Herself (15 page)

All around me, women of the richest sensibility were writing. Sometimes they lyricized the world, sometimes they classicised it. Sometimes they grotesqued it. And sometimes, without a tone altered or an honesty shifted, it was possible to feel—in the way one senses a closed window—that they had daintified it. Often they wrote from the interiors of women and children, or of the old. Men they wrote of as lovers, fathers or brothers. Seldom did they write from the interior of a man, or in the male persona altogether, as women had long since been written of by men.

I had done several stories that way, even before the novel. Now and then I idly wondered about this. How far could the adaptive imagination go? I wanted to think it could go anywhere. One enormous shadow then loomed over the American male writer, and through him, over me. War. With all its attendant virilities of sport and sex. Only one—Faulkner, after writing of it in its natural frame, and its current one (
Soldier’s Pay
) had gone on to a wider human comedy, hunting the past in the present. Fitzgerald, who had done the same in more immediate terms, was dead, and then largely unappreciated. The rest, senior and young, hunted the war novel, that great bear. And women were civilians, their only connection with war being the bed or the bedpan, the Red Cross doughnut or the office typewriter, or the entertainment circuit, which included those few female correspondents who flirted equally with generals and with death. For the mass of women, the war-connection was as wives, lovers and mothers, all Gold Star. All women were joined to this “larger” world by the same single thread—men. So deep was the human race sunk in war and all the effects of war, that this seemed to us entirely natural. As women, we could be Lysistratas, or Florence Nightingales. As writers, we could ape the men by seeing the world as militarily as possible, or we could popularize ourselves in the image always ready for us—as sweet sprinklers of sachet in the sickroom experience. Or we could stand back or aside, the better to see the whole range, and the whole other range, of human experience. Including our own.

Although my male confreres who in one way or other imitated Hemingway could still make me feel small punkins in front of a bar or behind a gun, secretly I thought them and him provincial in some way, though I couldn’t yet have told why. Their cult seemed to me both narrow and exaggerated. Hunting the blood dramas of war and ambulance as if out for game, tied to the physicality of events, they were becoming the male journalists of literature. Hindsight, not too much later, would tell me why. Men, and women too, who make a sentiment out of physical prowess, need a neo-primitive culture to sustain them; in ours, bloody as it is, physicality pursued to the end keeps one an eternal juvenile. When the prowess dies, the importance of such event dies, and the sentiment, even of combat, dies with them—as Hemingway’s suicide gun perhaps signaled. The price paid by some male American writers of the period would be that of an intellectuality refused. But this would be nothing to the price paid by all Americans, whether they know it or not, for fighting wars at the peculiar modern distance. While they sent their sons, the middle-aged stayed at home, to rot in silk, under safe skies. To tranquilize themselves for lesser tragedies. To psychoanalyse themselves for fears of cancer and death. To beat their breasts over the disappointments of educational and social meliorism—and social change. To yearn secretly for the cleansing violence that a nation has, when it defends itself and its ideals
at home
. All the falsities of that America could be laid to it.
We were not bombed at home.
We were the first nation really to live by the electric button, in our souls. Or in our balls? Men writers of the times were telling us that, sorrily not by their prophetic tongues but by their barometric actions. These samurai were having to cross the water, the air, to find gests emotionally worthy of them. Europe, in the bloodiest way, was still attracting Americans. Over there. Too late. In the bloodbath, women are more and more equal. War, no longer a gest, is civilian now. No one, not even a child, need be envious.

Back then, my own progress toward such ideas is slow. When the novel appears, its subject will after all obscure the fact that a woman wrote it. One writer friend will question me thoughtfully. Was it necessary for it to be written through a man? “Oh yes—” I flash back, from depths that surprise me “you see—he had to be able to go anywhere.” He sees the point.

By the time I write a second novel (1963) I will have come full circle. It is to be, as I tell him, “about the power of the little events that creep up on you while you are waiting for the big ones. And it’ll be as female as I can make it.” (It wasn’t. I would have regretted that. But it was more so than many serious novels by women. It was, I think, as female as things sometimes are.) A year or so after, a friend who has always admired my other work very vocally, calls me out of the blue. “You know I never read that one (
Textures of Life
). I was afraid to. To spoil what I think of you.” I worm out of him that friends have told him not to bother—it is a woman’s book. “But now I’ve read it, I want you to know that they’re wrong. It’s going right up on my shelf with your others.
Now
.” Victorians segregated the books on their shelves by sexes. But I refrain from mentioning it. Let it be.

Now, in the 1970s, I may be in danger of being segregated with women by women, by those ultra-feminists for whom, if I am not totally “with,” I will be “against.” I will wonder whether they have ever read Virginia Woolf’s
Three Guineas
, which so long ago said so much of their litany rather better, in turn getting much of it from another writer, Dorothy Richardson, whom all feminists might explore. No, art is not standing together. It is a statement by an outsider, from within.

When, in 1957, I wrote on Maurice Goudeket’s biography of his wife, Colette, I had this to say:

When Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette Gauthier-Villars de Jouvenel, known to all the world as Colette, died in 1954 at the age of eighty-one at the end of a life extraordinarily inseparable from her work, she had long since received from her own country that national esteem with which France rewards its writers. True, although she was the first woman member of the Académie Goncourt, she had never been a member of the Académie Française. So much the worse for them, rather than for her, to whom even the chary Gide had forced himself to write: “I myself am completely astonished that I should be writing to you, astonished at the great pleasure I have had in reading you,” and to whom the more generous Proust had already written, in 1919, “Your style and your color are so full of perpetual finds that if one noted everything one could write you a letter as long as your book.”

