In Our Time - Colette

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the outstanding French writers of the twentieth century. The novels of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 - 1954) always had women at their centre, from youth to mid-life to old age, and they were phenomenally popular, at first for their freshness and frankness about women’s lives, as in the Claudine stories, and soon for their sheer quality as she developed as a writer. Throughout her career she intrigued readers by inserting herself, or a character with her name, into her works, fictionalising her life as a way to share her insight into the human experience.With Diana Holmes Professor of French at the University of LeedsMichèle Roberts Writer, novelist, poet and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East AngliaAndBelinda Jack Fellow and Tutor in French Literature and Language at Christ Church, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Colette 1873 to 1954 was one of the outstanding French writers of the 20th century, and uniquely, her novels always had women at their centre, from youth to midlife to old age.

They were phenomenally popular. for their freshness and frankness about women's lives, as in the Claudine stories, but soon also for the sheer quality she developed as a writer. And throughout, she's intrigued readers by inserting herself or a character with her name into the works, fictionalising her life as a way to share her insights into the human experience.

With me to discuss Colette R. Diana Holmes, Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds, Michelle Roberts, writer, novelist, poet, and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Angerner, England and Belinda Jack, fellow and tutor in French literature and language at Christchurch University at Oxford. Belinda Jack, what was Colette's early life like? She had a wonderful childhood and she wrote a great deal about it and wrote it into much

of her writing. She had wonderful parents in many ways, particularly her mother, Cido. Her mother encouraged her in all sorts of ways that were key to her development as a writer. Such as? such as her reading, so there were no restraints on what she read, and she read a great deal of Balzac, which I think you can see in her fiction. But she also had an enormous physical freedom. She grew up in rural Burgundy, in a small village, Saint-Sauveré, en-Puisé. She enjoyed going to the local school.

But it's probably the freedom she had and the relative solitude of much of her childhood that's perhaps most striking. And one reason for that was because she came from a family that was considered slightly grander than most families in the village. Why was that? Well, they had more money, at least until a certain juncture. And she didn't speak the local patois.

She didn't speak the local dialect. And again, her parents' view was that you spoke proper French. So there were various things that set her slightly apart. and that meant that she spent a good deal of time roaming the countryside and one of the lines I love most about her descriptions of her early childhood was one in which she says, A qui vie au chan is a ser de seigneur de seigneur, the mon dieuille de vienne miraculeous and simple.

So something along the lines of if you grow up, if you're able to be in the fields and you use your eyes, then the world becomes memorable. miraculous and simple. What about her father? Are there any other aspects of her childhood that would lead to the writer she became? Well, the interesting thing about her father

who had lost a leg in the Napoleonic campaign in Italy, quite a striking figure and had been retired off and made a civil servant a tax collector. But he was in many ways of frustrated writer himself and he was a great lover of all things scientific. And so along with fiction, of which the family had a fair amount, there were all sorts of encyclopedias and works of non-fiction

about flora and fauna and all sorts of things. And in a way, I think having the influence of a mother who wanted to encourage direct experience, her mother was always saying, regard, regard. You know, there were always things. to be seen exactly and engage with in a sort of sensory way, feel it, touch it, taste it, smell it. And then her father's rather theoretical knowledge of things, he would pull out an encyclopedia and show her a diagram of a fungus,

whereas her mother would take her out into the woods to see a fungus. So she had this sort of double way of seeing the world, the abstracted, so-called scientific way and the immediate way. And I think that, I mean, I don't know if it's too grand to call it a sort of epistocet. but how you know about the world, how you engage with the world, was formed by this very different influence of father and mother. And I gather there wasn't much small talk around the table. Well, I think, yes, at one point she talks about how le vocables hermetic, the hermetic way of speaking, suddenly supersedes the everyday language.

What does she mean by that? Well, what she meant was they would start off talking like most families about, you know, relative trivia. And then her parents would want to engage in a grander conversation. And as a child, rather than feeling frustrated by not understanding the language, and in this, I think this is what makes a writer, Michelle will be able to correct me. But I think as a child, if you love language, even if you don't understand it, you realise that language can take you to places that are unknown. So not understanding language is almost as tempting and intriguing as understanding it. And so at family meals there would be this transition from what she called the language vulgar, not meaning vulgar in the English sense, but simply every day,

this transition from that accessible language to this sort of mysterious language that her parents spoke, which she knew that she would one day have access to, and which had a kind of magic like all things you don't know as a child. Thank you. Diana, Dana Holmes, why did education matter so much, she went to the village school? She did. It would have been much more normal for a middle-class girl in what was then a reasonably affluent family to go to a boarding school, a pensioner, probably run by nuns. But firstly, Cedo was not going to let her beloved daughter, her jewelling gold, as she, her Joyeon-Hour, she called her, disappear for large stretches of time to a boarding school.

