posted on 25 Jun 2016

Claudine’s House by Colette

Late in her life Colette wrote a book called The Blue Lantern, a series of short sketches about her life and how in old age it had shrunk to the small world of her apartment in the Palais Royale, a writing tray propped across her bed, a shaded blue light illuminating the favourite paper on which she wrote. It was a sad but valiant book by a woman who had lived through the Nazi occupation, often in fear that her Jewish husband would be arrested, who was now crippled with arthritis and in constant pain, but also determined that neither loss nor diminishment would overwhelm her.

Much earlier in her life she wrote a stylistically similar book – but a much happier one – called Claudine’s House. It also consists of short sketches, but is a memoir of her own country childhood in the 1880s in Saint-Saveur-en-Puisaye in Burgundy, about a hundred miles outside Paris. In it she writes of her beloved mother, Sido, her father, the Captain, an indomitable one-legged war veteran, her siblings, and perhaps especially of her mother’s house – a big house, surmounted by a high loft, set on a village street which rose steeply so that “the stables and sheds, the hen-houses, the laundry room and the dairy were obliged to huddle round a closed courtyard at the bottom of the slope”. Claudine’s House is now available in an excellent recent translation by Andrew Brown, published by Hesperus Press.

The intensity of the book derives from the fact that Colette is writing at the height of her powers – it was written in the early 1920s – and isn’t concerned merely in assembling a collection of memories. Like Proust, she is writing a book that is also about memory and the power of memory. It is a book about lost time, and the time it seeks to recover – to reclaim and render live and vital again – is a prelapsarian Eden on which Colette would draw for inspiration, comfort and consolation all her life. It is Colette at her sensuous best, writing that supple economical prose which seems at the same time both complex and simple, never over-reaching itself, never falling into empty sentimentalism, capable it seems of capturing any and every fleeting sensation, every half-buried emotion, every nuance of lived experience.

Insofar as the book has a narrative arc, it is a deceptively simple but carefully constructed one. Its short episodes illustrate her mother’s love and “imperious kindness”, village life, the pleasure of animals, the tyranny of children, her own childish desires and fears.

She writes beautifully, heartbreakingly, of Sido’s unquenchable spirit, even in her grief after the Captain’s death. “Having lost the man she had loved deeply and truly,” she says, “she was graceful enough to remain in our presence the woman she had always been, accepting her sorrow in exactly the same way she would have accepted the start of a long, gloomy season in the calendar, but receiving from all sides the fleeting blessings of joy. She continued to live a life swept by darkness and light, bowed under her torments, resigned, changeable in mood and generous, as rich in children, flowers and animals as some fertile kingdom.”

But significantly she never writes of her mother’s death. There is instead a strange, limpid, scarcely noticeable transition in the latter part of the book in which Colette, surrounded by children and cats and dogs and birds and flowers, simply becomes a version of her own mother, and we begin to understand that Colette’s life – her loves, her deepest sadnesses, the profound sensual pleasures that were a signature of all her work – was a life learnt from and lived in tribute to Sido.

Colette’s work was never about the struggle with form or the search for new innovative literary technique. She may have been a modernist in life but on the page she was a traditionalist. But her prose and her aesthetic vision and her sensibilities and steely intellect were nonetheless sophisticated and she deployed them with a kind of grandeur, perhaps even heroism. And no one seems as alive as Colette, or as fully attuned to life’s pleasures and sadnesses, or as able to capture them. Thank God she left us so much to read. Claudine’s House isn’t especially well known – in fact, a first English translation didn’t appear until the early-50s – but anyone who enjoys the particular riches Colette offers will not want to miss it.

Alun Severn

June 2016