Tag: Rachel Careau

A walk on the wild side: The Pure and the Impure by Colette

Colette’s The Pure and the Impure opens in an opium den in Paris sometime during what would come to be known, looking back through the veils of nostalgia, as the Belle Époque. Our narrator, also named Colette, arrives, not as a participant but as a writer intent on conducting a little research. Perhaps, it is implied, for novel.

Fully prepared to be bored, I settled down on my own little mattress, lamenting the fact that the squandered opium smoke rose thickly to the skylights. There it reluctantly came to rest, and its dark, appetizing fragrance of fresh truffles and burnt cocoa gave me patience, a vague hunger, optimism. The muted red color of the veiled lights pleased me, as did the white, almond-shaped flames of the opium lamps, one close by, the other two disappearing like will-o’-the-wisps, far off, in a sort of alcove tucked under the balustraded gallery.

She describes the night as it passes, with a careful attention to the sights, sounds and scents, but all the while she holds herself apart from those indulging directly in the smoke. Her words carry the promise that all manner of decadent secrets may be revealed in the pages to come and, as the narrative progresses, she does go on to discuss sexuality, gender, and the dynamics at play between men and women, speaking through her alter ego with a frankness that is fresh and at times startling. But, as in the opium den, an element of her own experience is always held apart, even contradicted by the attitudes she later expresses. And that complicated dance that both reveals and conceals is one of the reasons that this novel-that-is-not-quite-a-novel is so very engaging, as Rachel Careau’s carefully referenced and sensitively rendered retranslation demonstrates so clearly.

Originally published in French as Ces plaisirs in 1932, and then, after considerable revision, in 1941 under the author’s preferred title, Le pur et I’impur, Colette’s unconventional text was met with mixed responses. Its subject matter was salacious, no doubt upsetting some, but its structure—a series of portraits of people she has known, or known of, sometimes identified directly and sometimes referred to by pseudonyms or initials—lacked the typical narrative flow of a novel. Was it a memoir? Or a collection of gossipy accounts of past friends and lovers? Opinions diverge. However, for Colette herself, and for many of her readers, it may be her finest literary achievement. By turns oblique and unguarded in its revelations, it perhaps comes closer to an autobiography than the memoirs she would write, but it reads as something slightly different. Autofiction disguised as commentary? Whatever you call it, The Pure and the Impure pulls back the curtains on an unspoken world of sexual adventure as it existed more than a century ago. Colette introduces us to several self-styled, yet bitter, Don Juans, speaks of the companionship she found among a group of gay men, examines the nature of lesbian desire, and explores transmasculine cross gender expression in a manner that feels strikingly contemporary today.

Bisexual herself, Colette had many lovers, both male and female, during and between the first two of her three marriages, and was surrounded by a number of extravagant lesbian and gay personalities. She also appears in photographs wearing men’s clothing and confesses to having, at least in her younger years, an internal masculinity, a “mental hermaphroditism” that she wished she could escape. She speaks about how tipping the balance between a woman’s public sex and her concealed sex makes her so masculine that she unnerves a man. Such a woman’s domain, then, is that of other women:

How timorous I was, how womanly beneath my shorn hair, when I was pretending to be boy! . . . “Who will consider us women? Well, women.” They were the only ones who weren’t taken in. Under the cover of such insignia as a pleated shirtfront, a stiff collar, sometimes a vest, always a silk pocket square, I frequented a vanishing world, on the margins of all worlds. If mores, bad and good, haven’t changed in twenty-five or thirty years, class consciousness, by its suppression, has gradually undermined the demoralized sect I am speaking of, which tried, trembling with fear, to exist beyond the reach of hypocrisy, its breathable air.