school and secondly both parents were Republican and this is the era of the Third Republic, the early days of the Third Republic who introduced compulsory free state education into France in the early 1880s about the same time as in Britain and set up or the village schools a very centralised system of education. So the school that Colette went to was one of the new Republican schools and whilst looking at it from a 21st century perspective, we can see that the fundamental principles of liberty, equality, fraternity, were somewhat selective in that they certainly, to a large extent, excluded women and colonial subjects. Nonetheless, those were the guiding principles of education,

and even though the boys and the girls were separated, and it was, of course, the girls who had a helping of domestic arts in their education, Fundamentally, the core syllabus was the same for boys and girls. And in some ways, it was really quite good. It encouraged, like CEDAW, it encouraged learning through the senses, actually observing. It encouraged clarity of expression and ability to construct an argument. And Colette had, at least according to Claudine at school, to her memories of that period, She had a rather jolly girlhood at school

in terms of female friendships and general seditious wickedness. But she also took a lot from that education, which can be seen in her later work, a very strong work ethic, for one thing, that she always maintained. Obviously her ability to perceive and apprehend and reflect on the world around her.

A love of France, though she was scathing about the sort of pompous rhetoric that accompanied patriotism, she nonetheless remained a proud French woman throughout her life. She was almost pushed into her first marriage with a man much older than she was. But he, he did a long name, but people knew him as Willie, so it's easier to sit with Willie. He ran a sort of school of writers and took their work and signed it and sold them around the place. She married Vili, okay, it was in a sense, there weren't that many options for a 19-year-old girl in a village if she wanted to move out into the wider world, marriage being the obvious one. He was a family friend, that was how she knew him.

Vili, though, I think we have to say, had rather more charms than are apparent in the photographs. He looks like a rather rotund, balding, heavily facially haired gentleman whose powers to seduce a young girl are not at all obvious. but if we look at the evidence of all the very appealing women who did have affairs with him and indeed of Colette's own writing, there was something about him that doesn't come through on the photos. But from Collette's point of view, the interesting thing is that he took her into a milieu in Paris, known as the Demy Mond or the kind of half-world, which was inhabited by writers and creatives and performers and musicians and so on, where writing was a normal thing. And these years at the end of the 19th century in France, certainly,

are also years of the huge expansion of publishing. It's where new printing techniques, the technology of printing, converges with a massive new readership because of literacy going through the roof. And so all of the conditions with which she was surrounded, the milieu encouraged writing. And then, as you said, Vili was the entrepreneur of the literary age. And whilst he was a very adequate music journalist and not incapable of writing, what he actually did was employ a stable of impoverished young, often rather brilliant writers,

to whom he would dole out the different parts of the novel depending on their talents. And then he'd put them all together rather like a production line and produce a novel which would then be published under his own name. So it did take very long to realise that this new young wife rather enchanted his friends and the milieu in which they moved with her tales of schoolgirl days in Saint-Sauver. Can I cut across to Michelle here? The Claudine nobles, as we've been calling them, can you describe what they are and how he, Willie, her husband, encouraged her to write them and then published them under his own name. It was a great success, though. The story that Collette tells us, and I think it's important that whenever she's talking about her own life,

she's telling us a story, which means something quite carefully crafted, is that she bought a lot of exercise books, which were rather like the one she'd used at school. Willie encouraged her, because I think she was a bit bored some of the time, to jot down her reminiscences of schoolgirl life, saying, oh, well, I wouldn't mind if you spice it up a bit. She filled four or five of these notebooks, scribbling away madly. he looked at them and said Oh there's nothing here threw them in the drawer meant to throw them in the waste paper basket

missed put them in a drawer and only sometime later did he take them out again and was amazed oh my goodness there is something here clapped on his hat ran to a publisher I think what happened

was that after that a publisher taking them Willie had already decided that his young wife would be one of his ghosts but that these books had to be spiced up. And there was a lot of salacious interest in France at the time,

I think, about what was thought of as perversion, which included lesbianism. Lesbianism was a kind of sexuality that would be performed in pornography for men to consume. It wasn't really seen, I think, with respect and love at all. So Collette set to, and we don't quite know how much she altered the first Claudine and how much Willie did,

because that manuscript is lost. But the impression we get from what Colette tells us, and again, pinches of salt in every direction, is that she obeyed Willie. She perhaps compromised an original vision to put in the slightly more salacious details about teachers having sexy affairs with each other, girls flirting with teachers, youngish girls such as Claudine, I think she's 16, being gratified and embarrassed and humiliated to be pored by visiting school inspectors.

