Once my favorite book

Talent, overwhelming talent allows Collette to completely take over the reader's mind and repossess it with the mind of Renee, a Parisian dance hall girl whose heart has been frozen to love's warmth by an early disastrous marriage. Published in 1910, this definitively feminist novel that extols the single life for women, regardless of its cost in loneliness and heartbreak, is the story of a poor, honest -- always brutally so to herself -- and profoundly introverted woman of courage that is exceptional for the age in which she lives.

In lyrical stream of consciousness, we experience an intensely intimate communication with Renee's thoughts and emotions as she reveals details of her home life, the sophisticated relationship she has with male friends in contrast to the maternal one her closest female friend has with her. Renee is a star of a touring performing troupe whose members offer nonjudgmental support to one another. In fact, the nonjudgmental natures universal to all the characters in this book is confirmation of the French character often mistakenly interpreted by some traveling Americans these days that the French are aloof, even rude when, in fact, they are politely disinterested.

Soon, the serene balance of the life Renee has maintained as a wall against the humiliation, pain, and disgust with herself for having married the wrong man out of love-blindness is overthrown when a handsome, youthful, and wealthy admirer seduces her with his sincere charm, innocent (of destructive forces of love), and true devotion introduces himself into her life. Renee is overcome with a roil of and becomes disoriented to her principles. Befuddled by the dread return of passion and, she believes, warped by the unworthiness of her love for Max, Renee, though determined to resist Max, is too beset and succumbs to love's force in a happy idyll.

When the performing company's manager comes to her with the announcement of a six-week tour, Renee vacillates between asking Max to come with her and denying him what he wants as well. Finally, reality and Renee's insecurities assert themselves and are reinforced by her imagination. Picturing upcoming nights in drab hotels, the boring confinement of long train rides, and horrified thoughts of how disenchanting her appearance will be to him when he sees her "en deshabille" she faces facts. For a woman who no longer feels young and made beautiful by love's glow, the imagined terrors are too much. She regretfully sets off alone.

It is these six weeks on tour that she wrestles with herself internally, and through letters she writes to Max, and over the ones he writes faithfully in return, she tries to resolve her conflict about which future life to choose. Will she trust in Max's love and believe she may have the capacity to again give herself in love for a lifetime, or will she return to her small set of rooms in Paris only to wrest herself out of her beloved's arms forever? There, in the dreary rain of a chilly dawn, the reviewer must regretfully depart her company. ( )

Beautifully written but not at all what I expected. I guess that I was thinking it would be something like Gigi; instead, it is the painfully melancholy story of a woman so wounded by her failed marriage that she is struggling to suppress all emotional attachments. ( )

This is the first book I read by Colette. I thought it was witty, inspiring, full of life and personality. One of my favorite sentences already towards the end, on page 211: ' Who is the full-mouthed ancestor who goes on barking inside me with a violence not only verbal but sentimental?'. ( )

Colette based The Vagabond on her own life, the period when she turned to performing on the stage following her divorce from her first husband for his infidelities. She had already written the very popular Claudine series, but as they had been published under his name, she often had difficulty making ends meet.

In the story, her character Renee Nere is working as a 33-year-old dancer, and living alone in a seedy apartment building with other “ladies on their own”, including mistresses and ‘kept’ women. I loved Colette’s descriptions of the dingy dressing rooms at the various music halls, the bantering with fellow performers, and her putting up with the leering crowds as she slinked around in an Egyptian number that had her ending up in a sphinx position, propped up on her elbows (some photos of Colette herself exist in this pose). She was well aware that the compliments she received from men had nothing respectful about them, as they wanted “the same thing, always the same thing.” However, one well-to-do man falls for her in earnest, and begins courting her.