In this short passage, Colette moves from describing her ability to pass within this community of women who enjoy masculine attire and activities, to what turns into a rather sad portrait of an individual she calls “La Chevalière.” She describes her as a woman with “the strange appearance of a handsome man” who so deftly and stubbornly straddles the gender line that she is unable to form lasting relationships with women and ultimately fits in nowhere. Colette based this character on a well-known real woman, Mathilde de Morny, a former lover of hers, but it is apparent here and later in the novel, that she questions if two women can ever truly be very happy in a loving intimate relationship if “one of the women shifts toward being what I call a pretend man.” Thus, if “La Chevalière” can be seen as an early depiction of what we now refer to as a transgender man (and as a trans man myself, I would accept that perspective), it is not an entirely positive one. Clearly Colette is still nursing some baggage from her five year relationship with the inspiration for her character who, to no surprise, did not receive the depiction well. Such is the contradictory tendency that runs through this book.

For a writer who tackles sexuality in an open and seemingly unapologetic manner, the attitudes Colette expresses towards lesbians, and feminist ideas, is not as progressive as one might expect. In The Pure and the Impure, she looks back to the turn of the nineteenth century to find her ideal image of love between two women. Her portrait of the “Ladies of Llangollen,” Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who escaped the expectations of their aristocratic upbringings and retreated to the Welsh countryside where they lived together as a couple for fifty-one years is detailed. Colette carefully pores through the journals of Miss Butler, the older of the two women (unaware that Sarah also left writings), delighting in the bucolic pleasures of their days, and zeroing in on indications of their physical intimacy, such as the mention of “our bedside”:

English readers, more severe and more depraved than I, may consider this proof, but proof of what? Envious of so unshakable an affection, they assume that these two loyal maiden failed to remain pure—but what do they mean by pure? I have a bone to pick with those who believe that people aren’t being indecent when they stroke a young cheek, as warm and fresh as a velvet-skinned peach; but I their palm cups, squeezes, and weighs the pink breast as it would the peach, like it umbilicate, we must blush, cry out in alarm, sully the assailant . . . How hard virtuous people find it to believe in innocence!

Of course, as one reads this chapter, with its extensive quotes from Miss Butler’s diary, and Colette’s admitted obsession with certain passages filled with tender expressions of love and affection, it is easy to question whether her nostalgia for a time of a simpler, less flamboyant expression of love—lasting love—between two women says more about her own conflicted notion of purity than anything.

That is, perhaps, the real question at the heart of The Pure and the Impure. As a novel, it unfolds as a series of reflections that Colette is directing at her audience—that is, her reader. There is a conversational tone to her prose, the frequent use of ellipses creating a sense that she is almost feeling her way through her narrative, as, in manner, she is. There is a sensuous physicality to her writing. As Careau says in her Translator’s Note:

[. . .] Colette’s work, rarely cerebral, constantly foregrounds the body, whose intelligence she recognizes through her own experience: “It is my body that thinks,” she writes in La retraite sentimentale. “It’s more intelligent than my brain. It feels more subtly, more completely than my brain. When my body thinks . . . everything else falls silent.”

Yet her language is, in fact, controlled and precise, even—perhaps especially—when she is being pointed in her observations and recollections. She tends toward a certain economy of words, but her images can be very intense and she delights in rare and scientific words. And, of course, because most of her work has autobiographical underpinnings, it is always tempting to seek  the true Colette out in her novels and stories.

With this new edition of The Pure and The Impure we have a welcome  opportunity to experience (or re-experience) Colette’s fascinating meditation on the nature of men and women, sex and sexuality, through Careau’s attentive and sensitive translation, supplemented by extensive and detailed, yet unobtrusive, endnotes. Drawing on her own experience as a dancer, Careau describes how the musicality and discipline of ballet helped prepare her for a writer like Colette, even if she might not have realized it when she first encountered her work (her translation of Cheri and The End of Cheri was published in 2022). In her Note, she makes a very powerful statement about the role of discipline in translation:

Translation demands the dual discipline of close reading and careful writing: an attentiveness to the nuances of meaning of individual words (and to the nuances of their meaning for a particular author), to the repetition of words across a text, and to the order of words and phrases and how it causes meaning to unfold in a sentence; an alertness to tone, and its slightest shifts; a sensitivity to the sound, the music of the language. Translating Colette also requires the discipline of a researcher, in order to track down the rare words that she delights in: classical and literary usages, technical and scientific terms, contemporary slang and argot, obscure regionalisms, neologisms.

