Field Flowers

By Gerald Clarke

LETTERS FROM COLETTE Selected and Translated by Robert Phelps Farrar, Straus & Giroux 214 pages; $12.95

Her gift was the ability to create characters so vital that they seemed to leap from the page: the ebullient Gigi, skipping through the Tuileries; the elegant and doomed Cheri, in love with a woman twice his age; and Lea, archetype of the older woman, wise, but not yet wizened by age and experience. But Colette's greatest invention was Colette, the country girl who conquered Paris and captured life itself.

Oddly enough, though she died in 1954 at age 81, a good Colette biography has still to be written. Until one comes along, her letters will do very nicely. Every day she sent out half a dozen or so. Spontaneous, intensely conversational, they resemble nothing so much, as Translator Robert Phelps observes, "as an armful of field flowers, fresh, fragrant, still sparkling with dew, which Ceres, let's say, brought in from her morning walk."

The letters in this volume cover half a century, two wars, three husbands, at least one lesbian lover and numerous friends. Colette devoted her talent to her writing; her genius was reserved for friendships. "I should have long since given myself the pleasure of writing to you about your new book," she told Proust. "If I were to tell you that I burrow in its pages every night before going to sleep, you would think I was merely offering you a hollow compliment. But the fact is, [my husband] gets into bed every night to find me, your book, and my glasses. 'I am jealous but resigned,' he says."

Colette would have been a marvel wherever she was and whatever she did --there was nothing that escaped those lynxlike eyes--but she might not have become a writer. That was the work of her first husband, the infamous Willy, who set her to work writing potboilers, to which he affixed his own signature. That arrangement did not last long, however, and before the century was into its teens, Colette was writing modern classics under her own name. Her confidence, her courage and her determination undoubtedly came from her mother, whom she worshiped, and one of the most poignant passages occurs just after that admirable woman's death: "Mama died the day before yesterday. I don't want to go to the burial. I shall wear no visible mourning, and I am telling almost no one. But I am tormented by the stupid notion that I shall no longer be able to write to her as I always have." During World War I, she went to the front lines to be near her second husband; half crippled by arthritis during World War II, she nonetheless stayed in occupied Paris, endlessly working with what she called her usual "exasperated resignation."

Beneath the gaiety that illumines most of the letters is a profound despair, half mock, half real, at her demanding choice of profession. Like almost all writers, Colette found that simple, clear sentences are the most difficult. "I have now begun my scene . . . for the eighth time," she complained to one correspondent. "I've finished--or I think I've finished," she remarked about another story. "But not without torment! The last page, precisely cost me my entire first day [of vacation]--and I defy you, when you read it, to suspect this. Alas, that a mere 20 lines, without fancy effects or embossing of any kind, should make such demands. It's the proportions that give me the greatest trouble. And I have such a horror of grandiloquent finales." "To live without writing, oh marvel!" she added at another point. But when she was old and someone asked her why she continued to toil so diligently, she seemed shocked by the question. "It's my work," she replied.

Despite her protestations, every line reflects an unquenchable zest for living. As a young woman, she is fascinated with a nest of garter snakes, looking "like so many silk shoelaces." In middle age she embraces a languid October day, which has a "warmth so imperious and so gentle that it seems a form of grace." About the same time she meets the man who is to become her third husband. "The sea and the sand have become my native elements," she exclaims. "So is love. Am I not an abominable creature? (I need you to assure me otherwise.)" In old age, shortly before the liberation of Paris, she watches the passage of an Allied air armada: "This morning the sky was a ceiling of airplanes. How strange it all is, and how eager I am not to die before I have seen it all!"

Such ageless enthusiasm is as enchanting now as it was then. Except for a few snippets, none of these letters has been printed before in English. In his introduction, Phelps, a model translator in all respects, has one further surprise. Thousands of Colette's other letters remain hidden in vaults and boxes, waiting to charm and delight a whole new generation.

--Gerald Clarke

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