The pursuit of maman

In 2023 France celebrated 150 years since the birth of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a writer who enthralled readers with frank, provocative explorations of desire, friendship and other pleasures of the flesh in genre-defying works such as La Vagabonde (1910; The Vagabond, 1912), Chéri (1920; 1951) and La Naissance du jour (1928; Break of Day, 1961). The anniversary gave rise to a constellation of books musing on her legacy, with offerings from luminaries of French literary culture such as Emmanuelle Lambert and Antoine Compagnon, and a collective anthology, Notre Colette, a portrait of the writer as read by fans including Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe.

In the English-speaking world tributes have been sparser, an omission that Michèle Roberts’s new reflective essay, Colette: My Literary Mother, sets out to remedy. As its subtitle suggests, this unconventional book is profoundly intimate rather than clinically academic. Instead of attempting an exhaustive inventory of Colette’s output as a novelist, playwright and journalist, Roberts – herself an accomplished novelist and poet – analyses four key works of personal importance: La Maison de Claudine (1922; My Mother’s House, 1966), Break of Day, Chéri and La Lune de pluie (1940; The Rainy Moon, 1958). She celebrates Colette’s “straightforwardly amoral celebration of sensuality, the materiality of food and plants and creatures”, and her analysis takes a similarly earthy, grounded approach. This book reads like a warm, insightful conversation between two writers, with us – their audience – privileged to eavesdrop. Roberts never lets her prose curdle into abstract suppositions, or laboured analysis: this engrossing book is mercifully free of the dry pronouncements of the literary seminar.

Motherhood is the organizing thread of the book’s four short chapters, both Colette’s relationship with her towering mother figure, known as “Sido”, and Roberts’s “mother-daughter dancing game of attachment and loss, of leaving and returning”, experienced with her French mother, Monique. In deft psychoanalytic insights Roberts acknowledges her need as a young woman to reject or separate out from her mother’s native language. We sense that rereading Colette (and providing her own, personal translations from the French) has allowed her to settle some of her maternal ambivalence. “I have moved from a childish need either to idealise [my mother] or to see her as a tyrant, to recognising the difficulties in her life,” she writes.

Roberts is also an astute close reader of Colette, dissecting her “originality of invention” and formal innovations such as weaving multiple genres – “fiction, autobiography, memoir, reverie, letters” into Break of Day and the precocious “space made for the female gaze” in Chéri, where Léa hungrily appraises her lover’s masculine contours during an era in which women were expected to remain passive objects of desire. For Roberts such qualities elevate the author to the status of inventor of the modern novel, an accolade usually afforded to male modernist titans such as Proust or Joyce. Roberts, though, is wary of branding Colette an early exponent of contemporary autofiction, claiming that her avant-gardism “predates such terms.” This flirtation with the markers of literary history can feel a shade disorienting. Yet it is close to Colette’s own cat-and-mouse game with her reader, her desire to draw us in without ever allowing us to get too close. Overall, Roberts makes a convincing case for an intuitive and cumulative reading of Colette, unencumbered by the drive towards explicit “labelling”. “Labelling,” Roberts writes, “can fence off a work before I have tried it for myself […] If I need to label this text of Colette’s, I see her as an experimental modernist, showing us how her work is made: she comments on what she’s just written, she questions the reader, she consults with Sido’s ghost. She may pretend from time to time that she is artless, just idly daydreaming and free-associating, but her roman fleuve demonstrates a sophisticated handling of narrative.”

In thinking about motherhood Roberts contemplates wider models of literary kinship, considering the “many gendered mothers” (in Maggie Nelson’s turn of phrase), that birth a writer and their works. Colette: My literary mother, as well as acting as the generous “bridge into Colette country for readers approaching her for the first time” that Roberts hopes, is also, at many junctures, a valuable writers’ manual, full of advice from both Colette (“Look long at what pleases you and longer still at what displeases you”) and Roberts (“accept ambivalence, be contradictory if necessary, play tricks if you want to”).

At moments, the gratitude that Michèle Roberts feels towards Colette for encouraging her to “read better and write better” risks narrowing her critical distance. Yet the enchantment that this grande dame of French letters has woven over her is one that carries over into her interpretation of Colette: reading her take, this reader wanted to remain in the rich night of the book, and for day not to break the spell.

Alice Blackhurst is the author of Luxury, Sensation and the Moving Image, 2021. She is working on a book about Marguerite Duras’s The Lover

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