Her discipline is well rewarded in bringing all the unique qualities of Colette’s prose into focus. This is an endlessly intriguing work containing complex layers of fact, fiction, and even a little fancy. But, to read The Pure and the Impure today, from the perspective of present (and increasingly politically volatile) attitudes toward the LGBTQ community, we can appreciate how groundbreaking the book was—and how the kinds of contradictions Colette ultimately expresses about sexuality, her own and that of others, still complicate our attitudes today. Plus ça change. . .

The Pure and the Impure by Colette is translated from the French by Rachel Careau and published by W.W. Norton.

You who have loved me: Chéri and The End of Chéri by Colette (A new translation by Rachel Careau)

“My poor Chéri . . . It’s strange to think that in our loss—for you of your spent old mistress, for me of my scandalous young lover—we have lost the most honorable thing that we possessed on earth . . .”

It might surprise many English speaking readers to learn that writer, journalist and actress Colette was one of the most important literary figures in twentieth-century France, second only to Proust. Beautiful, resourceful, and sexually liberated, known for her liaisons with women and younger men, her persona may seem to overshadow her talent even though her better known contemporaries held her in very high esteem. And, of course, there is the matter of her gender and the name she ultimately chose to use which, contrary to expectation is not a diminutive but rather her last name. She was born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in 1873, would be the first woman elected president of the Académie Goncourt and, upon her death in 1954, she was given a state funeral. Yet if, as Lydia Davis suggests in her Foreword to the recently released edition of Chéri and The End of Chéri, Colette has not generally been afforded the respect she enjoyed in her native country, that may begin to change thanks to Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of two of her best loved works.

In her extensive and informative Translator’s Note, Careau discusses the unique qualities of Colette’s language and exposes the challenges of preserving the taut beauty of her prose:

what becomes most apparent to the reader of her work in the original French is its extreme and seemingly effortless economy: it contains no excess, no ornament, nothing beyond the essential. Her sentences can feel skeletal, the flesh carved away to convey their meaning with the fewest possible words. A master of concision, subtraction, condensation, renunciation, she is always trying to do more with less: “You become a great writer,” she states, “as much through what you refuse your pen as through what you grant it.”

This economy is difficult to capture without the temptation to fluff the pillows a little, correct her punctuation, fill in missing conjunctions, relative pronouns and even invent adjectives so as to keep her language from appearing too stiff—a tendency that marred earlier translations. But then one risks losing the spirit that animates her work. At once ornate and lean, her sentences flow unhindered by unnecessary clutter. Fond of ellipses, she paints small details with carefully selected words, side glances and intimations allowed to just drift unfinished into the air. Her ear for dialogue, both spoken and unspoken, is finely tuned, sharp and sharpened with complex emotion and barbed intensity. Chéri and its companion novel, The End of Chéri offer, in Careau’s crystalline translation, a welcome opportunity to fully appreciate the power of Colette’s literary talent.

Chéri, originally published in 1920, famously revolves around the affair of an aging courtesan, Léa, and her lover, affectionately called Chéri, a vain and spoiled young man nearly twenty-five years her junior. Set in the final years of the Belle Epoque, amidst the acquired (and sometimes feigned) luxury of the leisured class—not the uppermost layer of society but the strata composed of courtesans, former prostitutes and dancers—hers is not a work of social commentary. Colette’s tapestry features the intricacy and dynamics of human interaction: affection, obsession, deception, hostility, even tedium. She was a keen observer, not only of people, but of plants and animals. Small dramas play out on the page, but the magic lies not so much in what is happening as in how it is depicted in her precise, spare elegant prose.

