Animal Queen

CLOSE TO COLETTE (245 pp.)--Maurice Goudeket--Farrar Straus & Cudahy ($4).

"The feminine face needs leafage," Colette used to say, and regardless of fashion, she wore her hair pulled down over her forehead. Hundreds of photographers presented her to the world masked by her "leafage"--until one day, on her 80th birthday, Vogue's Irving Penn took "a staggering photograph" that left France's greatest authoress "exposed before posterity" (see cut). As if really seeing her for the first time, Colette's husband, Maurice Goudeket, marveled at what lay beneath the leafage--"a huge, domed forehead, like Beethoven's . . . bare, vast, significant, the forehead of a genius."

Long before he ever saw her, Maurice Goudeket was determined to know the Colette behind the leafage. He first read a book of hers when he was 15 or 16, and she 31 or 32, and announced promptly: "I am going to marry that woman." In 1935, after ten years' intimate friendship with Colette, he did. Close to Colette has little to say about Colette's tempestuous youth, when she wrote her notorious Claudine books and danced with bared breast in a Paris revue. It is simply the story of her and Goudeket's 29 years together--a restrained, respectful appraisal of the woman who wrote more intimately and sensuously of men and women than any other writer of her day.

Strictly Earthbound. Even D. H. Lawrence, to whom sexuality was the essence of life, tinged it richly with a sort of mysticism. But Colette, genius or no, was unique in regarding life as a marvelous array of strictly earthbound sensuous experiences. In novels such as Cheri and Julie de Carneilhan, she described as never before the precise effects of fingers upon skin, the allure of perfumes, the sensual enchantments of voices, glances and languorous movements.

Husband Goudeket shows how this unique "pagan love" operated in Colette's daily life. "There is only one creature! D'you hear, Maurice, there is only one creature!" she exclaimed to him once with "the intensity of a pythoness"--and from dawn to dusk she pursued the manifold forms of this one creature. First thing every morning, she must know just where the wind lay and the precise degree of humidity; around her bed were "a barometer, an outdoor thermometer . . . compasses . . . watches, chronometers, binoculars and magnifying glasses." After breakfast she would rush out into her garden like a starved animal. On visiting someone else's garden, she often "separated the sepals of flowers . . . smelled them . . . crumpled the leaves, chewed them, licked the poisonous berries and the deadly mushrooms . . . attracted bees and wasps, letting them alight on her hands and scratching their backs. 'They like that,' " she said. "Like a bacchante after libations," she would stumble along, "nose and . . . forehead covered with yellow pollen, her hair in disorder and full of twigs, a bump here and a scratch there."

Apples and Eclairs. "Overflowing with life and activity," wrote one of her secretaries, "she glows with physical joy, hugging to her strong heart every thing that quivers with life, in order to embrace it, crush it, draw the very marrow out of it . . . In . . . intervals passive, idling and greedy, she munches apples . . . disembowels chocolate eclairs arranges the fire . . lights some sticks of what she calls 'smell-good.' These flames and the smoke intoxicate her."

The insatiable Colette lived day in, day out with this appetite. The mere sight of a Camembert cheese roused desire to "feel the crust, measure the elasticity of the texture." Sapphires, spring's first lilies of the valley, the smell of humus, the sight of a dead tree branch "polished, glazed, oiled by generations of reptiles"--all these roused her. "She knew a recipe for everything, whether it was for furniture-polish, vinegar, orange-wine, quince-water, for cooking truffles or preserving linen . . ." It is no surprise to hear that "Balzac and Proust were the authors whom she reread untiringly"; in Balzac she found a lust for life that matched her own, in Proust a brilliant reflection of her love for the memories and mysteries of childhood.

Love and Genius. What was it like, living with such a fleshly dynamo? As might be guessed, husband Goudeket never attempted to rival his earth-shattering wife, never disemboweled eclairs, covered his nose with pollen or caressed bees and wasps. "A man does not love a woman for her genius: he loves her in spite of her genius"--and Goudeket's love was as balanced and precise as a line of Colette's prose. For when his tempestuous wife sat down to write (for three hours every afternoon), it was as if some supernatural policeman appeared and took her wildness under complete control. Colette, at work, was humble, painstaking, indefatigably exact. The marvel of her work lies in the discipline with which she marshaled and controlled the sensuous savagery of her subject matter.

This discipline, husband Goudeket shows, was always at hand when Colette required it. In all their 29 years together, there were no "scenes," there was no "betrayal"; only a diligent, equable harmony based on what Colette called "conjugal courtesy" and likened to the Briton nightly donning his dinner jacket in "a lost corner of Nepal." When she deemed the time had come for "passionate love" to give place to "more lasting sentiments," she quietly but frankly informed him of the fact. Goudeket never saw her in the morning before she had done her face, and when the Gestapo came to their Paris flat in 1941 to take him away (he was a Jew), she merely tapped him lightly on the shoulder and said briskly: "Off you go." Goudeket returned from Compiegne detention camp and soon again was "absolutely fit": it was the iron-masked Colette who "suffered more than could be imagined" and was not able to "regain her nervous equilibrium."

Privileged Sleep. While she died in 1954, aged 81, the people of Paris paid homage at her door for three days. Mistress and archinterpreter of the animal kingdom, she died a revered national institution, yet fulfilling "in every way the wish that she herself had many years before expressed:

" 'And when you lie down across the dizzying, wavy path, if you have not already shed your curly locks one by one, nor one by one your teeth, if your limbs have not worn out one by one, if the dust of the world has not, before your last hour, sealed your eyes from the marvelous light, if you have, right to the end, kept in your hand the friendly hand which guides you, lie down smiling, sleep happily, and sleep privileged . . .' "

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