In her long progression she was to have a life as multiple as one of the cat race she loved—Burgundian schoolgirl, provincial child-wife in Paris, hack writer, music-hall performer and dancer in the nude, actress as one of her own characters, theater critic, seller of beauty products, housewife as perfectionist in domestic lore as she was over a sentence, and writer—perhaps the first great French woman writer to come from the middle class.

Of the
Oeuvres Completes
, published by Flammarion in 1950, only a small portion of the fifteen volumes, comprising more than fifty titles, are available here in English, although more are promised. And here, too, she has never been given the critical attention awarded either her contemporaries or the younger generation of French writers. Her world, no more feminine than Virginia Woolf’s, was less bluestocking, her style too sure to be classed as experimental. And her supposed sensationalism, garbed as it was in the decor of the demimonde, seemed to many too frivolous for dignified consideration. One might say of her that her art was almost too accessible for criticism, at least for some American critics.

Actually she was her own best commentator, continuously reassessing her life and work, stalking its persistent themes from another angle. After reading Goudeket’s account, one understands better Colette’s extraordinary gift for the particularities of sensuous detail—a gift that was based in nature perhaps, but was to be equally sharp when turned on the tailor-made world.

“But above all she used the exact names of objects in daily use. … She knew a recipe for everything … furniture polish, vinegar, orange-wine, quince-water, for cooking truffles or preserving linen … this country wisdom impregnates all her work. … Looked at in one light it would not have displeased her if one talked of recipes for writing.”

This household imagery is to appear everywhere in her work, bringing a curious solidity to her demimondaine worlds, and used in contexts light or powerful, from the casual, conversational aside when she could call Bach “a sublime sewing machine” down to the details of Léa’s ménage in
Cheri
, where, in the language of cuisine and nursery comfort, the relationship is described without a psychological word, and no symbol of anguish is more apt than Léa’s turning out her cupboards after Chéri is gone.

Which brings us, brooding on the particular, to the question that often rears its silly suffragette head in critiques on women writers, and not infrequently in the hearts of the women themselves: Are female writers more limited in their world than male? Should they ignore all the special data they have as women or use it, try to be men or stand upon what they are—and in so doing any one of these things do they consign themselves to narrower than male limits and to less chance of greatness?

The answer, I think, comes better from Colette than from any other woman writer I know, and is to me a token of her stature. She is no more essentially feminine as a writer than any man is essentially masculine as a writer—certain notable attempts at the latter not withstanding. She uses the psychological and concrete dossiers in her possession as a woman, not only without embarrassment but with the most natural sense of its value, and without any confusion as to whether the sexual balance of her sensitivity need affect the virility of her expression when she wants virility there.

Reading her, one is reminded that art—whether managed as a small report on a wide canvas, or vice versa—is a narrow thing in more senses than one, and that the woman writer, like any other, does best to accept her part in the human condition, and go on from there. …

But let us return to Goudeket, who, while modestly disclaiming critical authority, scatters understanding everywhere in this quiet, graceful book. “It is not enough to say that she loved animals. Before every manifestation of life, animal or vegetable, she felt a respect which resembled religious fervor. At the same time she was always aware of the unity of creation in the infinite diversity of its forms. One evening she gave me a striking example of this. We were at the cinema, watching one of those shorts which show germinations accomplished in a moment, unfolding of petals which look like a struggle, a dramatic dehiscence. Colette was beside herself. Gripping my arm, her voice hoarse and her lips trembling, she kept on saying with the intensity of a pythoness: ‘There is only one creature! D’you hear, Maurice, there is only
one
creature.’

It is no wonder that she was able to treat every variation, singular or regular, of the sexual or half-sexual relationship, with never the slightest false touch of lubricity, for, seeing every creature as an aspect of one, she could never really regard the sexes as antithetical.

And this in turn was only part of a larger attitude that never made too much of the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, that was at any moment, witty or profound, likely to describe one in terms of the other. …

It is an attitude that accounts for much; it is for instance one reason why she translates well, for whatever nuance or idiosyncrasy may be lost, there is almost always some basic image, native to us creatures, that does not escape. It accounts in part, also, for that earlier mentioned “accessibility” which perhaps so depresses the interest of the modern critics, particularly those more interested in displaying themselves. There is nothing much to emend in Colette. She treats of the basic mysteries, but with the utmost care not to add any mystification of her own, like a midwife too busy getting the baby born to stop for the philosophical “Why?”

As for her “daring,” it is there, but is not of a sort to compel, for instance, those who love to brood on the eunuchoid element in James or to extrapolate a national homosexual dream from Huck Finn. It is the daring of an eye that looks on the world with the directness of total health—an eye somewhat chilling at times, possibly because, like those of the genus Bufo or Rano on whom she often drew for imagery, it occupies so very much of the head. One finds here perhaps the reason for the accusation that she did not create individual character, that she saw people to be as inchoate as those other fauna or flora-through whom life blooms, droops, and is cut down, and that she never moved from her microcosm either to the metaphysical or to the “world at large.” Certainly it would be just to say that she never seemed to have much time to consider things as they might be, so busy was she with the morality of things as they were.

By the time I wrote on Colette, I had come to terms with being a writer. And for all my surface rages in the past and to come, with being a woman among us. I feel I can go to any war I want to. To all the wars of life, and of mind.

In the depths of the world, of the sky, there’s a rhythm that must be listened to. Anybody can. One day—who knows under what cloud or circumstance?—that beat may seep from your wrist to your pen. Like blood—which has no ultimate sex.
One must give back the stare of the universe
. Anybody can.

T
HE STORY OF A
man aided in his pursuit of art or war by his love for a good woman, or a bad one, is an old literary occurrence. The spectacle of a woman encouraged in life, companioned in art and in certain of her own wars through love of a man—is not. Because of that, I break a self-imposed rule which was to have been—“Except for where it appertains to the work; keep your private life out of it.”