But it was a very good education for somebody who's writing her first book. I don't think anyone writing her first book will write it just from start to finish without any help at all. We all know that editors are priceless people if they're good editors. And I think we have to give Willie

credit for probably being a very good editor and helping her refine the book in a literary sense to become the bestseller that it did. He took credit for it. His name was on the book. When did they get through to be? that it was her, not him.

I think it's towards the end of the Claudine series. No four, yes. There are four books. We end up, I think, with Claudine liberating herself from the marriage with the older man. After the Claudine books, I think Collette went on to write to Miner books, again, quite sexy tales,

again with Vili's name on. Her first book that she had her own name on was Dialogue de Bette, which is like a play. and it's animals talking to each other. She went on stage. She decided to be a musical person, and she had a double act with an aristocrat

and had a lesbian relationship. And people were more outraged by the fact that it was an aristocrat on stage than the fact that it was a lesbian relationship. There's a wonderful story about the first night of Reve de Jit, Egyptian Dream. Missy, the lover and Collette, are playing out a scenario, It was a very sexy scenario between an archaeologist who discovers a mummy and unwraps the mummy's bindings and windings. And in the end, Collette is revealed in her splendour in a jewelled bra.

We didn't know that Egyptian mummies had jewelled bras, but they did in the Fantesiac. And as you say, Melvin, because the management of the theatre, including Vili, of course, emblazoned the outside with Mrs. Aristocratic insignia and coat of arms, there was an absolute riot, a stampede. that night. Even before Reb de Jit opened, the stage

was pelted by theatre goers with orange peel and tins of fruit juice and theatre programmes and goodness knows what. And of course, Vili loved it. He lapped it up and it was all grist to his mill and wonderful publicity. Belinda and Belinda Jack, she left him. He had many affairs and that might have been one of the reasons

and started to treat herself as a serious writer. And the first work we can talk about is the vagabond in 1910. Where did that take her? La vagabond drew to a large extent on her years as an itinerant performer. And when she started on the stage, and this takes us back to her childhood, she actually decided to opt for mime. And she opted for mime probably because she had a very strong Burgundian accent and felt that with a strong Burgundian accent, she couldn't actually speak on stage and be taken so seriously. This is one explanation. So she went into Mime, which of course

was extremely physical and travelled around France, learned a great deal about the theatre world, about how people very, very different from herself and her family lived. And she really drew on those experiences when she came to write Lavagabond. Does that include moral differences? Yes, absolutely. I mean, a lot of the women that she worked with had paid had men who helped them on their way. Most of the women who worked in that kind of world were very impoverished. She also learned a great deal about disguise. And I think in all her writing,

you have a sense in which she knew how people played parts. I think once you've been on the stage and been in a troop like that, you'll never really altogether yourself again because you know that you are play-acting, that all our lives we're play-acting. And then, as you say, she came to writing La Vagabond, which is a wonderful piece of writing. And that's really when I think she started to believe in herself as a writer,

because you can imagine that, as Michel was explaining, to have your work titillated by someone else and come out under someone else's name must have been extraordinarily sort of damaging to her sense of selfhood. And then I don't know whether Diogenesians. Anna and Michelle agree, but in many ways I think I see her whole life as a quest to be able to voice her own sense of who she is and what matters in the world. Diana, how did she first approach the idea of femininity? Do we see that in vagabond or does it develop later? I think it's there from the beginning. I mean, I think that turning deeply rooted assumptions about sex and gender on their.

