Colette – Claudine at School

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1900, Antonia White, Book Review, Claudine at School, Colette, France 1900s, Gay and Lesbian Literature

Wicked, vicious and enchanting – girl power in France, circa 1900

A major effect of my sequential twentieth century challenge is that reading in this way will inevitably take me outside the book itself as an isolated reading experience, and focus some attention on the time, culture and geography of its arising – and, I suspect, I shall happily be drawn into ‘biographical fallacy’ as there is always a life being lived (the author’s) in that time, culture and geography. And sat within the twenty-first century, it will no doubt be interesting to see how much we consider to be modern and new is of course, merely a spiral: specific manifestations may change, but the form remains the same

So, turning to Colette’s first novel, Claudine at School, the story of a racy minx of a fifteen year old in a perhaps unusual school in Burgundy, which was published in 1900 purporting to be written by Monsieur Willy, the nom-de-plume of Colette’s husband, it’s necessary to take a look at the author, and also at the person whose name originally appeared as author.

Colette, born in 1873 as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, was by 1893 married to Henry Gauthier-Villars, a man some 14 years older than she was. His pen-name was amusingly apt, as far as Anglo Saxon speakers are concerned, because he was a libertine, with serial mistresses. Monsieur Willy was an ‘author’ – except he wasn’t exactly. He was a man of wealth whose family business was a publishing house. Although he was a music critic and writer who wrote under several nom-de-plumes, he also persuaded impoverished writers to write books which he then published under his own name, gaining some reputation as a man of letters. Although the authors did get some recompense, and had the satisfaction of getting published, they did not get the financial rewards, or the kudos, which might have accrued had they got published elsewhere, under their own names. This seems like a different version, perhaps, of our modern vanity publication – in reverse! Willy encouraged Colette, clearly a woman of generous sexual tastes, to have affairs with women whilst he continued his own affairs, which marriage did not interrupt. Curiously, it did not seem that he encouraged her to also have affairs with other men!

In the end Colette married three times, as well as having relationships with other women. It is not always clear how much of her writing is fictional, and how much merely an embroidery of fact.

Colette as a schoolgirl : Simplesue.tumblr.com

The story behind the Claudine series of four books puts it about that that this is a thinly disguised fiction, based on Colette’s own experiences at school. Colette recounted some amusing, not to mention salacious, tales of life at a school, where the headmistress and second mistress were lesbians, and the central character and narrator, Claudine, was more interested in girls and young women than she was in boys and young men, at that time. Willy suggested she wrote ‘her’ escapades into a story, and he would see if he could publish them. By all accounts, he didn’t initially think much of them and slung them, forgotten, into a drawer. A few years later, discovering them, he realised they were gold, and published them under his name. To be honest, the themes of hot-house gymslip pashes, crushes and overt lesbian sex, plus a fair smattering of dominatrix behaviour, perhaps become more alluring if they are presented as being more fact than fiction, as his wife’s stories, written by him. Certainly Colette had a rather unconstrained, definitely unconventional sexual history, and the reader might assume Claudine IS Colette, though the story certainly has major departures from her own known life – Claudine is the only child of a widower who is an academic specialising in the study of slugs – this latter the source of much humour. Colette was the daughter of a tax collector and her much loved mother, Sido did not die in the author’s childhood! Nonetheless, the way Colette describes the definitely vampy Claudine, down to that amazing hair and the shadowed, smudged eyes, does seem as if she has described herself!

Colette’s life did show her to be a highly sexy and alluring woman, with a remarkably, one would think, for the time, relaxed, light-hearted and playful attitude to sex. Certainly what might be thought of as ‘Victorian morality’ was not the case across the Channel, if Colette, and her book’s reception are anything to go by. Claudine at School (and the three later volumes in the series) became a runaway success, inspiring merchandising mayhem, and generating income for ‘Monsieur Willy’

Colette by Jacques Humbert 1896

By 1906 the marriage was over. Willy owned the copyright to the books and the merchandise, and Colette was unable to profit from her own works. To support herself, she went on the stage, had a scandalous relationship with another woman, married twice more, and in her late 40’s embarked on an affair with her 16 year old stepson, the child of her second husband. In a case of art imitating life, one of her most famous books, Chéri (and The Last of Chéri ) charts the relationship between a woman in her 50s and a much younger man/boy. Her third husband, with whom she lived happily until she died, was also a much younger man.

Probably her most famous book was Gigi, which became a stage musical and a film

Her writing was hugely appreciated and praised in her native country – as indeed it deserved to be – her life and her art explored female sexuality, marriage, and the struggles of women for independence. She had a great gift for describing the world of the senses and physicality. Even in this first book there is clear delight in her descriptions of the natural world, the colours, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of reality. She was at one time regarded as France’s greatest woman writer, was a recipient of several literary honours, in both France and Belgium, President of the Academie Goncourt, a recipient of the Legion of Honour, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and was the first French female writer to receive a full State funeral.

