336
her watchfulness, although created out of her own sympathy.
manipulated nor destroyed, they become real when they are
vuln~
and they affect us especially when Colette shows them as mean
ar
stupid, grasping or selfish, defiant or childish.
If
Lea smiles to see
Cb&i
"as she loved him most-mutinous but amenable, insufficiently
chaiDei
and yet incapable of being free," Colette is not provoked to denoUDII
or defend her; Lea doesn't suffer from having her feelings revealed IIIIl
analyzed, nor does Colette preen herself on the acuity of her insighta.
Her freedom to observe and to communicate a variety of feelings
an..
out of the distance from which she views her characters: at this
a.
distance, no one is really indulged and no one sacrificed. Thus,
it •
not merely an unrelated aspect of Colette's skill that her charactt.a
have so tangible a physical existence and so distinct a physical awaro–
ness of themselves; nor is it only Colette's sensitivity and her faIIlOUl
style that make her animals and her natural descriptions so vivid.
The
strong physical sense we have of her characters is immediate and
sub–
stantial; the physical exists on its own terms, not as symbolic of some–
thing more inward; the men and women have real bodies, the cats have
fur we can feel. The same sense for the physical reality of hair and
fur
and skin is used to evoke and specify the emotional reality of discre1e
feelings. Just as the animals, the flowers, the storms Colette writes about
do not derive their existence from the displaced feelings of the charac–
ters, so the characters are not swollen into life by Colette's own feelings
about them. Her emotional distance from Lea, from Cheri, from Gigi,
from Julie de Carneilhan, instead of stunting them is exactly what
gives
them life.
Colette's style and her sensitivity are unusual, but rarer still
is
the way she uses them. Some writers, when they are "sensitive," can
alienate us by demanding too much of a sacrifice for sensitivity. The
in·
tense vision that attempts to appraise human life can often be deficient
in the degree to which it is intense in representing its own completeness.
Colette's success with her sensitivity is not of this sort because her
in–
sight claims only a partial not a universal truth. She writes about many
kinds of love and sexual situations, some of them rather unusual, but
we are never exhorted by a willful sensitivity to accept the situations
as final or complete; although the characters involved may have
this
attitude, Colette herself does not.
If
we think, for example, of how
The Cat
might have been handled by other writers, we can see Colette',
grace and skill clearly: a beautiful cat is so important to a Y04Jlg man
named Alain that he gives up his new young wife, Camille, and returns
with the cat to his mother's house (think of Katherine Mansfield
with
