Monday, March 15, 2010

My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson


Colette


My hero: 

Colette 

by Helen Simpson

'When I was a teenager, reading her bestowed a sense of entitlement to pleasure'

Helen Simpson
Saturday 15 May 2010

T

he great French writer Colette has nearly 80 volumes of fiction, journalism and memoirs to her name. When I was a teenager, reading her bestowed a sense of entitlement to pleasure which a procession of Victorian heroines had gone a fair way to extinguish. Self-abnegation played no part in Colette's world, fictional or otherwise. Her writing is as sensuous and acute as it is unsentimental, dwelling on "Ces plaisirs qu'on nomme, à la légère, physiques." Inspiringly resourceful, she broke free from an exploitative husband after the early succès fou of her Claudine novels to work the music-halls, playing a half-naked faun and an Egyptian mummy in a jewelled bra. She married three times, yet she never put the needs of others before her own and she never stopped making money from her writing. Far from worrying about the children, when she had a baby at 40 by her second husband (exactly nine months from the day her own mother had died), she planted her in Brittany with a strict English nanny and only visited every few months or so. At 47 she started an affair with her 16-year-old stepson which was to last almost five years.

While not exactly a role model, at least she showed there were other ways of doing it. Hard-headed and hard-working, she was low on pity for herself and others. Her letters are full of descriptions of meals; at 50, weighing an unapologetic 13 stone, she still looked good in a swimsuit. Her novels were admired by Proust and Gide. The third marriage was her happiest, and she was at her most productive in her 50s and 60s. Immobilised by arthritis in her final years, she continued to write from the daybed she called her "raft" up at a window in the Palais-Royal (her last word was "Regarde!"). Nor did she die horribly, or suffer vile punishment; she lived to be over 80 and was the first woman in France to be accorded a state funeral. Her prose is very beautiful and subtle, and I feel more alive when I read her.

THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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