I am fascinated by Colette’s bitterswette novels, Break of Day, The Vagabond, and Duo.  Colette is unsentimental, lyrical and playful, yet somehow this time around I’m disturbed by the heroines’ bravado and rejection of love. 

In my twenties when I first read Colette, I foolishly thought I was Colette. Not literally, barely figuratively, I identified with her courageous heroines, who were much more experienced than I and worked respectively as a music hall artist, a writer, and a costume designer.  (The reader’s moxie and power of imagination awes me!)  

Then in my thirties and forties, I admired the heroines’ strength and independence and pitied their loneliness, but the sentences are so graceful that I also felt joy. Still later (now), as a Woman of a Certain Age, I  am swept away by her style and subtlety but grieve for the characters’ mistakes, but perhaps they’re not mistakes. The decisions they make are painful.  And yet when I first read these books when I was very young, I approved of their recklessness and independence. Freedom, liberty, and equality! That was the dream.

I recently reread two of her short novels, Break of Day and Duo, which are so different in style they might have been written by different writers. Break of Day is an autofiction masterpiece, a melange of narrative and letters; Duo is very slight, a piece about the destruction of a marriage, later adapted as a play.

In the masterpiece Break of Day, narrated by Colette in her fifties, she describes summer days by the sea – dazzling sunrises and sunsets – and rollicking picnics with her artist friends.  She also quotes extracts from her late mother Sido’s letters, and strives to emulate Sido in middle age.  

Here is one of her many homages to Sido:

Whenever I feel myself inferior to everything about me, threatened by my own mediocrity, frightened by the discover that a muscle is losing its strength, I can still hold up my head and say, ‘I am the daughter of the woman who wrote that letter…

And there is love.  There is always a love affair in Colette’s novels.  Colette herself had many affairs with men and women, and was married three times.  In Break of Day, Colette’s neighbor, Vail, who is 35 to her 50, spends whole days with her and is obviously in love.  They swim together, she makes lunch for him, and he watches her mulch the garden and complains about her ruining her hands. She is too experienced to think an affair with him would work.  She doesn’t care about the age difference, but feels that it might be time to think about something besides love.  In real life, she was 52 when she fell in love with a 35-year-old Jewish bachelor, Maurice Goudeket, and they did marry. Later, during World War II, she rescued Maurice from a concentration camp by writing for Nazi publications. Obviously, this was a case of doing anything for love.

One of the most striking aspects of this novel is the narrator’s choice to call herself Colette.  She does not bother to change her name in Break of Day; she called the narrator Renee in The Vagabond. But she explains that readers should not mistake the character Colette in Break of Day for Colette herself. “Am I writing about myself? Have patience, that is my model.”

Duo, a novella about a couple in crisis, is written in the third person, much of it in dialogue. This short examination of the destruction of a marriage reads like a play, and was later adapted as a play.

Alice and Michel are on vacation on their farm.   Michel, a businessman who brokers theater deals, is in financial trouble. He is deeply in love with his wife Alice, a costume designer, but won’t burden her with worries about the farm. Everything changes when Michel finds a love letter to Alice from his business partner.

Colette describes the hell of a breach of trust in marriage, and Michel’s sleeplessness and constant interrogation of Alice. But whatever palliative half-truth she tells, he is in terrible pain. And Alice is cold: she is exhausted and doesn’t care that much after a while.  It seems entirely trivial to her. And, oddly, the cook empathizes with her: she shows Alice the bruises and cuts her husband inflicts on her. Their situations are different but they comfort each other..

The translation is everything here:  I started reading an awkward translation by Margaret Crosland and almost put away the book. Then I found Frederick A. Blossom’s elegant translation – it’s very stagy, but that’s the nature of the piece.

Much of Colette’s work is untranslated. Should I learn French so I can read her other work? Is there a website somewhere with English translations of unknown books or essays?