Chéri has a languid pace, despite the inevitable romantic dissolution that lies at its core. It opens with the petulant, self-absorbed Chéri, playfully donning Léa’s pearls while she observes him from the depths of her bed. They have, at this point, been together for six years although she has known him since he was a small boy as he is the son of a long-time friend and fellow courtesan. He is twenty-five, while she is nearing her fiftieth birthday. The dynamics of their relationship are dissected, dramatized in intimate detail. Colette zooms in on the hint of a smile, the arch of a brow, the subtle movement of a limb. Repeated images—the cast of light, mirrored reflections, passing aromas—serve to heighten the tensions simmering beneath the surface of every thought or interaction. Chéri is aware of his beauty, terrified of losing it, suspecting perhaps that little lies beneath the surface. Léa is also conscious of the creeping ravages of time but her confidence and security runs deep after a lifetime of carefully leveraging her charms:

She stood up, wrapped herself in a dressing gown, and opened the curtains. The midday sun entered the cheerful, overly decorated pink room whose luxury was dated, double lace panels at the windows, rosebud-pink faille on the walls, gilded woodwork, electric lights veiled in pink and white, and antiques upholstered in modern silks. Léa would not relinquish either this cozy room or her bed, a considerable, indestructible masterpiece of copper and wrought iron, severe to the eye and cruel to the shins.

It has always been inevitable that Chéri would one day be expected to take a suitable bride, but when that day arrives suddenly and sooner than either he or Léa anticipated, neither one is prepared for how it unsettles their personal and emotional  equilibrium.

The End of Chéri, conceived of separately and published six years later in 1926, is essentially a companion piece and completion of what can be understood as one work. It is now 1919, six years after the setting of Chéri, and war has changed everything and everyone except, tragically, Chéri himself in spite of his time in the trenches. Still beautiful, his beauty will no longer suffice. His young wife, Edmeé, to whom he was needlessly cruel, is now more than capable of holding her ground. The only character who insists on calling Chéri by his proper name, Fred, she is managing a hospital for wounded soldiers, clearly in love with the head doctor, and together with Chéri’s mother, managing the family fortune. Unable or unwilling to take up any meaningful labour, Chéri drifts through the days, looking for an anchor in past connections and spiraling deeper into depression.

The End of Chéri has a darker, even tighter tone. Physical descriptions can be brutal, grotesque—and often wryly funny—filtered through the thoughts of the characters, revealing more about the viewer than the viewed. Chéri is at once the central and increasingly isolated figure. New power dynamics are revealed, playing out between the many female characters who are strong, independent, even eccentric. Likewise, the fabrics, the colours, the floral displays, the household routines evoke an atmosphere that drives Chéri to become more bitter and defiant. Léa, in their shocking reunion, quickly diagnoses him:

 “You have altogether the look of someone who suffers from the sickness of the times. Let me speak! . . . You’re like all your fellow soldiers, you’re looking for paradise, eh, the paradise that’s owed to you, after the war? Your victory, your youth, your beautiful women . . . You’re owed everything, you were promised everything, well, it’s only fair . . . And you find what? A nice ordinary life. So you become nostalgic, spiritless, disappointed, depressed . . . Am I wrong?”

“No,” Chéri said.

Because he thought he would have given a finger off his hand to make her shut up.

The impact of the war is present throughout this novel, but always beneath the surface, a tribute to Colette’s impeccable restraint. The characters, their appearances, conversations and mannerisms hint at how great a shift has occurred. The world will never be the same, and, sadly, some of the most profoundly wounded victims are those who were untouched in battle.

Chéri and The End of Chéri is my first introduction to the work of Colette and I am grateful to have made my acquaintance with her through this attentive and astute translation. I came to know of Rachel Careau through her translations of another very different and yet very distinct French author, Roger Lewinter. With this release, English language readers finally have the opportunity to appreciate the economical beauty of Colette’s prose, her strong, independent female characters and her ability to expose the timeless vulnerabilities and strengths of the human condition.

Chéri and The End of Chéri  by Colette is translated by Rachel Careau with a Foreword by Lydia Davis and published by W. W. Norton.