Reading a brief account of her life and works, though I had read the Claudine books, and Cheri, many years ago, I had not at that time taken on board how extraordinary the subject matter was, given the time of publication. Never mind the sexual revolution of the sixties, certainly across the Channel from England this Frenchwoman was openly exploring her sexuality as the twentieth century dawned – and doing so in her writing with wit, verve, delicious openness and freedom. England and France were clearly worlds apart. It is impossible to think of an English writer at this time, at the tail end of Victoria’s reign, writing a book like this which is so frank and bold about young girls’ passions, and it also becoming a run-away best seller. What is remarkably different from, for example English writing on ‘inversion’ (as the term went in the UK) – such as Radclyffe Hall’s admittedly a generation later ‘Well of Loneliness’ or E.M. Forster’s 1913/14 written Maurice – which was in fact not published till after the author’s death – is that there is no sense of shame or guilt in ‘Claudine’ – there is gossip, there are whisperings and delight in scandal, but there is a kind of ‘so what?’ shrug being expressed about it all. A film of the book Claudine a L’École, directed by Serge de Poligny, and starring  Blanchette Brunoy, was released in 1937, here showing just some clips

What looks like a rather more knowing TV version followed later, with Marie-Hélène Breillat in the title role, directed by Édouard Molinaro and there is certainly a lot more ‘sass’ and a sense of in your face provocation in the clip from this.

Claudine herself is intelligent, witty, vicious, prone to sadism, rebellious, an utter minx, fearsome and sparklingly entertaining – and no relation at all to some of the troubled, angsty teens who become icons later in the century – Holden Caulfield, for example. Claudine runs rings around everyone, she oozes sexuality and female power and is no man’s – or woman’s – pushover. The book fizzes with vivacity, and the girls are remarkably odd – the intelligent ones are all wickedly ill-behaved, and the adults to a man and woman easily manipulated by the charming and scary Claudine and her close chum and nemesis ‘the lanky Anaïs’ This is young girl power, like a firework display.

Who would have thought that weird eating habits – a predilection for eating snow, pencils, crayons, cigarette papers and drinking vinegar could produce such an example of girls with not only attitude, but high intelligence and wit (you’ll have to read the book!)

We still had ten minutes to go before the end of class; how could we use them? I asked permission to leave the room so that I could surreptitiously gather up a handful of the still-falling snow. I made a snowball and bit into it: it was cold and delicious. It always smells a little of dust, this first fall. I hid it in my pocket and returned to the classroom. Everyone round me made signs to me and I passed the snowball round. Each of them, with the exception of the virtuous twins, bit into it with expressions of rapture. Then that ninny of a Marie Belhomme had to go and drop the last bit and Mademoiselle Sergent saw it.

“Claudine! Have you gone and brought in snow again? This is really getting beyond the limit!”

She rolled her eyes so furiously that I bit back the retort “It’s the first time since last year

Finally, during the hilarious examination scene, and in the lessons where the teachers vainly try to keep order, the standard of education, and particularly maths, is fearsomely high. No calculators either.

For me personally, the story dragged a little once the examination scene was over, and the final big set-piece and wrap up happened, with the visit of the Minister of Agriculture and a big ‘town celebration’ , though it did give the chance to open into the wider world.

     Colette with a couple of her soul-mates

The version I found was published in 1968, translated by Antonia White – she of Frost In May fame. You can rather tell that the translator is someone who is able to do much more than just ‘literal word for word’, and is someone who has the feel for the shape of a sentence, and the flavour of writing and different writers. I had no sense of ‘in translation’ just of immediate connection with what I was reading. The Kindle Version appears to be of the Vintage Classics republication of this, with White’s translation

Claudine at School Amazon UK
Claudine at School Amazon USA

A READING THE TWENTIETH POST – 1900 : FICTION – IN TRANSLATION

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Edmund White – Hotel de Dream

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Book Review, Edmund White, Gay and Lesbian Literature, Hotel de Dream, New York

Dream or Reality?

Edmund White, American writer whose subject is often the sexual mores of society – as a gay man born in 1940 he has lived through, and charted, many changes in attitudes towards same-sex relationships – here writes a rather brilliant book about the dying days of nineteenth century realist writer and journalist, Stephen Crane.

