Colette biography book
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Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
From the publisher:
A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation.
Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy–a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary of Willy’s sexual domination, Colette pursued an extremely public lesbian love affair with a niece of Napoleon’s. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter who bored her, at forty-seven she seduced her teenage stepson, and in her seventies she flirted with the Nazi occupiers of Paris, even though her beloved third husband, a Jew, had been arrested by the Gestapo. A
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Colette was a complicated and contradictory raph from Getty
“Chéri” sold thirty thousand copies by the fall of its first year, and inspired André Gide to send Colette a letter of beröm. (“I will bet that the one rave you never expected to receive was mine,” he wrote.) Between the serial publication of that novel and the publication of its sequel, Colette, in an unsettling case of life imitating art, seduced her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand. “I invented Léa as a premonition,” she later wrote. Just as Léa groomed the teen-age Chéri, so this depraved maman taught Bertrand to swim, fed him hearty meals, and took his virginity.
The affair lasted about five years, at the end of which Colette began writing “The End of Chéri.” When we pick up the action again, it is , and Chéri has returned from the war. His wife, Edmée, has evolved into an independent woman who runs a hospital for wounded soldiers and is besotted with the head doctor. Chéri and Edmée’s marriage is sexually ari
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Brenda Maddox
What is it with the French? What has given them the right to claim the inside track on ooh-la-la, the routine activity that propagates the species? One of the strengths of Judith Thurman’s massive biography is its grasp of the evolution of French social and sexual sensibility, from the Revolution to the Occupation.
Whatever the causes of French erotic self-admiration, the novelist Colette (born , died ) set out to embody and propagandise it. This pretty woman with the triangular face and pert, knowing eyes churned out, from the age of twenty-four, naughty but well-written books which preached that she, and her nation, understood the secrets of the flesh better than the rest of the world, and practised them better, too. She cultivated a promiscuous bisexual lifestyle to underscore her message. Even as a girl, she posed with aggressive suggestiveness on the garden swing, her long plaits suggesting Miss Whiplash as well the gymslip virgin.
Born in the Burgundian villag