Next up on the essays shelf:
Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love
During Anne Fadiman’s reign as editor of The American Scholar (I had a subscription). During her reign, she instituted a regular feature called “Rereadings”, where she asked authors to go back and reread a book they loved when they were young and see how the experience had changed. What was the book to them originally and what was it to them now? This book is a collection of those essays.
I have never read Colette, so I cannot speak to the power of her books and her view of life, although I know how influential it was based on my understanding of modernism and all of the big players of that time. I know people feel passionately about Colette. Her fans are like acolytes. Colette gave a vision of how to live which still has power, still can reach out to readers of another century. But I was not one of those readers. I would love to hear from others out there who have read Colette, and hear their experiences of it. Sometimes when you re-visit a book that swept you away as a younger person, a book that espouses a kind of philosophy or a way of looking at things, you are shocked at how … shallow it all seems once you get some actual life experience. This was my experience with Richard Bach (I’ve written quite a bit about it on my site). Re-reading him was a shock to my system and I still get angry defensive letters from those who adore him/forgive him/whatever. They see my assessment as somehow invalidating their own, which of course is never my intention here. But whatever. I read Bridge Across Forever and Illusions when I was 17, 18, and fell in LOVE. It seemed TRUE. It seemed REVELATORY. This effect lasted for years. I stood in line for hours to get Richard Bach’s signature at a book signing. I am so disenchanted with Richard Bach now that I almost look back on my infatuation with him with wonder. Was that the same person? What the hell happened to me? His books, which seemed so sweeping and true and comforting, suddenly seemed shallow and VERY uneasy. I felt his unease with real life, with the mess of human relationships, with REALITY. This only came with my own hard knocks, through my 20s and 30s, my own experiences with disappointment, reality. So again, I am only speaking for myself. I miss my teenage/early 20s self who thrilled to those books and believed in them. But I have crossed the Rubicon for sure. Even if I find love in my life, it won’t ever feel like THAT, it won’t ever feel like the vision put forth in Bach’s books. And I say to that: EXCELLENT. I have a deep distrust of the vision Bach puts forth, and now all I see are red flags! But again, what a shock, to go through SUCH a change with an author. He’s the only one I can say that about. Many of the other books I loved as a kid – Harriet the Spy, the Anne/Emily books, Madeleine L’Engle’s stuff – all of that holds up beautifully. Bach is destroyed. The change in my attitude is akin to a scorched-earth policy. His books will never seem the same, I can’t even revisit them with pleasure. They just piss me off. I feel like I was in a cult and now I have been de-programmed.
Vivian Gornick, in rereading Colette, doesn’t sound quite as emphatic as I do (ie: Richard Bach sold the culture a BILL OF FAKE GOODS hahaha), but she does sound disheartened by how small the books seem, when they seemed so so huge to her when she read them at twenty. Again, I would love to hear from Colette fans. Gornick doesn’t completely throw Colette out. She still thinks that Colette’s description of romantic infatuation, the loss of self, the swoon of charged excitement, is superb, powerful stuff. I’m not sure I agree with Gornick’s point below that the culture has gone through a sea change. I think it really is that she is now middle-aged herself and the power of the books just didn’t last through her real-life experiences. As long as Love was a hypothetical, something to dream about, Colette showed the way. But once you actually experience it, Colette comes up wanting. (This was Gornick’s experience.)
Anyway, it’s all very interesting. Here’s an excerpt.
Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love
When I read Colette in my twenties, I said to myself, That is exactly the way it is. Now I read her and I find myself thinking, How much smaller this all seems than it once did – cold, brilliant, limited – and silently I am saying to her, Why aren’t you making more sense of things? Yes, I have from you the incomparable feel of an intelligent woman in the grip of romantic obsession, and that is strong stuff. But sexual passion as a driving force doesn’t seem to matter on its own, as it once did. It no longer feels large. Certainly, it no longer feels metaphoric.
Why? I ask myself. Is it that I no longer “identify” with the delicious despair of erotic love? Hardly. I have learned over a long enough life that at any moment anyone who is alive can feel it all – the joy, the panic, the sick excitement – exactly as she did at twenty-five or thirty-five. No, it is a matter not of feeling but of altered sensibility: not only mine but that of the culture as well. The question to ask is, Does a person who is twenty-five today read Colette as I read her at twenty-five. And the answer to that, I’m afraid is also: hardly. It’s not that I have passed from youth to middle age, it’s that the culture has undergone a sea change. Even though we feel love as we always did, we don’t make of it as we once did.
When The Vagabond was published in 1910, Andre Gide sent Colette a letter of extravagant admiration: he thought the novel brilliant and powerful. For the next forty years, Colette’s work would be received in the same spirit by every leading literary light throughout Europe and America. She was beloved not only for her mastery of the French language – her famous style – but also because she said things that struck a nerve deep in the culture. Her books persuaded her readers that something fundamental and immutable was being described: naked, unadorned, and irreducibly true. It is impossible to imagine the same response being accorded this work today – not because it is about love (Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Stendhal are also about love), but because it is only about love.
So where does that leave me? Filled with righteous feminist rejection of Colette? Not so easy as that. I walk around these days feeling as though pieces of her writing lie heavy on my chest. Sometimes a sentence lifts itself off the surface, and stands in the air before me…. “Our honest bodies [cling] together with a mutual thrill of delight … while our souls … withdraw again behind the barrier.” Repeatedly, I lean in toward the prose. Then, of course, that which has changed in me shrinks, holds back, stiffens. I want the reading of Colette to be the same as it once was, but it is not. Yet I am wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again.
“Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love”? I’m so looking forward for this!
Too bad I don’t know Colette (or Gornick for that matter). If I may ask, who else is in there?
Have a great week Sheila.
It’s a great collection – you should check it out – I’ve done a couple of other excerpts already! http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?tag=rereadings
Thanks for that. Will definitely check it out.
Ah, Richard Bach is your Hermann Hesse.
Do you feel duped by Hesse? I haven’t read any Hesse – I am assuming he is probably a better writer than Bach. I just feel embarrassed by how taken in I was by Bach’s vision!
No, I don’t feel duped. I do have the “who was the kid who loved this” reaction to rereading one of his books. That’s the comparison I was making.
But I don’t feel like I was lied to by some jerk.
Ha! Well, that’s good! I am still, in my way, trying to come to terms with Richard Bach, which is why I wrote so much about him those years ago. Who was this person who had such an affect on me? I made choices based on my “belief” in his vision. I don’t think it’s fair, at all, that some of his fans felt betrayed by the fact that he ended up divorcing Leslie (his wife, whom he wrote three books about). The man is human. BUT I think it is Richard Bach’s discomfort with his own humanity that is quite interesting. I mean, the man has six children, and in all of the books he has written – he never mentions them ONCE. What is that ABOUT, Richard Bach?? I know two of his kids, I think, have written books about their father – and I admit I am curious.
Okay, this is too much. I picked up Fadiman’s “Rereadings” (enjoying it, thanks) and I began with Pico Iyer’s essay about D. H. Lawrence’s “The Virgin and the Gypsy”. Because, D. H. Lawrence.
And very early in his essay Iyer mentions reading and feeling completely at home in Hesse’s “Narcissus and Goldman” just before reading “The Virgin And The Gypsy” and escaping more completely into that world. Later in the essay he remarks that when he was in his 20’s her learned that Lawrence (like Hesse, explicitly) was something that one should consider a childish enthusiasm.
Now I want to re-re-read Narcissus and Goldman. And Steppenwolf. And re-read The Rainbow, my favorite of Lawrence’s.
I read Johnathan Livingston Seagull (even before Hesse) and I do recall that it was more affecting than I expected for something that was little more than a picture book. But I didn’t follow up by reading more of his stuff.
Mutecypher – Ha!! Love all those connections!
I’d call myself a Colette fan, although I don’t have more than a passing familiarity with her work. I love her little sketches of vaudeville life, and I quite enjoyed “Gigi” and Claudine at School, but I haven’t read The Vagabond, The Shackle or any of her mature stuff. So I’ve taken more notice of her brilliant style–her flair for dialogue and the effortless, vibrant rhythm of her prose–than any philosophy. Colette never seemed large to me, but she’s undeniably talented and entertaining. I got a sense of her power to convey the core of an experience. Even though Claudine at School is an exaggerated story, I still felt like I was seeing the world exactly how a bright, bored schoolgirl would see it–even though all the external things happening to that schoolgirl were extravagantly fake. Creating that natural feeling of inward authenticity in the midst of the ornate and unapologetic artificiality of her stories may be what she’s best at. But then again, I hardly know her.
I really should check her out – I have no idea why I missed her. That whole era is fascinating to me, and I’ve read all of her contemporaries. Thanks for your perspective!
Really fascinating because Hesse and Colette happen to be two writers I was just on fire about in my 20’s, read everything by them, and really wonder about it now. I don’t feel like I was, “Sold a bill of fake goods” but they don’t quite hold up for me. But I would recommend young people to read them both. Whereas writers like Salinger, Kerouac, Henry Miller, though I have changed and maybe I don’t feel like “I am Holden!” or I just want to take speed and drive back and forth across the country, something deep holds up. After Nine Stories I went back and again reread Franny and Zooey and Catcher, they hold up for me! I’m still laughing out loud by myself at Holden. I don’t know why! I read Catcher in almost one sitting, maybe someone can say there are better writers then Salinger but there is something beyond this being a book just for the young. Interesting too, because I’m nothing like Holden, or Franny or Zooey, why do I identify with them? I went to look for The Vagabond in my house, (in which I know somewhere I still have the same copy) I had a memory of being head over heels about it, couldn’t find it, but found The Pure and The Impure. I’m in the middle of it now (and wondering about all the things I had underlined) I still find Colette interesting and good but I feel like Gornick, something is just not there anymore that deep for me and that shook my soul.
Regina – wow, so interesting! I also laugh out loud listening to Holden’s voice. It wasn’t so much identification for me, as I felt like I really clicked with that HUMOR.
Thanks for your perspective on rereading Colette. If I were to pick her up now, where should I start?
Hmm. Good Question! Maybe either The Vagabond or Cheri. Reading The Pure and Impure now and wondering what I was on fire about, I’m gleaming from it that I as a very young woman I was excited by Colette because of the feminism, women dressing like men, masculine women, and romanticized living in Paris and being part of that forbidden underworld existence at that time.
Funny, when the commenter, Martin used the word effortless for Colette’s writing, that’s the word I was thinking of when you mentioned the humor of Salinger, (oh my God, Yes!) and don’t find that in Colette, though I do agree she is talented and entertaining.
Thanks so much. I am so interested in Colette’s time period, as I said – it’s strange that I would have “missed” her in my reading, but I did. Thanks for the recommendations!