I like to read eclectically. This weekend I read Colette’s short novel, The Other One, and Horace’s Ode I.Xl, which urges us to live in the present and carpe diem (seize the day).
I know perfectly well that you will all prefer reading about Colette, so I’ll start with that. But I also tacked on my prose translation of the ode at the bottom of the post.
The Other One, one of Colette’s lesser-known books, is included in a 1951 omnibus, Short Novels of Colette, which has a 57-page introduction by the novelist Glenway Westcott. Westcott’s introduction is the liveliest essay I’ve read on Colette, just as wonderful as Judith Thurman’s biography.
Westcott declares Colette “the greatest living” French writer. (She died in 1954.) He writes, “I know that in critical prose, as a rule, the effect of the superlative, greatest, is just emotional…. Greater than Mauriac? Greater than Martin du Gard, Jules Romain, Montherlant, Sartre? Yes, of course. But I have not had the zeal to read or re-read that entire bookshelf for the present purpose; nor do I imagine that the reader wants any such thorough and fanatic work. Let me not pretend to be able to prove anything. Let me peaceably point to… Colette’s merits, here and there in her work.”
The heroine of The Other One is the intelligent, sensual, lazy Fanny, who has been married for 12 years to Farou, a well-known playwright. The novel appropriately unfolds rather like a play, characterized by pitch-perfect dialogue, vivid women’s chit-chat, and reactions to a letter. The letter triggers the subsequent events.
During the unbearable heat of a summer in the country, Fanny spends her days reading novels, napping, and eating gooseberries. She is teased about her overeating by her friend Jane, who helps manage the household and is Farou’s secretary. Meanwhile, Fanny’s stepson, Jean, has spent the summer quietly stalking Jane, on whom he has a crush.
The women are waiting for a letter from Farou, who is in Paris working with the director. Fanny reads the letter aloud and is amused by his references to an actress: she gathers he is having an affair, one of many. A sophisticated woman still loved by her husband, she dismisses the dalliance as insignificant, but Jane is tense and brittle: her reaction seems over-the-top. Later, Jean confirms Fanny’s fear that Jane and Farou have had an affair. It is a nightmare for Fanny.
The most important aspect of a Colette novel is never the plot: it is the lyrical style, the details of women’s lives, the little things one never knows one has noticed. It resonates when Fanny feels stung seeing Jane lounge in a chair reading a novel. (“It’s my novel,” and she proceeds to list the other things Jane has stolen: her husband, her stepson. etc.) In The Other One, there are also pages and pages of good-humored dialogue, delineating the women’s friendship.
This may seem a trivial situation, and Colette has written better about this elsewhere, but the emotional pain is universal. Nothing Colette writes is ever cliched. And the 1931 translation is by Viola Gerard Garvom is smooth, if not great English.
Horace, Ode I.11. The first time I encountered the phrase carpe diem (seize the day) was in this ode by Horace. Horace, or the persona of the poem, urges Leuconoë to stop worrying about about the future and seize the day. I’d remembered this poem as upbeat, and was disconcerted by the gloom. Horace wrote several more cheerful poems about seizing the moment, but this is the first in which he uses the phrase Carpe diem.
And here is my literal prose translation.
Do not seek–it is impious to know–what end the gods have given me, what end to you, Leuconoe. Don’t try Babylonian astrology, either. How much better to bear whatever will be! Whether Jupiter allots more winters, or whether this is the last, which now weakens the Tyrrhene sea crashing against opposite cliffs, be wise, strain clear the wine, and cut back the hope of a long life in a short time span. While we speak, envious time has fled. Seize the day, trusting in the future as little as possible.
Gloomy, perhaps, but inspiring.
And now I’ll search for the Colette. I was fascinated by Colette in high school. Years later I learned that she loved cats, as have so many excellent writers.
Horace is brilliant. And, you know what Glenway Westcott said: “Colette is the best living writer.” Though no longer living, she is great.