{"id":71469,"date":"2013-10-14T07:55:45","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T11:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=71469"},"modified":"2025-09-25T11:35:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T15:35:17","slug":"the-books-rereadings-seventeen-writers-revisit-books-they-love-edited-by-anne-fadiman-love-with-a-capital-l-the-vagabond-and-the-shackle-by-colette-by-vivian-gornick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=71469","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love<\/i>, edited by Anne Fadiman; \u201cLove with a Capital L, The Vagabond<\/i> and The Shackle<\/i>, by Colette\u201d, by Vivian Gornick"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rereadings\"<\/a>
\nNext up on the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Anne Fadiman<\/p>\n

During Anne Fadiman’s reign as editor of The American Scholar<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i> and Illusions<\/i> 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. <\/p>\n

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.) <\/p>\n

Anyway, it’s all very interesting. Here’s an excerpt. <\/p>\n

\"Colette_seminaire_Julia-Kristeva\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Anne Fadiman; \u201cLove with a Capital L, The Vagabond<\/i> and The Shackle<\/i>, by Colette\u201d, by Vivian Gornick<\/big><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> read her at twenty-five. And the answer to that, I’m afraid is also: hardly. It’s not that I<\/i> have passed from youth to middle age, it’s that the culture has undergone a sea change. Even though we feel<\/i> love as we always did, we don’t make<\/i> of it as we once did.<\/p>\n

When The Vagabond<\/i> 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<\/i> about love. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n