Colette - Secrets of the flesh: a life of Colette

IMPRESSIVE AND FASCINATING

No novel, no memoir, no other biography displays such insight and vitality. Through deft observation, research, and beautiful writing, Thurman brings alive one of the most astonishing writers and women ever to stride this earth.

USA Today

[An] essential biography by a stylish writer of great sympathetic understanding and intellectual authority.

P HILIP R OTH

Colettes last word was regarde, and this is what Judith Thurman has done so well. She has taken all the pieces of this difficult and fascinating life, and shown it to us whole.

The Times (London)

Vastly entertaining reading An exhaustive, elegantly written, complex, and subtle study through which Colette emerges as resilient and vulnerable in equal measure, spurred on by phenomenal resources of energy and an exuberant joy in life. Certainly the extraordinary, rebellious, extravagant spirit that was Colette continues to fascinate and to inspire. Her life [was] a unique drama, retold with sensitivity, depth, and authority in Judith Thurmans magnificent biography.

New York Newsday

An engaging new biography This is the best and, I sense, truest portrait to date. The formidable Colette has met her match in the formidable Thurman.

Vogue

As poetic a work of art as anything her subject, the brilliant French writer, could have penned. Secrets reads as smoothly as a novel, and Thurmans technique is flawless.

Time Out New York

[A] near-perfect biography If anyone ever wondered whether nonfiction could be art, then they should read the work of Judith Thurman.

The Sunday Telegraph

A ferociously intelligent, masterful life of Colette, which stays supremely in control of her wild, bold, brilliant, and often obnoxious subject.

H ERMOINE L EE The Observer

Intelligent and comprehensive.

Newsweek

[AN] ACUTE AND ENORMOUSLY ENTERTAINING BIOGRAPHY THURMAN TAKES THE FULL MEASURE OF HER ELUSIVE, GIFTED, OUTRAGEOUS, DIFFICULT SUBJECT.
J EAN S TROUSE

Thurmans account, informed by a penetrating intelligence and written with seductive elegance, is the latest of many, but it is good enough to become the last word. Astringently clear-headed in its arguments, vividly evocative of the varied milieus that Colette in her socially adventurous life frequented, it is as richly enjoyable as a good old-fashioned realist novel, with a huge cast of characters sumptuous and diverse locations and a heroine whose personality was as singular and as splendidly outrageous as her trademark purple hair.

The Sunday Times (London)

Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurmans superb life of Colette, guides the reader with great assurance through a wealth of complex material. [She is] a gifted literary biographer, as sure-handed as her subject. A fiercely intelligent and accomplished book andusing the words with all due weightan immense pleasure.

Salon

A biography that oozes intelligence, affection, and skepticism in all the right dosages. Secrets of the Flesh not only dissects Collettes personal life but also seduces the reader into exploring her body of work.

Village Voice Literary Supplement

A wonderful biography, distinguished by its sensitivity, compassion, and wit.

The Independent (England)

There is a grandeur to [Colettes] long life to which Thurman, in this splendid volume, does ample justice. She is perceptive about the contradictions which make Colette such a troubling figure, especially her habit of expressing extremely conservative opinions while living entirely at odds with them. She emerges from Thurmans biography as a radical reactionary, a paradox who fascinates and repels in equal measure.

Financial Times

A pleasure to read. This is a book full of triumphs So well and beautifully written and so sure of its way with the life that at its end, youre left with just that: the life, in all its grandness, extraordinariness, ambiguity, and focused vitality.

The Scotsman

ALSO BY JUDITH THURMAN

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright 1999 by Judith Thurman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Owing to limitations of space, all permissions to reprint previously published material will be found immediately following the index.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/BB/

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-107467

eISBN: 978-0-307-78981-5

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

v3.1

For Charlotte (Arkie) Meisner

When my body thinks all my flesh has a soul.

C OLETTE ,

Retreat from Love

Biographers generally believe that it is easy to be a monster. It is even harder than being a saint.

C OLETTE ,

Lettres ses pairs

I N MARCH OF 1900, a forty-one-year-old Parisian man of letters published a novel that purported to be the journal of a sixteen-year-old provincial schoolgirl named Claudine. Henry Gauthier-Villars was best known as an amusingly opinionated music critic who had championed Wagner and insulted Satie. His paunch and top hat had endeared him to the cartoonists of the penny press; and his duels, his puns, and his seductions of women managed to generate almost as much copy as he wrote himself.

Gauthier-Villars used his own name for scholarly non-fiction and one of many pseudonyms when a work was light. He and his alter egosWilly, Jim Smiley, Boris Zichine, Henry Maugis, and the Usherettehad a bibliography which already included a collection of sonnets, another of essays on photography, several comic almanacs, a monograph on Mark Twain, and a number of salacious popular novels. It was not a very well kept secret that most of these works had been improved by other hands, if not entirely ghostwritten. In an ironic bow to this reputation, Willy claimed that the new manuscript had arrived in the mail tied with a pink ribbonthe literary equivalent of a baby girl delivered by the stork.

Claudine at School was not the first authorial travesty of its kind, and certainly not the last, although Claudine herself was something new. She was the

The novel languished for a few months until Willy rallied his influential friends, who duly produced reviews hailing Claudine at School as a masterpiece. By autumn, it had sold some forty thousand copies, becomingincluding its four sequelsone of the greatest French best-sellers of all time. There were five Claudines in all, two successful plays, and a range of product spin-offs in the modern sense, including Claudine cigarettes, perfume, chocolates, cosmetics, and clothing. The author, notorious to begin with, became something of a brand name himself. I think that only God and maybe Alfred Dreyfus are as famous as [Willy], said Sacha Guitry.

The man who signed