The enigmatic fiction of Roger Lewinter: Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things

It is unusual to come to the end of a book and be completely at a loss as to how to write about the reading experience one has just had, and yet feel compelled to make some sort of attempt, however indirect or uncertain that might be. And that is exactly how I find myself now, having just finished Roger Lewinter’s novella The Attraction of Things. Together with Story of Love in Solitude, a very brief collection of three short stories, these two recent releases from New Directions (translated by Rachel Careau) serve as an English language introduction to the French writer and translator’s beguiling, meditative, and sometimes simply perplexing, fiction.

lovesolitudeThe latter volume, originally published in 1989, is one of the most unusual and strangely captivating books I read all year. The stories are focused and contained, reading almost like prose poetry, but they offer a taste of Lewinter’s idiosyncratic unspooling sentences that can wind around seemingly unrelated clauses before finding their way, from beginning to end, by such a circuitous route that one often feels inclined to retrace the pattern back to its source. It is an experience akin to untangling a long garden hose, or, more appropriately, following the designs of a richly decorated tapestry such as the Kashmir shawls that Lewinter’s narrator—whose writing and translating projects mirror the author’s so directly that the line between fiction and memoir appear to blur—obsesses over in the story “Passion” and throughout the course of the longer novella. Even attempting to write about Lewinter’s prose invites a tendency to add divertive notes, set off with dashes, not entirely unlike the style he employs.

See? Already it feels as if I am spinning my wheels. The reward though, especially in the shorter pieces, lies in the attention to detail and emotion, often of a detached or self-reflective nature, that is granted the events, objects or individuals with whom the narrator is engaged. The simplest story, the opening titular piece of Story of Love in Solitude, lasts for less than three pages and concerns the persistent presence of a spider. It captures so acutely the type of everyday irritation that quickly turns to a sense of loss when the routine is broken and an odd affection is realized after the fact.

athingsThe other two stories are more complex in the attractions and obsessions they entail and introduce characteristics that are present—and I want to say, more inclined to cause a measure of frustration—throughout the novella: Lewinter’s tendency to use explicit dates and translation projects to track time while he dismantles and reconstructs the chronological (in)consistencies in his stories—one which involves an epic battle against insect infestation and fate to save two camellias, and the other, which traces the protagonist’s drawn out and ultimately fruitless obsession with a young man he observes in the market. What makes these set-pieces work is the way that, for all his musing and meandering, Lewinter writes with an almost symphonic intensity, building tension into his narratives, and bringing each one to a charged conclusion. These small discursive journeys relate ordinary events that are oddly familiar, sensitive, and moving.

The same forces are at play in The Attraction of Things, which is the earlier of the two works, originally published in 1985, and, again, the overlap of characteristics between the narrator of the novella and, at the very least, the literary career of the author, create the sense that this is one voice, an alter-ego or fictionalized version of Lewinter himself. As he states, Attraction is:

…the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him—beings, works, things—and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where passion strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward that passion.

The path that this being follows is one that appears to be characterized by an attempt to avoid deep emotional engagement with people by allowing objects—78 RPM records, Kashmir shawls, porcelain collectibles—to distract him. Against this pursuit of things, his mother and father become ill and eventually die, he allows a relationship with a woman to drift away, and lets a man take advantage of him. His passivity approaches denial of mortality, commitment, and sexuality. The flea market and the lure of things is a refuge. So too, is his work, which primarily involves immersing himself in the words of others.

Lewinter, the author and his narrator alike, has translated Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser, and Rilke among others. But of special significance perhaps, is his deep association with the work of Georg Groddeck (1866-1934), the German physician widely regarded as a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine. If nothing else, this presents a possible context for understanding the manner in which the protagonist and his parents each face, and deal with, illness and physical ailments. There is a strong self-determination and stubbornness shared by the three family members that is, at the same time, a source of frustration to the son in his own distracted state. It is also interesting that Lewinter—separating him from his narrator is becoming redundant in this context—mentions writing about the connection between Bosch and Groddeck in an essay on paradise in psychoanalysis (Groddeck et Le Royaume millénaire de Jérôme Bosch—1974). Immediately this adds a new dimension to the obsession with Kashmir shawls—the colours and designs integrating cardinal points, black hearts, and angels—that runs throughout the novella and resurfaces in the later story “Passion.” To what extent are the textiles collected, cherished and hung on the walls an attempt to reflect a dream of paradise? But, most critically, when winding one’s way through the elliptical sentences that stretch on and on, often for a page or more, the narrator’s absorption with the work of a man who envied Freud’s discovery of psychoanalysis offers a way to “read” Lewinter’s distinct style of writing.

