334
children of the bourgeoisie
(The Cat),
or courtesans
(Cheri),
or
tit
children of courtesans
(Gigi, The Last of Cheri),
or divorcees
(lulil
de Carneilhan).
The lives of such people may touch upon politics cr
large affairs, but they are not involved in problems of the intellect,
or conscious of the implications of their actions and desires; yet
theJ
are not primitive or simple. Colette's world is not one that can
be
mapped out, shown in its ideology or the massing of its forces, in
the
steadiness of its legend or the angle of its vision. The characters do Id
represent points of view, their situations do not stand in any very clear
relation to the crisis of French society or of European culture;
their
lives are not symbolic nor are their figures mythic, and it is a questilll
whether their values or manners can satiify the prevailing Americaa
hunger. Colette is really as different as a writer can be from the
imagt
our demands create.
Perhaps there was something fortuitous about her birth in 1871
Had she been born a decade or a generation later, we may feel every–
thing would have been different and more difficult, and yet
that
doesn't account for our interest in her. Nor does it explain her achieV&
ment; we may still wonder how it was done, what strength was
re–
quired to be as she is and was, what faith, what standards, what
re–
silience. Although it might be hard to think so, Colette was probably
fortunate in the beginning of her career, when writing was something
of a duty or trade, a matter of being locked in a room for four hoUD
to write at Willy's command. Her literary career did not begin
in
a
turmoil of expression and rebellion and sensitivity from which
she
might not have escaped; not that she remained aloof from the stresses
of the creative life, or ignorant of them-but only perhaps that
she
learned early to separate problems of sensitivity and problems of liter–
ature. Colette's later, more capable work- rather than the Claudine
books-is the ambiguous tribute to that apprenticeship, grim and shabby
though it may have been in other ways. Its perversities, however, should
not lead us to a wrong view of its value for Colette. Given the circum–
stances of her marriage, the work she did for Willy, and especially
the
fact that he passed off her first work as his, writing was probably
more
restrictive and anonymous than it was personal or liberating; it was not
likely to suffer in the same degree that Colette herself suffered. Life
provided sufficient human complications, but she never found it neces–
sary to renounce writing in order to regain her personality, as Katherine
Mansfield did. It was not only Colette's good fortune to precede
that
generation and to be exempt from the problems of its women
writers,
for by the time she found herself in their situations, she was already a
