sappy). By 1904, Colette was a trained craftsman--and fed up with the life of a tormented hack. At 31, after twelve years of marriage, Colette broke with Willy.

The Realm of the Senses. Having lived under wraps so long, Colette went straight onto the music-hall stage, where she threw off the wraps with a vengeance. In mimes and dances she displayed "[first] her uplifted bosom, and then the whole of her harmonious nudity." But she continued to write, too, and her subject matter was as nude as her mimes. The world of the senses became Colette's special province, and she proceeded to map it with audacious knowingness.

Colette, says Biographer Margaret Crosland, "cannot be only partially accepted. One accepts everything or dismisses her completely." In fact, a case can be made that exactly the reverse is true. Colette was revered as a queen of French literature not because her kingdom was boundless, but because it was strictly limited and superbly governed. The subjects of Queen Colette have no souls, no morals, no politics, no intellects. Their aim is to devour the maximum of sensuous pleasure at the price of a pain that they often find most enjoyable, e.g., Cheri's heroine gets a big kick out of her lover's passion for hocking her jewelry.

All Colette characters have the nerves and blood vessels of animals, but their hottest emotions are always ready to leap to the aid of their coldest calculations. In a jealous woman, for example, Colette sees "the development of a sense of hearing, virtuosity of vision, speed and silence of steps, the sense of smell directed towards the trace left behind by hair, by a perfumed powder, the passage of an indiscreetly happy person--all this recalls very closely the exercises of soldiers on a campaign, and the knowledge of poachers."

The Law Against Pity. Colette's characters are sensitive to pain, but because they live according to the laws of what Chaucer calls "Merciles Beaute," they can never expect pity. The queen herself had so ordained it. "Suffering," said Colette, "is perhaps a childish business . . . It is very painful . . . But I am afraid [it] deserves no consideration whatsoever."

What went for her characters went for Colette herself: no self-pity was allowed into her voluminous personal histories. Her second marriage (to handsome Man-of-the-World Henri de Jouvenel) was a love match, but it went the way of the first. Biographer Crosland thinks that a streak of "masculinity" in Colette may have contributed to the sharp disappointments of her love life, but this is improbable. Masculinity, by Colette standards, is not something hard and tough: it is soft and yielding in a rather nasty way. ("They're timid, you know," says a Colette girl, of men.) Colette finally found a happy marriage with Husband No. 3, bookish Maurice Goudeket, whom she described ("in the most charming and expressive way," murmurs Author Crosland) as "my best friend."

How long Colette's literary realm will survive its queen remains to be seen. Her reputation has never been higher. Her classic style and natural dialogue, her girlish eagerness mixed with aged uninhibitions, still lure the most timid modern men into her perfumed jungle kingdom.

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