We sat down with New Yorker writer and National Book Award-winning biographer Judith Thurman ahead of her Roundtable seminar on Colette’s Chéri and The End of Chéri to discuss the enigmatic, mordantly funny, taboo-flouting French writer — her inherent contradictions and dark humor, what Americans often miss when they read her, and why she still has the power to surprise us.
You’ve written that Colette’s best work is revolutionary without seeming to be. What do you mean by that?
Colette is often associated with nature and food and love and motherhood — “women’s page” subjects. It’s a real misreading of her. She’s someone who writes subversively about the primal depths of human nature and desire, and the paradoxes of gender. And she’s quite pessimistic — her stories do not have happy endings. She’s a much darker writer than people allow.
For American readers, Colette is something of an enigma and a contradiction — a major 20th century writer who is sometimes misunderstood or overlooked entirely in the US. What do American readers get wrong about Colette?
I think American readers are most familiar with her best-known and most atypical short story, Gigi — perhaps only in the film version — and don’t go much further. I don’t think her fiction or her great journalism are widely known. And I don’t think Americans can appreciate her revolutionary trajectory. In 1900, she invented the first modern teenager, as we understand the term, in the heroine of her first novel, Claudine. Claudine wasn’t a rom-com ingénue. She wasn’t an innocent country schoolgirl, despite her guise as one. She was a troubled and transgressive young woman. She acted on her desires — for both sexes — sometimes aggressively. She didn’t conform to feminine stereotypes. And she experienced some of the pathologies of adolescence — the hungers, the shames, the angst, the body issues and self-harm — that are common among teenagers today. She’s a character in transition, in all senses of the word, and she embodied a new notion of adolescence that hadn’t existed historically.
Cheri and The End of Cheri cut to the core of gender dynamics in a romantic relationship from a century ago. How do these novels remain so relevant to our culture’s ongoing understanding of gender and love in 2022?
Well, the subject in both cases is forbidden desire. Forbidden desire takes different forms depending on the era, and right now there’s a whole new set of forbidden desires in our culture having to do with transsexuality and gender. On those subjects, Colette was prescient. She writes about the way that gender assignments, which are conventionally absolute, obliterate nuance and punish otherness. She writes about the faulty primal attachments that infants form with their first caregivers, and the dramas of domination and submission, of merging and separation, that subsequently play out in romantic relationships. The power dynamics of a relationship are a microcosm of the power dynamics in a society. How do we fill the void that our parents left? How do we satisfy our insatiable hungers? What do we do with our helplessness and confusion? How do we claim our rightful identities? So Colette, in that sense, is a depth psychologist. Those depths, however, generally resist translation into artful language. And she is one of the great prose stylists. Her sentences have extraordinary purity while acknowledging the impurity of human feeling. And at a moment when gender is such a nuclear subject, she’s an important voice to rediscover.
You wrote perhaps the definitive contemporary biography of Colette. What was the single biggest surprise that you encountered while researching and writing Secrets of the Flesh?
In any biography, the greatest challenges are the paradoxes in your subject’s character. Colette was a sexual revolutionary who lived publicly with a person whom we would now regard, and who would probably regard themselves, as a trans man — her lover the Marquise de Morny. But she disavowed feminism. “The feminists deserve the whip and the harem,” she told a journalist, in 1910. Her third husband was a Jew, yet she had the deeply bred anti-Semitism of her culture. She idealized her mother, at least in prose, but she herself was a terrible parent. I was a single mother of 42 when I began writing the biography, and I was appalled by her maternal callousness. “The old boy of 40,” as she called herself, when her daughter was born, protected her work life and her love life and her freedom from the demands of an infant, including an infant’s entitlement to love and holding. And many years later, when her daughter announced she herself was a lesbian, Colette disapproved. Her sympathies, in fact, are often with the men in her work, whom she thought of as “the weaker sex.” “Men are terrible,” Colette once said, then she hastened to add, “Women too.” But her work is able to contain and to explore these contradictions without seeking to resolve them. And I think that’s why she’s a great writer.
What do you hope participants will take away from this course?
An appetite for the word. For reading. For the effort and reward of great literature. And for engaging with life’s most uncomfortable contradictions.
Reading Colette with Judith Thurman begins Monday, November 14, on Roundtable. Sign up today.