Hotel de Dream mixes known facts of Crane’s life and known at-the-time assessment of his character, with plausible `what-if’ invention. Large sections of the book contain the dictated work of a last novel, The Painted Boy, which Crane, painfully dying from tuberculosis, coughs up his life’s blood to finish, dictating it to his `wife’ Cora Taylor, in wrenched out, feverish whispers

Crane, who did die from a final pulmonary haemorrhage, from TB, in a health spa in Germany, at the ridiculously young age of 28, was a writer in the naturalist, realist tradition. He had a passionate social conscience, and empathised with the disadvantaged and powerless in society – particularly those outside respectability. He had been involved in a law case, protecting a prostitute against an unlawful charge against her. The case was lost, and Crane himself censured by sections of society which had lauded him for his literary gifts. He had met Cora, who also became a journalist, and was separated from her second husband, though not divorced, and ran a bordello Hotel de Dreme, in Florida. Settling in England for a while, Crane become the friend of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, H.G. Wells, and Ford Madox Ford. In England, Crane and Taylor lived as, and were believed to be, husband and wife.

Stephen Crane

However, White’s book is not purely a biography, or even a straight biography written as fiction. Although Crane had dictated his final work, as he was feverishly dying, to Cora, that work was The O’ Ruddy, not The Painted Boy

The Painted Boy, the novel within the novel, is White’s imaginative invention, and within it, Crane inserts himself as an observing character, so there are various mirrors, illusions, inventions, but delivered with realistic imagination, using known facts, as well as `what if…….’

White’s central idea for The Painted Boy, was to say `what if’ this writer who was known to have understanding and acceptance for those who were outside conventional morality, who was humane and empathetic, had encountered those who at the time were absolutely seen as deviant and abhorrent – the gay community – and, particularly, poor young boys who turned to prostitution as a means of making a living.

He charts a love story between Theodore Koch, an upright, conventional, married banker, who falls headlong in love with an abused street boy, Elliott. Crane is also a character within the book, who meets the boy (who is dying of syphilis, as Crane himself is dying with his own disease) and, despite an initial abhorrence, is moved to an act of kindness towards the starving boy, gains his trust, and hears his story, with which, as writer and journalist, he wants to honour the dispossessed, and also castigate society with.

The more Elliott talked the sadder I felt. His voice, which had at first been either embarrassed or hushed or suddenly strident with a whore’s hard shriek, now had wandered back into something as flat as a farmer’s fields. He was eager to tell me everything, and that I was taking notes, far from making him self-conscious, pleased him. He counted for something and his story as well.

I found this an absorbing and tenderly written book, and was further intrigued by White’s afterword, where he not only reveals `what’s true and what ain’t’, but also, explores the fact that Crane’s earliest biographers (who had known him) were also fabulists. One of them, the critic James Gibbons Huneker, who also features in the `real’ sections of White’s book, did recount the meeting and conversations between Crane and a young male prostitute, and recorded that Crane began to write a book about his story, perhaps to be a companion piece to an earlier story of a female prostitute `Maggie, A Girl of The Streets’ Although this in part clearly acted as a springboard for White’s Hotel de Dream, recent researches have revealed that Huneker, and the other early biographer did not always possess pens which flowed with the light of truth

The subtitle of this book of White’s is ‘A New York Novel’ as it is the tail end of the nineteenth century and the gulf between the world of sophisticated, moneyed sensibility and the impoverished, desperate life of the streets in New York, which is the subject matter of White’s novella within a novel.

Edmund White – Hotel de Dream Amazon UK
Edmund White – Hotel de Dream Amazon USA

Sarah Waters – The Paying Guests

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Book Review, Gay and Lesbian Literature, Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

Behind lace curtains in genteel South London, circa the early 1920s

Although I still feel Sarah Waters never equalled two of her Victorian set novels, Fingersmith and Affinity, this may be partly because most authors have a certain pattern to their work, and if a reader has a familiarity with that author, sooner or later they will be aware of their particular tricks and habits. By the time I read her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, which I found disappointing, and her second world war novel, The Night Watch, she had become predictable, even a little tired, to me, and the rich, complex, exuberance of the first two I read, and their cast of unique, properly quirky and layered characters, so typical of Dickens, Thackeray and Collins, had fallen away into something more run of the mill

I hesitated whether to read The Paying Guests, due to mixed reviews. In the end, I was glad I made the journey, even if this did not properly fascinate until the Second Section.

Set in London just after the First War, Frances Wray and her mother are sliding into genteel poverty. Frances’ brothers were killed in the trenches; her father had made bad investments, and his death leaves the two women nearly penniless. They have a large house, and decide to let out the top floor. Leonard and Lilian Barber, a upper working/lower middle class couple move in.

1020s freestanding ashtrays

The slow first part of the book, where I felt most predictability was happening, was the inevitable move towards the major relationship. Complete with  several sessions involving a lot of heavy breathing and rummaging beneath clothes which has to be extremely furtive, because deeply shocking and forbidden. Etc.