head is something that is fundamental to Colette's value as a writer and it's there from very early on. In all kinds of ways, we're in an era where sex and gender are assumed to be one and the same, where a woman is assumed to be very feminine or if she's not, there's something wrong with her and a man very masculine in the most conventional definition of what femininity and masculinity mean. Colette from very early on mixes up the gender. gender attribute, so she has women who are quite strong and independent and robust, even referred to in some cases as virile, men who conversely are narcissistic, may be posturing in an attempt to live up to the masculine role, but are also often quite sensitive and

dealt with it as such. So there's a kind of crossover. Going back to what Belinda said about the music hall, I think the theme of gender, as a kind of musk or disguise is very present right from La Vagabond and even the earlier writings on the music hall on. So you get these really hardworking young women with their hands reddened by housework and their anxiety about where the next meal's coming from, getting up on the stage beautifully costumed as Madame de Pompadour

or a queen or a princess or something and performing femininity in its most extreme and conventional sense. So there's all of that. And then another thing I think is that from very early on, romance and sex, which she once described as the bread and butter of her writing, is always there. But it always has a kind of socio-economic basis. She does always make it clear in her writing

that men hold the legal and economic power. The only case is in her writing where women, a woman, manages to achieve a sort of full agency a sense of themselves as an independent being, is where they have managed to achieve some kind of material independence too, which is not easy. So it may be through performing on stage, as she did,

the options were few, or it may be, and in many cases is, by accepting that their capital in this world is the beauty of their body and their sexuality, and selling that very strategically in such a way as to amass a decent four, like Leia in Cherie, which they can then live on for the rest of their lives. Michelle, Michelle Roberts, where do you see Colette drawing inspiration from her knowledge of women?

That's such a difficult question because I think she's always making things up as well as depending on what she knows. Perhaps we could look at Cherie and we could look at the opening scene where Cherie, the young man who's kept by, by the older woman, Leah, who's been a courtesan in the way Diana was describing, there's this huge bed, and Cherie's getting up because he's got to go out, and Leah's still lounging about. She's still very, very beautiful. But she starts feeling anxious about ageing. And that's a theme that I see running through Collette's work

is the way that in that culture, in which you're only prized for youthful beauty, a woman, her sense of femininity and herself, is going to depend a lot on makeup, good lighting, the right gestures, the right poses. And there's a sense perhaps that Collette herself would catch herself in the mirror and think, oh, that's me, I don't like myself from that angle. Oh, my nose isn't right.

My chin is a little too full. And that's what I sense in the opening scene of Cherie. Leia voluptuous, they've, made love in gorgeous splendour and delight, but nonetheless, she's looking at herself and thinking, am I still pleasing enough, am I young enough, am I beautiful enough? I would imagine, and I don't know for sure, that Collette had those moments. Melinda, can we get to the question of the relationship between her work and her own life? Well, I think this is really, it takes us to the heart of Collette as a writer. And I think the term autophiction was coined in the 1970s to suggest that

writing may always blur these apparent distinctions, the distinction between the fictional and the autobiographical. And I think all Colette's work blurs that distinction. And I think one of the reasons why it blurs it is because Collette's way of writing is Colette. her way of writing tells us about who she is. The way in which she uses language exposes what matters to her about life. So there's a sense in which in all her writing, in her very style, you get a sense of who she is. I mean, I think it was Montaigne who said of his essays that his life was consubstantial with his essays. In other words, to know Montaigne, you only need to read his essays.

And in the same way, I think you read Colette in all the myriad genre. in which she wrote, which included a huge amount of journalism. And the sum of everything she wrote is, in a sense, Colette. And then there are paradoxes. When it's more at the fictional end, there's a lot of dialogue, it's much sparser, it's much less lyrical. When she's at the more autobiographical end, she's much more lyrical, she's much more poetic, she's much more suggestive.

So in a sense, the writing that you might associate, more with the truth about who she was is much more poetic and the writing you might think of as more made up is actually much sparser in its style. Donna, can we look at Break of Day? Yes. So Break of Day is a most unusual book. I think it could be described though the word is never used as a book about the menopause with a remarkably modern agenda.

There's a lot of talk around the menopause at the moment as women try to reclaim it as a real state. in the female life course that doesn't need to be seen as something that has to be hidden or is slightly humiliating in some way. Colette writes about in the break of day notably about that point in a woman's life where the narrative of heterosexual love and romance and sexuality which has been until then very central in her work begins to retreat and she finds then that emerging from that younger period in a woman's life, the world out there beyond it, rather than being impoverished by loss, is unbelievably rich and deserves all the

attention and the energy that she can give it. There's a nice line in Break of Day that is one of the grand banality of the life of a woman, the amour, se retire of the mienne, the maternity is an other grand banality, which we might translate us.

You know, love, one of the great commonplaces of a woman's life is retreating from mine. Maternity is another great common place. And she often had her tongue very slightly in her cheek.