Renee has just been divorced after eight painful years of humiliation, including times when she was asked by her husband to leave their residence so that he could ‘entertain’ one of his other women. After leaving him, she was then subject to whispering and ridicule by those around her whose “most serious argument was: ‘What do you expect, my dear child!’”, and who commented “it’s only now that she’s thought of complaining?”. She has just found her feet on her own, has a healthy distrust for men, and has no interest in her admirer, even mocking him with the nickname “Big Noodle”. However, gradually she begins to soften, and before leaving on a 45-day tour around France, she realizes just how much he means to her. The big question, of course, is whether she will give up her single life and re-marry.

As Judith Thurman says in the introduction, the heroine of this novel “examines her addiction to men with amused detachment, and flirts, alternatively, with abstinence and temptation. Is there love without complete submission and loss of identity? Is freedom really worth the loneliness that pays for it? These are Colette’s abiding questions.” As Colette herself has Renee say in the novel, “there are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison which makes you beat your head against the wall.”

I enjoyed Colette’s writing, which seems very ‘French’, transporting me back to the Paris music halls at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as honest, dealing with conflicting feelings. While she didn’t consider herself a feminist, I find it has a strong, and very real, feminist message. Thumbs up for this one.

Quotes:
On her first husband, a ‘Don Juan’, and his charms on women:
“I met him, married him, lived with him for eight years … and what do I know of him? That he paints pastels and has mistresses. I know, too, that he achieves daily the disconcerting feat of being, for one person, a ‘plodder’ who thinks of nothing but his art; for one woman a seductive and unscrupulous ruffian; for another a fatherly lover who seasons a passing infatuation with a piquant flavour of incest; for still another the tired, disillusioned and aging artist seeking to adorn his autumn with a delicate idyll. There is even the woman for whom he is, quite simply, an unchartered libertine, still vigorous and as lecherous as could be desired; and finally there is the silly little goose, well brought up and deeply enamoured, whom Adolphe Taillandy taunts, torments, spurns and takes back again with all the literary cruelty of an ‘artist’ in an society novel.”

The chapter when her admirer and a friend take her into the country (leading to the admirer’s first kiss, somewhat bungled) is very well written. I loved this snippet:
“’It smells good,’ says the Big-Noodle suddenly, sniffing the air. ‘It smells like it does at home.’
I shook my head: ‘No, not like your home, like mine! Hamond, what does it smell like?’
‘It smells like autumn,’ says Hamond in a weary voice.
Whereupon we said no more and stood still, gazing up at a rivulet of sky imprisoned between very tall trees, and listening to the liquid call, clear and quavering, of a blackbird defying the winter, that came to us through the living, whispered murmur that rises from a forest.”

Lastly this erotic scene, when she finally does kiss him:
“Oh! … suddenly my mouth, in spite of itself, lets itself be opened, opens of itself as irresistibly as a ripe plum splits in the sun. And once again there is born that exacting pain that spreads from my lips, all down my flanks as far as my knees, that swelling as of a wound that wants to open once more and overflow – the voluptuous pleasure that I had forgotten.
I let the man who has awakened me drink the fruit he is pressing. My hands, stiff a moment ago, lie warm and soft in his, and my body, as I lie back, strives to mould itself to his.
…
Full of pride, my friend gathers me up in his arms as though I were a bunch of flowers, and half lays me on the divan where he rejoins me. His mouth tastes of mine now, and has the faint scent of my powder. Experienced as it is, I can feel that it is trying to invent something new, to vary the caress still further. But already I am bold enough to indicate my preference for a long, drowsy kiss that is almost motionless – the slow crushing, one against the other, of two flowers in which nothing vibrates but the palpitation of two coupled pistils.
…
Anxious to arrange my hair and see what my new face looks like, I took up the hand-mirror, and it makes me laugh to see we both have the same sleepy features, the same trembling, shiny, slightly swollen lips. Maxime has remained on the divan and his mute appeal receives the most flattering of responses: my look of a submissive bitch, rather shame-faced, rather cowed, very much petted, and ready to accept the leash, the collar, the place at her master’s feet, and everything.” ( )