On a Paragraph by Colette in The Pure and the Impure
Colette. The one word, forbiddingly cast on stone representing the world’s great writers. Forbidden because of subject or the way she can seem too simple, as William Gass writes, “One can skate over her and miss it and read it like any high school girl romance…” Colette came to me through James Salter — and his recounting how his friend Robert Phelps edited a much cherished book called Earthly Paradise — so cherished that Salter’s daughter, who died in an accident, was buried with it, as it was her favorite book. Salter: “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.” Any words on Colette will turn into a divination to these other two writers, who I’m much closer to. Colette is still at a remove from me, though there is a Spinx-like quality. I love her, but maybe not in the way I love Christine Schutt and Fleur Jaggy and Elizabeth Hardwick, who are more of her inheritors. Hardwick wrote that The Pure and the Impure is her “odd masterpiece” “about men and women…who live for passions.” Colette comes together in a fleshy way unlike those minimalist drawings on the covers of her FSG books by Jacqueline Schulman. There is something Pre-Cambrian to her prose and at the same time it’s timeless and it knows much more than you.
The above paragraph is a marvel of sonics, even translated, filled with wisdom, perspective, cunning, as robust as a nearly harvested apple and as health-conscious for the eater. Colette the narrator is describing people. At this point in The Pure and Impure, Colette is describing younger people’s attractions to her. This is the last chapter of the book and this is its third paragraph. It beings: “To dissimulate and keep up the dissimulation over a long period without ever flagging, through silences, through smiles, to appear to be an entirely different person — this relegates the trifling exaggerations of gossips to a quite inferior category.” Dissimulate means “to hide under a false appearance.” She is writing that dissimulation is a task “only possible for the young” — now why would that be? She then imbues that with the brightening metaphor at the heart of the paragraph: “it is almost a kind of secretion, as native to young people as an insect’s ability to elaborate its horny wing sheath, its casque and corselet of hard chitin…” An insect “elaborates” — what a choice. In the next sentence she alludes that this is all in her memory — as she is trying to “outwit.” Why is it a “forbidden pleasure of penetrating the world of the young?” Because one has to play off of other people to get somewhere with them, and for an older person like herself, it comes easily. I’ve chosen this paragraph for its sonics and sentiments, but also the stage qualities of the latter — I could have easily chosen the next which is more straightforward and funny: “We come to you for warmth,” declare my young friends of both sexes, wearing their youthful wounds like decorations, some of them still glistening with a trace of fresh blood, battered from recent blows.”
What is Colette up to? She seems to be tearing down the whole edifice of her later life with these young people. Whose art of dissimulation is on display? But let’s go back to that exquisite metaphor: “its casque and corselet of hard chitter…” Two hard c’s before a soft one. If they are insects, she is the power overarching them — and she is able to reach into their cages and pick them up if need be. And a few pages later, we land on the nth degree — the words of love: “What then has changed between us, between love and me? Nothing, unless myself, or love. Everything that proceeds from love still wears its color and spreads it over me.” Colette has a sassy science of finding and embalming emotion, as living nectar and energy, onto the page, in trains of words. Her power is in her truth — her truth. She is the old seafarer of love — she’s seen it all, she’s felt it all, and unlike Ahab, she has “the power to hurt but will do none,” mostly.