I think she knew how people would take that. But then that, in break of day, that sort of movement is mirrored in the form of the novel itself. So most of the novel is Colette, in inverted commas, the kind of literary version of herself, is there in Provence in a house very near the sea,

thoroughly enjoying the warmth of sun on the skin and the sea and all the colours of the sky and her friendships with local artists and so on. And memories, memories of Cedo, it's in break of day, that it becomes clear. that Cedo as Colette reconstructs her. Her mullah.

Is, in a sense, the model of what Colette herself is trying to become and indeed is becoming. So that's really the central part of the novel. But into this creeps a largely fictional story of a young man who lives down the hill, a rather beautiful young man, who it becomes gradually apparent is enamoured of Colette and would very much like to have an affair with the Colette figure. Vial, he's called. Vial keeps coming into the story, he and a young woman who in her turn is in love with Vial.

But then it's as if Colette, as if the main part of the novel, so the part about Colette's self and her relationship with the world, keeps kind of pushing him out again. So you get a paragraph where Vial comes in and says something or does something and she might describe in some detail in her characteristic reversal,

reversal of the male gaze into a female gaze. She might describe the beauty of his muscles or his body or his skin. And then the text goes back into lyrical evocations of the natural world. And two pages later she might say, oh, of course, I was talking about Vial and goes back briefly to the linear narrative of the sort of would-be romance. And it doesn't last very long because very soon she's back into the main part of the book and the book ends without any Vial in it at all, just with a whole passage about CEDAW and the natural world.

So it's a really wonderful book and most innovative in both formal and thematic terms, I think. Can I jump in there, Diana, and just add that I think the way the book opens is wonderful because it's a letter from CEDAO about her life and about the cactus is going to bloom and therefore she can't possibly come on a visit to Paris. And what's so wonderful about this book is the way it mixes different sorts of writing. So there are these letters from Cedo to Colette. There are musings by Collette on her mother, which are like love letters, reveries.

And I think that's where Belinda absolutely was saying about the poetic and lyrical side with the autobiographical writing. And then you'll get something as prosaic about which wine you're going to have with which dish and fishing it up out of the well. And there are about four, five different kinds of writing, all put together in this novel, with breaks, with gaps, with musical pauses. And I think it's Collette's chedé d'oeuvre, her mistress piece.

I would agree. Michelle, while I'm with you, with you, can you say briefly what she says about ageing? That's been made clear by what's being said. When I read her, I'm always aware of paradoxes and contradictions. So on the one hand, the character of Leia in Cherie, it's about a woman who, in the terms of her culture, is getting past it.

She's 50. still loves having sex with young men, but in that culture, she's passed it. In break of day, she's, I think, relishing what she herself, the character Colette, is calling the menopause and the moment for reflection that it brings and the sense of getting older. And she's toying with desire,

which continues to flourish for men, for their beautiful bodies. A sort of desire aimed at women, too, she can appreciate the beauty of the young women who are lounging around the beach. And she's also conscious of this love or this desire that may be withdrawing from her like a sea going out. But I think one of the jokes about Collette on aging is that she went on having love and sex till late in her life.

She got together with her third husband, Maurice, when she was, I think, 50 or a little bit more. And at the time of writing Break of Day, when she's heroically renouncing sex and love and beautifully invoking, I think, the way that the world rushes at you to compensate even more richly, the beauty of the world.

You know, she's actually whirling about with Maurice and having a really good old time. So I always think Colette's, yes, tongue in cheek, as Diana said, contradictory and contradictory about aging, that it's glorious, it's a loss, it's the moment, it's love, as Floubert said.

Melinda, is there any one paragraph to describe her style? Well, am I allowed to say there's a technique that I think takes us to the heart of her style? And that technique is the use of simile, the way she likens one thing to another. Now, she uses this way of likening one thing to another to make us aware of how bound up different parts of our experience actually are. So, for example, when she's talking autobiographically about her sister in La Maison de Cloudine, which isn't a Clodine novel, she used that title strategically, La Méin de Clodine is a whole lot of reminiscences about her life. And when she's talking about her sister, her sister clearly having been very peculiar, very withdrawn, maybe suffering from some kind of mental condition, she talks about her sister's hair as, like a mal ingress. like an affliction that you cannot cure.

