The Livres–Souvenirs of Colette: Genre and the Telling of Time by Anne Freadman (review)

The paradox and the oxymoron are figures central to Colette’s writing: they convey her lively disregard for established dichotomies, and they are inseparable from the humour as well as the lyricism of her style. A paradox lies, too, at the heart of one important strand of her literary project, for although she is a writer whose own life is extensively recounted to her readers, she persistently warns against any assumption that this constitutes straightforward autobiography: ‘Imaginez–vous, à me lire, que je fais mon portrait? Patience! C’est seulement mon modèle’ (epigraph to La Naissance du jour). Anne Freadman captures splendidly Colette’s distinctive ways of representing time and her own life course, pointing out the inventive, skilfully crafted nature of her life–writing and its modernity: although Colette is not normally classed as a modernist, her experimentation with genre coincides with modernism’s assault on nineteenth–century literary forms, and also takes on the material realities of modern publishing by perfecting the short form for literary columns, then connecting these creatively in book form. Using the interesting structure of a five–part sequence modelled on the sonata, Freadman traces Colette’s different uses of genre in the books she broadly categorizes as ‘Livres–Souvenirs’. Beginning with Colette’s separation from her Claudine alter ego, notably in ‘Le Miroir’ (in Les Vrilles de la vigne), she then reads Mes apprentissages as the closest Colette comes to a memoir, with its portrait of personal experience within a social context. But this account of her early ‘life and times’ is also the beginning of a move away from life as narrative, towards life recounted as a collection of moments, fragments, anecdotes, stories — souvenirs, in the senses of both memory and keepsake. Freadman characterizes Colette as a collector more than as the narrator of her own linear story, and her written memories thus take the form of a bouquet, an album, or (one might add) in visual terms the nicely chosen collection of glass paperweights on the book’s cover, each containing some fragment of the ‘real’ world. Freadman demonstrates how this mode of ‘telling time’ (as one might tell one’s beads) takes different generic forms, from Sido’s deployment of the family album to the diary form adopted and adapted in the two final volumes written in old age, L’Étoile Vesper and Le Fanal bleu. She also shows how the ‘livres–souvenirs’ model counters the tragic view of human mortality that sees ageing only as decline and loss. Instead, time enriches, accumulates, remaining to the end in the ‘I–here-now of writing’ (p. 137) that refashions the writer’s ‘chaud pêle–mêle souvenirs froissés’ (L’Étoile Vesper, quoted on p. 126) and offers them, in a complex autobiographical pact that assumes the best of her (large and popular) readership, as a gift. Freadman’s own book is elegantly written and delivers analytical acuity in the voice of a reader moved and enriched by her subject, as Colette’s writing deserves.