Margotlog: Proust and Colette: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Margotlog: Proust and Colette: Nothing Gold Can Stay

Today with wind in golden leaves, and the sky a brilliant blue, it's as if loss is being transformed into immediate memory. We memorialize the gold even as it mounds the streets.

I pack up three bags of organic compost to recycle. As I finish my work at the compost site, a young man with a fist-full of smallish plastic bags walks past. I call out: "Do you have any larger ones?" He is gone in an instant, and just as leaves fly up in a slant of sun, he hands me two long green bags. The magic of memory: I have been listening to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It is very very long. In the eight-disc set, I visit over and over the house at Combray where he waits anxiously for his mother to come upstairs and give him a good-night kiss. The beach at Balbec where he goes with his grandmother--her gentle figure leaning over him. The next day at breakfast, intense golden light is smothered by heavy curtains, which let only a sliver fall across the breakfast table.

Finally in the midst of this memory magic, I can't stand my limited knowledge any more and look up Proust in the encyclopedia. I knew that he'd waited until the last decade of his rather short life to retire to a cork-lined room and write. There where he gave memory precedence, he initially wrote only one volume.Others followed, embellishing, recovering, re-inventing. He captured the extraordinarily lush style that neither smothers or impedes the onward flow of narrated memory. In the narrator's voice there is a tinge of irony, as adult Marcel faintly sympathizes with his younger agony when the young woman Albertine, whom he's loved for a long time, now fully reveals her sexual interest in women. 

Yesterday, my husband and I went to Minneapolis to see a movie called "Colette," based on the early years of another French marvel, almost Proust's contemporary.Whatever I'd read about it had completely vanished to be replaced by my much earlier fascination with this true French stylist. Though Colette, like Proust, made marvelous decoys out of her own life, I found that Willie, the much older literateur who seduced young Colette, had initially used the material of her life to boost his own reputation.

When she took leave of him, intending to tell her own stories, not letting Willy subsume her into a charater called Claudine, I urged her on. By then, she had done away with her coil of braids; her hair became an enticingly boyish bob in fasion in the early 20th century. My mother's hair never had the swagger of Kiera Knigthly's Colette, but it fit nicely under a cloche. By this time, Colette had a girl/boy lover. Not so different, I say to myself, from Proust's Albertine who also seduced girl lovers whom she tried to keep from Marcel.

What was it about French culture at the close of Proust's era and the opening of Colette's, that gave these extraordinary stylists such rich aplomb? There is a freedom from niceties or reticence (think Emily Dickinson) which turn many American women's stories away from celebrating the flesh and toward hints of mystery--both powerfully appealing, but unable to capture the body as a free-wheeling ironic entity, worth all its rambunctious license.