And really she's talking about her sister and whatever it was that was strange about her, which was like an affliction that could never be cured. But she brings it in to describe the young woman's hair and how impossible it was to brush her sister's hair. So her sister's hair is like a maling garisable. And Colette's constantly doing this. She's constantly describing one thing

to suggest something else. She's never explicit. She's never dogmatic. I mean, another example might be when she's talking about dolls plates that she was playing with on the lawn as a child. And she likens the dolls plates to Grand Marguerite, like giant daisies.

And the point is that the daisies are like dolls' plates and the dolls' plates are like daisies. because when you're a child, it's a magical world in which you play and you can put something on the head of a daisy because it becomes a doll's plate. I think this use of simile, this way of blurring what would otherwise be distinctions. I mean, she talks about meat in the butcher's

as being like the pulp of a begonia. What was she thought of at the time? Eventually she got the Pinguangor and Proust praised her very highly, said it, Virginia Woolf, but she'd been on the musicals, and she was a journalist, goodness me. So what did people say about her as a writer? Well, I think I'll give my version and then we can see if you agreed me.

I would say that she stands outside the sort of master narrative of French literature for a number of reasons. And so in the big histories of French literature, the big, you know, the major kind of critics of the age, she was, to be fair, her stylistic abilities were recognised from very early on.

and she was always taken to be, acknowledged to be, a remarkable stylist. So for a long time in French schools, if you had a dictation, which was used very much, you were very likely to get a passage from Collette, which no doubt put generations of French young people off Collette because they associated her with difficult dictations. But she was still considered to be a rather second-rate writer by a large number of, I might say, male critics because they were all male, on the grounds that her themes were frivolous.

And there's a very nice quote in there's a woman called Nicole Wardieu who's written a lovely book on Colette. And she herself remembers growing up in mid-20th century France and being taught what to appreciate in literature. And she describes it as being mind and anguish and nothingness and night were the kind of literature that you were supposed to properly. admire. It was dark, it was neelist, it was serious stuff. So that

to like a writer who wrote about characters called Cherie and Gigi and so on was clearly much too frivolous and she was kind of taught not to like people like Colette. So for a long time I think Colette wasn't taken terribly seriously as a kind of first

rate French writer. I would say it was in the 70s with feminist criticism coming in with a couple of magnificent books in French actually that started off the feminist criticism that she begins to be really seriously considered as a writer. And now in France, she has got all the big marks

of proper esteem and acknowledgement. She's in the Pleiard edition of collected works and so on. Michelle, can we talk about Gigi? Her last novel, she was sitting in a musical and perhaps her most famous... Gigi's interesting, perhaps, for an English audience because it could well be that because of the film,

Collette became a sociable. with that particular novel, Gigi. And I think that's cast of veil over the rest of Collette's works, and a lot of English people just didn't realize that she was a founding mother of modernism, that she invented the French novel, that she invented a female voice in French literature,

which finally had to be taken very, very seriously. Gigi is a problematic novel, and made more so by that film. We get Maurice Chevalier, crooning Saint-Cherbe. for little girls. You think you could get away with it today? Well, I think it would be more difficult because it's a sort of sexualising gaze

of an older man onto a young girl, which we would now resist if we'd say, let that young girl be her wild, amazing self, as Collette wanted young girls to be. The text of Gigi, when it's written in the war, I think, I think that's right. It seems to me like a fairy story.

It's about a young woman who's being brought up by two older women to become a courtisan, they have been. It's an upsetting book for me. I don't like it. I don't like the fairy tale ending in which, oh, you don't have to be a courteousanne after all. This lovely man's in love with you and he's going to marry you. Hooh, end of problem. That story is still very popular in Western culture. It's the basis of subsequent films like Pretty Woman. I find Gigi very difficult. I don't like it as a book. I don't want Collette to be remembered by that novel.

Was her reputation in France less than a reputation abroad? Well, her reputation in France was very high. I mean, when Proust died, many people regarded Colette as the writer who replaced him as France's greatest writer. That reputation, I think, was not transferred into the academy in the sense that in terms of literary critical work, she wasn't given anything like the attention that Proust was given. And that's tragic. So much has been written about Proust. Proust has been translated over and over again. Colette hasn't had that attention. I think that may be changing because I think there is now a realisation. I mean, as Michel said, Gigi, the film didn't do her any good at all. It's one of the least interesting pieces that she ever wrote and the film is weak in many ways. In England, I think maybe if you've had the kind of rather notorious, youth that she had,

the appearing on the stage semi-naked and so on, maybe the English think you can't be a great writer, that there's something about image. And, you know, she invented a kind of makeup that she thought she might be able to market. She had a gymnasium in her home, so she could keep her body in shape.