Any quotation from either book that captures a fragment of one of the gloriously nested sentences, would fail to do justice to the effect, or serve as a necessary sample for discussion, so permit me one longer, complete quote (by happy coincidence, this passage, which I selected as I was reading, happens to end a longer excerpt that was reproduced on Lit Hub):

The health of my father, since the previous September, had been deteriorating, the drugs having less and less control over the tremor that was now paralyzing him in spurts, disjointing his day with gaps to which, not wanting to hear of another hospitalization, he reconciled himself, and which I likewise trivialized; while, returning after the three months’ interruption occasioned by Antigone to Le chercheur, I finished the word-for-word translation in June, to find myself confronted with the difficulty unresolved, since I still didn’t know how to convey in French what showed through in the German, in my version rendering, as I was aware, only a state of amazement, not, in its magnetization, the torrent  of a life; and, the more I advanced, the more I was losing my way, when, on August 13, I had to have my father admitted, despite his refusal—“because you die there”—, to Thônex so that they could try, by gradually changing his medication, to stabilize his condition; but it was the balance found upon the death of my mother, three years earlier, that was undoubtedly slipping away.

Lewinter’s narrative clearly fits into the broad category of stream of consciousness writing. It is not as loosely unformed as some variations; the insertion of exact dates and concurrent writing and translation projects provides a structural formality and logic to the account. Not being well acquainted (yet) with the pioneers of the nouveau roman, I am not as well equipped as another reviewer (see John Trefry here) might be to draw refernces from that direction—my reading is necessarily instinctual and informed by the spaces where I related with particular poignancy to the larger story. The way the narrator’s mind wanders is reminiscent of the way we talk to ourselves and allows him to capture something somewhere between unarticulated thoughts and formal discourse. This is the private debate, the ongoing perseveration, the way we justify our obsessions with objects or people, our impatience with others—especially with those closest who invariably raise the most complex emotions—and any other shortcomings we care to catalogue and excuse as we structure our own internal narratives. As we articulate ourselves into being.

As the narrator’s equilibrium is slowly undone, that is, as his father’s deteriorating health challenges him to break down his own defenses, he is forced to finally open himself up and truly embrace the man he must admit he has never really understood. Father and son, mirrors in more ways than either wishes to recognize, are drawn, both resisting the pull, into a full acknowledgement of their affection for one another. And what is the first thing our narrator does to mark this breakthrough? He looks for an object to commemorate the occasion. There is constant interplay between emotional exhilaration and exhaustion that drives The Attraction of Things, at the level of the sentence and across the text as a whole, that to no small degree, contributes to the state in which a reader emerges at the end. In the span of 79 small pages one has experienced something at once fantastic and draining.

Not unlike a session on the analyst’s couch. And very much like the experience of trying to untangle and make sense of our own lives.

Lewinter is not going to be for everyone. If I was uncertain in the early chapters of Things after loving the smaller pieces in Story of Love, I became increasingly engaged as the father’s health deteriorated, in part because there were echoes of my own father’s decline and death over the first six months of this year. At times I almost had to laugh out loud at the older man’s stubborn resolve and refusal to give in to a weakening, crumbling body—my father was exactly the same. Now, having taken the time to write about this novella, I have come to respect and marvel at what it demonstrates about how an essentially ordinary, even mundane story can be told—no, orchestrated—and granted an operatic arc that creates an experience a reader will have a hard time shaking. There is a lot in this slender volume.

In the end, I am not certain I have articulated or elucidated anything especially profound about these two small books. To date, there is one more piece of fiction in Lewinter’s oeuvre and, as I understand it, Rachel Careau is still dedicated to translating his works. I know I will be watching for more.

Story of Love in Solitude and The Attraction of Things are published by New Directions. Each book is bilingual, with the complete French text following the English.