I did find myself also having to fight off a constant voice which was saying `this is post First World War – why didn’t Frances get a job?’  as a solution for their scrimping poverty.  The First War certainly saw the start of women really coming forward in the workplace, so it felt strange that this was not something which seemed to be in anyone’s mind, even more so when a couple of Frances’s friends, from the same class, are in the workplace. But of course, if she had got a job the narrative would not have had the time and space for the secret assignations to happen.

pinned from 25,media.tumblr.com

Eventually, there are a couple of quite horrific and cataclysmic events which then take the novel into much darker territory, and that is when I began to find my interest was really engaged, and the book moved away from being a bit Mills and Boon/Black Swan formulaic, and became something much more psychologically intricate – the effects of guilt, shame, terror of discovery, the agonies of conscience, the conflicts between courage and fear, and how shared guilt can destroy relationships.

Although this was all terrific stuff, I was not sufficiently swept up by the novel to stop myself having some questions about realism. Some of which can’t really be explained, due to spoilers. However, there is a section which does demand huge physical strength and fitness, and one of the people who needs this has come quite close to shuffling off this mortal, and it seemed pretty impossible that they would have been able to carry out the task. The `wrap’ of the book also seemed a little contrived; after the tremendous build-up of the psychological journey the central characters were making, it almost felt as if Waters had run out of steam. There is a long courthouse sequence, and how that resolves, did not feel quite as expected. It felt like an ending Waters wanted for the characters, rather than an ending true to reality

This all sounds as if I’m not recommending Waters’ book – well that isn’t the case, it is I think a strong read, just that for me the most interesting and satisfying parts of the novel were after Frances enters the world of the conflicts between self-interest and survival, and the powerful voice of conscience. For me. the bodice heavings before that point, and the resolution at the end pulled me away from surrendering, but there is a great chunk of wonderfully subtle and knotty twists and tugs of contrary feelings, thoughts, desires in the centre of the book, where the central characters and the various clashes of the fine gradations of the English class system made for a compelling read.

This is certainly a book stirring up a fine number of very differing viewpoints, I came to it on the back of an excellent review by Cleopatra Loves Books, who made this one of her books of the year.

And (in my view anyway) those loving the book and those not so loving the book are writing well argued reasons for their responses, sometimes divided by opposite opinions about the same matters. And that is also the case with professional reviews on some of the more lit ficcy papers, as well as us passionate reader bloggers. So whichever way opinion falls, there is a lot of satisfying reading to grapple with here!

I’m also fascinated by the very different ways marketing has been targeted, by the different dust jackets in the UK and (left side) and the States (right side) Europe has chosen to emphasise a noir, thriller aspect, with the dust jacket even looking like the poster for an early Hitchcock movie, whilst the American version suggests tasteful erotica, with its elegant black and white arthouse look

The Paying Guests Amazon UK
The Paying Guests Amazon USA

Sarah Waters – Affinity

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Affinity, Book Review, Gay and Lesbian Literature, Ghost story, Sarah Waters, Victorian pastiche

A perfect match of style and content by a real writer

The British writer Sarah Waters wrote a couple of stunning books (in this reader’s opinion) exploring the Victorian period, written from an unusual perspective – Waters is a lesbian, and most of the intimate relationships in her books are between women.

In two of these books, Affinity, published in 2000 and reviewed here, and Fingersmith, she is pitch perfect in inhabiting the literary style of the nineteenth century. I have a feeling re-reads are due!

Waters not only writes with finesse and precision about the Victorian world, but she has delightfully recreated a precise and balanced formality in her writing style, which conjures up the shades of Wilkie Collins and of course Henry James – a sly and crafty nod to ‘The Turn Of The Screw’ – in the naming of the medium’s control. As Affinity purports to be the writings from her two protagonist’s journals, the rather old fashioned structure of her prose is perfect.

Affinity, set in the 1870, is the story of a woman who visits prisons, doing good works, and there  encounters a young medium. Spiritualism was widespread at this time, both taken seriously and the subject of fraudulent investigation also. This is a ghost story, a love story, – and a complex twist of a story to be unravelled and revealed. Very Wilkie Collins.

She weaves her story splendidly – in a more leisurely (Victorian) era, this novel would surely have seen publication in one of the literary monthlies or weeklies, and we would all have had to wait, breathless with anticipation for the next installment! How lucky we are to be able to read at our own pace!

The ending was shocking, and disappointing – but entirely proper.

This might sound like a contradiction in terms, but I think those who have already read the book will understand!

If she were really a Victorian writer, perhaps the ending could have been different, but because she reflects a more modern sensibility of the world of Victorian spiritualism, the ending is as it should be.

I wished the book had ended some other way, from my viewpoint as a reader who had been led to involve with the main character, because of the writer’s skill. However as a reader in the more modern ‘observer’ role, with a twentyfirst century observation, she gives the only ending acceptable to that sensibility.

What a clever writer! Even more so for not just being a writer who plays mind-games, and is purely cerebral – she writes with the gusto, liveliness and vivacity of Dickens and Thackeray.

Affinity Amazon UK
Affinity Amazon USA