You know, that's not the English idea of a great writer. She's in a room of one's own, very... Indeed. Looking on a square in London and concentrating. Quite. And having upper middle class colleagues, publisher friends and all the rest of it. And her life was quite different from that. It was a very unusual life.

And she's a very unusual writer. And I think somehow we have to find ways of encouraging people to see the brilliance of her use of words. All it comes down to in a great writer is the use of words. And it wasn't for nothing that Virginia Woolf admired her. Virginia Woolf could see that she was. was a magician of words. Proust cried when he finished Mitsou because he felt the strength of her words. She was immensely popular and she was popular with a female readership. She wrote for women's magazines. She published regularly in women's, she was an agony aunt column briefly with Marie Claire

for some time. And I think that did, apart from the kind of femininity of her writing, for example, the reversal of the gaze and her description of male bodies and so on, which some critic objected to on the grounds that she reduced men to mere jigolos. So I think the same process as certainly happens in Britain did happen in France, despite the slightly different view on personal lives in France. Is there any cynical, anything cynical about the way her reputation accreted? Possibly, I think understandably perhaps she certainly, towards the end of her life, she enjoyed not so much the notoriety, actually the celebrity and the marks of esteem

that did come her way, for example, you know, being a member of the Academy Goncourt and so on, she enjoyed all of that. And as in break of day, she makes it very clear that to have that kind of social power, which is relatively rare in a woman, does change one's sense of oneself and the possibility of different kinds of relationships

and different kinds of living. And Michelle, we're coming to the end now. What aspect of Colette's work do you think will most appeal to a contemporary audience? I think Collette writes with an honesty about the difficulties of being a woman in contemporary culture and that was true for when she was a young woman starting out and it's certainly true now that we need writers who are prepared to be honest about how young women feel and think and that means reclaiming the image of the young woman from anything too sentimental

or too sexualized in a pornographic way. It means inventing a voice that can recognise what Diana was talking about rescuing feminine and masculine as energies inside a young woman and portraying a young woman as much, much larger than literature in the past has always allowed her to be. Finally, Melinda. One thing we might want to emphasise is her subversion of rigid genre, this idea that if you write it has to be a novel, if you write it has to be a short story, if you write it has to be journalism.

It has to be autobiography. And I think it's just very exciting to read a writer who's writing some time ago now, who was already exploring the possibility of abandoning those rigid categories and pursuing ideas, pursuing stories that shift and move and can be reinvented. I think that's very exciting. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Michelle Roberts, Belinda Jack and Dana Holmes, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, it's the temperance movement in Britain in the 19th century,

the campaign for abstinence from alcohol. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to say you didn't say? On the whole gender question, I think, The point should also be made that she's also tremendously sympathetic to boys, men, masculinity, to the difficulty too of living up to what in a very binary system becomes the male role.

So she has these characters who are kind of casualties of patriarchy, who can't make it into that role. And in the case of Cherie, End up actually, you know, dying of it, in the case of Alain, in La at and at retreating into the maternal garden because they can't live out there. So that's one thing that her men are not simply kind of foils against which the women play off. They're also treated very interestingly and unusually. And the second thing is going back to the unusualness

of her style and her writing. And that's how paradox and all the associated parts of speech like oxymoron appear and reappear throughout her work. And in imagery, so Belinda cited some of them that you know you get the shadow of the trees described as as blue as young corn

all kinds of improbable but wonderful images and I think what those images do is they're a constant subversion of a common sensical view of the world they're always opening the world up to a possibility of looking quite differently quite differently

contradictory you know so that they're to do with her subversion of common sensical views of values and morality, but that happening at the level of style. Yeah, I mean, I think following on from that, that also points us to how badly misread she's been because people think, oh, she writes about animals. Oh, she writes about the natural world and prettiness. Oh, she writes about love.

But all these things, you can't write about love without writing about power. You can't write about animals without anthropomorphising. helping us to see what it's like to be human when you watch an animal. All kinds of emotional complexities are written in to these apparently straightforward themes. And I think that is maybe a clue to why she isn't recognized as being the great writer she is, that people have latched on to the superficial theme and not recognized that actually through, that the wonderful thing about writing is it's kind of three-dimensional quality. So you can write about one thing and learn about something really very different.

So some people have criticised her for not being sufficiently political. Well, actually, in a sense, there are huge sways of her writing that are about power, are about class, or about the power of the press. I mean, all kinds of highly political questions are explored, but they're not explored as explicitly and dully and dogmatically as they might be another writer. I'd just like to emphasise something we've all been mentioning anyway,

but it's the power of the female gaze on nature, a kind of greed in Colette, a kind of violence, and that's far away from anything pretty, pretty, or baroque or merely decorative. Cedo apparently used to say, yes, regard, regard, look, look, but she also said, don't touch, don't touch,

meaning don't destroy what you're looking at. So you get an image of Colette kind of eye to eye with that Daisy on the lawn or that bird's beak or that piece of food or that open bottle of wine. And she's cherishing and she's greedy and violent about wanting to possess. And at the same time, she's trying not to possess,

but doing it in language. So that she makes the body of a text the same as this glorious sensual world. She's doing something exceptional. Her love of words is absolutely glorious. And you see that as a child. I mean, there's a wonderful story. about her hearing the word presbyter, a presbytery.

And she thinks a presbytery is the striped shell of a snail. This is what a presbytery is. And she's content with this. And then, of course, there's an awful time when in family conversation it emerges that the local priest lives in a house called the presbyter. And she realizes that the presbytery is actually where the curé lives and not this lovely, striped, shiny shell that a snail lives in. And she talks about sleeping with this word.

She cherishes it to the point where she takes the word to bed and hears it, presbyter. And despite being told that she's, in a sense, mistaken, she decides to create her own presbyter, which is a little den into which she takes all sorts of things that she cherishes from the natural world. And I think that sense of, and we all have a relationship like this with language as children.

But it's knocked out of us. It's knocked out of us by education. It's knocked out of us by this idea that you have to have the correct word. And I think what reading Collette helps us to do is to re-engage with maybe what we think of as a childish way of being in the world. But it's actually the most important way for all of us to be in the world, which is to be attentive, to be respectful, to be aware, to praise the extraordinary world that we're in. and to go on valuing language. I mean, I'm at the moment so frightened by cliche and the way in which so much of the language that's bandied around

is the dead metaphor, is cliche, is what's repeated over and over again on the internet. And we're losing the conjuring power of words to mean something really important. And we have to go on reinvigorating language, revivifying it. if we're going to be true about things and not just parrot language. There's a story that is absolutely on that theme, which is the sick child, L'Enfant Malad, which was turned into an opera by Ravel and Collette

who wrote the words for it, which is entirely about how words, for this sick child who can't actually, you could compare it to Colette, herself when she was stuck in the Palais Royal on her Lirado, on her roughed bed, unable to actually move, but through language and memory and reflection, able to travel endlessly out into the world. And the sick child does exactly that, that words for him, the sound of words,

you know, evoke all kinds of wonderful things. I just reread a bit of it this morning and he's traveling on a way, I'm thinking half in French, on a cloud of lavender. His mother sprays lavender into the room and he sees it as a cloud on which he then rides and goes out and travels all over the surrounding countryside on the back of this cloud.

And it's the words, the materiality of the words. She talked about her reading of Bousaac or Boussac himself as Mont Voyage, my voyage, my travel. And so as a small child, she travelled in her own reading and wants to perpetuate that idea. And I think another aspect of her use of language

is her use of metaphor where I think she's using feelings that you could experience as being somehow internal, mapping them onto the external world and making images out of that connection. And then you see in her text the image that she's created in the outer world coming back inside.

So there's this circular, cyclical relationship with the outside. outside world, and that's beautifully exemplified in the little boy who's ill, because one thing he's doing is using his sense of his own illness and pain and impossibility and delirium to create images that have never before existed. And that's what Belinda's saying. She wants us to do, and I agree with her. That's what we should be doing. We should all be artists in our everyday life. Collette said, look for a long time at what pleases you, but look even longer at what displeases you. And if only people would do that before they start trolling, if only they'd come up

with interesting insults. Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. All right, here we go, O'Tee. Five, six, seven, eight. Dance. It has the power to connect and to entertain. And in a new series for BBC Radio 4 and BBC sounds, I explore the iconic dancers who have been doing just that. Dance, it really, I think, saved my life. Join me, Otima Wusser, as I delve into the lives of the innovators and the

mall breakers who have changed dance forever. Gene Kelly was this working class guy that I just really connected with that. Otimabusa's Dancing Legends on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.